And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one.
Then why can't supply satisfy demand? Prices on all the enthusiast-oriented cards have been going up for months, and if you really want a top-end card (5970 for example), it's really hard to find one.
Monitors are getting bigger and cheaper, and a lot of people want to play at (minimally) 1900x1200 at high settings. For newer games that takes expensive cards.
Or, it's possible that Google has an edge on the NSA in some areas. The NSA has a lot of talented people. Google has a lot of talented people. The people at the two organizations aren't all working on the same problems with the same amount of focus. So we don't actually know.
Personally, I take the point of the story to be that the federal government could, in the right legal climate, use private industry to do a lot of dirty work, which is why it isn't safe for us to allow Google to acquire all of our information now. Who knows -- in that possible future, Google's role might allow the NSA to free up a lot of talent to work on a whole range of other nefarious projects.
First off, why didn't Bruce say, "I'll only come if everything is on the record?" As it stands, this is basically a PR puff piece for nerds.
The original conversation he had with Hawley in April was "mostly off the record." This interview was done in May and June, and is not a transcript of the April conversation. Unless Schneier says otherwise, I don't think there's any reason to believe that anything said during the interview process was off the record. Presumably, the original conversation was just that -- a conversation, not an interview or anything that was expected to be published; I don't think it's at all odd that Schneier would agree to some things being off the record in that context.
I've apparently been unclear about several things here, and I apologize for that. I'll try to clarify some things, though not in the order you complained about them.
About your dancing around whether you said that God exists or not, I think it's just weak. If anyone's faith is so fragile that he can be offended by others questioning its veracity, it's obviously their own damn problem.
I'm not trying to dance around anything or avoid offending anyone; I just don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion about the logical proofs for the existence of God in the middle of this discussion about ethics. I'm willing to have that debate elsewhere, though I've had it a hundred times before, hence my offer to go to email. If someone reading this thread wants to say "Oh, well, this argument is moot anyways because God exists," I'm willing to have that discussion, I'd just rather not do it here, because it's tangential to what we're talking about. My comment about 'sensitive readers' was tongue-in-cheek.
You also say that mysticism is "a strong alternative" for basing ethics on, probably because it claims to offer a shortcut to direct knowledge.
It's strong in one sense, but obviously weak in many others. It's strong in the sense that it provides what it claims are foundational principles of ethics, which in my opinion, reason can't even claim. Thus it provides a basis for action, which I think reason cannot do. But you're of course correct that the "truths" you get that way are not really demonstrable or verifiable. And as for your statement that This, of course, can be much better explained by human cognitive biases and anthropology, I believe I noted that the ethics of religious groups are invariably informed by the social/cultural situation of the groups. We're not in disagreement here.
Another reason is that moral precepts based on delusions are more likely to be divisive than useful and uniting.
Here we disagree, at least in part. I don't think that moral precepts based on delusions are necessarily any more or less likely to be divisive than moral precepts based on, say, biology, neuroscience, or "shared human constitutive principles." But I think that in some sense all moral systems are based on a delusion, namely that the moral precepts (whatever they're based on -- whim, mysticism, reason, biology, whathaveyou) can be universalized. Any moral system is divisive as soon as you run into someone or someones who don't accept whatever precepts you've decided are fundamental.
I understand your argument to be that for a system of ethics to work, it needs to be based upon some absolute or metaphysical truths...
No, my argument is that for a system of ethics to work in the specific sense of universality, it needs to be based on such truths. For a system to work in the specific sense that everyone in the whole world can get together and agree on a framework of discussion for ethics, and solve their problems through that discussion, then yes, such a system would need to draw on some kind of universal truth. But for systems to work in a more modest way, and on a more local scale, no such thing is required. Usually all that's required is that the people within a given system mostly accept that some precepts are universal and fundamental. That acceptance, that universality, will be called into question when the people who live by that system run into people who don't; but depending on what precepts are chosen, the system may be very effective in organizing human life within the local group.
...and reason is ruled out because "empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental." I suppose this is because all knowledge is mediated, not immediate, and what we think we know about reality is based on induction.
My comment about empiricism might as well be a red herring. I was giving the poster I responded to two reasons why I ignore the kind of philosophers he seemed to b
Ethics based on whims is an alternative, but we don't usually go there (at least not all the way there), because doing ethics that way fails. It doesn't 'grease the wheels' of human interaction effectively, so to speak. People who try to live that way don't get very far socially unless they are extremely crafty and also lucky. I imagine that an entire society that tried to practice an ethics based solely on whim would collapse almost immediately, but of course I don't know that for certain.
Ethics based on mysticism is obviously a strong alternative, and often produces working results, for some definition of 'working.' Of course, any group or society that claims its ethics are based entirely on its mystical or religious principles is naive -- its ethics are invariably also based on the social and cultural history of the group and its interactions with outsiders, while simultaneously being informed by the mystical/religious doctrines and experiences of its members. And those doctrines and experiences also change over time.
Are there other options? Yes. (See a divergent branch of this discussion for ideas about creating a somewhat-rational system of ethics by choosing one or several ethical axioms and then applying reason to them.) I'm not sure there are any good ones though -- and by 'good' I mean: options that allow people with different systems of ethics based on different foundations to come together and work out problems in a productive way through discussion.
But it's damn important to remember that the lack of good alternatives doesn't prove that there can be an ethics based on reason. At best (if it's true that there aren't good alternatives) it proves that we're sort of screwed. This problem is similar to one that comes up often in discussions with people who derive ethics from God. Very religious people have often said to me that God must exist because as soon as God goes away, so do ethics. My response has not been, as they hoped, "Oh, well, there must be a God then, because we can't give up our ethics." Rather, my response has been, "Damn, you better get to work figuring out how to do ethics without God." The point being that the unfortunate consequences of a truth -- like the truth that ethics can't be based on reason, or that God doesn't exist -- don't somehow invalidate that truth.
(For particularly sensitive readers: feel free to assume that I'm not actually claiming that God doesn't exist, except for the sake of demonstrating a point in the argument. Anyone who wants to argue about God can send me email, which is listed on my Slashdot user page.)
What I don't understand is why one doesn't simply come up with an ethical axiom (or set thereof) and then proceed logically from that point.
One can of course do this (though a single axiom probably wouldn't be enough to derive a functional system), and in fact many philosophers have (though they've often claimed that the axioms themselves are founded in reason, which is silly.). But there are many real problems with this approach. One problem -- very serious, but not at all the most serious -- is that ethical systems based on 'ethical axioms' tend not to fit very well with actual human life. That is to say, it's usually very easy to point out situations for which, when we apply the derived ethical system to them, we become very uncomfortable with the results. (Kant's categorical imperative is a perfect example in this regard -- life is far too varied and messy and situational to be dealt with effectively by such an uncompromising principle.)
But the more serious problem is, for lack of a better term, meta-ethical. We aren't all going to agree on the axioms. The one you chose -- "suffering should be avoided" -- will be rejected by many people as soon as they realize that your axiom doesn't (for them) trump all sorts of other values they hold dear. Those who do not accept it outright will subordinate it to other axioms which they hold to be more important. Once that happens, how do we have productive discussions about ethics? Reason can't be the arbiter because it has nothing to say about which of the various foundational concepts should be employed.
However, reason in combination with a bias, such as Occam's razor, can get you somewhere if you already have assumed some basic moral rules and values.
Of course; but it's those assumptions of basic moral rules and values that are the problem! Where should we get them from? How should we settle debates when different groups have different sets of assumptions? Where's the common ground on which to have those discussions if we can't agree that our assumptions must stem from reason (a situation I've asserted is impossible)?
Of course, in a strict relativistic sense there is never anything preventing you from having completely different moral rules for each particular situation you are in (e.g. "Killing neighbours is morally right, unless their last name is Doe"). But such a system is quite useless, since it can never tell you how you should act, and it eliminates every possibility of even having discussion about morality.
I understand what you're saying, but it's important not to confuse arbitrariness with social construction. Societies' moral systems depend on the history, belief structures, and relationships of power within those societies. They may not be rational in the sense that reason isn't their foundation, but that' doesn't make them arbitrary. They often seem arbitrary to outsiders, but then, that moves both ways -- an outsider's system will seem just as arbitrary to a native. That's because the assumptions differ, because their roots -- social reality and history -- also differ. How do you decide between them? You can ask which system serves a society better, but even that is problematic, because what counts as 'better' will depend on subjective values just as much as the moral systems themselves.
In fact, the exact same things could be said about science, a field which we generally associate strongly with reason and reality, since its foundation, empiricism, in itself is an arbitrary principle.
Empiricism is not an arbitrary principle. It can't be established through deductive logic, but we choose it from a multitude of other epistemological methods for definite reasons. We don't just pull it out of a hat or use it because it won a lottery. Even Hume, after failing to ground inductive reasoning in anything other than a habit of the mind, would call you insane for ignoring the repeated occurrences of events in similar situations, because following the habit works. That isn't arbitrary; it isn't the case that there are two poles, 'grounded in logic' and 'arbitrary' and that all our systems and methods must fall out at one or the other of them.
Reason does not give us science, yet it is usually said that science is grounded in reason.
Science is grounded in reason insofar as it is a system of activity that is grounded in a set of consistent principles; and those principles have a place in the history of the development of logic. Science is reasonable when it doesn't exceed the epistemological 'reach' of those underlying principles -- that is, when it remembers (1) that empiricism is in some sense always logically provisional; (2) that nothing it produces is ever safe from revision based on further empirical endeavors; and (3) that it is always possible that other methods of investigating reality may produce truths, although those truths may look very different in form from empirical truths. (Of course, if you want to take a Kantian view, which I usually do, empiricism isn't really provisional; but that opens up a whole other can of worms. And even in that case, (2) and (3) still hold.)
Nontheless, to claim that either science or morality is straightforward is rather presumptuous, I would say.
Actually, the precise meanings of the terms 'ethics' and 'morals' depend on which philosopher you're reading, and more broadly, which school of philosophy you're studying. The definition of ethics you've given may function within the broad discipline that's usually called 'Analytic Philosophy' (though even there the definition isn't consistent), but move much beyond that -- say, to the ethical systems of some 20th Century French and German philosophers -- and all bets are off. When Walter Kaufmann, for instance, uses the word 'ethics' in his translation of Martin Buber, he sure doesn't mean "like morals, only with Reason as their underpinning." He means, as Buber did, relations based on the irreducible sacredness of another human being.
Whatever definitions you like to use, the central criticism remains. Almost all of modern Analytic ethics ignores the impossibility of establishing ethical/moral claims based on reason, much like most modern analytic philosophers ignore the fact that empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental. That's why I tend to ignore the field.
There is no pre-existing blanket-o'-morality waiting for you to see it and embrace it...
That's true, but I don't think that supports your original assertion, namely:
A system of values ("morality") that's grounded in reality and reason is fairly straightforward.
Reason cannot ground a morality. Reason is a tool that doesn't provide goals. It gets us from point A to point B -- that is, it allows us to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves. It cannot tell us what those goals should be, and it's precisely this 'should' that grounds any moral system. So, for example, if my ethnically related compatriots and I want to kill our ethnically different neighbors -- because they make us uncomfortable, because we're short on land and water and they have plenty of both, because their beliefs offend us, whatever -- reason can tell us many things. It can tell us that we can't get away with what we want to do because someone with a big stick (another neighboring group, say) will come and kill us in turn; or that the people we want to kill are too strong for us to assault; or perhaps that nothing stands in our way of accomplishing our desire. If the latter, reason can tell us how to best go about killing our enemies -- what tactics to use, what timeline to follow to achieve the best results, how to hide our actions from outside observers until we've succeeded, etc.
What reason cannot tell us is that we should not kill our neighbors in any absolute sense. It can tell us that we should not try to kill them because we cannot handle the consequences of trying. Or it can tell us that we should because we can get away with it. But it can never tell us that we shouldn't because it would be morally wrong to do so. Reason doesn't dictate what we should or shouldn't want -- only how to get where we want to be.
Moral systems that invoke reason are thus also relative -- relative to our desires and to all of the assumptions we bring to the table. Whether reality itself is relative to anything, or an absolute framework in which we live, is more or less irrelevant. The benefit of classical systems of ethics -- what gives them their moral force -- is that they are based on unreasonable foundations, such as the sanctity of human life, which reason cannot in any sense provide. We can reject them because they do not, in our view, reflect reality; but we can't replace them with a tool that has no claim to absolute moral truth. If we're to be honest logicians, we must accept the consequences of our conclusions and live in a world that is ultimately far less comfortable and settled and straightforward than the world of our religious forebears.
My question to programmers is this, Swap may have made sense 30 years ago, when ram was like $8/byte and not much faster than disk anyway, but in 2007, ram is ubiquitous and MUCH faster than disk. Why do we even have swap anymore at all?
Because RAM isn't quite ubiquitous, and because people still run out of memory even when they max out their systems -- or, for that matter, when they buy as much RAM for their systems as they can afford. Remember, RAM is only relatively inexpensive, when compared to the price of RAM in the past. Disk is still much, much cheaper. And when you do run out of memory, you'd much rather have your machine slow down while swapping, thus giving you time to kill processes or allow the machine to work through the problem, rather than simply crash.
Two relevant examples:
1) A co-worker of mine is a Windows developer. He usually has at least two additional copies of Windows running in VMs on his workstation. Now that he's supporting Vista, the 4 GB of RAM in his workstation (which is as much as it will take) isn't always quite enough. He would rather spend some time swapping than have his workstation crash.
2) I admin several Linux servers at our university that are multi-user statistics/computation servers. Anyone at the university can log in and run programs. Most of the users are graduate students using Matlab, Mathematica, SAS, Stata, etc., running large data sets and using lots of RAM. We're only budgeted for a certain amount of hardware, and as a result, our machines only have 16GB of RAM each. When a few users start really large jobs, and one of them uses up what's left of available RAM, we don't want the machine crashing and taking everyone's jobs with it. Likewise, if some doofus writes a program with nasty memory leaks, swap space gives us the time we need to go in and kill the offending process; other users who've got long-running jobs don't have to lose 2 weeks worth of work because we ran out of memory.
Have you read Darwin? You do understand that according to the theory, speciation occurs over vast periods of time, and in the short term, this occurs through adaptation, right? If you get that much, you must understand that your gripe boils down to this: we can't have adequate evidence that something occurs without watching the process from beginning to end, and thus observation of adaptation plus the fossil record plus common genes shared between distinct species isn't good evidence.
If that's your position, please let me know the next time God shows up at your house; I have some complaints I'd like to make.
Universal claims stand so long as there are no counterexamples, generalizations stand so long as counterexamples are comparatively rare.
No, neither of them stand in the absence of adequate evidence. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for you to cite even a single police station on the entire planet that wouldn't cover up the crimes of its officers. Can you name even one counterexample?
Every police department in the world that hasn't been accused; every police department that has been accused, investigated and cleared. But you're setting a dirty trap. You've already implied that due to internal cover-up, we can assume they're all guilty.
almost all police forces have criminal members (you know this)
No, I don't, and neither do you.
almost all police forces protect those members (you know this)
No, I don't, and neither do you.
Your 'you know this' is just a variant on the 'everyone knows this' mistake, which is essentially an argumentum ad populum.
You're making a knowledge claim. You're saying that because you've read some newspaper articles and seen a lot of corruption first hand, you have knowledge that all or almost all police, everywhere, are corrupt. The evidence you're citing doesn't support that conclusion.
You're not just being sloppy about your general reasoning; you're being sloppy about your facts, when you bother to mention any. For example, your claim that the RCMP and OOP constitute about 90% of all police officers in Canada is completely false (unless 'about 90%' means 'a lot and I haven't bothered to find out how many'):
I guess your statement that So at the very least, I can tell you that Canadian police officers are mostly criminals just fell apart.
Your entire argument also rests on a host of unstated (and unsubstantiated) assumptions. For example, your claim that if there is corruption in a department and it is covered up, then all officers in the department are corrupt, assumes that every officer in the department knows about the corruption (possibly false) and hasn't reported all of their knowledge about the corruption to their superiors and to appropriate external agencies (possibly false). Without that assumption your argument falls to pieces, and you have no evidence whatsoever on which to base the assumption.
You're drastically oversimplifying because the conclusion you already think you know is true doesn't stand if you reason correctly. You hand-pick your sample, you assume that every officer in every department has full knowledge of everything and always responds inappropriately, and you make up your statistics as you need them without actually knowing the truth. You invent statistics to support your argument. You're terribly biased and you're fudging your reasoning to cover it up.
Have you ever done work in the social sciences? 'Newspapers and things' can be cited as evidence of the occurrence of events. They are not reliable as sources of information about broad trends, unless they're citing other sources about such trends, in which case one needs to look at the other sources. Newspapers don't provide a random sample of anything, or a large sample of anything (unless you're studying the writing habits of newspaper reporters). They are probably the most commonly used source in our society for fallacious arguments based on small sample sizes (yeah, that's a guess on my part).
Oh, and you can make inferences from small samples.
Yes, but not hand-picked, non-random ones.
I can make any universal claim I like about a group, so long as there are no counterexamples.
Actually, you're making an existential claim about a trait, so the burden of proof rests on you. Let's test your theory by analogy. Can you claim that:
All black people are violent? All Jews are greedy? All homosexual men are attracted to little boys?
You can't make any of these claims, no matter how many anecdotes you pull out, nor can you make your claim about police. The reason you can't make any of these claims isn't because people can pull counterexamples; it's because you don't have any evidence. I'm sorry, but until you start playing by the rules of evidence, your claim just isn't serious.
That's a sample of 29000 officers, who either commit crimes or are willing to cover for the crimes of others.
So is your conclusion valid for: A) All police in the world? B) All police in the Western Hemisphere? C) All police in North America? D) All police in Canada? E) All police in large Canadian cities, plus provincial and national police, but not small-town police? F) Absolutely nothing?
So at what point do you consider that your local police force is an insufficient sample size from which to generalize to the entire world?
I'm not criticizing your anecdotes. Spend all day listing more for all I care. I'm criticizing your logic, which doesn't hold up. If you don't have real numbers, you don't get to make massive generalizations. I mean, you can make them as much as you like, but there's no reason for anyone else to accept them.
There's a reason we have rules of inductive logic. Biologists don't get to tell us that every dinosaur had three claws per limb after observing two species that had three claws per limb. Anthropologists don't get to tell us that all human beings have kinship laws that prohibit marriage between first cousins after seeing ten villages where such marriages are prohibited. And you don't get to tell us that some vast majority of police officers are corrupt based on a sample size of ten, or twenty, or a thousand. You have to provide your numbers. This is a point of fact. And if you don't actually know the fact, you ought not be pretending you do.
And so most cops are in every legal sense criminals.
Please back that statement up. I want to see your numbers. I assert that you're generalizing from anecdote and from news coverage of individual incidents. This is a perfect example of the fallacy of hasty generalization, or, if you will, insufficient statistics. You're arguing a point of fact, and I want to see the fact.
That's what a Human life is worth to the police...
There is no such thing as 'the police'. There is only a wide range of people. Your choice to condemn every person in the world who choses that career as subhuman is almost in the same species of hatred as racism. It's blindly irrational, and it's deeply wrong. Speaking it in public is an unethical act akin to claiming that all Gypsies are thieves or that all Jews hoard money. The only difference is that the group you're condemning is made up of people who can leave the group. And the statement that every member of the group is subhuman until every member of the group is ethical, is so far beyond rationality as to have strayed into the absurd.
I can understand where that kind of hatred comes from. But I hope you can understand that even though you have reasons to feel that way, your reasons don't justify the broad scope of your hatred, or the assertion that every person in the world who wears a uniform is subhuman. The world isn't really made up of such convenient black and white, all-or-nothing distinctions. The world is actually a complicated place. If there's anything constant, it is that offering simple answers to complex problems, or giving simple descriptions of complex systems, is folly -- though admittedly, such folly is emotionally comforting and intellectually satisfying.
If every man and woman in uniform threw in the towel tomorrow, most of them would be acting unethically and abdicating responsibility, and many people would suffer and die for that abdication. That, if nothing else, really ought to give you pause.
I'm not saying that there aren't corrupt cops. I'm not saying that there aren't a LOT of corrupt cops. I have plenty of my own anecdotes about experiences I've had with bad cops, lazy cops, cops who busy themselves harassing law-abiding citizens who look different, etc.
But I've also known a lot of good cops, and I've gained a certain amount of respect for people who are willing to put their lives on the line to protect their fellow citizens. I've known cops who do serve as officers as a day job and spend most of their time off work as volunteer firefighters or medics; people with an admirable ethic of public service, who are cops because they want to devote their lives to the people around them.
I believe that corrupt cops ought to be punished very severely. Corruption in the police should not be tolerated. There is an inherent danger in having a police force, and one of several ways to deal with that danger is to be on the lookout for bad behavior and come down hard when it's found. But I'm very defensive about the 'all cops are evil scum' reaction that comes up every time a police brutality incident comes to light. It isn't true and it isn't fair. Your post suggested that the job of being a cop is equivalent to "...pissing people off and harassing them, assaulting teenagers for the heinous crime of loitering, ignoring rape victims while using deadly force to deal with noise complaints..." and that when someone applies for the job, that's what they're signing up for. There are many ethical and upright people who don't deserve to be painted with that assumption.
And officials wonder why police universally are looked upon as evil and not to be trusted.
I don't believe that police 'universally are looked upon as evil and not to be trusted.' Please provide a source for that assertion. I strongly suspect you believe it because you and some people you know think police are evil and untrustworthy.
Oh and knowing several career cops, most are mentially unstable and enjoy abusing their "power"... There are some good ones, but they are very rare lately.
I wasn't suggesting that police brutality is excusable or shouldn't be severely punished. I was contradicting a specific point, and saying that many small-town cops have serious work to do.
And they often do have serious work. Do you really believe that police work is all assaulting teenagers and ignoring rape victims? If so, do you actually know any police officers? On what basis are you generalizing?
I was careless in my above post. I didn't mean to suggest that every small town has all of these problems. I've spent time in towns that do, however. The frequency of incidents is much lower than in big cities, but of course the police forces are also much smaller.
"What I am more referring to is the small town cop which has nothing to do but wrongfully arrest and harass innocent people so that he can keep his job..."
Do you really think that's all a small-town cop has to do? Small towns, like large ones, have domestic violence, mentally unstable people with weapons, robberies, rape, assault, dishonest businesses, unauthorized dumping of hazardous chemicals, racial discrimination, problems with crack and meth and alcoholism... and the list goes on. In some ways life is harder on a small-town cop: everyone knows them, and they can make enemies in a tight-knit community just by doing their jobs -- and moving to another job may mean leaving a community they've been tied to for their whole lives.
Slashdot Mirror
And you know who buys the top of the line super expensive cards? Pretty much no one.
Then why can't supply satisfy demand? Prices on all the enthusiast-oriented cards have been going up for months, and if you really want a top-end card (5970 for example), it's really hard to find one.
Monitors are getting bigger and cheaper, and a lot of people want to play at (minimally) 1900x1200 at high settings. For newer games that takes expensive cards.
http://xkcd.com/307/
Or, it's possible that Google has an edge on the NSA in some areas. The NSA has a lot of talented people. Google has a lot of talented people. The people at the two organizations aren't all working on the same problems with the same amount of focus. So we don't actually know.
Personally, I take the point of the story to be that the federal government could, in the right legal climate, use private industry to do a lot of dirty work, which is why it isn't safe for us to allow Google to acquire all of our information now. Who knows -- in that possible future, Google's role might allow the NSA to free up a lot of talent to work on a whole range of other nefarious projects.
First off, why didn't Bruce say, "I'll only come if everything is on the record?" As it stands, this is basically a PR puff piece for nerds.
The original conversation he had with Hawley in April was "mostly off the record." This interview was done in May and June, and is not a transcript of the April conversation. Unless Schneier says otherwise, I don't think there's any reason to believe that anything said during the interview process was off the record. Presumably, the original conversation was just that -- a conversation, not an interview or anything that was expected to be published; I don't think it's at all odd that Schneier would agree to some things being off the record in that context.
I've apparently been unclear about several things here, and I apologize for that. I'll try to clarify some things, though not in the order you complained about them.
...and reason is ruled out because "empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental." I suppose this is because all knowledge is mediated, not immediate, and what we think we know about reality is based on induction.
About your dancing around whether you said that God exists or not, I think it's just weak. If anyone's faith is so fragile that he can be offended by others questioning its veracity, it's obviously their own damn problem.
I'm not trying to dance around anything or avoid offending anyone; I just don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion about the logical proofs for the existence of God in the middle of this discussion about ethics. I'm willing to have that debate elsewhere, though I've had it a hundred times before, hence my offer to go to email. If someone reading this thread wants to say "Oh, well, this argument is moot anyways because God exists," I'm willing to have that discussion, I'd just rather not do it here, because it's tangential to what we're talking about. My comment about 'sensitive readers' was tongue-in-cheek.
You also say that mysticism is "a strong alternative" for basing ethics on, probably because it claims to offer a shortcut to direct knowledge.
It's strong in one sense, but obviously weak in many others. It's strong in the sense that it provides what it claims are foundational principles of ethics, which in my opinion, reason can't even claim. Thus it provides a basis for action, which I think reason cannot do. But you're of course correct that the "truths" you get that way are not really demonstrable or verifiable. And as for your statement that This, of course, can be much better explained by human cognitive biases and anthropology, I believe I noted that the ethics of religious groups are invariably informed by the social/cultural situation of the groups. We're not in disagreement here.
Another reason is that moral precepts based on delusions are more likely to be divisive than useful and uniting.
Here we disagree, at least in part. I don't think that moral precepts based on delusions are necessarily any more or less likely to be divisive than moral precepts based on, say, biology, neuroscience, or "shared human constitutive principles." But I think that in some sense all moral systems are based on a delusion, namely that the moral precepts (whatever they're based on -- whim, mysticism, reason, biology, whathaveyou) can be universalized. Any moral system is divisive as soon as you run into someone or someones who don't accept whatever precepts you've decided are fundamental.
I understand your argument to be that for a system of ethics to work, it needs to be based upon some absolute or metaphysical truths...
No, my argument is that for a system of ethics to work in the specific sense of universality, it needs to be based on such truths. For a system to work in the specific sense that everyone in the whole world can get together and agree on a framework of discussion for ethics, and solve their problems through that discussion, then yes, such a system would need to draw on some kind of universal truth. But for systems to work in a more modest way, and on a more local scale, no such thing is required. Usually all that's required is that the people within a given system mostly accept that some precepts are universal and fundamental. That acceptance, that universality, will be called into question when the people who live by that system run into people who don't; but depending on what precepts are chosen, the system may be very effective in organizing human life within the local group.
My comment about empiricism might as well be a red herring. I was giving the poster I responded to two reasons why I ignore the kind of philosophers he seemed to b
Ethics based on whims is an alternative, but we don't usually go there (at least not all the way there), because doing ethics that way fails. It doesn't 'grease the wheels' of human interaction effectively, so to speak. People who try to live that way don't get very far socially unless they are extremely crafty and also lucky. I imagine that an entire society that tried to practice an ethics based solely on whim would collapse almost immediately, but of course I don't know that for certain.
Ethics based on mysticism is obviously a strong alternative, and often produces working results, for some definition of 'working.' Of course, any group or society that claims its ethics are based entirely on its mystical or religious principles is naive -- its ethics are invariably also based on the social and cultural history of the group and its interactions with outsiders, while simultaneously being informed by the mystical/religious doctrines and experiences of its members. And those doctrines and experiences also change over time.
Are there other options? Yes. (See a divergent branch of this discussion for ideas about creating a somewhat-rational system of ethics by choosing one or several ethical axioms and then applying reason to them.) I'm not sure there are any good ones though -- and by 'good' I mean: options that allow people with different systems of ethics based on different foundations to come together and work out problems in a productive way through discussion.
But it's damn important to remember that the lack of good alternatives doesn't prove that there can be an ethics based on reason. At best (if it's true that there aren't good alternatives) it proves that we're sort of screwed. This problem is similar to one that comes up often in discussions with people who derive ethics from God. Very religious people have often said to me that God must exist because as soon as God goes away, so do ethics. My response has not been, as they hoped, "Oh, well, there must be a God then, because we can't give up our ethics." Rather, my response has been, "Damn, you better get to work figuring out how to do ethics without God." The point being that the unfortunate consequences of a truth -- like the truth that ethics can't be based on reason, or that God doesn't exist -- don't somehow invalidate that truth.
(For particularly sensitive readers: feel free to assume that I'm not actually claiming that God doesn't exist, except for the sake of demonstrating a point in the argument. Anyone who wants to argue about God can send me email, which is listed on my Slashdot user page.)
What I don't understand is why one doesn't simply come up with an ethical axiom (or set thereof) and then proceed logically from that point.
One can of course do this (though a single axiom probably wouldn't be enough to derive a functional system), and in fact many philosophers have (though they've often claimed that the axioms themselves are founded in reason, which is silly.). But there are many real problems with this approach. One problem -- very serious, but not at all the most serious -- is that ethical systems based on 'ethical axioms' tend not to fit very well with actual human life. That is to say, it's usually very easy to point out situations for which, when we apply the derived ethical system to them, we become very uncomfortable with the results. (Kant's categorical imperative is a perfect example in this regard -- life is far too varied and messy and situational to be dealt with effectively by such an uncompromising principle.)
But the more serious problem is, for lack of a better term, meta-ethical. We aren't all going to agree on the axioms. The one you chose -- "suffering should be avoided" -- will be rejected by many people as soon as they realize that your axiom doesn't (for them) trump all sorts of other values they hold dear. Those who do not accept it outright will subordinate it to other axioms which they hold to be more important. Once that happens, how do we have productive discussions about ethics? Reason can't be the arbiter because it has nothing to say about which of the various foundational concepts should be employed.
However, reason in combination with a bias, such as Occam's razor, can get you somewhere if you already have assumed some basic moral rules and values.
;)
Of course; but it's those assumptions of basic moral rules and values that are the problem! Where should we get them from? How should we settle debates when different groups have different sets of assumptions? Where's the common ground on which to have those discussions if we can't agree that our assumptions must stem from reason (a situation I've asserted is impossible)?
Of course, in a strict relativistic sense there is never anything preventing you from having completely different moral rules for each particular situation you are in (e.g. "Killing neighbours is morally right, unless their last name is Doe"). But such a system is quite useless, since it can never tell you how you should act, and it eliminates every possibility of even having discussion about morality.
I understand what you're saying, but it's important not to confuse arbitrariness with social construction. Societies' moral systems depend on the history, belief structures, and relationships of power within those societies. They may not be rational in the sense that reason isn't their foundation, but that' doesn't make them arbitrary. They often seem arbitrary to outsiders, but then, that moves both ways -- an outsider's system will seem just as arbitrary to a native. That's because the assumptions differ, because their roots -- social reality and history -- also differ. How do you decide between them? You can ask which system serves a society better, but even that is problematic, because what counts as 'better' will depend on subjective values just as much as the moral systems themselves.
In fact, the exact same things could be said about science, a field which we generally associate strongly with reason and reality, since its foundation, empiricism, in itself is an arbitrary principle.
Empiricism is not an arbitrary principle. It can't be established through deductive logic, but we choose it from a multitude of other epistemological methods for definite reasons. We don't just pull it out of a hat or use it because it won a lottery. Even Hume, after failing to ground inductive reasoning in anything other than a habit of the mind, would call you insane for ignoring the repeated occurrences of events in similar situations, because following the habit works. That isn't arbitrary; it isn't the case that there are two poles, 'grounded in logic' and 'arbitrary' and that all our systems and methods must fall out at one or the other of them.
Reason does not give us science, yet it is usually said that science is grounded in reason.
Science is grounded in reason insofar as it is a system of activity that is grounded in a set of consistent principles; and those principles have a place in the history of the development of logic. Science is reasonable when it doesn't exceed the epistemological 'reach' of those underlying principles -- that is, when it remembers (1) that empiricism is in some sense always logically provisional; (2) that nothing it produces is ever safe from revision based on further empirical endeavors; and (3) that it is always possible that other methods of investigating reality may produce truths, although those truths may look very different in form from empirical truths. (Of course, if you want to take a Kantian view, which I usually do, empiricism isn't really provisional; but that opens up a whole other can of worms. And even in that case, (2) and (3) still hold.)
Nontheless, to claim that either science or morality is straightforward is rather presumptuous, I would say.
That's for certain.
Actually, the precise meanings of the terms 'ethics' and 'morals' depend on which philosopher you're reading, and more broadly, which school of philosophy you're studying. The definition of ethics you've given may function within the broad discipline that's usually called 'Analytic Philosophy' (though even there the definition isn't consistent), but move much beyond that -- say, to the ethical systems of some 20th Century French and German philosophers -- and all bets are off. When Walter Kaufmann, for instance, uses the word 'ethics' in his translation of Martin Buber, he sure doesn't mean "like morals, only with Reason as their underpinning." He means, as Buber did, relations based on the irreducible sacredness of another human being.
Whatever definitions you like to use, the central criticism remains. Almost all of modern Analytic ethics ignores the impossibility of establishing ethical/moral claims based on reason, much like most modern analytic philosophers ignore the fact that empiricism can't be epistemologically fundamental. That's why I tend to ignore the field.
There is no pre-existing blanket-o'-morality waiting for you to see it and embrace it...
That's true, but I don't think that supports your original assertion, namely:
A system of values ("morality") that's grounded in reality and reason is fairly straightforward.
Reason cannot ground a morality. Reason is a tool that doesn't provide goals. It gets us from point A to point B -- that is, it allows us to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves. It cannot tell us what those goals should be, and it's precisely this 'should' that grounds any moral system. So, for example, if my ethnically related compatriots and I want to kill our ethnically different neighbors -- because they make us uncomfortable, because we're short on land and water and they have plenty of both, because their beliefs offend us, whatever -- reason can tell us many things. It can tell us that we can't get away with what we want to do because someone with a big stick (another neighboring group, say) will come and kill us in turn; or that the people we want to kill are too strong for us to assault; or perhaps that nothing stands in our way of accomplishing our desire. If the latter, reason can tell us how to best go about killing our enemies -- what tactics to use, what timeline to follow to achieve the best results, how to hide our actions from outside observers until we've succeeded, etc.
What reason cannot tell us is that we should not kill our neighbors in any absolute sense. It can tell us that we should not try to kill them because we cannot handle the consequences of trying. Or it can tell us that we should because we can get away with it. But it can never tell us that we shouldn't because it would be morally wrong to do so. Reason doesn't dictate what we should or shouldn't want -- only how to get where we want to be.
Moral systems that invoke reason are thus also relative -- relative to our desires and to all of the assumptions we bring to the table. Whether reality itself is relative to anything, or an absolute framework in which we live, is more or less irrelevant. The benefit of classical systems of ethics -- what gives them their moral force -- is that they are based on unreasonable foundations, such as the sanctity of human life, which reason cannot in any sense provide. We can reject them because they do not, in our view, reflect reality; but we can't replace them with a tool that has no claim to absolute moral truth. If we're to be honest logicians, we must accept the consequences of our conclusions and live in a world that is ultimately far less comfortable and settled and straightforward than the world of our religious forebears.
My question to programmers is this, Swap may have made sense 30 years ago, when ram was like $8/byte and not much faster than disk anyway, but in 2007, ram is ubiquitous and MUCH faster than disk. Why do we even have swap anymore at all?
Because RAM isn't quite ubiquitous, and because people still run out of memory even when they max out their systems -- or, for that matter, when they buy as much RAM for their systems as they can afford. Remember, RAM is only relatively inexpensive, when compared to the price of RAM in the past. Disk is still much, much cheaper. And when you do run out of memory, you'd much rather have your machine slow down while swapping, thus giving you time to kill processes or allow the machine to work through the problem, rather than simply crash.
Two relevant examples:
1) A co-worker of mine is a Windows developer. He usually has at least two additional copies of Windows running in VMs on his workstation. Now that he's supporting Vista, the 4 GB of RAM in his workstation (which is as much as it will take) isn't always quite enough. He would rather spend some time swapping than have his workstation crash.
2) I admin several Linux servers at our university that are multi-user statistics/computation servers. Anyone at the university can log in and run programs. Most of the users are graduate students using Matlab, Mathematica, SAS, Stata, etc., running large data sets and using lots of RAM. We're only budgeted for a certain amount of hardware, and as a result, our machines only have 16GB of RAM each. When a few users start really large jobs, and one of them uses up what's left of available RAM, we don't want the machine crashing and taking everyone's jobs with it. Likewise, if some doofus writes a program with nasty memory leaks, swap space gives us the time we need to go in and kill the offending process; other users who've got long-running jobs don't have to lose 2 weeks worth of work because we ran out of memory.
Have you read Darwin? You do understand that according to the theory, speciation occurs over vast periods of time, and in the short term, this occurs through adaptation, right? If you get that much, you must understand that your gripe boils down to this: we can't have adequate evidence that something occurs without watching the process from beginning to end, and thus observation of adaptation plus the fossil record plus common genes shared between distinct species isn't good evidence.
If that's your position, please let me know the next time God shows up at your house; I have some complaints I'd like to make.
Next time you get an infection, please do us all a favor and take the ID challenge: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.ht ml?uc_full_date=20060702
Universal claims stand so long as there are no counterexamples, generalizations stand so long as counterexamples are comparatively rare.
No, neither of them stand in the absence of adequate evidence. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim.
Oh, and I'm still waiting for you to cite even a single police station on the entire planet that wouldn't cover up the crimes of its officers. Can you name even one counterexample?
Every police department in the world that hasn't been accused; every police department that has been accused, investigated and cleared. But you're setting a dirty trap. You've already implied that due to internal cover-up, we can assume they're all guilty.
almost all police forces have criminal members (you know this)
No, I don't, and neither do you.
almost all police forces protect those members (you know this)
No, I don't, and neither do you.
Your 'you know this' is just a variant on the 'everyone knows this' mistake, which is essentially an argumentum ad populum.
You're making a knowledge claim. You're saying that because you've read some newspaper articles and seen a lot of corruption first hand, you have knowledge that all or almost all police, everywhere, are corrupt. The evidence you're citing doesn't support that conclusion.
You're not just being sloppy about your general reasoning; you're being sloppy about your facts, when you bother to mention any. For example, your claim that the RCMP and OOP constitute about 90% of all police officers in Canada is completely false (unless 'about 90%' means 'a lot and I haven't bothered to find out how many'):
http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/legal05a.htm
I guess your statement that So at the very least, I can tell you that Canadian police officers are mostly criminals just fell apart.
Your entire argument also rests on a host of unstated (and unsubstantiated) assumptions. For example, your claim that if there is corruption in a department and it is covered up, then all officers in the department are corrupt, assumes that every officer in the department knows about the corruption (possibly false) and hasn't reported all of their knowledge about the corruption to their superiors and to appropriate external agencies (possibly false). Without that assumption your argument falls to pieces, and you have no evidence whatsoever on which to base the assumption.
You're drastically oversimplifying because the conclusion you already think you know is true doesn't stand if you reason correctly. You hand-pick your sample, you assume that every officer in every department has full knowledge of everything and always responds inappropriately, and you make up your statistics as you need them without actually knowing the truth. You invent statistics to support your argument. You're terribly biased and you're fudging your reasoning to cover it up.
You know, newspapers and things.
Have you ever done work in the social sciences? 'Newspapers and things' can be cited as evidence of the occurrence of events. They are not reliable as sources of information about broad trends, unless they're citing other sources about such trends, in which case one needs to look at the other sources. Newspapers don't provide a random sample of anything, or a large sample of anything (unless you're studying the writing habits of newspaper reporters). They are probably the most commonly used source in our society for fallacious arguments based on small sample sizes (yeah, that's a guess on my part).
Oh, and you can make inferences from small samples.
Yes, but not hand-picked, non-random ones.
I can make any universal claim I like about a group, so long as there are no counterexamples.
Actually, you're making an existential claim about a trait, so the burden of proof rests on you. Let's test your theory by analogy. Can you claim that:
All black people are violent?
All Jews are greedy?
All homosexual men are attracted to little boys?
You can't make any of these claims, no matter how many anecdotes you pull out, nor can you make your claim about police. The reason you can't make any of these claims isn't because people can pull counterexamples; it's because you don't have any evidence. I'm sorry, but until you start playing by the rules of evidence, your claim just isn't serious.
That's a sample of 29000 officers, who either commit crimes or are willing to cover for the crimes of others.
So is your conclusion valid for:
A) All police in the world?
B) All police in the Western Hemisphere?
C) All police in North America?
D) All police in Canada?
E) All police in large Canadian cities, plus provincial and national police, but not small-town police?
F) Absolutely nothing?
You can do the work on figuring that out.
You KNOW which number will be much larger.
No I don't, and neither do you. You haven't bothered to do your research. If you had, you'd be producing numbers.
no such thing -- we're talking about Humans here
Earlier you claimed we were talking about subhumans. Are you prepared to admit that people who make mistakes are still people?
So at what point do you consider that your local police force is an insufficient sample size from which to generalize to the entire world?
I'm not criticizing your anecdotes. Spend all day listing more for all I care. I'm criticizing your logic, which doesn't hold up. If you don't have real numbers, you don't get to make massive generalizations. I mean, you can make them as much as you like, but there's no reason for anyone else to accept them.
There's a reason we have rules of inductive logic. Biologists don't get to tell us that every dinosaur had three claws per limb after observing two species that had three claws per limb. Anthropologists don't get to tell us that all human beings have kinship laws that prohibit marriage between first cousins after seeing ten villages where such marriages are prohibited. And you don't get to tell us that some vast majority of police officers are corrupt based on a sample size of ten, or twenty, or a thousand. You have to provide your numbers. This is a point of fact. And if you don't actually know the fact, you ought not be pretending you do.
And so most cops are in every legal sense criminals.
Please back that statement up. I want to see your numbers. I assert that you're generalizing from anecdote and from news coverage of individual incidents. This is a perfect example of the fallacy of hasty generalization, or, if you will, insufficient statistics. You're arguing a point of fact, and I want to see the fact.
And if you're right, I'll gladly admit I'm wrong.
Until then, they're subhuman.
That's what a Human life is worth to the police...
There is no such thing as 'the police'. There is only a wide range of people. Your choice to condemn every person in the world who choses that career as subhuman is almost in the same species of hatred as racism. It's blindly irrational, and it's deeply wrong. Speaking it in public is an unethical act akin to claiming that all Gypsies are thieves or that all Jews hoard money. The only difference is that the group you're condemning is made up of people who can leave the group. And the statement that every member of the group is subhuman until every member of the group is ethical, is so far beyond rationality as to have strayed into the absurd.
I can understand where that kind of hatred comes from. But I hope you can understand that even though you have reasons to feel that way, your reasons don't justify the broad scope of your hatred, or the assertion that every person in the world who wears a uniform is subhuman. The world isn't really made up of such convenient black and white, all-or-nothing distinctions. The world is actually a complicated place. If there's anything constant, it is that offering simple answers to complex problems, or giving simple descriptions of complex systems, is folly -- though admittedly, such folly is emotionally comforting and intellectually satisfying.
If every man and woman in uniform threw in the towel tomorrow, most of them would be acting unethically and abdicating responsibility, and many people would suffer and die for that abdication. That, if nothing else, really ought to give you pause.
I'm not saying that there aren't corrupt cops. I'm not saying that there aren't a LOT of corrupt cops. I have plenty of my own anecdotes about experiences I've had with bad cops, lazy cops, cops who busy themselves harassing law-abiding citizens who look different, etc.
But I've also known a lot of good cops, and I've gained a certain amount of respect for people who are willing to put their lives on the line to protect their fellow citizens. I've known cops who do serve as officers as a day job and spend most of their time off work as volunteer firefighters or medics; people with an admirable ethic of public service, who are cops because they want to devote their lives to the people around them.
I believe that corrupt cops ought to be punished very severely. Corruption in the police should not be tolerated. There is an inherent danger in having a police force, and one of several ways to deal with that danger is to be on the lookout for bad behavior and come down hard when it's found. But I'm very defensive about the 'all cops are evil scum' reaction that comes up every time a police brutality incident comes to light. It isn't true and it isn't fair. Your post suggested that the job of being a cop is equivalent to "...pissing people off and harassing them, assaulting teenagers for the heinous crime of loitering, ignoring rape victims while using deadly force to deal with noise complaints..." and that when someone applies for the job, that's what they're signing up for. There are many ethical and upright people who don't deserve to be painted with that assumption.
And officials wonder why police universally are looked upon as evil and not to be trusted.
I don't believe that police 'universally are looked upon as evil and not to be trusted.' Please provide a source for that assertion. I strongly suspect you believe it because you and some people you know think police are evil and untrustworthy.
Oh and knowing several career cops, most are mentially unstable and enjoy abusing their "power"... There are some good ones, but they are very rare lately.
Please see my sig.
I wasn't suggesting that police brutality is excusable or shouldn't be severely punished. I was contradicting a specific point, and saying that many small-town cops have serious work to do.
And they often do have serious work. Do you really believe that police work is all assaulting teenagers and ignoring rape victims? If so, do you actually know any police officers? On what basis are you generalizing?
I was careless in my above post. I didn't mean to suggest that every small town has all of these problems. I've spent time in towns that do, however. The frequency of incidents is much lower than in big cities, but of course the police forces are also much smaller.
"What I am more referring to is the small town cop which has nothing to do but wrongfully arrest and harass innocent people so that he can keep his job..."
... and the list goes on. In some ways life is harder on a small-town cop: everyone knows them, and they can make enemies in a tight-knit community just by doing their jobs -- and moving to another job may mean leaving a community they've been tied to for their whole lives.
Do you really think that's all a small-town cop has to do? Small towns, like large ones, have domestic violence, mentally unstable people with weapons, robberies, rape, assault, dishonest businesses, unauthorized dumping of hazardous chemicals, racial discrimination, problems with crack and meth and alcoholism
That's not precisely true: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irregardles s
It's also listed similarly in the OED, the online version of which is pay-only.
Give it another 30 years, and it'll be a word like any other.