Pay cuts don't work. They trim 20% of the cost but crash morale. This is the same reason why they imposed a 10-week waiting period. (And they well know that most of the victims will have found new work during that time.)
How many sales associates work under each manager? How many managers work under each store manager? How many store managers work under the regional coordinator? They're pruning the bottom of the tree- rather than take a chunk out of the executive money-sink, they'd kill off FIVE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED EMPLOYEES.
Your approach would work if the problem was a top-heavy organization. We don't know that this is the case at Circuit City.
Furthermore, they aren't downsizing at all. From TFA I infer they intend to replace the casualties with new hires.
Are you willing to believe that perhaps they really are just trying to reduce the salaries of sales staff? And why shouldn't they, considering that it's a low-skill low-responsibility job?
Well I don't think that a list of survival behaviours for living on an otherwise unpopulated island with no hope of rescue really constitutes a moral framework. The only moral question in such a situation I can think of is whether you choose to keep on living as best you can, give up and die, or whether you can't make a clear decision between the two because you've lost hope but the survival instinct is too strong. After all, you can't reproduce and that's the other major instinctual imperative. Nearly all your decisions will flow from the choice to continue living or not, and from your personal tendencies and abilities for observation, deduction, knowledge retention, foresight, planning, and determination. They can only become "wrong" in the context of someone else with different abilities that would lead them to different choices given the base "moral" choice.
This is where we are missing each other's points, then.
Let us assume that the maroon wants to continue living as best he can, in order to last long enough to eventually be rescued. He now has a range of options available to him: he can play in the sand all day, he can identify edible plants and attempt to cultivate them, he can begin constructing a large "HELP" message, and so on. Some of these options are better for his goal (survival and rescue) than others... and, critically, he is able to know the difference. For him to then choose the worse option is... is... is immoral?
That's how I'm defining 'morality'. I've decided that morality means how well a person chooses within his knowledge in order to achieve his long-range goals. And so it doesn't change when other people and society enter the picture; it just gets more complex. (If I had to accept the use of the word 'ethics', I would use it to mean the subset of morality dealing with social interactions.)
I'm not saying you are wrong. Rather, I think you are insightful and I wish we could talk in person. What I am saying here is that we have an off-by-one error.
My argument, then, is that my meanings are more useful. They are also less perilous because they don't succumb to the idea that one's social obligations come from somewhere other than one's own long-term self-interest. To me, social obligations stem intimitely from one's long-term self-interest. For example, I refrain from murder simply because I wish to avoid the consequences.
What do you think?
A second point, which we should take up later, is whether it is necessary to have one's primary moral goal be a long-range contented life. You've mentioned Kant's proposal that it is not necessary, but I think I've got some traction towards the opposite conclusion.
Far less confusing, but misleadingly overgeneralized. There is a huge set of things that fall under "survival decision making" that have fuck-all to do with morality. Morality and ethics are classically about "right and wrong", the duties and responsibilities of humans as sentient, self aware beings. Trying to shoehorn not eating fucking sand into the category of "morality" is utterly asinine. You've clearly read so many philosph texts that you can convince yourself of anything. Out here in the real world, however, we differentiate between ethics and biological drives.
Again I insist that there is peril in focusing the terms 'right', 'wrong', and 'morality' to the category of social obligations. It is perilous because it implies that private actions -- which affect only the actor -- are somehow exempt... and meanwhile that one's social obligations derive from something other than one's own long-range self-interest. From that latter idea can and will flow all manner of nasty political systems, all eager to cash in on the idea of causeless sacrificial duty to the state.
That peril is avoided if social obligations are seen as a subset of a larger, self-centered 'morality'. I treat my neighbors well, in other words, because that behavior maximizes my own safety and comfort. (And yes, I know that this raises the impossible free-rider problem... which I prefer over the alternative.)
But assuming you're right... what term would you use to describe the predicament of a guy marooned on a desert island? There are behaviors that must be urgently practiced, and others that must be urgently avoided, if he is to survive. There are also long-ranged actions that he must understake, such as storing up food for the winter. If those survival imperatives are not 'morality' or 'ethics', then what are they? And what language would you use to criticize his short-sighted decision to eat his store of seeds?
As a last bit of food for thought, "moral" behaviour from certain individuals that benefits their group may be counterproductive for the group if other individuals in the group do it. For instance, large scale immunizations benefit a population only if there's a large fraction of the population which is immunized (>75%). However it can be harmful to individuals with abnormal immune responses to be subjected to strong frequent immunization stimuli like multi-agent immunization shots (i.e. flu shots), to the extent that it can severely exacerbate their immune disease and impair their ability to contribute to the group. Very few people have a sufficiently developed ethical understanding to be able to deal with such an apparent moral inconsistency.
Ah yes, the free-rider problem. Even after bending my thoughts on it for a decade, I don't see a solution, and apparently nobody else does either.
My sons have begun asking philosophical questions that land near it, and I wish I had a more compelling answer than "Because we feel bad about ourselves when we free-ride on others". The scarey fact is that judicious free-riding may be moral after all.... but I still hate myself when I catch myself doing it.
You decide which is more important to you. The main conflicts within the US today lie between those who believe in an ethics-based interpretation of the constitution, vs. those who think "morality" is more important. Do you believe more in individual freedoms or in the good of the whole?
Those 'moralists' are using the word 'morality' in a very narrow fashion: the legal enforcement of ancient religious dictates. You can accept their definition, but then you'll find yourself in need of a new word that means "the wisdom used to pursue and obtain personal happiness" -- such as is needed in a society just as much as it is needed on a desert island.
You and others are using the word 'ethics' to refer to the latter, at least in social situations. And so you have no word at all for the wisdom that would be direly needed on a desert island. I am trying to reclaim the word 'morality' for both concepts, because they aren't fundamentally different.
Think of it this way. You are surviving alone on a desert island. To do so you must adhere very strictly to a code of behavior that maximizes your chances of survival. Suddenly another castaway washes up. Now you've got some new options, and there may be new restraints in order to get the most out of the newcomer, but you are still in a fight to survive and find peace. You can still make the wrong choice and end up getting hurt or killed. No matter how many more castaways you add to the island, this doesn't change. And that is why I, and many philosophers, call all "How should I behave?" questions 'morality'.
To put it another way: Adding people to the desert island example certainly adds some complications, but it can't change the actor's base standard of value ("survive for as long as possible while being as happy, safe, and comfortable as possible"). The newcomers simply complicate it, and open up new avenues of fulfillment for it. Morality, then, gets deeper, and the actor's best-path-to-goal will change, but that's all. He is still pursuing that same standard of value, and making many decisions along the way by the method that his moral code prescribes. (Some moral codes prescribe prayer and charity as the correct method; you and I would instead prescribe rationality and tit-for-tat.)
And fundamentally, morality and society is more important. Even if you're so physically and intellectually gifted that you would do quite well even under the breakdown of society, you would probably still be less well off than you are now (unless you live in poverty in the third world, which is why society breaks down there so much more easily).
Certainly society can be a beneficial place to live (provided that it's not a slave society). But, the actor's survival is still in his own hands, society or not; his or her decisions still help or hinder towards the ultimate goal.
But the religious fundamentalists are advocating a version of morality which has become partially obsolete due to advancement in technology and knowledge, so their crappy understanding of morality tends to give it an undeservedly bad reputation.
True enough. It is so bad now, honest folks like you have resorted to using a completely different word ("ethics") to describe what the original word once meant. That concession has placed you in a tug-of-war between 'morality' and 'ethics', with no way to defend your choice when a conflict between the two arises.
The former things concern only yourself and thus, while you shouldn't do them just as a simple matter of practical reason, such self-regarding acts are beyond the scope of morality or ethics.
If you use the word 'should' in a sentence, then it's a moral issue.
If you define morality as being unconcerned with practical decisions, then you need another word, and another code with a presumably different standard of value, to guide those practical decisions. In other words, why shouldn't I do such things? They are impractical according to which ultimate goal?
"A matter of practical reason" is not an answer, because it assumes that the moral question of "what should we pursue and by what means shall we obtain it?" has already been decided. But that decision is exactly the definition of 'morality' (at least as used by me). That definition subsumes the social realm, being as it is a place among others in which humans must make survival decisions.
You're such an idiot. None of those are issues of morality. It's not ethics that keep us from eating sand, it's basic biology. Animals avoid eating sand, and they have no sense of morality.
You can define 'morality' as "social rules" and 'ethics' as "survival decisionmaking" if you wish... but it'll only get you into trouble. It is far less confusing to define morality as "survival decisionmaking" and then regard society as a subset of it, since the same principles must apply therein. For example, messing with a scorpion is uselessly risky (and therefore immoral) in the very same way that spraying graffiti on your neighbor's fence is uselessly risky (and therefore immoral).
Take up a serious philosophy text and you'll see them doing the same thing. To propose a separate code of behavior for social situations can only bring about the unanswerable problem of "What do I do when morality conflicts with ethics?". Granted, many religions do make that mistake, but only because they teach that morality is concerned with God's needs and therefore humans need a separate code in order to satisfy their own needs.
I was questioning his definition too, but your island hypothetical strengthens his position in my mind.
So you can eat sand then? Snakes and scorpions are harmless now? Cold and exposure have no power over you any longer, since morality has been demoted to the social realm?
Society can protect a person from dangers and poor choices, and so morality is much weaker in social situations. On a desert island, where life and death are a daily struggle, the effects (for good or bad) of our choices are most real, most personal, and least able to be blunted by help from others.
The solution is quite simple actually. Since all that junk is orbiting Earth, the position of any one piece of junk at any time is function of the Earth's gravity (and the piece's velocity), that's how orbits work. Since we can't change the junk's velocity (it doesn't have an engine, or we lost contact with it), all we need to do is increase the Earth's gravity for a couple of days and all the junk will de-orbit by itself. How to increase the Earth's gravity is left as an exercise to the reader.
Not to worry; the Earth gains about one ton per year from infalling cosmic particles.
As well, the Frito-Lay Corporation, in partnership with Dolly-Madison, are committed to the task of increasing the Earth's gravitational pull... one person at a time. I take my hat off to these patriotic, civic-minded businesses for doing their part to solve the desperate space-junk problem!
Have you read about the Bonobo monkey? It would be fun to be a Bonobo monkey for a while.:)
It's good to see academia finally beginning to acknowledge the social role that homosexuality plays. For so long, sex was regarded (with religious-grade evasion) strictly as a means of procreation. The idea that Mother Nature made it a dual-purpose attribute, as nearly all other physical attributes are, was verboten.
Boy, are we humans capable of stupendous acts of induced ignorance, or what? I'll never know how the hell I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species.
I dunno. Remember: this is the same country where McDonald's was successfully sued for serving hot coffee.
I agree with your sentiment, if not with your example. The McDonald's case was not about hot coffee; rather, it was about abnormally hot coffee vs. the reasonable expectations of the customer.
That said, I myself still firmly advocate "buyer beware", instead of the modern and lamentable "seller beware" system we are now stumbling under... but still, you should pick a better example.
Your analogy is flawed. Homosexual love is harmless and consensual, unlike the beastialy or pedophilia. An estimation of 3-10% of the population is gay, you can't deny them the freedom to love someone else for the rest of their life.
Take care not to make the mistake of assuming that orientation is a binary. Orientation is not a bit that is either 1 or 0. Rather, it's a continuum... and few of us are at the edges (100% straight or 100% gay).
Unfortunately, Western society applies a great deal of peer pressure on us to affect 100% straightness. But nowadays that peer pressure -- designed to maximize the production of farmhands -- is obsolete. And so I wonder how all our preferences would play out if that pressure were finally lifted.
Not to mention the asexuals, who are pushed into the same closet.
Drink isn't immoral though. If I get drunk a lot, I'm only harming myself, not other people.
Immoral things have to harm other people. But even then there are things which are immoral which should not be illegal, like adultery.
Odd definition of morality you have there. Morality would not apply if you were marooned alone on a desert island, then? In that desperate circumstance, how long could you survive while operating on the idea that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, no difference between value and disvalue?
And finally, the statistics bit is a bit of a slippery slope. Ok, women are, statistically, smaller then males. But the same thing could be said of, say, black males to white males. So does that male white males easily victimized and they should feel constantly threatened and vigilant?
It's not specifically about raw size. Rather, it's about several things that contribute to brawling prowess: average deliverable impulse, average willingness to injure, average willingness to kill, average willingness to flee (which short-circuits the fight-for-your-life aggression). My sense is that women lose on all four counts to men. Whites probably lose on all four counts to blacks, too, on account of the difference in average testosterone level.
As a more concrete example, my wife and I went to see a Billy Joel concert last year. The money that we paid Billy Joel for tickets will eventually be spent by him on car insurance. Most of that money will go to the victims of his poor driving who will spend it to repair their cars and bodies. Then their auto mechanics and surgeons will spend that money on something else. Economists refer to this as the Velocity of Money.
Bottom line: paying someone to stand on his head isn't has inefficient as you make it out to be.
It comes down to a question of net social wealth created. Wealth includes pleasure, safety, and comfort, of course, in addition to just boots, because humans demonstrably need spiritual nutrition (etc.). What Billy Joel does with his earnings afterward is a separate moral calculation; the question is how the payments to him caused him to behave.
In his case, the payments caused him to spend his 12 hours producing a great deal of pleasure for a great many people, and that's a net positive. Paying someone the same money to stand on their head for twelve hours would not make such a large contribution to our net wealth. Paying a servant to spend an entire day doting on a rich person doesn't do much better.
Obviously, the money will then move on to the next person, but as I said, that's already a given.
Since you care about velocity, look at it this way. A servant must spend an entire day doing whatever in order to move $1,000 onward. A million-dollar laptop causes 5 or 6 people to spend an entire day manufacturing a laptop in order to move $1,000,000. So, even if you don't care about my "net social wealth" crap, you can see that million-dollar laptops are a very efficient way to create velocity.
There is no difference, in principle, on people "wasting" money on luxury items than there is spending money any other way. When it comes right down to it, nobody "needs" anything more than food and shelter, assuming the world even "needs" people at all.
True enough. But not all efforts are equally efficient. While the actual spending of money cannot -- itself -- waste anything, it can induce wasteful behavior. For example, suppose I spend $1000 hiring someone to stand on their head. By my spending, I caused one person to waste two person-days' worth of effort.
That said, I agree with you: this insane laptop is a great way to keep the wealth moving around. Its construction consumed about $2000 worth of actual effort, yet it liberates a million dollars from a concentration (i.e. from a rich person) to be spread around again.
Ditto with all luxury objects, for that matter. The higher the markup (i.e. the greater the difference between price and the effort to produce it), the more efficiently it dilutes wealth concentrations. Servants, meanwhile, are at the opposite end of the efficiency spectrum: low price but large number of person-hours consumed.
Ford doesnt make cars, they run a failing health-care coop. I think they run a little auto business on the side, though.
:golf clap:
Very witty.
Indeed, I've read that every GM car includes $2000 paid out in medical care to GM retirees. In order to stay price-competitive, this means that somehow, $2000 in labor and materials must be removed from every GM car. Which means that a $10000 GM car contains $8000 of engineering. No wonder they can't compete.
Probably within the next decade, they'll get congress to assume the burden, and then they'll miraculously improve in quality. And our taxes will go up again.:|
Why don't they just switch to Linux? end of security problem.
Linux would not be so secure if it became mainstream, or if it became the dominant OS in use at a valuable target (US government computers). Presently, Linux doesn't receive near the same blackhat attention that Windows does.
As well, Linux is no more secure than its administrators are competent. There is not a lot of Linux expertise out there right now. If the feds switched to Linux tomorrow, it would be quite a while (and truckloads of money) before we reached critical mass of Linux administration skills. Until that time, there would be a lot of broken, misconfigured, and unpatched Linux installations.
I don't think you understand how evolution selects for altruism. You see, your genes don't need you to breed in order for them to be passed down to the next generation. All you have to do is ensure that enough of your fellow humans, especially those with genes similar to yours. pass on their genes, and you have passed on yours through them. Genes are selfish bastards.
True enough. But this discusson isn't about the welfare of our genes or our species. It's about morality. As humans, we alone have the power to aim our life away from reproduction. Our genes may encourage altruism, for their own ends, but that is no foundation for a moral code.
Indeed, a lot of morality is probably going to be devoted to the various ways and means of resisting our hardwired behaviors, being (as they are) so often obsolete.
On average, if your actions help even three cousins breed, statistically speaking it is very likely that all the genes you carry have been passed on even if you never breed. Genetics works on much larger than individual scale. But it gets deeper, that is only one reason that evolution selects for altruism.
True enough.
Another reason is strategic. The world is full of local scarcities and surpluses. Iterated prisoner's dilemma has shown the 'tit-for-tat' strategy to be quite effective, and other research has shown the general case that cooperation is the most effective strategy unless there are no local surpluses or no local scarcities. Altruism is the first step to cooperation and a proven superior strategy.
Tit-for-tat is not altruism -- not according to any useful definition of the term. Tit-for-tat means responding to the other guy in the manner he treated you. Altruism, by contrast, would have you turning the other cheek.
Of course you can #define ALTRUISM = TIT_FOR_TAT and sound enlightened, but tit-for-tat is not what most people have in mind when they speak of the nobleness of sacrificing to strangers.
The final reason is known as the handicap principle. Since much of evolution is driven by sexual selection, things that help get a mate are selected for even if they hurt the chance of survival. Witness the peacock's tail. Not only does it make him easier to see and catch, if he has any parasites at all it will look ragged and tattered. His tail is a handicap, and therefore a brag to the peahens that is hard to fake. It is saying, "look at my genetic superiority, ladies! I'm so superior I can sport this gaudy monstrosity and get away with it!"
Sure.
Altruism is the same. By sacrificing resources you prove your worth to the opposite sex. With all those evolutionary reasons for altruism, it is no wonder it is such an important motivating factor.
I don't know what planet you are from, but I have never once seen anyone attracted to anyone else's altruistic acts. (Do not confuse praise with attraction.) What attracts humans may indeed be excess strength or energy, but it isn't the acts of sacrifice.
In fact, recent economic research has shown that the basis of the free market, the "selfish actor" theory, is false. People are not primarily motivated by self interest. They are motivated by a sense of fairness, reciprocity, and altruism.
Again you lump fairness and reciprocity (i.e. tit-for-tat) in with altruism. The two are vitally different. And in the experiments you cite, altruistic behavior usually occurs when the subjects think they are being watched.
Not that that matters anyway. Morality isn't about average behavior or genetic urges, it's about how we should find a safe and comfortable life in spite of all that.
Have you ever noticed that altruism is denigrated by people who are selfish and have no empathy?
I am selfish yet have too much empathy. It makes me a lo
Getting around shouldn't be so bloody dangerous considering how ubiquitous it is. Imagine not every having to let drunks choose between being responsible vs driving home drunk. And imagine not ever having to be on the road where some random drunk or incompetent driver, can end your life at any instant, where it is just bad luck that puts you in this spot.
The safety aspect is definitely a selling point. But that's not the killer app.
The killer app for AI cars is: traffic throughput. Right now, traffic throughput is limited by our need to leave lots of space in front of our car so that we don't hit the guy in front of us. This creates low throughput through traffic lights because everyone must wait for the person in front of them to move away, before starting to move too. AI would need none of that.
Ditto for freeway merges and weaves. AI could weave two lanes of cars together with ease... even without central automation or inter-car communication. All that is needed is a sufficiently standardized algorithm or a sufficiently clever computer. Our brains already do the same, even when the "DriveCar.exe" process is set to low priority in favor of a ringing cellphone.
Can you imagine how fast traffic could move if (to name just one benefit) everyone rolled forward instantly when the light turned green? And if nobody slowed down to rubberneck a roadside accident?
The implementation problem might solve itself too. Once AI cars prove their mettle, I can imagine that cities will designate more and more lanes as "AI only", with attendant increases in speed limit and throughput. Sort of like how HOV lanes work today. Soon we'll all be clamoring for an AI car in order to get the same benefits.
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Pay cuts don't work. They trim 20% of the cost but crash morale. This is the same reason why they imposed a 10-week waiting period. (And they well know that most of the victims will have found new work during that time.)
Your approach would work if the problem was a top-heavy organization. We don't know that this is the case at Circuit City.
Furthermore, they aren't downsizing at all. From TFA I infer they intend to replace the casualties with new hires.
Are you willing to believe that perhaps they really are just trying to reduce the salaries of sales staff? And why shouldn't they, considering that it's a low-skill low-responsibility job?
This is where we are missing each other's points, then.
Let us assume that the maroon wants to continue living as best he can, in order to last long enough to eventually be rescued. He now has a range of options available to him: he can play in the sand all day, he can identify edible plants and attempt to cultivate them, he can begin constructing a large "HELP" message, and so on. Some of these options are better for his goal (survival and rescue) than others... and, critically, he is able to know the difference. For him to then choose the worse option is... is... is immoral?
That's how I'm defining 'morality'. I've decided that morality means how well a person chooses within his knowledge in order to achieve his long-range goals. And so it doesn't change when other people and society enter the picture; it just gets more complex. (If I had to accept the use of the word 'ethics', I would use it to mean the subset of morality dealing with social interactions.)
I'm not saying you are wrong. Rather, I think you are insightful and I wish we could talk in person. What I am saying here is that we have an off-by-one error.
My argument, then, is that my meanings are more useful. They are also less perilous because they don't succumb to the idea that one's social obligations come from somewhere other than one's own long-term self-interest. To me, social obligations stem intimitely from one's long-term self-interest. For example, I refrain from murder simply because I wish to avoid the consequences.
What do you think?
A second point, which we should take up later, is whether it is necessary to have one's primary moral goal be a long-range contented life. You've mentioned Kant's proposal that it is not necessary, but I think I've got some traction towards the opposite conclusion.
Again I insist that there is peril in focusing the terms 'right', 'wrong', and 'morality' to the category of social obligations. It is perilous because it implies that private actions -- which affect only the actor -- are somehow exempt... and meanwhile that one's social obligations derive from something other than one's own long-range self-interest. From that latter idea can and will flow all manner of nasty political systems, all eager to cash in on the idea of causeless sacrificial duty to the state.
That peril is avoided if social obligations are seen as a subset of a larger, self-centered 'morality'. I treat my neighbors well, in other words, because that behavior maximizes my own safety and comfort. (And yes, I know that this raises the impossible free-rider problem... which I prefer over the alternative.)
But assuming you're right... what term would you use to describe the predicament of a guy marooned on a desert island? There are behaviors that must be urgently practiced, and others that must be urgently avoided, if he is to survive. There are also long-ranged actions that he must understake, such as storing up food for the winter. If those survival imperatives are not 'morality' or 'ethics', then what are they? And what language would you use to criticize his short-sighted decision to eat his store of seeds?
Ah yes, the free-rider problem. Even after bending my thoughts on it for a decade, I don't see a solution, and apparently nobody else does either.
My sons have begun asking philosophical questions that land near it, and I wish I had a more compelling answer than "Because we feel bad about ourselves when we free-ride on others". The scarey fact is that judicious free-riding may be moral after all.... but I still hate myself when I catch myself doing it.
Those 'moralists' are using the word 'morality' in a very narrow fashion: the legal enforcement of ancient religious dictates. You can accept their definition, but then you'll find yourself in need of a new word that means "the wisdom used to pursue and obtain personal happiness" -- such as is needed in a society just as much as it is needed on a desert island.
You and others are using the word 'ethics' to refer to the latter, at least in social situations. And so you have no word at all for the wisdom that would be direly needed on a desert island. I am trying to reclaim the word 'morality' for both concepts, because they aren't fundamentally different.
Think of it this way. You are surviving alone on a desert island. To do so you must adhere very strictly to a code of behavior that maximizes your chances of survival. Suddenly another castaway washes up. Now you've got some new options, and there may be new restraints in order to get the most out of the newcomer, but you are still in a fight to survive and find peace. You can still make the wrong choice and end up getting hurt or killed. No matter how many more castaways you add to the island, this doesn't change. And that is why I, and many philosophers, call all "How should I behave?" questions 'morality'.
To put it another way: Adding people to the desert island example certainly adds some complications, but it can't change the actor's base standard of value ("survive for as long as possible while being as happy, safe, and comfortable as possible"). The newcomers simply complicate it, and open up new avenues of fulfillment for it. Morality, then, gets deeper, and the actor's best-path-to-goal will change, but that's all. He is still pursuing that same standard of value, and making many decisions along the way by the method that his moral code prescribes. (Some moral codes prescribe prayer and charity as the correct method; you and I would instead prescribe rationality and tit-for-tat.)
Certainly society can be a beneficial place to live (provided that it's not a slave society). But, the actor's survival is still in his own hands, society or not; his or her decisions still help or hinder towards the ultimate goal.
True enough. It is so bad now, honest folks like you have resorted to using a completely different word ("ethics") to describe what the original word once meant. That concession has placed you in a tug-of-war between 'morality' and 'ethics', with no way to defend your choice when a conflict between the two arises.
Well said. But:
If you use the word 'should' in a sentence, then it's a moral issue.
If you define morality as being unconcerned with practical decisions, then you need another word, and another code with a presumably different standard of value, to guide those practical decisions. In other words, why shouldn't I do such things? They are impractical according to which ultimate goal?
"A matter of practical reason" is not an answer, because it assumes that the moral question of "what should we pursue and by what means shall we obtain it?" has already been decided. But that decision is exactly the definition of 'morality' (at least as used by me). That definition subsumes the social realm, being as it is a place among others in which humans must make survival decisions.
You can define 'morality' as "social rules" and 'ethics' as "survival decisionmaking" if you wish... but it'll only get you into trouble. It is far less confusing to define morality as "survival decisionmaking" and then regard society as a subset of it, since the same principles must apply therein. For example, messing with a scorpion is uselessly risky (and therefore immoral) in the very same way that spraying graffiti on your neighbor's fence is uselessly risky (and therefore immoral).
Take up a serious philosophy text and you'll see them doing the same thing. To propose a separate code of behavior for social situations can only bring about the unanswerable problem of "What do I do when morality conflicts with ethics?". Granted, many religions do make that mistake, but only because they teach that morality is concerned with God's needs and therefore humans need a separate code in order to satisfy their own needs.
So you can eat sand then? Snakes and scorpions are harmless now? Cold and exposure have no power over you any longer, since morality has been demoted to the social realm?
Society can protect a person from dangers and poor choices, and so morality is much weaker in social situations. On a desert island, where life and death are a daily struggle, the effects (for good or bad) of our choices are most real, most personal, and least able to be blunted by help from others.
Not to worry; the Earth gains about one ton per year from infalling cosmic particles.
As well, the Frito-Lay Corporation, in partnership with Dolly-Madison, are committed to the task of increasing the Earth's gravitational pull... one person at a time. I take my hat off to these patriotic, civic-minded businesses for doing their part to solve the desperate space-junk problem!
Indeed.
Have you read about the Bonobo monkey? It would be fun to be a Bonobo monkey for a while. :)
It's good to see academia finally beginning to acknowledge the social role that homosexuality plays. For so long, sex was regarded (with religious-grade evasion) strictly as a means of procreation. The idea that Mother Nature made it a dual-purpose attribute, as nearly all other physical attributes are, was verboten.
Boy, are we humans capable of stupendous acts of induced ignorance, or what? I'll never know how the hell I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species.
Not quite. They are proliferating more as if they have half-lives of their own.
*rimshot*
I agree with your sentiment, if not with your example. The McDonald's case was not about hot coffee; rather, it was about abnormally hot coffee vs. the reasonable expectations of the customer.
That said, I myself still firmly advocate "buyer beware", instead of the modern and lamentable "seller beware" system we are now stumbling under... but still, you should pick a better example.
Take care not to make the mistake of assuming that orientation is a binary. Orientation is not a bit that is either 1 or 0. Rather, it's a continuum... and few of us are at the edges (100% straight or 100% gay).
Unfortunately, Western society applies a great deal of peer pressure on us to affect 100% straightness. But nowadays that peer pressure -- designed to maximize the production of farmhands -- is obsolete. And so I wonder how all our preferences would play out if that pressure were finally lifted.
Not to mention the asexuals, who are pushed into the same closet.
Odd definition of morality you have there. Morality would not apply if you were marooned alone on a desert island, then? In that desperate circumstance, how long could you survive while operating on the idea that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, no difference between value and disvalue?
It's not specifically about raw size. Rather, it's about several things that contribute to brawling prowess: average deliverable impulse, average willingness to injure, average willingness to kill, average willingness to flee (which short-circuits the fight-for-your-life aggression). My sense is that women lose on all four counts to men. Whites probably lose on all four counts to blacks, too, on account of the difference in average testosterone level.
It comes down to a question of net social wealth created. Wealth includes pleasure, safety, and comfort, of course, in addition to just boots, because humans demonstrably need spiritual nutrition (etc.). What Billy Joel does with his earnings afterward is a separate moral calculation; the question is how the payments to him caused him to behave.
In his case, the payments caused him to spend his 12 hours producing a great deal of pleasure for a great many people, and that's a net positive. Paying someone the same money to stand on their head for twelve hours would not make such a large contribution to our net wealth. Paying a servant to spend an entire day doting on a rich person doesn't do much better.
Obviously, the money will then move on to the next person, but as I said, that's already a given.
Since you care about velocity, look at it this way. A servant must spend an entire day doing whatever in order to move $1,000 onward. A million-dollar laptop causes 5 or 6 people to spend an entire day manufacturing a laptop in order to move $1,000,000. So, even if you don't care about my "net social wealth" crap, you can see that million-dollar laptops are a very efficient way to create velocity.
True enough. But not all efforts are equally efficient. While the actual spending of money cannot -- itself -- waste anything, it can induce wasteful behavior. For example, suppose I spend $1000 hiring someone to stand on their head. By my spending, I caused one person to waste two person-days' worth of effort.
That said, I agree with you: this insane laptop is a great way to keep the wealth moving around. Its construction consumed about $2000 worth of actual effort, yet it liberates a million dollars from a concentration (i.e. from a rich person) to be spread around again.
Ditto with all luxury objects, for that matter. The higher the markup (i.e. the greater the difference between price and the effort to produce it), the more efficiently it dilutes wealth concentrations. Servants, meanwhile, are at the opposite end of the efficiency spectrum: low price but large number of person-hours consumed.
Drat, where are my mod points when I need them. You, sir, deserve a roflcopter, and then some!
Don't thank god for that, thank natural selection. A virus that impairs its host's vision is not going to get much time to reproduce itself.
Actually, there is such a thing as a pentachromat. She's female. And yes, she's a bitch. I have personally met her, fought her, and got my ass kicked.
:golf clap:
Very witty.
Indeed, I've read that every GM car includes $2000 paid out in medical care to GM retirees. In order to stay price-competitive, this means that somehow, $2000 in labor and materials must be removed from every GM car. Which means that a $10000 GM car contains $8000 of engineering. No wonder they can't compete.
Probably within the next decade, they'll get congress to assume the burden, and then they'll miraculously improve in quality. And our taxes will go up again. :|
Linux would not be so secure if it became mainstream, or if it became the dominant OS in use at a valuable target (US government computers). Presently, Linux doesn't receive near the same blackhat attention that Windows does.
As well, Linux is no more secure than its administrators are competent. There is not a lot of Linux expertise out there right now. If the feds switched to Linux tomorrow, it would be quite a while (and truckloads of money) before we reached critical mass of Linux administration skills. Until that time, there would be a lot of broken, misconfigured, and unpatched Linux installations.
What about puppy-dog tails?
True enough. But this discusson isn't about the welfare of our genes or our species. It's about morality. As humans, we alone have the power to aim our life away from reproduction. Our genes may encourage altruism, for their own ends, but that is no foundation for a moral code.
Indeed, a lot of morality is probably going to be devoted to the various ways and means of resisting our hardwired behaviors, being (as they are) so often obsolete.
True enough.
Tit-for-tat is not altruism -- not according to any useful definition of the term. Tit-for-tat means responding to the other guy in the manner he treated you. Altruism, by contrast, would have you turning the other cheek.
Of course you can #define ALTRUISM = TIT_FOR_TAT and sound enlightened, but tit-for-tat is not what most people have in mind when they speak of the nobleness of sacrificing to strangers.
Sure.
I don't know what planet you are from, but I have never once seen anyone attracted to anyone else's altruistic acts. (Do not confuse praise with attraction.) What attracts humans may indeed be excess strength or energy, but it isn't the acts of sacrifice.
Again you lump fairness and reciprocity (i.e. tit-for-tat) in with altruism. The two are vitally different. And in the experiments you cite, altruistic behavior usually occurs when the subjects think they are being watched.
Not that that matters anyway. Morality isn't about average behavior or genetic urges, it's about how we should find a safe and comfortable life in spite of all that.
I am selfish yet have too much empathy. It makes me a lo
The safety aspect is definitely a selling point. But that's not the killer app.
The killer app for AI cars is: traffic throughput. Right now, traffic throughput is limited by our need to leave lots of space in front of our car so that we don't hit the guy in front of us. This creates low throughput through traffic lights because everyone must wait for the person in front of them to move away, before starting to move too. AI would need none of that.
Ditto for freeway merges and weaves. AI could weave two lanes of cars together with ease... even without central automation or inter-car communication. All that is needed is a sufficiently standardized algorithm or a sufficiently clever computer. Our brains already do the same, even when the "DriveCar.exe" process is set to low priority in favor of a ringing cellphone.
Can you imagine how fast traffic could move if (to name just one benefit) everyone rolled forward instantly when the light turned green? And if nobody slowed down to rubberneck a roadside accident?
The implementation problem might solve itself too. Once AI cars prove their mettle, I can imagine that cities will designate more and more lanes as "AI only", with attendant increases in speed limit and throughput. Sort of like how HOV lanes work today. Soon we'll all be clamoring for an AI car in order to get the same benefits.