Corporations are a way to profit from criminal activities without the risk of being held responsible. You invest your money, and the board and CEOs know what to do, wink wink, whatever it takes to make a buck, and you never even have to know about all the suffering you caused with your investment.
It isn't just a few bad apples, the barrel of corporate culture is almost pure rot, with very little apple at all.
"My government wouldn't do this! It must be a fake!"
Sorry, it's been verified. The US government not only would do this, it has a long and verified history of doing this. Read up on the history of central and south America. But maybe all that history is fake too! Yeah, maybe anything bad anyone has ever said about the US is fake!
Do you not understand that the reference you gave discusses levels of moral reasoning? You brought the theory up.
Stupid people need to be responsible for their own choices, as do smart people who make stupid mistakes. However, allowing victimization to occur is a negative externality for everyone. It allows the most callous to accumulate financial power, which they may turn against our freedoms.
Therefore, it makes sense to spend resources to punish those who do it. It also makes sense to educate people in how to resist being taken advantage of. It is not advantageous to dismiss the situation as social Darwinism at work.
It isn't really a liberal or conservative issue. I think we can all embrace education in critical thinking and not letting crime pay.
People using the more developed stages of moral reasoning do not need my advice. People using the earlier stages do not handle ambiguity and relativism well. So, I could say something that is perhaps useful to a majority of people and risk alienating the more developed, or speak to people perfectly capable of making their own moral decisions, and risk confusing most people. In the end, people using the higher levels of moral reasoning don't care about punishment or reward anyway.
What would you have me do? You yourself admit my statement is a pretty close fit, would it be that much better if I added three more paragraphs of clarifications? Sure, sometimes it is not only okay to hurt other, but actually works to the greater good. Should I list all the situations where that is true?
You miss the point. It isn't who these people are hurting, it is what they are being rewarded for. Rewarding behavior that hurts others is never a good idea, no matter how minor the harm.
Yes, you are supposed to care. If you don't, it indicates a major subsystem of your brain is missing (you're a psychopath) or damaged (you're like most people.) Our brain has mirror circuits that let us run simulations of other sentient beings, which tie in to empathy circuits that let us feel what others are feeling. If you can witness suffering without feeling anything, there is something wrong with these circuits. As they are highly advantageous, both for the individual, and for the species as a whole, you might want to get that looked into.
The thing about the "stupidity tax" as so many call it is not that it harms the stupid, it is that it rewards the corrupt.
You can laugh at the people who fall for things like this and pat yourself on the back all you like, but it is wrong. It isn't helping society. It isn't weeding out the weak and stupid. It is rewarding evil.
You don't understand natural selection or evolution. We are changing the fitness criteria. There is not objective 'better' or 'worse' genes. Just what works and what doesn't.
Suddenly, it is not a big deal to have hemophilia or cancer prone genes. Most often, when you see a dangerous gene in fairly large numbers in a population, it also conveys a benefit. For instance, the genes linked to sickle cell anemia also provide resistance to malaria.
So you can shut up about natural selection. You have unnatural ideas about it, based on wrong headed 'genetic superiority' arguments. You have no idea what good effects those negative genes might also be providing, but you'd gladly do away with them rather than do away with the conditions that make them a liability.
Do you like playing god because you feel inherently superior?
I read about them in Sciam, back when they first captured the sonoluminescence phenomenon. Then I happened upon a featured photo or article of the day or something, I think, and read about their eyesight. Fascinating creatures.
Focal planes? Bah! What do we need with focal planes when we have, essentially, tens of thousands of pinhole cameras and eyes divided into three separate areas. Compared to your fovea, we have multiple bands of high res areas stretching across the middle of our eye! Can you see circularly polarized light? Why, an octopus has better eyesight than a human!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go stun a herring.
Christ on a fucking pogo stick, another one? What's with people who can't admit that maybe, just maybe, humans aren't the best at everything?
Mantis shrimp don't have a blind spot, because their eyes aren't like the stupid human eyes where the optic nerve attaches to the front! Nyah nyah nyah!
Here's the quote I was referring too:
The visual information leaving the retina seems to be processed into numerous parallel data streams leading into the central nervous system, greatly reducing the analytical requirements at higher levels. As far as I know, there is only a single data stream per eye in human vision. It may be transmitted in parallel, but there is only one image created for each eye. Not so for the vastly superior mantis shrimp. We have trinocular vision in each eye, so suck it, monkey boy!
I wouldn't, I mean, a mantis shrimp would never consider trading my, I mean his superior eyes for your puny human ones!
Something like a Mantis Shrimp? Some species can detect circularly polarized light; each stalk mounted eye, on its own, has trinocular vision; they have up to sixteen different types of photoreceptors (not counting the many separate color filters they also have) to our four; and the information is transmitted from the retina in parallel, not serially down a single optic nerve like ours.
These are also the little dudes who can strike with the force of a.22 caliber bullet, fast enough to cause cavitation and sonoluminescence.
So if (fdisk forbid) one day, the vast majority of people in the US say that we don't have the right to freedom of expression, we no longer have that right? Forgive me, but I can hardly call that a reasonable idea. It's sad, and frightening, but true. I mean seriously, what are you going to do? Complain to them? Shoot all of them?
You are basing your morality on appeal to authority, what is the point of that? Even if there are natural rights, not everyone agrees what they are. Let me turn it around: So if, one day in the future, the vast majority of people in the US decide that freedom of expression is no longer a natural right, we no longer have that right?
Do you see what you're doing here, and why it is pointless? It would be nice if there were a nice man in the sky to tell us right from wrong, or a big book somewhere, or something written in stone, but there isn't. There is no absolute morality. I know, it seems terrifying, but the world has still been stumbling along without it.
Now, there may be absolutes for any finite group. There is what is right for you. There is what is right for your family, your society, your nation, all living things on earth, every sentient being everywhere. But there are no absolute absolutes that all sentients can know with certainty, and anyone who says there are is simply arguing from authority. They have no better way to convince you to accept their argument than saying, "I say that Nature, or some Authority, or God says so," which boils down to "Believe it because I say so."
The better path is to create a system that all can agree on because it is in their self interest. Fortunately, most humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and a desire to reciprocate. We don't need an absolute external morality because we have an inborn morality based on what works for our species as a whole.
Working for compensation where you can leave at any time (perhaps with legal consequences) is not slavery. You are just describing legitimizing exploitative working conditions, but thankfully we have laws against that, too. You aren't allowed to let your workers work in toxic environments, even if they sign a contract, and I think that is a good thing
I do not see the value in promoting exploitative systems of any sort. I believe in not just protecting but increasing human freedom, which means supporting systems that increase real human choices. Systems where anyone feels compelled to do something because they have no other choice are not free systems. I don't believe 'the freedom to take advantage of other's misfortune' is a freedom that should be protected.
There are no natural freedoms. The word 'freedom' would be as meaningless to a lone individual as the concept of water is to a fish. Individuals decide on what freedoms they want and form societies to help uphold those freedoms. You may consider anything you like to be a basic freedom, but if no one else agrees, your definition is only as meaningful as your individual ability to defend that freedom.
In order for a freedom to be real and meaningful, a group of people all must agree to defend it. People do not want to defend the rights of someone to own a slave, or the rights of someone else to sell themselves into slavery, so tough luck.
I just don't think it's a good idea to allow people to own other people. If it were required that there had to be a clause letting the slave end the contract if they wished, through some means, and everyone who owned slaves had to register that fact publicly, then I might be willing to agree with the idea. Or if we had a decent enough social safety net that nobody would ever have to enter into slavery. But I still think the harm outweighs the good.
The thing is, you claim that taking advantage of someone in desperate straights is coercion, and therefore no allowed, who would ever do this? If it isn't coercive, then there is no way that one could make it permanent. A slave could always decide to break the contract. That's what we have now. You can always agree to be someone's slave, they just can't hold you to it if you change your mind.
But it sounds like you want a situation where the slave would not be free to change their mind.
It isn't just an individual choice, it impacts society in negative ways. Certainly all systems are subject to corruption and abuse, but some more so than others. This is one of them. Society has weighed the costs and benefits, and found that the costs of the freedom to sell oneself into slavery outweigh the benefits. If you don't like the decision, you are free to try to change it through the methods our society has in place for that. Or you can go start your own society.
The freedoms you gain are that sociopathic individuals can not gain unfair advantage in this instance. Society is damaged by the existence of a slave class. Extreme disparity in wealth creates societal instability. Many people would not want to participate in a society that allowed slavery.
Informed consent does not indicate lack of coercion. Sometimes, a person doesn't have any other options, and they don't really have a choice. Disallowing slavery removes that option.
Perhaps if there were perfect access to information about who owns slaves and who doesn't, and people could decide not to do business with individuals who do own slaves, this would be legitimate. But then slave owning wouldn't be a viable option, and the point would be moot because no one would do it. It wouldn't be economically viable. The only way it would work for the slave holder would be if they were allowed to lie about it, or keep it secret.
The thing about slavery is the externalities. You are hurting more than just yourself by selling yourself into slavery. Freedom does not mean the freedom to harm others. When you sell yourself into slavery, you are allowing the sick and despicable to profit unfairly. You are destroying the very ties that bind us together into a community. You are committing unfair labor practices. And the whole thing is just too open to abuse.
We have to give away some freedoms to get the freedoms we want. Freedoms don't exist in a vacuum. If I want freedom from being hit in the face, I must give up my freedom to swing my arm wherever I want. We give up the freedom to sell ourselves into slavery in order to gain more important freedoms.
It is very dangerous to base an ethical system or philosophy on black and white principles. The world is a complex place, and all actions have unintended consequences. If you try to create a philosophy that is dedicated to never placing restrictions on others, you will see the impossible paradoxes quite soon, if you are actually thinking about it and not just using your black and white system to avoid having to think about the complexities of the real world.
Yes, freedom is good. But if you aren't careful, your attempts to increase freedom can end up decreasing freedom instead.
True. That was just a simple example. You could economically ruin a whole neighborhood, though. You wouldn't get everyone, but few people would be desperate enough to sell themselves into slavery. If the incentive of potentially owning slaves were there, people would find ways to make it happen.
Profiting off of other's desperation is sick and despicable and has no place in civilized society. It disgusts me that you are defending the idea. Is that really what freedom means to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations are a way to profit from criminal activities without the risk of being held responsible. You invest your money, and the board and CEOs know what to do, wink wink, whatever it takes to make a buck, and you never even have to know about all the suffering you caused with your investment.
It isn't just a few bad apples, the barrel of corporate culture is almost pure rot, with very little apple at all.
Who knew that there was a professional nail-biter's competition, let alone that Tiger Woods won it?
The Chinese plan is different from the US plans, how, exactly?
"My government wouldn't do this! It must be a fake!"
Sorry, it's been verified. The US government not only would do this, it has a long and verified history of doing this. Read up on the history of central and south America. But maybe all that history is fake too! Yeah, maybe anything bad anyone has ever said about the US is fake!
Do you not understand that the reference you gave discusses levels of moral reasoning? You brought the theory up.
Stupid people need to be responsible for their own choices, as do smart people who make stupid mistakes. However, allowing victimization to occur is a negative externality for everyone. It allows the most callous to accumulate financial power, which they may turn against our freedoms.
Therefore, it makes sense to spend resources to punish those who do it. It also makes sense to educate people in how to resist being taken advantage of. It is not advantageous to dismiss the situation as social Darwinism at work.
It isn't really a liberal or conservative issue. I think we can all embrace education in critical thinking and not letting crime pay.
People using the more developed stages of moral reasoning do not need my advice. People using the earlier stages do not handle ambiguity and relativism well. So, I could say something that is perhaps useful to a majority of people and risk alienating the more developed, or speak to people perfectly capable of making their own moral decisions, and risk confusing most people. In the end, people using the higher levels of moral reasoning don't care about punishment or reward anyway.
What would you have me do? You yourself admit my statement is a pretty close fit, would it be that much better if I added three more paragraphs of clarifications? Sure, sometimes it is not only okay to hurt other, but actually works to the greater good. Should I list all the situations where that is true?
You miss the point. It isn't who these people are hurting, it is what they are being rewarded for. Rewarding behavior that hurts others is never a good idea, no matter how minor the harm.
Yes, you are supposed to care. If you don't, it indicates a major subsystem of your brain is missing (you're a psychopath) or damaged (you're like most people.) Our brain has mirror circuits that let us run simulations of other sentient beings, which tie in to empathy circuits that let us feel what others are feeling. If you can witness suffering without feeling anything, there is something wrong with these circuits. As they are highly advantageous, both for the individual, and for the species as a whole, you might want to get that looked into.
The thing about the "stupidity tax" as so many call it is not that it harms the stupid, it is that it rewards the corrupt.
You can laugh at the people who fall for things like this and pat yourself on the back all you like, but it is wrong. It isn't helping society. It isn't weeding out the weak and stupid. It is rewarding evil.
Digg? More like poo on a stick.
You don't understand natural selection or evolution. We are changing the fitness criteria. There is not objective 'better' or 'worse' genes. Just what works and what doesn't.
Suddenly, it is not a big deal to have hemophilia or cancer prone genes. Most often, when you see a dangerous gene in fairly large numbers in a population, it also conveys a benefit. For instance, the genes linked to sickle cell anemia also provide resistance to malaria.
So you can shut up about natural selection. You have unnatural ideas about it, based on wrong headed 'genetic superiority' arguments. You have no idea what good effects those negative genes might also be providing, but you'd gladly do away with them rather than do away with the conditions that make them a liability.
Do you like playing god because you feel inherently superior?
I read about them in Sciam, back when they first captured the sonoluminescence phenomenon. Then I happened upon a featured photo or article of the day or something, I think, and read about their eyesight. Fascinating creatures.
Focal planes? Bah! What do we need with focal planes when we have, essentially, tens of thousands of pinhole cameras and eyes divided into three separate areas. Compared to your fovea, we have multiple bands of high res areas stretching across the middle of our eye! Can you see circularly polarized light? Why, an octopus has better eyesight than a human!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go stun a herring.
Is there any non-delicious shrimp?
Mantis shrimp don't have a blind spot, because their eyes aren't like the stupid human eyes where the optic nerve attaches to the front! Nyah nyah nyah!
Here's the quote I was referring too: The visual information leaving the retina seems to be processed into numerous parallel data streams leading into the central nervous system, greatly reducing the analytical requirements at higher levels. As far as I know, there is only a single data stream per eye in human vision. It may be transmitted in parallel, but there is only one image created for each eye. Not so for the vastly superior mantis shrimp. We have trinocular vision in each eye, so suck it, monkey boy!
I wouldn't, I mean, a mantis shrimp would never consider trading my, I mean his superior eyes for your puny human ones!
Dude, calm down. I wasn't dissing humanity, by mentioning that mantis shrimp have better vision, okay?
"Hew-mans! Hew-mans! Hew-mans! we're number one! we're number one!"
Feel better now?
Something like a Mantis Shrimp? Some species can detect circularly polarized light; each stalk mounted eye, on its own, has trinocular vision; they have up to sixteen different types of photoreceptors (not counting the many separate color filters they also have) to our four; and the information is transmitted from the retina in parallel, not serially down a single optic nerve like ours.
.22 caliber bullet, fast enough to cause cavitation and sonoluminescence.
These are also the little dudes who can strike with the force of a
Go Super Shrimp!
You are basing your morality on appeal to authority, what is the point of that? Even if there are natural rights, not everyone agrees what they are. Let me turn it around: So if, one day in the future, the vast majority of people in the US decide that freedom of expression is no longer a natural right, we no longer have that right?
Do you see what you're doing here, and why it is pointless? It would be nice if there were a nice man in the sky to tell us right from wrong, or a big book somewhere, or something written in stone, but there isn't. There is no absolute morality. I know, it seems terrifying, but the world has still been stumbling along without it.
Now, there may be absolutes for any finite group. There is what is right for you. There is what is right for your family, your society, your nation, all living things on earth, every sentient being everywhere. But there are no absolute absolutes that all sentients can know with certainty, and anyone who says there are is simply arguing from authority. They have no better way to convince you to accept their argument than saying, "I say that Nature, or some Authority, or God says so," which boils down to "Believe it because I say so."
The better path is to create a system that all can agree on because it is in their self interest. Fortunately, most humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and a desire to reciprocate. We don't need an absolute external morality because we have an inborn morality based on what works for our species as a whole.
Working for compensation where you can leave at any time (perhaps with legal consequences) is not slavery. You are just describing legitimizing exploitative working conditions, but thankfully we have laws against that, too. You aren't allowed to let your workers work in toxic environments, even if they sign a contract, and I think that is a good thing
I do not see the value in promoting exploitative systems of any sort. I believe in not just protecting but increasing human freedom, which means supporting systems that increase real human choices. Systems where anyone feels compelled to do something because they have no other choice are not free systems. I don't believe 'the freedom to take advantage of other's misfortune' is a freedom that should be protected.
There are no natural freedoms. The word 'freedom' would be as meaningless to a lone individual as the concept of water is to a fish. Individuals decide on what freedoms they want and form societies to help uphold those freedoms. You may consider anything you like to be a basic freedom, but if no one else agrees, your definition is only as meaningful as your individual ability to defend that freedom.
In order for a freedom to be real and meaningful, a group of people all must agree to defend it. People do not want to defend the rights of someone to own a slave, or the rights of someone else to sell themselves into slavery, so tough luck.
Now I know what to do with all my dead monkeys!
I just don't think it's a good idea to allow people to own other people. If it were required that there had to be a clause letting the slave end the contract if they wished, through some means, and everyone who owned slaves had to register that fact publicly, then I might be willing to agree with the idea. Or if we had a decent enough social safety net that nobody would ever have to enter into slavery. But I still think the harm outweighs the good.
The thing is, you claim that taking advantage of someone in desperate straights is coercion, and therefore no allowed, who would ever do this? If it isn't coercive, then there is no way that one could make it permanent. A slave could always decide to break the contract. That's what we have now. You can always agree to be someone's slave, they just can't hold you to it if you change your mind.
But it sounds like you want a situation where the slave would not be free to change their mind.
It isn't just an individual choice, it impacts society in negative ways. Certainly all systems are subject to corruption and abuse, but some more so than others. This is one of them. Society has weighed the costs and benefits, and found that the costs of the freedom to sell oneself into slavery outweigh the benefits. If you don't like the decision, you are free to try to change it through the methods our society has in place for that. Or you can go start your own society.
The freedoms you gain are that sociopathic individuals can not gain unfair advantage in this instance. Society is damaged by the existence of a slave class. Extreme disparity in wealth creates societal instability. Many people would not want to participate in a society that allowed slavery.
Informed consent does not indicate lack of coercion. Sometimes, a person doesn't have any other options, and they don't really have a choice. Disallowing slavery removes that option.
Perhaps if there were perfect access to information about who owns slaves and who doesn't, and people could decide not to do business with individuals who do own slaves, this would be legitimate. But then slave owning wouldn't be a viable option, and the point would be moot because no one would do it. It wouldn't be economically viable. The only way it would work for the slave holder would be if they were allowed to lie about it, or keep it secret.
The thing about slavery is the externalities. You are hurting more than just yourself by selling yourself into slavery. Freedom does not mean the freedom to harm others. When you sell yourself into slavery, you are allowing the sick and despicable to profit unfairly. You are destroying the very ties that bind us together into a community. You are committing unfair labor practices. And the whole thing is just too open to abuse.
We have to give away some freedoms to get the freedoms we want. Freedoms don't exist in a vacuum. If I want freedom from being hit in the face, I must give up my freedom to swing my arm wherever I want. We give up the freedom to sell ourselves into slavery in order to gain more important freedoms.
It is very dangerous to base an ethical system or philosophy on black and white principles. The world is a complex place, and all actions have unintended consequences. If you try to create a philosophy that is dedicated to never placing restrictions on others, you will see the impossible paradoxes quite soon, if you are actually thinking about it and not just using your black and white system to avoid having to think about the complexities of the real world.
Yes, freedom is good. But if you aren't careful, your attempts to increase freedom can end up decreasing freedom instead.
You can't handle the Thruth!
True. That was just a simple example. You could economically ruin a whole neighborhood, though. You wouldn't get everyone, but few people would be desperate enough to sell themselves into slavery. If the incentive of potentially owning slaves were there, people would find ways to make it happen.
Profiting off of other's desperation is sick and despicable and has no place in civilized society. It disgusts me that you are defending the idea. Is that really what freedom means to you?