xssve
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aswad
quote:
ORIGINAL: xssve
Theft is clearly unethical for example: the thief gets all the benefit, the victim bears all the cost - this asymmetrical distribution of cost:benefit is at the core of ethical assessment.
Which, again, relies on a priori assumptions about whether this asymmetry is desireable, undesireable, neutral or irrelevant to the assessment being made. And, as put, it fails to take into account whether the victim shares the assumptions. If I said I would like you to steal the movie "What Women Want" from my movie collection (and, if you lay off the rest, I do...), it should be quite clear that while I bear an objective cost, I have a subjective gain that by far outweighs it, as I dislike the notion of throwing the movie in the garbage (waste not, want not, etc.), but don't want to have it.
Not at all - unless you make an assumption that the needs of one individual are greater than another's via some other species of assessment, you can safely assume that the needs of all individuals involved are equivalent, ceteris paribus.
You do have to take inot account market dynamics, supply and demand, consent, etc. - balanced, or symmetrical, doesn't necessarily mean "equal" - when you negotiate to exchange your labor for wages for example, it's a voluntary arrangement: you can charge whatever the market will bear, either party is free to exit the contract if a compromise cannot be reached.
Same thing with a relationship, presumably, the ethics are confined to the members of the dyad, or whatever other number of finite people are involved - the point being, that the ethical impact on anybody outside this group is largely neutral - a typical moral value system, comprised of explicit rules, regulations, etc., on the other hand, will usually have a significantly different take on this - moral systems are almost invariably relativistic.
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ORIGINAL: AswadIn the case of the Ilsa trilogy, I resolved this by foisting it on someone stupid enough to borrow it, simply stating "you won't like it, and I don't want it back, so either throw it away or find another gullible sucker who is too curious for his own good and pass it down the line; you have been warned." That hasn't worked for What Women Want, because no sane person is going to have enough curiosity to want to borrow it, apparently. But I digress.
Point being, if my ethic states that I will consider the long term over the short term, for instance, then a case can easily be made that some actions that are unethical in the short term may be ethical in the long term, at which point one may want to introduce a quantitative assessment, which gets even more complicated and further removed from anything a human can conceivably relate to with our limited brain power. I can, however, say that stealing is likely to prompt a degree of selection for people who are more robustly adapted to thieves.
More interestingly, it is trivial, for almost any action considered ethical or unethical, to show that there is another view which regards it differently by the same original metric, so long as that metric is not artificially bounded (as I posit they must all be in order to be meaningful). This is a property of the self-balancing, self-correcting and adaptive nature of human society and interactions. For instance, WW2 entailed a number of actions that were arguably unethical by most modern standards of ethics, yet it is also inescapable that the same standards can be applied to show long term benefit from WW2, including the formation of those very same standards. Like Democracy? Thank Hitler. Like Jews? Thank Hitler. Dislike despotism? Thank Hitler. Like medical ethics? Thank Hitler. Yet, somehow, I'm not inclined to go off on a round of heil'ing him, and I doubt you are, either.
The thing that makes it interesting, is that your definition essentially invalidates itself, as each action can be shown to be both unethical and ethical at the same time, and if you introduce quantitative measures, then the time integral of that will show that each action leads to a net zero. In short, it can't be objectively valid and ethically meaningful at the same time.
Now, I do derive my own notion of ethics in a particular manner, and I suspect it's beneficial in general.
But this delusion of objectivity and certainty that seems so prevalent is just that: a delusion.
Or, using Voltaire's term for the latter: absurd. You choose.
Health,
al-Aswad.
I don't know quite what the rest of this means - there is always a question of the "the greater good", but typically, this requires some degree of convincing, i.e., argument, that it is the greater good - it's never entirely axiomatic, even though it might be treated as such.
I think you may be talking about Les Miserables, and this is exactly the sort of situation that benefits from a cost:benefit analysis - if one assumes that eating enough to stay alive is a requirement necessary for all people equally in order to maintain some level of utility.
In short, in any group of theoretically autonomous humans, the requirement to maximize their individual utility must be assumed to be equal. If group utility is a factor in individual utility, and it usually is, then typically, compromises will be made between short term and long term requirements.
It's pretty straightforward unless you're attempting to fit it into some other meta system - it is the meta system, and you'll find it underlies almost every ethical system in praxis - if for no other reason than any other point of reference is necessarily arbitrary.
I'm not at all sure how you mean it invalidates itself, something can be ethically neutral, i.e., neither bad nor good, here nor there - taking a shit is ethically neutral unless it happens to be in somebody else's bed.
I never said it couldn't get complicated, questions of group vs. individual utility invariably are - compromising the utility a certain number of individuals might be rationalized if a significant threat to group utility is at stake, war for example - considerably less so if it's merely a question of convenience for certain other individuals claiming to represent the group, group values, etc. - follow it to the fundamental fulcrum of any given issue though, and it's invariably about how costs and benefits are being distributed.
And, on the contrary, unethical behavior is typically self-limiting while ethical behavior tends to maximize group utility - as in business ethics for examples, where enforcable contracts are the foundation of economic activity, or the NAZI's you mention, who paid a heavy price in the long run for devoting critical infrastructure to erdicating the bulk of their trained labor pool.
It's likely the very reason the Eastern offensive stalled and turned the tide of the war, as trains that could have been carrying supplies and reinforcements were diverted to carrying Jews to the gas chambers.
By contrast, the relatively ethical conditions of the eventual truce, including the Marshall plan - as compared to the punitive Versailles treaty that preceded it - benefited both victor and vanquished.
In spite of this, it's suspected that Eisenhower allowed quite a few Germans to starve to death in internment camps in the interim, and all in all, Germany suffered considerable losses in both population and political autonomy.
By the same token, the rights of the accused in our Bill of Rights are rationalized on the principle that arbitrary punishment is unethical, an unethical legal system is an unstable one, and vulnerable to revolt - which is exactly what they were in the midst of.
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