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shawnmmcc
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Actually, ethics attempts to do that, find a universal behavioral code. Ethics attempts to have an internally consistent system of behavior that includes universally applied rules. It's very simple, but very difficult. Most of the time we don't want to have the degree of self-honesty required for ethics.
Straw man one. Strictures against murder. Moralists point to that all the time to claim that everyone imposes morals on others. However, and I cannot remember the source of this misquote, "Your right to freedom stops at the tip of my nose." It is very easy to ethically ban murder. The murderer himself does not normally want to be the subject of his behavior, he just wishes to inflict it. Some mentally ill individuals may want both - ethically that's easy, let their personal murder come first and the problem is solved. If they argue well they have to kill that bit*h first - well, that person has something they want to do first. Straw man absurdum dealt with again, ethically.
Straw man two. All laws are an attempt to impose moral behavior. No, there are two, you could argue three kinds of laws. The first is exactly that - imposing moral behavior. My wife, who is Jewish, cannot purchase Shabbat wine on Sunday morning in this state. Why? The Christian majority in this state wanted to keep their Sabbath holy and unsullied, according to their standards. Imposing moral law.
Conversely, DUI laws. Those are penalizing a reckless behavior that puts others at substantial risk. Therefore it is penalized. What defines reckless behavior? Those behaviors that put other people at various involuntary risk - if it's voluntary self-consistent ethics require that you let them, because if you don't - the slippery slope argument applies. If you want to set up a drunk drive high speed race track, ethically I am fine with that. Everyone participating is volunteering. If you try to take your child on the track with you, they cannot give informed consent and so I pass laws limiting that. Problem solved, and a real world application is motorcycle helmet laws that apply to minors, and not adults.
Third are laws such as contractual laws. Those laws are necessary for the orderly running of society. As such they are ethically consistent, so long as they deal with a voluntary association that is not compelled. That is why due process is so important, and why arbitration is now being abused. Try to purchase or rent a house without an arbitration clause. It is becoming impossible, in some markets it de facto is. As those contracts include letting the seller/lease holder the choice to control the arbitrator, they are no longer ethical - shelter is not voluntary. Mutually agreed upon arbitrator clauses can be ethical, the choice is on a level playing field.
Ethics are not easy. They require a high degree of self-honesty. The religious zealot says "Of course I wouldn't mind living in a religiously controlled state, see I'm being self-consistent." Would you mind if those doing the controlling were of a different sect, or creed? Then you are internally self-contradicting, and fail the ethics test.
Abortion is the ugly duckling here. We are talking the definition of human. We are also talking about genuine disagreement over what constitutes human life. However, ethically that is easy. Pro-choice, not pro-abortion. With so much disagreement, until we have a better definition, leaving it up to personal choice is consistent. I personally dislike abortion. However, once you ban abortion, consistency can state you should ban birth control pills, IUD's, etc. - any birth control technique that interferes with an already fertilized egg - BK is quite consistent there, for example. Ethically looking at where that leads, I elect to be pro-choice. When I was a devout Catholic I was anti-abortion. Then I was moral, now I attempt to be ethical.
Try reading the Tao Te Ching, or whatever English mangling you want of the Chinese. It makes a very honest attempt (some would argue it succeeds, but that would take up an entire bookshelf on it's own) at many ethical maxims, and explains why if you actually bother to read it, versus peruse it. That's why many individuals argue that it, like Buddhism, are not religions at all but philosophies.
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Last Conformist
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of Calakmul
Jul 2003
time: 06:23
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quote:
Abortion is the ugly duckling here. We are talking the definition of human. We are also talking about genuine disagreement over what constitutes human life. However, ethically that is easy. Pro-choice, not pro-abortion. With so much disagreement, until we have a better definition, leaving it up to personal choice is consistent. I personally dislike abortion. However, once you ban abortion, consistency can state you should ban birth control pills, IUD's, etc. - any birth control technique that interferes with an already fertilized egg - BK is quite consistent there, for example. Ethically looking at where that leads, I elect to be pro-choice. When I was a devout Catholic I was anti-abortion. Then I was moral, now I attempt to be ethical. |
Who gets to decide what are genuine disagreements? What if I and my Klan pals are convinced that negroes are not people?
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shawnmmcc
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No Kuci, you've misreading. It's not subjective at all, it's actually absolute. It's internally self-consistant, versus having an external locus (i.e. religious texts). That's why ethics is much more difficult. Morality's hardest task is applying texts written thousand(s) of years ago to modern life. Ethics must find a self-consistant application for everything.
Drug abuse is one example. Using drugs that will cause psychotic behavior (i.e violence) after a certain length of time, i.e. PCP and meth is unethical. They can and should be banned. Other drugs like Heroin only cause grief, and often the death, of the user. Legal. Then you have the problem of cannabis. Taken internally it's fine, smoked privately it's fine - until you have children who are subjected to the smoke. As I've said, ethically laws are often complex, and people sadly want the quick, easy solution - legalize or ban it, no shades of grey.
Read my post. Slavery involves so many ethical inconsistancies as to be a silly attempt to refute my points. Does the slave holder mind the behavior applied to him? Ethically simple. Note that instead of using an easy straw man like slavery, I used abortion, one of the great and thorny ethical dilemmas. There is no easy answer, but I do have a set of practical, self-consistant ethics that at least deal with it.
Under the ethical strictures I suggest, pro-life individuals can have their child, and refuse to use the pill. Other individuals who disagree with them can have an abortion, or use the pill.
If I take the pro-life position to reducio ad absurdem - what if the couple is going to have a microcephalic idiot, which in it's most extreme form means only a brain stem. You shine a light to the skull, and it glows pink - it's fluid filled, no brain at all.
This microcephalic idiot has no awareness. It has NO cerebral cortex at all. It will eventually die. Do you feel comfortable passing laws requiring the couple to have that, and wait for it to die. How about one of our posters whose sister had such a deformed fetus that many organs were on the outside, and if it survived it would have been in non-stop pain until it died. See the problem?
So you can ethically deal with all these issues - it's never easy, it requires self-honesty, sometimes of the brutal variety, nuance and a huge amount of effort. Morality can be simple, straightfoward, and easy. Just do what this religious text says. For obvious reasons ethics does not have universal appeal.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:23
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Assigning value to anything beyond "glob of cells" is highly subjective. We're all globs of cells, some more complex than others, and any meaning to be found in it all is a matter of ideology. We don't have a monopoly on defining anything, I know, but certainly your whining that it's not a person is no more or less valid than my whining that it is, so the moral imposition charge is still BS.
It all comes down to who's correct. Nobody has ever convinced me that our right to exist is contingent on our sentience or any other ability we may have. If you want to be completely simplistic and literal about this, sentience would appear to be an unknown critical mass of electrical impulses organized within a cellular network, which forms within a sufficiently bloated "blob of cells."
There are several reasons why sentience-as-personhood is so ridiculous. First of all, nobody can define what it means decisively, and even the imprecise definitions rely on methods of measurement which can't be proven when the subject is an infant or fetus. All anyone ever says in defense of the principle is that, by a certain point in fetal development, little Johnny might theoretically have developed the principle of cogito ergo sum, so we might want to leave him alone just to be safe. Before that, it's open season. Notice how this establishes one's right to live as something to be proven or earned with time.
Secondly, many of the cognitive abilities of infants are primarily artifacts of experience at living in the world, not innate qualities. Language, for example; our ability to speak and understand language is partly ingrained, but requires a sufficiently rich intellectual environment to bring out its full potential by a certain age. That's pretty much proven. So at least some aspects of the intellect come from life experience combined with the emerging abilities of the developing brain, which brings me to my next point...
Thirdly, even out of the womb a child is far from developed into the intelligence we associate with "humanity," as anybody who's read the names Piaget or Erikson knows. Even in adolescence the brain is not developed entirely, and choosing a point along the spectrum of growth in the meantime cannot be anything but arbitrary.
Finally, I'm politically moderate and have never used God to support any of my abortion arguments on Poly. I believe in God, but I oppose legalized abortion on purely civic grounds. Don't play the "Religious Right" card on me. And as I once replied to Sava, you oppose the right of the individual terrorist to decide whether or not it is morally right to hijack planes and fly them into skyscrapers. "Anti-choice! Anti-choice! Odin is anti-choice!"
Or you would you prefer to use the labels each side customarily uses for itself and argue with actual arguments instead? 
Thanks for your honest input, Kuci.
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:23
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quote:
Originally posted by shawnmmcc
No Kuci, you've misreading. It's not subjective at all, it's actually absolute. It's internally self-consistant, versus having an external locus (i.e. religious texts). That's why ethics is much more difficult. Morality's hardest task is applying texts written thousand(s) of years ago to modern life. Ethics must find a self-consistant application for everything. |
False dichotomy. Something with an "external locus" can be internally consistent. Moreover, YOUR justification for things is external - that most or all people believe that it's true.
quote:
Drug abuse is one example. Using drugs that will cause psychotic behavior (i.e violence) after a certain length of time, i.e. PCP and meth is unethical. They can and should be banned. |
Why? Every answer you give is ultimately based on some unjustifiable statement - either a religious text or that "everyone thinks it's true" - and so it's objectively no better than any other (internally consistent) moral statement.
quote:
Read my post. Slavery involves so many ethical inconsistancies as to be a silly attempt to refute my points. Does the slave holder mind the behavior applied to him? Ethically simple. Note that instead of using an easy straw man like slavery, I used abortion, one of the great and thorny ethical dilemmas. There is no easy answer, but I do have a set of practical, self-consistant ethics that at least deal with it. |
Again, that assumes that all individuals are morally identical, which is not only unjustifiable but inconsistent with any sort of punishment for behavior - else it would be no more OK for the jailer to lock up the inmate than for the inmate to lock up the jailer.
quote:
This microcephalic idiot has no awareness. It has NO cerebral cortex at all. It will eventually die. Do you feel comfortable passing laws requiring the couple to have that, and wait for it to die. How about one of our posters whose sister had such a deformed fetus that many organs were on the outside, and if it survived it would have been in non-stop pain until it died. See the problem? |
You forget I don't agree with the pro-life crowd. I believe (apparently like you) that personhood is based on consciousness. However, it's an unjustifiable belief - or the argument for it reduces to other unjustifiable beliefs.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:23
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Uh, hello, Shawn? Under the slavery analogy (analogy, not comparison!), the individual holds the right to decide for himself whether or not it is right to whip the negro to make him pick your cotton. Nobody else has the right to decide what is or is not his property for him, after all. "Don't call that darky a 'human' with rights of his own! If he were human, he would have human characteristics, like white skin, education, and the ability either to stop us from whipping him, or to whip us back. The very thing we think of when we say human is missing from him."
And heroin addicts quite frequently turn to crime to pay for their high.
And again I say, don't pull the blasted religious right card on me. Ben hasn't spoken in a while in this thread IIRC, but you can try it on him when and if he shows up and starts actually using scriptural justifications.
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18-02-2005 20:16
I guess that makes you Pro-Death.
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