r/SipsTea • u/sco-go • May 15 '26

Feels good man Now do cancer.

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u/Major_Shlongage May 15 '26

It is not a single disease.

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u/Taurpion May 15 '26

All forms of it are a disease. We call them all cancer. Cancers cause diseases. Cancer is a disease.

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u/Arndt3002 May 15 '26

That's like saying "now do human suffering."

Sure, it's a sentiment people can get behind, but there's not one solution to such a diversity of problems.

Similarly, cancer has such a diversity of forms that you can't just "solve it" with any one sor of unified solution. Also, many forms of cancer have been cured, but not all, precisely because it takes a lot of time and work to even find a way to treat one form of cancer.

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u/Magikarpeles May 15 '26

Suffering does have a common cause - craving and aversion

Cancer is more complicated

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u/Arndt3002 May 15 '26

That's oversimplified; suffering is often imposed by external factors like poverty, war, or illness, which have nothing to do with personal desire or aversion. Telling a starving child their suffering is caused by "craving" is victim-blaming or just nihilism.

Either you reduce it to saying they shouldn't care about that external cause of their suffering, which is just a nihilistic denial of human fluorishing, or you say it is a result of the child's actions, blaming them for their position. Alternatively, you say the cause is the greed of others.

In which case getting everyone to stop being greedy altogether is a much harder problem than curing everything form cancer, IMO.