I can't decide which is my favorite model for your fallacy here. You give me so many choices.
Circular reasoning:
Starting from the conclusion:
Thinly veiled ad hominem:
A creature unable to form a viable society cannot form a viable society in order to deal with whatever it is that prevents them from being unable to form a viable society.
You Have Selected:
Starting From The Conclusion. That's a bold move, Goblin, let's see if it pays off for him.
It is indeed a fallacy, because you base everything upon the
assumption that having a racial drive to be cruel must needs cause every goblin to start bloodfeuds with their fellow goblins, to the point that culture and population centers cannot exist. You offer no hint of evidence (beyond your own
feelings) to support your claim of how these goblins
must unavoidably be. Of course, as the saying goes, what is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence, but happily I don't even
have to go that route, as it's quite simple for me to show that "alternate possibilities
could exist," which was all I've been arguing for.
Just as the other forum members have commented, I too agree that goblin cruelty would be better as a focus-based drive than a biological requirement. Yet there are creatures that DO have an absolute imperative to hurt, maim, and kill on a very regular basis: They're called
carnivores, and almost all of them
must kill at least once every couple of days. Granted, basic hunting does not necessarily involve any actual
cruelty . . . except that it's a very common behavior for an adult predator to catch a prey animal, and bring it back to its young
still alive, so that the offspring can inexpertly rip apart a critter that has already been too badly injured to defend itself. Common house cats, meanwhile, are well known for their practice of
playing with their wounded prey for long periods before finally killing it, and they very often kill purely for sport. These behaviors actually go
beyond the levels of cruelty that goblins are seen, or even
hinted at as, doing in DF, and therefore one could quite plausibly argue that goblins are actually LESS cruel than cats. According to YOU, then, GoblinCookie, cats
cannot have any kind of social organization, because they "have to hurt each other and consequently end up killing each other."
Except of course, that that is patently false. What do we KNOW about cats? They have an innate drive to hunt, torture, and kill, even without need. They are fiercely territorial, and will defend their home turf against rival cats with tooth and claw. The more belligerent toms will frequently sport scars, torn ears, and other marks of their various battles. When on the prowl, cats almost always prefer to do so alone, and never cooperate to bring down a target animal. BUT. Their fights are only rarely
fatal. That one-eyed tomcat is proof, not that he fights all the time, but that he
survives those fights. Cats frequently make friends with other cats, and sometimes congregate in large communities where their individual interactions do hint at a social structure, and even a hierarchy.
Now, granted, cats are not sentient, but even so we can clearly see that here is a creature with a genuine, full-blown biological cruelty "quota", that
still manages not to murder itself to extinction, and even has a semblance of social order. I told you earlier that I only had to show a single reasonable counterexample in order to prove you wrong. That example is now
provided, your baseless assertion is now
disproved.
beings unable to cooperate cannot cooperate in order to be able to cooperate.
My point above was only one possible refutation to this line of thinking, two others are:
They can if the beings are hostile to each other at
some times, but more placid during others. With the most obvious examples naturally being the various species who routinely fight many duels during mating season, but get along with each other quite well at all other times of the year. We can see this especially in animals that have evolved distinctly
non-lethal weapons to be used against rivals, such as the giraffe's little rounded knobs that pass for "horns". Cooperative behaviors learned during peacetime would very plausibly lead to mercy during times of stress, an effect that increases proportionally with the creature's intelligence.
Innate cruelty, and social behaviors that can mitigate / channel said cruelty, could have evolved in tandem ('evolved' in this case possibly meaning either a generational progression of learned cultural behaviors, or actual genetic evolution). Cruelty and brutality can be very effective means to reproductive success, but taken to extremes they can also quite easily backfire and make one the common enemy of a larger group, so the two qualities of "You should be the baddest dude around" and "But not TOO bad, though" could wind up in a sort of arms race, each trait effectively striving to outdo the other. Apply this pattern to your average primate, and eventually you'll get a goblin. At no point does the creature's cruelty override its self-control by
too great an extent, so there is no paradox.
Also if you weren't too angry to pay attention
Actually, I don't believe you've ever gotten me angry. Annoyed, but not angry.
I am not arguing that goblins should not be cruel and that goblin society would not function. I was specifically arguing only against the idea of having goblins have to inflict a given amount of cruelty in order to function.
And that's very interesting to me, that you would take such a fine distinction (goblins perform some given amount of cruelty just for the hell of it, vs. goblins perform the
exact same acts of cruelty because they feel some innate drive to do so) and explode it into such a major difference of results (goblins that torture for fun are seen to live in population centers of around 10,000 people, but goblins that feel biological pressure to torture can never be around each other). As I recall, you were similarly fond of hyperbole back during the DuckTales episode, arguing that the majority of ducks successfully reproducing could have
no other result than total ecocide within the span of a single generation. Is "Extreme Conclusion Jumping" a sport? Should you be wearing protective equipment?
I am only saying that a society would not function if all it's members were forced to be cruel to each-other by some biological imperative . . .
I have stated repeatedly that goblins are NOT forced to be cruel
to each other, victims such as other races, animals, the undead, and even inanimate dummies have all been discussed in this thread. If anyone isn't paying attention, it's you. Please stop arguing against things that I clearly did NOT say . . . unless you're playing Logical Fallacy Bingo, and you need "Straw Man" to win.
. . . slavers are not themselves slaves so they are apart from the regime as it were.
Slavery obviously cannot exist without slave owners, and therefore slavers are unequivocally an essential part of the system. They are also, as it happens, the part of the system with the greatest amount of control over said system, so the lion's share of the guilt & blame for slavery's inherent evils must fall directly to them. I say this not out of desire to perpetuate a slavery derail (you'll notice I'm not bothering to respond to your Human Rights clusterfuck), but merely as an example of how you tend to say ridiculous things if you think you can get away with it. Let me simply assure that you are wrong, on the factual count as well as the ideological one.
I do actually have a history degree
I wouldn't worry about it, you hide it rather well.
One interesting little detail is the ability of slaves to actually buy their freedom *from* their masters.
Yes, several cultures that practiced slavery did so in a manner that was decidedly low-key, compared to the more hardcore American version. But in those cases, an adult slave willingly signing his services over to a master for a set period of time, for a set wage, is actually far more akin to a contract employee than a "real" slave, born into bondage and with hardly any feasible way of ever escaping it, short of death. For some types of Roman slaves, it was practically being a slave in name only. But to extend that sort of leniency to
all slave-keeping cultures, and imply that
all slaves had the ability to buy their own freedom, is a gross overstatement on your part.
Oh, I doubt anyone would try to kill you over it . . . you might lose a couple of teeth, though.
Over what?
Sigh. Over saying crap that makes you sound incredibly racist, such as "Slavery is not an individual cruelty to which an individual can personally be responsible," and "It is better for the slaves to think that their masters are kind people and they are only being punished because they are 'bad slaves'".
The reality of slavery for many slaves was far more boring.
Yes, but when we modern humans think of the word "slavery", especially when it's goblins doing the enslaving,
that kind of slavery is not what we're thinking of. We don't think, "Oh, I won't be allowed to vote or own property, but I'll still be treated about as well as a minimum-wage McDonalds employee", we think "Oh My God, I'm going to be flogged every night and worked to death, aren't I." That kind of slavery is clearly evil, and that's the clearly kind of slavery that goblins practice, and for you to step in and say, "ACKCHYUALLY, slavery was sometimes more moderate," does nothing but cloud the issue for no other purpose than to let you sound educated. If you want to muddy the ethical waters with low-impact slavery, have at least the good taste to specify that you're doing it with humans or dwarves, or with goblins trying to change their ways.