The point is about some fuzzy concept of "intelligence" that we can't really measure
How do you come up with a median of something you can't measure? In fact, let's back up-- how do you do any statistical analysis with something that you can't attach number values to?
Let's put it another way... "half the people you meet are below the median in muscle strength". That we can measure a bit more effectively, but it's still an analog function. No two people are going to be exactly as strong down to the nanogram.
Are you seriously suggesting that it's not possible to get identical measurements of two different analog values? Pick a unit. Muscle strength, to the nanogram? Are you saying it's impossible that, if you measured billions of people, that any 2 would be measured to have the same muscle strength, to the nanogram?
Maybe because people are used to the idea of "needing a new computer" even though it's often not the case these days? It's funny, because I think you're right. When we had very little power at our fingertips, we were much more aware of how it was being used. It's ironic that, now that new computer purchases are often less warranted, we become quicker to propose it as a solution.
Maybe it's just because a new computer is so inexpensive these days. If you can get a decent computer for $500, it's almost not worth my time to bother trying to fix them anymore.
God, I don't think I've had to deal with any IRQ related issues since I stopped using Windows 95/98. Forget about the fact I use/support Macs these days. Why should common techs care about IRQs? What modern OS still requires that sort of configuration?
Still, if you're going to come up with a median, there must be some means of measurement, and it must be possible to rate people on a scale. However it's measured and in whatever units, there's the possibility that multiple people (especially given such a large sample as "all people") will be measured to have the same intelligence. In such a case, it becomes possible for the median to fail to produce a 50/50 split.
Which leads to my "not necessarily". Even if it's pretty likely that it would produce a 50/50 split, or something very close, it won't necessarily produce a 50/50 split.
So, you're saying he doesn't walk? Eh, I don't buy it. It seems a little... far fetched. Maybe lucas will correct it in the super-ultra-special edition, wherein we find that Yoda learned to teleport by talking to dead Jedis, which is how the Jedi's bodies "disappear" when they "die". Eventually, Yoda will be having a lightsaber fight in the background of every scene, which was what Lucas really envisioned in the first place.
Well no fucking shit -- point to me at some point in the last 100 years where your average person knew to any degree of certainty how their tech worked.
Also, (and oh, I know people aren't going to like this) engineering isn't the same as "science". Science asks why things work the way they do, but engineers often just need to know whether things work and how things work. Engineering is more trial-and-error, as well as dealing with unknowns, than most people realize. Did we need to understand everything about electricity before we made a light-bulb? We still don't understand everything about electricity. We don't really know what electricity is, we just know enough about how it works to use it for things. Did we need to understand physics before we could build a wheel?
I'm not claiming there's no such thing as "best practices", or that it's not important to understand why past engineers chose to build things the way that they did. But even that doesn't mean you have to understand everything. And that's for the engineers building the tech.
Once you get to techs (mr. fix-it), they just need to know how to fix it. Users just need to know how to use it. Are you seriously going to tell me that most people, 50 years ago, understood everything about telephones? Sufficiently to design a telephone network?
You claimed a fundamental difference was that a legitimate user cares if they have a biometric taken from them.
No, I claimed that they'd care if you asked them to change their authentication. My assertion from the beginning was, while lifting my fingerprints might be easy, it's hard for me to change my fingerprints. Getting DNA, taking a picture, scanning my retinas might be within our technology, but ask me to change my DNA, have enormous amounts of plastic surgery to change my face, get hand/eye transplants, and you're going to run into trouble. Passwords can be changed. I can be issued a new keycard. You want to issue me new hands and a new face, that's a problem.
I'm afraid you are just trying to invent some difference and/or sidestep any argument to avoid admitting that you were mistaken. You still have not provided a single fundamental difference.
And I'm afraid you're just stonewalling and there's no point in continuing this. If you want further clarification, go back and read my prior posts, as I don't intend to respond further.
PS: Is a 1 in 10,000,000 chance that someone dies worth it if you save 10,000,000 lives? Why?
What you're describing is more of a moral dilemma, not an ethical dilemma. The distinction is a fine one, but it's there. Morality might tell you that it's better to take a small risk with one person than to doom many. Ethics, sometimes, boils down to questions like, "Am I the right person to make this decision?"
Sometimes, even if you know what the "right" decision is, ethical constraints might prohibit you from making that decision. Another example: You're a defense attorney defending someone you know to be utterly reprehensible. If you get this guy off the hook, he'll steal, rape, murder, and generally inflict a lot of harm on a lot of people. You know, for a fact, that they guy is guilty. You're pretty sure that he'll be ok in prison, and in fact he might be just as well and happy there. One might argue that it's "moral" to not-quite try your hardest, it's harder to argue that it would be ethical.
The distinction between morals and ethics might be comparable to the distinction between justice and legality. They often line up and relate to each other, but they aren't the same thing. Morals tend to deal with goodness and compassion while ethics deal with things like duty and large-scale ramifications.
I deny this is a valid difference. If I graft a key onto my body, how does that make it different in use from a biometric? I'll address each of your points below.
Depends... can the key be removed or changed without causing permanent and irreversible damage to the carrier? If so, then the difference might be slight. However, it might still be a detectable alteration to the person's biological being. Let me put it this way: if authentication is based on voiceprint, thumbprint, and a scan of the vein patterns in my arm, no one can detect that ahead of time. They must be familiar with my security system and anticipate that those qualities will be looked for. If an object can be found in some kind of a search, that object tells the searcher that I use that means of authentication somewhere.
Hair color is a biometric. It is easily dyed a different color.
I don't remember suggesting that we use hair color alone as a means of authentication... That people have physical characteristics that are easy to change/fake is pretty irrelevant to whether "having" physical characteristics yourself brings up different security concerns than "having" an object with certain physical characteristics.
Depending upon the biometric, a user may not care if a sample of his hair or DNA is taken. Again I see no fundamental difference.
You will see a difference when you ask the user to change his DNA for future authentication.
You have failed to convince me and unless you come up with a real, fundamental difference (in terms of their characteristics or the way biometrics are applied) I don't think I will ever agree with you.
Eek. I guess I'm in trouble now. Wait.... I have a real good rebuttal: You have failed to convince me, and I don't think I'll agree with you!
I disagree with this. You only have to fake the characteristics of Bob that the guards know. You don't have to fake "being bob" because most of what makes Bob, Bob is completely unknown to the person(s) testing Bob.
I didn't say you had to *be* Bob, but just that you had to fake it. You have to alter characteristics of your being in order to mimic characteristics of Bob's being.
Bringing this back to modern terms, does a thumbprint scanner test to see if you are Bob or if you have the same thumbprint that it is expecting?
It's testing part of what it means to be Bob by testing for a specific physical characteristic of Bob. Is your problem here that biometrics aren't "soul" measuring devices? Yes, when you measure what a person is, you're measuring certain limited characteristics, whether they be physical, mental, or behavioral.
Your assertion that what is being tested is who a person is, rather than a combination of "things they have" and "things they know" is mostly due to the fact that thousands of tests are being issued more or less simultaneously by the most advanced tester known to man, another human.
No, my assertion is all security could be said to be testing for "things they have", but that "things they know" and "things they are" are special cases, worth distinguishing.
Your objection that biometrics don't measure a person's essence, to me is like saying that asking for a password does not measure "something you know" because it only measures your ability to respond. You don't actually need to know anything to give the right response to a question about Bob's wife, you just have to be able to respond close enough to fool the guard, and it certainly doesn't measure *everything* that Bob knows. No, biometrics don't simultaneously measure *everything* that you are, but they measure some portion of your physical being. You don't have to actually be everything Bob is, so long as you can fake characteristics of Bob close enough to fool whatever is measuring it.
Biometric devices don't test "something you are" they test one physical characteristic of your body, which is, in principal, no different than any other physical object you might have.
It is different, however, in that it's measuring a physical characteristic of *your body*. And this is my point: it deserves special classification as a more problematic version of "something you have" in that valid users are going to be less able or likely or willing to change their "authentication key" if it requires extensive surgery and transplants. I'm not saying it can't be faked or it warrants bypassing rigorous analysis. Biometrics have one strength over normal "something you have" items in that they're convenient-- you always have it with you, without needing to carry anything extra. Therefore, while "something you are" items aren't necessarily more problematic for "the enemy" to steal/circumvent than normal "something you have" items, they're certainly more problematic for the valid users once they are stolen.
Embryos are simply configurations of human cells...
People are simply configurations of human cells.
The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.... To conclude, embryos have no inherent moral value. They only have moral value if you believe potential to have moral value gives something moral value, which I believe to be a kind of circular argument and a conflation of ideas.
It makes me wonder whose definition of "moral value" you're using. I would say that a chair can certainly have value. Destruction of a chair, in spite of its lack of consciousness, can most certainly be a moral issue, and therefore the act of destroying it might be said to have negative moral value.
Besides all that, you're conflating "morals" and "ethics", which leads me to believe you ought to be more generous with your combatants' philosophic attempts.
Those statements are equivalent in meaning, so it doesn't make sense to set them as opposites with a "neither-nor" comparison.
The "neither... nor" construction doesn't imply that they're opposites. Beyond that, the sentiments that "the ends justify the means" and that "all's well that ends well" are not completely equivalent in meaning. The first implies the intention to bring about a positive result, as well as a positive result, forgives negative actions, while the latter implies that intentions and actions are utterly unimportant so long as the result is good. Perhaps you're thinking of "no harm, no foul," which might be considered equivalent to "all's well that ends well." However, I think even "no harm, no foul" is a bit different, in that there might be quite a bit of harm and foul, and things might still end well.
I don't object to most of your break down of ethics, but the portion labeled "consequences" holds a funny position in an ethical quandary. The consequences can often be used when attempting to judge an action. However, they are, in a certain sense, an unknown during any ethical examination. "Ethics" is not the same as justice. You might judge a person's action as "good" or "bad" and still not answer as to whether it was ethical. "Ethics" are involved at the moment you're taking a course of action. Ethics relates to the principles by which we make decisions and act, given that you can't know the results until afterward. Criminal justice-- what a judge and jury do, following up behind after the action, is a fundamentally (though not entirely) different topic.
Is that an issue of the ends justifying the means, or the immediate context justifying the means?
The reason I said ethics and the attitude that "the ends justify the means" are, by definition, in conflict is that, if your ethical principle is that "the ends justify the means", then there must be no principle for "proper" or "moral" action beyond that. It's a dead end. No actions, then, can be ethical. No action can be judged good until the long chain of causality has played out, the results are known and measured, and the end is judged to be good.
I'm not very familiar with any online works specifically. "Ethics" of course, has a couple meaning and some nuances. However, the idea that "the ends justifies the means" is generally held to be, almost by definition, in conflict with ethics. This is because "ethics" are the principles which govern actions, and not outcomes.
If you're really interested (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt despite being modded a troll) I'd tend to recommend Plato or Aristotle. Google for "Nicomachean Ethics" and you'll probably find a free version. There are plenty of works out there, but no authority.
Why don't we grind up our dead as a food source? Ok, lets get rid of health considerations. Why don't we feed our dead to zoo animals? Use them for fertilizer? Really, they just end up in holes in the ground anyhow, right? Eventually, it's all fertilizer, it goes back into the food chain, so why not put the bodies to immediate use?
A lot of ethical considerations are raised by the simple fact of it being abhorrent to profit from the harm or death of others. Yes, even if they are going to come to harm and die anyhow. Should we grind up babies and inject them into other people, in any case that the baby is soon going to be dead either way?
So, yes, there's a bit of an issue here, which is where the ethical dilemma comes in: to what extent is an fetus a "baby"? To what extent does a human life with no hope of survival deserve respect? I'm not saying a fetus is equivalent to a baby, but they aren't totally dissimilar. I'm not saying we shouldn't use embryonic stem cells, but can you seriously tell me that the question doesn't warrant a pause and some consideration before you say "yes"?
I don't think we have any fundamental disagreement. However, I think that saying Bob has physical characteristics (like a certain shape to his face) is pretty comparable to saying Bob has knowledge of the password. In neither case does the word "has" mean quite the same thing as saying Bob has a key. If you really want to get down to it, we could say Bob's brain is a "physical characteristic", and therefore the password, existing somewhere in is brain, is "something he has".
In your example of Bob, you mentioned that you would have to know how Bob would respond to a question about his wife. If you ask Bob a flat-out question, like, "where's your wife?" and check for a correct answer, then sure, that's an issue of something you know. However, if Bob has a certain speech pattern, or a personality quirk, those are also "things that he is". It's not sufficient to "know" that he has the quirks, you have to fake having them also. You have to fake being Bob. Or are you going to insist "personality" is also something you "have"?
If we allow ourselves to say that knowledge is just a special case of "having", then why not allow that "having" a face or thumbprint is a special case of "having"? They do warrant being separated out a bit, and talked about specially, don't they? If for no other reason, then to talk about the weaknesses, the fact that you're carrying them around all the time. People can see your face and touch your hands (or touch something that touched your hands). They're unprotected, constantly changing, constantly being damaged. You can't replace them or change them. They weren't designed to be machine readable, and therefore aren't as easy for a machine to read (reliably). You are agreeing, aren't you, that biometrics have some real weaknesses that aren't present in other "something you have" items?
Muddying the waters with psuedo-scientific bastardizations of real, well thought out, time tested, rules and principals will only make matters worse.
I don't mean to muddy the waters at all. The idea isn't new or unscientific. It isn't untested. We can disagree about whether we want to separate out the different sorts of "having" for the sake of terminology, but it doesn't change the fact that "facial recognition" and behavior measurements have been used in security for... well, forever. It just didn't used to be computers doing the facial recognition.
(BTW, there are ethics involved in research of all kinds, in engineering, in law, in business, etc. You simply do not agree with the idea that ethics should be a part of stem cell research.)
I hope you don't get modded down here, because it's a good point. I might respect the position of someone who, after much deliberation, believes that embryonic stem cells should be used. However, anyone who thinks that using embryonic stem cells is a no-brainer either doesn't understand the ethical considerations at stake, or simply doesn't believe in ethical considerations at all. Ethics is tricky business, and neither "the ends justify the means" nor "all's well that ends well" are sufficient ethical justifications.
And yes, also the research here was done with umbilical cells, and the US government has absolutely no problem funding research using umbilical cells. The federal government simply put restrictions on the funding of gathering fetal cells, which is a long way from outlawing stem-cell research.
3. Don't let your local community decide what should be taught in schools. Curriculum should be decided by a national panel made up of leaders in each field of study. Education should be a national issue, not one decided based on local beliefs no matter how "intelligent" those beliefs are.
I agree that the local community shouldn't necessarily decide what should or should not be taught, but they should have some say. Frankly, the idea of a national panel is awful. How about this: if you're really going through all this trouble to attract the best and brightest into teaching, and you're sending them to school regularly to grow their knowledge/skills, why not let the teachers have some say in what they teach? An individual teacher probably has a pretty good idea of what the students in his/her class need. If someone has an issue with the teacher's decisions, take it up with the principal. If a principal isn't sufficiently solving with the issues that arise, fire the principal and hire a new principal.
Additional bureaucracy is rarely a solution, especially when it's additional bureaucracy at the national level.
4. Provide options for traineeships in traditional trades (e.g. electrical, plumbing etc) for the non-academic students. This will help remove disruptive elements from classes allowing those who want to study or have the aptitude to study to do so in peace. (not that you don't need to study to become a plumber and such, but I'm sure you all know what I mean)
These are two different situations, really. Those who would become plumbers aren't necessarily those who are disruptive in class. Students being "disruptive in class" is sometimes related to students being forced to take classes they aren't interested in, but not always. Even when it is an issue of the student being disinterested, it isn't clear to me that the solution is to get that student out of the class.
However, I do agree that it's silly for high schools to applaud calculus as the height of achievement for a student, and pretend as though plumbing is useless. If you're going to have a public school system, it should be seeking to prepare children for their lives (and good citizenship), which includes practical considerations. How about teaching classes on how to balance a checkbook and live on a budget? You know, things like home-ec and shop aren't that dumb. If someone wants to take some vocational classes, it should be encouraged. However, I don't think this should preclude an english class or two.
So maybe we should have more electives in high school, and fewer (more carefully chosen) mandatory courses. However, this would require that students achieve a higher level of education before entering high school than they currently receive.
6. Ban the teaching of religion on any and all school grounds. AND ENFORCE IT!!! Religion has it's place in society, but not in schools!
Are you really one of those who believe that the world is going to end because the 10 commandments are posted on the wall? Might I suggest that children need to be exposed to more ways of looking at things rather than fewer? Of course, I assume the truth will bear itself out over the course of time, so I don't really see the need to prevent people from saying things that I don't agree with or believe in.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it help if I typed a little smiley face? ;-)
How do you come up with a median of something you can't measure? In fact, let's back up-- how do you do any statistical analysis with something that you can't attach number values to?
Let's put it another way... "half the people you meet are below the median in muscle strength". That we can measure a bit more effectively, but it's still an analog function. No two people are going to be exactly as strong down to the nanogram.
Are you seriously suggesting that it's not possible to get identical measurements of two different analog values? Pick a unit. Muscle strength, to the nanogram? Are you saying it's impossible that, if you measured billions of people, that any 2 would be measured to have the same muscle strength, to the nanogram?
Ok, let's just drop it. It's getting off-topic.
Maybe it's just because a new computer is so inexpensive these days. If you can get a decent computer for $500, it's almost not worth my time to bother trying to fix them anymore.
God, I don't think I've had to deal with any IRQ related issues since I stopped using Windows 95/98. Forget about the fact I use/support Macs these days. Why should common techs care about IRQs? What modern OS still requires that sort of configuration?
Which leads to my "not necessarily". Even if it's pretty likely that it would produce a 50/50 split, or something very close, it won't necessarily produce a 50/50 split.
Am I wrong?
Not necessarily. Consider if you have 5 people. 4 people have an IQ of 100, and 1 has an IQ of 80. In that case, only 1/5 are below the median.
eh, I think it's probably more like three fourths. Wait... mean, median, or mode?
So, you're saying he doesn't walk? Eh, I don't buy it. It seems a little... far fetched. Maybe lucas will correct it in the super-ultra-special edition, wherein we find that Yoda learned to teleport by talking to dead Jedis, which is how the Jedi's bodies "disappear" when they "die". Eventually, Yoda will be having a lightsaber fight in the background of every scene, which was what Lucas really envisioned in the first place.
Also, (and oh, I know people aren't going to like this) engineering isn't the same as "science". Science asks why things work the way they do, but engineers often just need to know whether things work and how things work. Engineering is more trial-and-error, as well as dealing with unknowns, than most people realize. Did we need to understand everything about electricity before we made a light-bulb? We still don't understand everything about electricity. We don't really know what electricity is, we just know enough about how it works to use it for things. Did we need to understand physics before we could build a wheel?
I'm not claiming there's no such thing as "best practices", or that it's not important to understand why past engineers chose to build things the way that they did. But even that doesn't mean you have to understand everything. And that's for the engineers building the tech.
Once you get to techs (mr. fix-it), they just need to know how to fix it. Users just need to know how to use it. Are you seriously going to tell me that most people, 50 years ago, understood everything about telephones? Sufficiently to design a telephone network?
No, I claimed that they'd care if you asked them to change their authentication. My assertion from the beginning was, while lifting my fingerprints might be easy, it's hard for me to change my fingerprints. Getting DNA, taking a picture, scanning my retinas might be within our technology, but ask me to change my DNA, have enormous amounts of plastic surgery to change my face, get hand/eye transplants, and you're going to run into trouble. Passwords can be changed. I can be issued a new keycard. You want to issue me new hands and a new face, that's a problem.
I'm afraid you are just trying to invent some difference and/or sidestep any argument to avoid admitting that you were mistaken. You still have not provided a single fundamental difference.
And I'm afraid you're just stonewalling and there's no point in continuing this. If you want further clarification, go back and read my prior posts, as I don't intend to respond further.
What you're describing is more of a moral dilemma, not an ethical dilemma. The distinction is a fine one, but it's there. Morality might tell you that it's better to take a small risk with one person than to doom many. Ethics, sometimes, boils down to questions like, "Am I the right person to make this decision?"
Sometimes, even if you know what the "right" decision is, ethical constraints might prohibit you from making that decision. Another example: You're a defense attorney defending someone you know to be utterly reprehensible. If you get this guy off the hook, he'll steal, rape, murder, and generally inflict a lot of harm on a lot of people. You know, for a fact, that they guy is guilty. You're pretty sure that he'll be ok in prison, and in fact he might be just as well and happy there. One might argue that it's "moral" to not-quite try your hardest, it's harder to argue that it would be ethical.
The distinction between morals and ethics might be comparable to the distinction between justice and legality. They often line up and relate to each other, but they aren't the same thing. Morals tend to deal with goodness and compassion while ethics deal with things like duty and large-scale ramifications.
Depends... can the key be removed or changed without causing permanent and irreversible damage to the carrier? If so, then the difference might be slight. However, it might still be a detectable alteration to the person's biological being. Let me put it this way: if authentication is based on voiceprint, thumbprint, and a scan of the vein patterns in my arm, no one can detect that ahead of time. They must be familiar with my security system and anticipate that those qualities will be looked for. If an object can be found in some kind of a search, that object tells the searcher that I use that means of authentication somewhere.
Hair color is a biometric. It is easily dyed a different color.
I don't remember suggesting that we use hair color alone as a means of authentication... That people have physical characteristics that are easy to change/fake is pretty irrelevant to whether "having" physical characteristics yourself brings up different security concerns than "having" an object with certain physical characteristics.
Depending upon the biometric, a user may not care if a sample of his hair or DNA is taken. Again I see no fundamental difference.
You will see a difference when you ask the user to change his DNA for future authentication.
You have failed to convince me and unless you come up with a real, fundamental difference (in terms of their characteristics or the way biometrics are applied) I don't think I will ever agree with you.
Eek. I guess I'm in trouble now. Wait.... I have a real good rebuttal: You have failed to convince me, and I don't think I'll agree with you!
I didn't say you had to *be* Bob, but just that you had to fake it. You have to alter characteristics of your being in order to mimic characteristics of Bob's being.
Bringing this back to modern terms, does a thumbprint scanner test to see if you are Bob or if you have the same thumbprint that it is expecting?
It's testing part of what it means to be Bob by testing for a specific physical characteristic of Bob. Is your problem here that biometrics aren't "soul" measuring devices? Yes, when you measure what a person is, you're measuring certain limited characteristics, whether they be physical, mental, or behavioral.
Your assertion that what is being tested is who a person is, rather than a combination of "things they have" and "things they know" is mostly due to the fact that thousands of tests are being issued more or less simultaneously by the most advanced tester known to man, another human.
No, my assertion is all security could be said to be testing for "things they have", but that "things they know" and "things they are" are special cases, worth distinguishing.
Your objection that biometrics don't measure a person's essence, to me is like saying that asking for a password does not measure "something you know" because it only measures your ability to respond. You don't actually need to know anything to give the right response to a question about Bob's wife, you just have to be able to respond close enough to fool the guard, and it certainly doesn't measure *everything* that Bob knows. No, biometrics don't simultaneously measure *everything* that you are, but they measure some portion of your physical being. You don't have to actually be everything Bob is, so long as you can fake characteristics of Bob close enough to fool whatever is measuring it.
Biometric devices don't test "something you are" they test one physical characteristic of your body, which is, in principal, no different than any other physical object you might have.
It is different, however, in that it's measuring a physical characteristic of *your body*. And this is my point: it deserves special classification as a more problematic version of "something you have" in that valid users are going to be less able or likely or willing to change their "authentication key" if it requires extensive surgery and transplants. I'm not saying it can't be faked or it warrants bypassing rigorous analysis. Biometrics have one strength over normal "something you have" items in that they're convenient-- you always have it with you, without needing to carry anything extra. Therefore, while "something you are" items aren't necessarily more problematic for "the enemy" to steal/circumvent than normal "something you have" items, they're certainly more problematic for the valid users once they are stolen.
People are simply configurations of human cells.
The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.... To conclude, embryos have no inherent moral value. They only have moral value if you believe potential to have moral value gives something moral value, which I believe to be a kind of circular argument and a conflation of ideas.
It makes me wonder whose definition of "moral value" you're using. I would say that a chair can certainly have value. Destruction of a chair, in spite of its lack of consciousness, can most certainly be a moral issue, and therefore the act of destroying it might be said to have negative moral value.
Besides all that, you're conflating "morals" and "ethics", which leads me to believe you ought to be more generous with your combatants' philosophic attempts.
The "neither... nor" construction doesn't imply that they're opposites. Beyond that, the sentiments that "the ends justify the means" and that "all's well that ends well" are not completely equivalent in meaning. The first implies the intention to bring about a positive result, as well as a positive result, forgives negative actions, while the latter implies that intentions and actions are utterly unimportant so long as the result is good. Perhaps you're thinking of "no harm, no foul," which might be considered equivalent to "all's well that ends well." However, I think even "no harm, no foul" is a bit different, in that there might be quite a bit of harm and foul, and things might still end well.
I don't object to most of your break down of ethics, but the portion labeled "consequences" holds a funny position in an ethical quandary. The consequences can often be used when attempting to judge an action. However, they are, in a certain sense, an unknown during any ethical examination. "Ethics" is not the same as justice. You might judge a person's action as "good" or "bad" and still not answer as to whether it was ethical. "Ethics" are involved at the moment you're taking a course of action. Ethics relates to the principles by which we make decisions and act, given that you can't know the results until afterward. Criminal justice-- what a judge and jury do, following up behind after the action, is a fundamentally (though not entirely) different topic.
The reason I said ethics and the attitude that "the ends justify the means" are, by definition, in conflict is that, if your ethical principle is that "the ends justify the means", then there must be no principle for "proper" or "moral" action beyond that. It's a dead end. No actions, then, can be ethical. No action can be judged good until the long chain of causality has played out, the results are known and measured, and the end is judged to be good.
Are you suggesting that we have fetuses write wills?
If you're really interested (I'll give you the benefit of the doubt despite being modded a troll) I'd tend to recommend Plato or Aristotle. Google for "Nicomachean Ethics" and you'll probably find a free version. There are plenty of works out there, but no authority.
Why don't we grind up our dead as a food source? Ok, lets get rid of health considerations. Why don't we feed our dead to zoo animals? Use them for fertilizer? Really, they just end up in holes in the ground anyhow, right? Eventually, it's all fertilizer, it goes back into the food chain, so why not put the bodies to immediate use?
A lot of ethical considerations are raised by the simple fact of it being abhorrent to profit from the harm or death of others. Yes, even if they are going to come to harm and die anyhow. Should we grind up babies and inject them into other people, in any case that the baby is soon going to be dead either way?
So, yes, there's a bit of an issue here, which is where the ethical dilemma comes in: to what extent is an fetus a "baby"? To what extent does a human life with no hope of survival deserve respect? I'm not saying a fetus is equivalent to a baby, but they aren't totally dissimilar. I'm not saying we shouldn't use embryonic stem cells, but can you seriously tell me that the question doesn't warrant a pause and some consideration before you say "yes"?
In your example of Bob, you mentioned that you would have to know how Bob would respond to a question about his wife. If you ask Bob a flat-out question, like, "where's your wife?" and check for a correct answer, then sure, that's an issue of something you know. However, if Bob has a certain speech pattern, or a personality quirk, those are also "things that he is". It's not sufficient to "know" that he has the quirks, you have to fake having them also. You have to fake being Bob. Or are you going to insist "personality" is also something you "have"?
If we allow ourselves to say that knowledge is just a special case of "having", then why not allow that "having" a face or thumbprint is a special case of "having"? They do warrant being separated out a bit, and talked about specially, don't they? If for no other reason, then to talk about the weaknesses, the fact that you're carrying them around all the time. People can see your face and touch your hands (or touch something that touched your hands). They're unprotected, constantly changing, constantly being damaged. You can't replace them or change them. They weren't designed to be machine readable, and therefore aren't as easy for a machine to read (reliably). You are agreeing, aren't you, that biometrics have some real weaknesses that aren't present in other "something you have" items?
Muddying the waters with psuedo-scientific bastardizations of real, well thought out, time tested, rules and principals will only make matters worse.
I don't mean to muddy the waters at all. The idea isn't new or unscientific. It isn't untested. We can disagree about whether we want to separate out the different sorts of "having" for the sake of terminology, but it doesn't change the fact that "facial recognition" and behavior measurements have been used in security for... well, forever. It just didn't used to be computers doing the facial recognition.
gee, thanks. I might actually use this.
I hope you don't get modded down here, because it's a good point. I might respect the position of someone who, after much deliberation, believes that embryonic stem cells should be used. However, anyone who thinks that using embryonic stem cells is a no-brainer either doesn't understand the ethical considerations at stake, or simply doesn't believe in ethical considerations at all. Ethics is tricky business, and neither "the ends justify the means" nor "all's well that ends well" are sufficient ethical justifications.
And yes, also the research here was done with umbilical cells, and the US government has absolutely no problem funding research using umbilical cells. The federal government simply put restrictions on the funding of gathering fetal cells, which is a long way from outlawing stem-cell research.
(really just posting so maybe someone will see the AC post)
I agree that the local community shouldn't necessarily decide what should or should not be taught, but they should have some say. Frankly, the idea of a national panel is awful. How about this: if you're really going through all this trouble to attract the best and brightest into teaching, and you're sending them to school regularly to grow their knowledge/skills, why not let the teachers have some say in what they teach? An individual teacher probably has a pretty good idea of what the students in his/her class need. If someone has an issue with the teacher's decisions, take it up with the principal. If a principal isn't sufficiently solving with the issues that arise, fire the principal and hire a new principal.
Additional bureaucracy is rarely a solution, especially when it's additional bureaucracy at the national level.
4. Provide options for traineeships in traditional trades (e.g. electrical, plumbing etc) for the non-academic students. This will help remove disruptive elements from classes allowing those who want to study or have the aptitude to study to do so in peace. (not that you don't need to study to become a plumber and such, but I'm sure you all know what I mean)
These are two different situations, really. Those who would become plumbers aren't necessarily those who are disruptive in class. Students being "disruptive in class" is sometimes related to students being forced to take classes they aren't interested in, but not always. Even when it is an issue of the student being disinterested, it isn't clear to me that the solution is to get that student out of the class.
However, I do agree that it's silly for high schools to applaud calculus as the height of achievement for a student, and pretend as though plumbing is useless. If you're going to have a public school system, it should be seeking to prepare children for their lives (and good citizenship), which includes practical considerations. How about teaching classes on how to balance a checkbook and live on a budget? You know, things like home-ec and shop aren't that dumb. If someone wants to take some vocational classes, it should be encouraged. However, I don't think this should preclude an english class or two.
So maybe we should have more electives in high school, and fewer (more carefully chosen) mandatory courses. However, this would require that students achieve a higher level of education before entering high school than they currently receive.
6. Ban the teaching of religion on any and all school grounds. AND ENFORCE IT!!! Religion has it's place in society, but not in schools!
Are you really one of those who believe that the world is going to end because the 10 commandments are posted on the wall? Might I suggest that children need to be exposed to more ways of looking at things rather than fewer? Of course, I assume the truth will bear itself out over the course of time, so I don't really see the need to prevent people from saying things that I don't agree with or believe in.
Was some of the code lost on this post?