As a thought experiment, consider a reality with a single human. There are no other humans, animals, or anything of that nature. Not in the past, present, or future.
The human has access to a a machine which can create anything, except for living beings.
The main question:
- Can this person perform any immoral action?
What about symbolic harm?
2. What if the person creates a human child-body with no brain and does terrible things to it? (rape, defecate in its mouth, eat it, etc)
3. What if the child-body is identical to the person as a child and
a) The person does not know this
b) The person does know this
What about self-harm?
4. What if the person refuses to eat? They desperately want to eat, but refuse, until they die.
a) Because they want to die
b) Because they decided to do so arbitrarily
c) Because they want to suffer
d) Because they want to lose weight
5. What if the person cuts off a limb and regrets it later?
Finally:
6. Is there another question which ought to be added?
While I’m no objectivist, an idea I like from Ayn Rand’s “The Objectivist Ethics” is that fulfillment is the mind’s way of telling us we are living in accordance with our values, and morality is the question of what those values should be and why. Viewed through this lens, answering in terms of fulfillment would then be circular reasoning.
So the question is: is it right to derive fulfillment at all, from actions such as self-harm or abusing an effigy in unspeakable ways? Do the answers to these questions change when moving between our own universe and this lonely thought experiment one? If so, how and why?