Very cool, if true

I wish this one was a check box. If it was, I'd go for flow from general principles. One should discuss the principles and then work out the answers to specific examples from them and are mostly situational. Principles can sometimes act as guidelines, but it's the instances that count. I think they're both true.

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Both true in different situations? Or at the same time?

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Both. :-)

Morals and ethics, when reduced to radiobutton quizzes, rarely make sense.

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Morals rarely make sense to me at all.

The word usually boils down to "The way I'd like the world to be" but is usually used to mean "The way the world intrinsically should be, according to Nature,God or some other external entity."

I have a few general principles for things which generally seem to me to lead to outcomes that I like, and I've mentally made a few notes to cover those areas where they produce negative effects.

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I see morals as "This is what feels right to me."

I see ethics as statements of principle, sometimes worked out beforehand by discussion, sometimes informed by situational examples.

When morals and ethics collide, you have to decide whether you're going to do what feels wrong to you, or do what you know in principle is wrong but which feels right to you.

I do not believe that anyone can decide in advance what they're going to do in a situation they have no previous experience of, when their morals are telling them one thing and their ethics are telling them another.

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Is abstaining from murder a moral choice, or an ethical one?

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Ethics are moral systems. So any choice made because of an ethical system is automatically a moral one.

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nickys.livejournal.com

It could also be a practical choice - fear of the consequences of getting caught.

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Both.

Murder feels wrong to me. But I can hypothesise circumstances in which I might be so angry and outraged that I would want to kill someone. My anger/outrage might make me feel that murder was the moral choice.

Ethics, however, say that murder is never right. Ever. Not even state-sanctioned murder.

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As far as I understand, ethics are the principles and the system in which they reside, morals are the instances, which seems to tie in with what you are saying.

Most people, however, don't realise that morals (and ethics) are purely personal, and the terms have become so loaded with additional meaning that I don't like to use them.

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So, murder is OK, because I find it morally acceptable?

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What do you mean by "OK"?

And ok to who?

Morals are intrinsically subjective and personal. What's a good thing to you won't be a good thing to you.

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Acceptable.

Acceptable in general, because *I* find it morally acceptable. That seems to be what you're implying - we should all be guided by our personal morals, and that's OK. You seem to be, and I may be wrong, almost implying Darwinism.

Or are you saying something else?

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Acceptable in general

What, to the majority? To everyone?

Who are you saying has to accept this?

Morals are intrinsically personal. We get on with each other because we have social rules that most of us follow and people get punished for breaking. Some people agree with more of these social rules than others. Some people obey more of them than others. Some people murder, some people speed, some people never break a law in their life.

But it's all down to personal choice in the end.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "Darwinism" here.

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We are, in most things, governed by 'majority rules'. Which seems fair to me. Unfortunately, we always tend to feel hard done by when we don’t agree with the majority. As

yonmei says above, murder is ethically wrong – but that’s only because the majority decides that. Sadly, I’m running out of belief that the majority of humans will continue to have group interests at heart, as opposed to personal interests. We seem to be getting more and more selfish, as a race.

I don't agree that morals are intrinsically personal. There can also be group morals, group ethics. Life is a mix of both, I guess.

I believe whole-heartedly in social rules, and social responsibility. But then, I'm not particularly selfish.

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There can also be group morals, group ethics.

Sure, but choosing to follow them is a personal choice.

"I was only following orders" and "everyone else was doing it" are not excuses.

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We are, in most things, governed by 'majority rules'. Which seems fair to me.

It doesn't, to be honest, seem fair to me. The majority of people have an IQ of under 102. I'm damned if I'm doing something just because they think it's a good idea.

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Hah - yeah, but you're now being prejudiced against people with lower IQs. First, you have to question the mechanism for measuring 'intelligence', then you have to make a huge logic leap that because people have an IQ lower than 102, they don't know what's best for humanity as a whole. That's a heck of a subjective criteria for assuming a majority is wrong.

For the record, I measure 'best' as something that will allow humanity to survive, and grow happier as a race. Not something I see much evidence of right now.

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you're now being prejudiced against people with lower IQs.

Yup. Definitely. No objection there from me. When it comes to making decisions about my life (and pretty much anything else, but especially my life), I'm definitely in favour of smarter people making the decisions rather than stupider people.

Well, actually, I'm in favour of _me_ making them, but I'm happier taking the advice of smart people than stupid people.

And personally, I see a far better world nowadays than there used to be. Less people dying aged 35, less disease generally, more people with an education, cheaper food, better food, access to incredible information sources, amazing travelling ability, monumental communication ability.

True, this is still largely confined to the first-world, but it's spreading slowly and I'd much rather live now than at any time in the past.

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kpollock.livejournal.com

I know that you don't mean this, but the 'IQ' test is not a fantastic measure of actual intelligence.

I'll assume you use the term 'IQ' that as a convenient shorthand.

You'll get no complaints from me about not wanting stupid people to in any way run my life.

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Yes. I believe that IQ is a fairly good way to measure pattern-matching type intelligence, but it's not great by any means.

Just a handy way of saying "the majority of people are dumb as sticks, possibly dumber"

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heron61.livejournal.com

Just a handy way of saying "the majority of people are dumb as sticks, possibly dumber"

An exceptionally true statement and the primary reason that I distrust democracy. Most people believe the obvious lies that politicians tell them, and then in the next election they either believe the same (now even more obvious) lies or they believe the other politician's equally transparent lies - it's completely pathetic. I've seen polls that boil down to the fact that many people support Bush because he talks tough and that makes them feel good about themselves and the US and that many people voted for Ronald Reagan because he had an honest face. We desperately need to start engineering our species for increased intelligence and then educating most people so that they can actually think.

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More suicide, more depression, more violent assaults, more weapons of mass distruction, more terrorism, larger scale wars, guns, nuclear waste.

I don't agree with the 'less disease'. Try telling that to Aids-ravaged Africa. And I don't think SARS has vanished yet either.

I was thinking more in terms of 'recent' though. The things you mention *are* good, of course. But I feel like we're at the apex at the moment, or at least a plateau. There's a possibilty we could continue advancing, but I don't see it. Governments are more concerned with money than with combatting the green house effect. They will instigate wars over oil. Religious fanatics have always existed, but now the means to cause large scale damage are more readily available than ever before. People are becoming more and more dissatisafied with life - where's the point in living longer if you're not happy? In general, humanity seems to be on the brink of heading on a course of self-destruction. For every advance we make, we also make a dreadful mistake. I guess I said it all here.

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See, I see all of those things as having been that way throughout all of history.

This week we don't have the black plague, rickets, cancerous sores or syphillus klling us all off. The majority of the population of the first-world is well-fed, and there's progress in pretty much every country that isn't wracked by civil war.

There is more potential for fanatics to cause damage, but the world is slowly becoming less religious, so i hold a little hope there.

I don't believe the world is going to plateau, but then I do believe in the likelihood of the singularity, which puts me out on the fringes anyway.

I do agree that there are problems with people being demotivated, and I think that the focus on meaningless work will have to change, but compared to spending your whole life slaving in the fields in order to have enough crops to not starve to death, I think it's an improvement.

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"but compared to spending your whole life slaving in the fields in order to have enough crops to not starve to death, I think it's an improvement"

Minus the 'starving to death' bit, that's *definitely* subjective. A lot of people would be happy to do that, and are. A lot of people work 12 hour days for illegal wages so as not to starve to death right now. Just 'cos they're not in the fields doesn't make it any less hard.

We have AIDS, SARS, increasing heart disease and cancer rates. Woo. Probably others that I can't think of too. Yeah, medical advances mean we live longer, but there are just as many health hazards out there as there ever was. 'Progress' is pretty ambiguous, too.

This whole argument is subjective, so we should probably stop. Suffice it to say, you think humanity is progessing in leaps and bounds, I'm not convinced.

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wolflady26.livejournal.com

I think there are some pretty non-subjective ways to measure the ways in which humanity has progressed medically, at least. Average life spans, infant mortality rates, and average height, for example, have all changed really incredibly drastically. We haven't done away with death, thank goodness, but I don't think there is any way you can not say that medical care is incredibly advanced compared to even relatively recent history, and that health hazards are dramatically reduced.

And SARS as a new disease in comparison to advancements like penicillin is really in another league. There are many questions about SARS, including whether it is a real disease or just a collection of flu-like symptoms. Think the death rate is high? There may be an explanation for that. And here is a comparison of the death rate with other "plagues". :D

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To which I reply - give it time. Yeah, we've been progressing. What I was trying to say was, how much longer will that continue?

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heron61.livejournal.com

500 years ago lifespans were (on average) pathetically short, 80+% of people were illiterate even in the most literate nations (China then being the most literate nation on the planet) and in most places 95+% of people were illiterate. Almost no one would travel more than a hundred miles from their home, malnutrition affected everyone except the wealthy to at least some degree, a minor infection could mean death or mutilation, the status of women was shockingly bad in every state-level society on the planet, the rate of death in childbirth was between 10% & 15%, and there was nothing resembling reliable birth control.

Some of this is significantly different in the Third World, and all of this is vastly different in every nation in the First World. The lives of the First World poor suck, but they are far better than the lives of any poor person more than 100 years ago and in many ways significantly better than the lives of wealthy people 500 years ago.

Would you honestly rather live anytime more than 100 years ago than in the present day? I'd enjoy visiting the past but only if I was absolutely certain that I could get back to the present.

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nickys.livejournal.com

It's all very complicated, because there are conflicting rights in almost all cases. One person's right to do something conflicts with another person's right to be left in peace.

Freedom of speech is often in conflict with the right for people to avoid things that upset them (as we discussed earlier with the example of gruesome anti-vivisection posters being placed where my seven year old can see them as we walk along the street).

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Of course, some people might feel that by choosing not to be offended by the posters and thus do something about it, you're overruling the animal's right not to be chopped up.

rights being another one of those subjective things.

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Disagree.

The message can be the same, without the offensive image. The animals rights aren't protected any more by an offensive message than they would be without one.

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I disagree that the message is the same without the offensive image. It may be possible to get a similar message across without the image, but it's not the same image. And it's almost certainly a less effective one.

People are very good at ignoring things, and sometimes it takes somebody holding (for instance) a dead Ethiopian child up and saying "look at what is happening, please help us." to make a difference.

Lots more people would be vegetarian if they saw a slaughterhouse. They intellectually know that their steak is hacked off chunk of slaughtered cow, but they don't really emotionall understand what that entails.

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nickys.livejournal.com

Not really. I have no objection to those posters being shown to anyone over voting age, because they have a moral responsibility to know what's going on in the country even if they'd rather not.

But my kids can't vote yet, so there is no purpose in upsetting them over a situation which they have no power to change.

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