Perhaps. I mean, there are races with enormous mental sexual dimorphism but Quendi do not manifest it in any customary way. More study needed, where by needed I mean pretty thoroughly optional as long as nobody's actually refusing to teach little boys math.

Of course not. And our sexual norms are entirely symmetric, if inconvenient.

Well, symmetric by gender. They are hardly fair to people who have no luck cultivating the accepted preferences.

I'm sure by now you can imagine what this all sounds like to me.

Like the Valar are silly and we should really have thought it through and concluded better by now but you'll admit that we've had more important priorities and tolerate us as long as we're only doing this to ourselves, presumably.

Yes. Actually I was thinking that if Eru didn't want gay people he could have just not made any. There's species where it simply doesn't happen for one reason or another, it's not impossible in principle.

We may not fall in love often enough for the Asgardian categories to make sense of us. I am not of some intrinsic orientation towards men; I am in love with one specifically. If Findekáno were a girl maybe I'd still like him, though I obviously would not have pursued him.

Well, there are still species where they don't fall in love with the same sex, whatever vocabulary is preferred for the sorting of the population.

Maybe Eru was aiming for that and erred slightly. I get the sense that there were some communication failures in Creation.

Like the stupid cylindrical planet! But people he's supposed to have made directly, yes? Even the Dwarves he had to ensoul or something?

Maitimo shrugs. I think the difference between us is smaller than we think; I am happy to declare the divine plan good and righteous and then not care for being good, while you're inclined to claim 'goodness' for something less arbitrary than the whims of gods and then plant your flag there. We both do as we please, and it mostly pleases us for people to have space for the lives they want, and all that's incomparably overshadowed by killing Moringotho as quickly as possible, so it comes down to an aesthetic difference in most respects.

It seems more than aesthetic to me, but I take your point.

Maybe the gods really do know more than we and there's a deep sense in which they're right. Maybe they just are so much more than us, experience so much more than us, that our suffering ought to matter to them the way plants matter to us, and their whims are worth more than our whole lives. I'm happy to concede all of that and then defy them anyway.

If that works for you.

If you learned that that were true, would you switch sides? Go 'huh, I guess the satisfaction Moringotho gets from his games actually is of more moral weight than any experience any of these beings have'? It was a popular philosophical problem in Valinor; it's an obvious consequence of there being things thousands of times more complex and powerful than others and believing that not all minds have equal moral weight.

I don't know what it would look like to 'learn that it was true'. I draw one threshold and it's low enough on the scale that I got nervous about hunting for dinner when I heard there was someone who could talk to animals around - I could learn that the threshold should be lower, or that I mis-estimated something's place on it, but I hold things above that threshold to a moral standard and the Enemy's forfeited his right to be considered as an end in himself as anything other than a distant last priority. If bigger entities are more valuable it is because they can do more, not because they have magical experiential properties that make everyone else plants by comparison.

I suppose that's one approach. I don't draw a threshold - torturing a bird is wrong but less wrong than torturing a dog and that's less wrong than torturing a man - and it does follow that some things could matter far more than we do. You know, in general doing morality with thresholds gets you all kinds of absurd results - you'd torture an infinite number of puppies who are three months old rather than one who's three months and a day old, if their thought processes happen to change that day in the way that makes them cross your line - I wouldn't expect personhood to be a conveniently discrete category, or a static one.

Well, I also don't torture things, in general.

I torture trees all the time, and call it carpentry.

You don't chop them down before you cut them up? Anyway, if you're about to tell me plants feel pain here I will be thoroughly astonished.

No, they don't. But I'm sure as far as Moringotho's concerned, nor do we, not really, not in the interesting sense in which real beings have experiences.

I'm sure this stupid cylindrical planet has a completely different history of organisms, complete with spontaneously appearing sapients, but in my galaxy, living things - which bear striking resemblances in many cases to local examples - typically arise via a prolonged winnowing and random iteration process generation after generation. They don't keep anything they don't need. Plants couldn't react to pain if they had it, it wouldn't do them any good; they can't flinch or run away or be steered clear of unhealthy habits of self-harm they'd be hard-pressed to take up or trained not to bite their tongues off; so they don't have it.

By that argument animals should suffer more intensely than we do, because they only have pain and pleasure to govern their choices, while we can also be motivated by reason and need be less intensely incentivized by suffering.

Not particularly; they also can't necessarily proceed through pain to do something they've been persuaded is important, not having the ability to be persuaded. And your people may have woken up by a lake one day in their modern form, but mine are presumably descended recently enough on the applicable time scale from some sort of bizarre ice creature to not have worked out all the advantageous changes to the machinery. Once intelligence sufficient to build on itself is present it works a lot faster than sitting around waiting for anything with the wrong pain threshold to fail to reproduce.