In which Forbes Mag. becomes indistinguishable from parody

[Carinthium]

Stas Bush:
If it's irreversible but not unjust, even if it causes problems, it is irrelevant to ethics. An asteroid headed for Earth due to natural causes would be the prototypical example. Even human actions can be harmful and yet completely just- a utilitarian would have to agree with me there.

The fact remains that AMBIGIOUS LAWS ARE IN THE LAWBOOKS. If this were all some project with law not actually passed yet there would be no problem- but there is a clear problem as it is.

Simon Jester:
"Fair" is not an ontologically real quantity, as can be shown by Hume's Is-Ought distinction problem. Cognitive neuroscience shows that talking about fairness in such a way is a mere metaphor. The question is which version best represents how to best do ethics.

Otherwise you get to the problem "None of us did anything wrong! Why are you calling the result unfair?"

Your ideal of "contact with reality" is as ludicrous as Confucianism or the code of chivalry. It is pseudo-philosophy, not fitted for actual debate.

Yes there are problems with the law being too complex for humans to understand and obey. That is the other side of the coin when it comes to the problem of ambiguity. Stas Bush, however, is wrong to claim the solution is simplicity- that's what I was trying to demonstrate.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon Jester:
"Fair" is not an ontologically real quantity, as can be shown by Hume's Is-Ought distinction problem. Cognitive neuroscience shows that talking about fairness in such a way is a mere metaphor. The question is which version best represents how to best do ethics.

Otherwise you get to the problem "None of us did anything wrong! Why are you calling the result unfair?"

This problem is unavoidable.

It is very much possible for a group of people, acting separately and without coordination, to produce a result totally different from what any of them were aiming for. Look at crowd dynamics, or (for an extreme but fictional example) The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry.

You can't get around that. You can pretend the issue doesn't exist, by giving "good" or "fair" an absurd definition, but all that does is turn your arguments into gibberish.


To take another specific example: it is morally neutral to drive on the right side of the road. It is morally neutral to drive on the left side of the road. Neither choice is preferable to the other; if we all changed from driving on one side to driving on the other, it would not in any way make things morally worse or better.

Thus, if we wish to measure the 'goodness' of "driving on the X side of the road," clearly this has a goodness-value of zero.

But consider the following scenario: Two drivers come around a hairpin turn in the mountains. One is driving on the left, one is driving on the right. There is a collision. Two actions which taken in isolation are ethically neutral have led to a very negative result.

It is infantile to complain "but neither of us is doing anything wrong, why did we end up in a car accident?" In isolation neither action was wrong- but in the context of other people's actions, at least one of the drivers was making a mistake.

Society responds by legislating that all drivers use one side of the road to drive on, and stick to it. The choice is arbitrary, but nonetheless necessary- it has to be one or the other. And any individual who deviates by driving on the 'wrong' side of the road in their own country is committing a very unethical* action, even though in isolation there would be no problem with his actions if they were the only driver on the road.

*i.e. reckless and dangerous to others
_______________________

So, to sum up the argument in my example:

There is NO ethical quality X, which you can attribute to human actions, for which you can simply assert "if all individual actions have quality X when taken in isolation, then the collective result of all actions necessarily has quality X when integrated over the whole system." I don't care if you call the quality "fairness," "high personal utility-value," "godliness," or "freedomosity."

The problem is that it is simply not true that in the general case, individual actions with quality X automatically add up to collective actions with quality X.

Your ideal of "contact with reality" is as ludicrous as Confucianism or the code of chivalry. It is pseudo-philosophy, not fitted for actual debate.

You have not addressed the issue- if your proposed code of ethics has nothing to do with reality, why should people who live in reality bother to know or care about it? What is its value? What does it accomplish, that could not be accomplished just as well by ignoring it?

Yes there are problems with the law being too complex for humans to understand and obey. That is the other side of the coin when it comes to the problem of ambiguity. Stas Bush, however, is wrong to claim the solution is simplicity- that's what I was trying to demonstrate.

You have failed to do so- because your stated goal is to achieve unambiguity, and unambiguity cannot exist unless the law system is simple enough for unschooled humans to understand. By making the system very complex you might remove the 'ambiguity' that human beings have to make decisions... but you create the 'ambiguity' that most people have literally no idea what will happen to them in advance because they can't remember all the relevant legal codes.

The only way to get truly unambiguous law, if you define "judge makes decisions" as ambiguity, is to simply define a list of crimes, assert that anyone accused of a crime is automatically guilty, and make them all punishable by death (or some other extremely fixed and rigid punishment). Anything you do to make the system more subtle, more able to take more variables into account, will make it more ambiguous.

[K. A. Pital]

Even human actions can be harmful and yet completely just- a utilitarian would have to agree with me there.

If overall utility decreases as a result, this is hardly a beneficial utilitarian outcome. If you mean that it is possible for something to be "just" as in "justified" by utilitarianism which at the same time lowers overall utility irreversibly, that does not seem to be correct.

[Carinthium]

First- you make an implicit assumption that harmful consequences must be morally bad. I do not make said assumption.

Second- You assume that 'corresponding to reality' in ethics is something similiar to empirical knowledge, which a system must have or else be deluded. The problem with this is that 'corresponding to reality' in practice means a list of priorities for things which must be important or else a system doesn't 'correspond', when in reality that is nothing like correspondence.

Third- The solution within a legalistic compromise, as opposed to a free world, is to use the law to force people to study very hard. I'm thinking something along the lines of getting of English classes in school and replacing them with legal classes plus replacing one or two minor classes (say, arts) with law as well.

Then, on top of this, lawyers memorise a second layer of law and use government subsidies to inform the common people of this to the extent there are no ambiguity post-legal explanations. These explanations will be avaliable to all for free.

[K. A. Pital]

First- you make an implicit assumption that harmful consequences must be morally bad. I do not make said assumption.

You said "utilitarian", that's why I assumed that we are working within a utilitarian framework. If not, then certainly harmful consequences can be defined as morally good. No problem.

[Carinthium]

Oops- should have made myself clearer. I was trying to play your utiltarian stance (I'm given to understand you are one) against you despite not being one myself. My criticism was mainly of Simon Jester though- I missed your new response.

In response to that, I say that yes it can be just if the alternative would lower overall utility even more.

[Patroklos]

Carinthium, question:

Do you believe in the existence of 'unfair' or 'unjust' or 'improper' methods by which a person can be influenced into making an agreement, trade, or bargain?

The rest of it aside, the article did address this:

It’s not the Henry Fords and Steve Jobs who exploit people. It’s the Al Capones and Bernie Madoffs. Voluntary trade, without force or fraud, is the exchange of value for value, to mutual benefit. In trade, both parties gain.

[K. A. Pital]

Comparing Henry Ford, who at least tried to ensure a high level of life for his workers (before the GD), with Steve Jobs, is the example of dishonest lumping-together that Forbes, this stupid oligarch mouthpiece, employs all too often.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The author of the article shows a complete and total misunderstanding of the point-of-view that he argues against. The fact that the teachers received a paycheck does not change the fact that without a highly-educated workforce, trained at great societal expense, the success of Steve Jobs would have been impossible. Without a modern transportation for people to get to work, come together to create ideas, etc., none of the great businesses of today could have been built. Without an orderly populace that follows the rule of law, maintained at great expense by police and legal systems, bastions of wealth like Goldman Sachs would simply have been looted. To say that the beneficiaries of all this, whatever genius it might have taken to go as far as they did, owe no debt to society is absurd on its face. Does the author suppose that they would have prospered equally had they been born in a place like Myanmar?

More importantly, the success of today's business tycoons is possible because their forbearers understood that these arguments are tripe, and funded these systems by paying taxes. Now that it's their turn to pay it forward, many would rather eat the seeds along with the harvest and deny opportunities to future generations.

[Simon_Jester]

First- you make an implicit assumption that harmful consequences must be morally bad. I do not make said assumption.

Yes, I'm aware of that. The issue this raises is that you just...

Look, I'm going to assume you're not actually stupid, and try to explain.

You come here and you just assert "X is right, Y is wrong, consequences don't matter, other people's arguments don't matter, only my argument matters." You don't even try to engage meaningfully with this, except to repeat that your own (rather vague, quasi-naturalistic, very idiosyncratic) views are correct.

The qualitative experience is very frustrating. It's like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in heliocentrism, and whenever you point out something wrong with geocentrism they just say "I don't think that's important" or "that is a heliocentrist argument and I don't believe in heliocentrism. Therefore, it is irrelevant to the natural conclusion that the sun orbits the earth."

That is what it's like debating with you on these issues. It's not just that you disagree with us about very basic principles. It's that you don't even seem to care about the disagreement, you just shrug and repeat your original views, without trying to justify them beyond the level of "I think these are right."

Which means that anyone who didn't already agree with you is inevitably going to ignore you. You're not even making an effort to be convincing, really. You're saying "I don't believe in X," which is not an answer to someone who objects "but X is a problem!" You must at least try to explain why X is not an issue if you want to convince.

You cannot flatly dismiss all evidence and arguments which contradict your position and expect to be taken seriously. I'm sure you'd recognize this if it were happening on any issue other than moral philosophy and social theory. But you yourself do it over and over within those areas.

Please, try to think and speak clearly about your own assumptions, and at least try to lay them out in a convincing fashion, rather than using them as a license to ignore what everyone else is saying while blindly repeating your own position.

---

Now, back on the subject- you missed my point entirely. Again. This time, the problem is that you've completely bypassed and ignored my point about your argument not holding in the general case.

You cannot simply assert "Actions X and Y have quality 'fair,' which is desirable. Therefore, an arbitrary combination of X and Y actions will automatically yield a 'fair' result which is itself desirable." Intangible properties like 'fairness' do not work that way, not in the general case. For your argument to be sound, you would need fairness to work that way.

But you can't just assume that, because it isn't true in the general case, which I proved by counterexample: the case of the two motorists, where two decisions that produce 'desirable' or 'neutral' outcomes in isolation yield a highly 'undesirable' outcome when both decisions are taken at the same time in the same environment.

In physics, one rock plus one rock equals two rocks, and it's as simple as that.

In moral philosophy, one 'fairness' plus one 'fairness' need not equal two 'fairnesses.' It need not even equal one 'fairness,' or any positive number of 'fairnesses' at all.

It might, but since you can't rely on a general-principles statement that it must, you need to back up and prove that it does before you can proceed and say "market outcomes are a priori fair."

---

Second- You assume that 'corresponding to reality' in ethics is something similiar to empirical knowledge, which a system must have or else be deluded.

No. I am not.

My point is that if you want to spend your days working out the ethics of hermaphroditic methane-breathers in a world where gravity points up, you can... but your results will not be applicable to the world we know. Humans have no reason to pay attention to them.

Likewise, if you want to spend your days working out the ethics of a society where magic duplicating machines create anything you desire for free at the push of a button, you can... but your results will not be applicable to the world we know. People in a real civilization have no reason to pay attention to them.

If your starting assumptions are wrong, or weighted incorrectly, or if you use faulty logic, then your oh-so-infallibly 'deduced' moral conclusions are pure gibberish and mean nothing. They are an exercise in intellectual masturbation, nothing more.

Now, that you may be prepared to grant- that if you use faulty inputs or bad logical processes, you get a garbage result.



But there's a corollary on the output side of the scale, which I keep trying to explain to you.

If you make statements about the real world without stopping to check their accuracy, your results are worthless. But by the same token, if you make prescriptions about the real world without stopping to check those prescriptions' results, your results are worthless. Because what that comes down to is you saying "I don't care if this is good advice or not, do it anyway." Only a complete fool would listen to a person who says that.

Would you listen to a doctor who didn't care whether or not the medicine he prescribed works? Probably not. So why do you expect us to listen to an 'ethicist' who is just as indifferent to the consequences of his own theories?

Third- The solution within a legalistic compromise, as opposed to a free world, is to use the law to force people to study very hard. I'm thinking something along the lines of getting of English classes in school and replacing them with legal classes plus replacing one or two minor classes (say, arts) with law as well.

Then, on top of this, lawyers memorise a second layer of law and use government subsidies to inform the common people of this to the extent there are no ambiguity post-legal explanations. These explanations will be avaliable to all for free.

Why bother?

If you consider "remove legal ambiguity" to be more important than "good outcomes," the answer is simple: make all crimes punishable by death. There. Very easy to remember. Very simple. No ambiguity.

Of course, if you have more than one goal at a time, like a sane person, that's a terrible solution. Sane people want to avoid legal ambiguity, but they also want laws that produce good outcomes, that are intelligently designed to accomplish some desirable goal.

But if you actually thought like a sane person you wouldn't fixate on "LAWS ARE TOO AMBIGUOUS AAARGH" as if it were the most important thing in the universe.

[Welf]

That article annoyed me. A lot. I stopped reading most of the thread because I saw Carinthium post and I know that is not worth my time reading.

All I want to say is: Marginal Income = marginal productivity. What's so hard to understand about that for Fisher's sake.

Except if we are in imperfect markets. Which we are. And then information and power asymmetry benefits the top incomes.

We really need a socialist revolution every 100 years or so to put all the idiots against the wall.

[Carinthium]

Simon_Jester, I'm guessing you're the kind of naturalised epistemologist who doesn't believe in an analytic-synthetic distinction, nor a dichotomy between ethics and epistemology. That's part of the problem.

My viewpoint is more rationalistic- only arguments matter. You need an argument to DEMONSTRATE that consequences matter rather than merely assuming it- nobody has given such. When others make arguments, I counter-argue- that's how debate works. Even when I think I'm wrong, I counter-argue out of principle because that's how argument works. I only concede a point when the case for what I'm saying is untenable.

You are the one assuming here- you ASSUME that consequences must matter for a system of ethics. I don't assume that, so in lieu of argument I assume they don't.

-----------------------------

Your example of the two motorists doesn't make sense because you simply assume that the result is morally unfair. It isn't. Therefore you lack a case on this point.

-----------------------------

There is a fundamental difference in your examples. A doctor's purpose is health- the implicit assumption of the patient is that he is there to support the patient's health. There is a meta-philosophical assumption here. An ethicist CANNOT have meta-philosophical assumptions and still be anything more than a crap ethicist.

ALL Ethics comes from a single system, metaphorically if not literally comparable to a system of Laws. Assuming we still apply human ethics, we can put in empirical information such as harry potter magic, DBZ chi, or whatever, assume it accurate, and come up with results interpreting the same system.

Mostly, your problem here is that you have not demonstrated that an ethical system must eliminate harmful consequences. ONLY a consequentialist can agree with your claim about consequences- any deontologist or virtue ethicist who agrees is automatically a hypocrite, with the rare exception of a deontologist who asspulls around is-ought or who can demonstrate that human intutions inherently value people not being harmed above other principles.

--------------------------------------------------------

Good idea, but politically untenable. I actually would agree with your system if and only if it could be implemented, ALONG WITH a Constitution that was completely unambigious itself. First I look for ethics, then I look for means to implement.

[Terralthra]

Your example of the two motorists doesn't make sense because you simply assume that the result is morally unfair. It isn't. Therefore you lack a case on this point.

No, he assumes that the outcome - a crash, injury and/or death for both motorists, is morally undesirable. You can tell this because he used the word "undesirable", and not the word "unfair." You seem to read and write reasonably well, but very often substitute words in response to others' posts that are not synonyms, nor are even particularly similar in meaning. Are you EFL/ESL?

ALL Ethics comes from a single system, metaphorically if not literally comparable to a system of Laws. Assuming we still apply human ethics, we can put in empirical information such as harry potter magic, DBZ chi, or whatever, assume it accurate, and come up with results interpreting the same system.

I see no basis for this magnificently extraordinary claim that "all ethics comes from a single system."

Mostly, your problem here is that you have not demonstrated that an ethical system must eliminate harmful consequences. ONLY a consequentialist can agree with your claim about consequences- any deontologist or virtue ethicist who agrees is automatically a hypocrite, with the rare exception of a deontologist who asspulls around is-ought or who can demonstrate that human intutions inherently value people not being harmed above other principles.

Virtue ethics are founded on a principle of positive outcomes. Aristotle and Plato laid out virtue ethics on the basis that pursuing virtues would lead to being a happier person, an inherently outcome-oriented idea.

[energiewende]

This article is basically right; in fact it is stupendous to consider the positive externalities that the small percentage of people who discovered and invented pretty much everything have 'given' to the world.

One example: suppose that I have an income of $1,000/year in 1500. Today, I still only earn $1,000/year. But, in 1500 I catch measles and die. Today, I was able to buy a measles vaccine for $10 - merely 1% of a single year's income - and survive! Nothing I have done, suppose as a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh, has contributed in any way to bringing about this vast improvement in my standard of living. And yet I still get to enjoy it!

Now compare the reality to the conventional wisdom, which is that rich biotech companies (among others) are the reason I am poor.

[Terralthra]

This article is basically right; in fact it is stupendous to consider the positive externalities that the small percentage of people who discovered and invented pretty much everything have 'given' to the world.

One example: suppose that I have an income of $1,000/year in 1500. Today, I still only earn $1,000/year. But, in 1500 I catch measles and die. Today, I was able to buy a measles vaccine for $10 - merely 1% of a single year's income - and survive! Nothing I have done, suppose as a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh, has contributed in any way to bringing about this vast improvement in my standard of living. And yet I still get to enjoy it!

Now compare the reality to the conventional wisdom, which is that rich biotech companies (among others) are the reason I am poor.

Nonsense. Your tax dollars pay for the regulations and protections which ensure that everyone gets measles vaccines, even those who can't afford them, to keep people who can't use them or have had them wear off surrounded by herds of immune people. They also ensure that the cost of the measles vaccine is kept low (via subsidies) and that when you buy a measles vaccine, you actually get a measles vaccine, instead of a light dose of some numbing agent as a placebo. They also protect those biotech companies' patents with government funds and arbitrage. Oh, and the police forces which keep you from simply taking the measles vaccine for free because you're carrying a bigger weapon. It's part of a larger and complex system of interdependencies and networks.

[Carinthium]

I can't help looking like a troll, can I? I honestly don't intend it- it just seems to be a curse following me all over this site!

No, he assumes that the outcome - a crash, injury and/or death for both motorists, is morally undesirable. You can tell this because he used the word "undesirable", and not the word "unfair." You seem to read and write reasonably well, but very often substitute words in response to others' posts that are not synonyms, nor are even particularly similar in meaning. Are you EFL/ESL?

I am neither EFL nor ESL.

I'm not used to dealing with 'morally undesirable' seperate from 'morally unfair', as in my moral system the former does not exist except in cases of the latter. Suffice to say that this irrelevant as he would have to demonstrate either.

I see no basis for this magnificently extraordinary claim that "all ethics comes from a single system."

If we are to talk of ethics as something other than irrational "You feel, I feel", we must treat ethical facts as facts to which there is only one right answer. Unless you have a single system of rules that distinguishes Right from Wrong (and defines them, of course), you will have cases in which there is no fact of the matter as to whether they are Right or Wrong, meaning your system has failed.

Consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology represent incompatible possibilities- if you want to reconcile them, the only way to do so is to claim they all approximate One True System that you are yourself trying to approximate. But none of you are capable of laying such a system out or you already would have and none of your talk about rejecting one true system would be necessary.

Can we at least agree that a system which leads to even one moral dilmena without a clear answer is not satisfactory? At best, it approximates satisfication- I agree that you can progress from such a system in a way metaphorically comparable to science to ultimately get it "right", but if you have a moral dilemna you have a problem.

Virtue ethics are founded on a principle of positive outcomes. Aristotle and Plato laid out virtue ethics on the basis that pursuing virtues would lead to being a happier person, an inherently outcome-oriented idea.

Firstly, this is circular. The purpose of an ethical code is to decide what is Right and Wrong, at the core. Embracing virtue ethics because it gives hapiness supposes happiness is Right.

Second, it is wrong anyway. Virtue Ethics do not lead to happier lifestyles. Do you have any scientific evidence to back yourself up, or do you fail on that claim by this site's ridicolously harsh standards before I even get into it?

[energiewende]

This article is basically right; in fact it is stupendous to consider the positive externalities that the small percentage of people who discovered and invented pretty much everything have 'given' to the world.

One example: suppose that I have an income of $1,000/year in 1500. Today, I still only earn $1,000/year. But, in 1500 I catch measles and die. Today, I was able to buy a measles vaccine for $10 - merely 1% of a single year's income - and survive! Nothing I have done, suppose as a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh, has contributed in any way to bringing about this vast improvement in my standard of living. And yet I still get to enjoy it!

Now compare the reality to the conventional wisdom, which is that rich biotech companies (among others) are the reason I am poor.

Nonsense. Your tax dollars pay for the regulations and protections which ensure that everyone gets measles vaccines

I just said I paid $10, which is the market price (actually it's twice as high; I was reading the wrong line).

even those who can't afford them, to keep people who can't use them or have had them wear off surrounded by herds of immune people.

I'm still much better off having been personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized than not being personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized. Perhaps things could be even better, but I've nonetheless internalised a massive benefit without working harder or producing more things, by direct consequence of someone else's effort and ingenuity.

The same is true of innovations that have reduced the price of food and clean water, reduced the price of construction, reduced the price of travel, and so forth. In fact, the single biggest benefit of industrial society has been to make common conveniences that the super-rich alone used to enjoy. The Queen of England could simply hire a Shakespeare to write her plays to be performed whenever she liked; she isn't much helped by the emergence of the film industry which just replicates this on a bigger scale. The bulk of the population on the other hand goes from having little access to arts to easy access to them. The same was done for books by the printing press, replacing illuminated folios of the super rich with mass-produced paperbacks. Very few of these people were responsible for producing those developments.

[Terralthra]

I can't help looking like a troll, can I? I honestly don't intend it- it just seems to be a curse following me all over this site!

Maybe you should think about that for, like, five minutes. Every thread you post in turns into a shitfest of people telling you that you're spouting bullshit. Consider what possible conditions allow this situation to arise so repeatedly.

No, he assumes that the outcome - a crash, injury and/or death for both motorists, is morally undesirable. You can tell this because he used the word "undesirable", and not the word "unfair." You seem to read and write reasonably well, but very often substitute words in response to others' posts that are not synonyms, nor are even particularly similar in meaning. Are you EFL/ESL?

I am neither EFL nor ESL.

I'm not used to dealing with 'morally undesirable' seperate from 'morally unfair', as in my moral system the former does not exist except in cases of the latter. Suffice to say that this irrelevant as he would have to demonstrate either.

He would have to demonstrate that two people dying unnecessarily and pointlessly is morally undesirable?

I see no basis for this magnificently extraordinary claim that "all ethics comes from a single system."

If we are to talk of ethics as something other than irrational "You feel, I feel", we must treat ethical facts as facts to which there is only one right answer. Unless you have a single system of rules that distinguishes Right from Wrong (and defines them, of course), you will have cases in which there is no fact of the matter as to whether they are Right or Wrong, meaning your system has failed.

Consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology represent incompatible possibilities- if you want to reconcile them, the only way to do so is to claim they all approximate One True System that you are yourself trying to approximate. But none of you are capable of laying such a system out or you already would have and none of your talk about rejecting one true system would be necessary.

I haven't said anything about rejecting "one true system". What I said is that you have yet to lay out any particular evidence justifying your belief that there is one. That's not the same as saying there isn't one, that's saying "show me." Which you have not, in this confused mishmash. Deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics as three systematic approaches to ethical reasoning are neither of them perfect, but each offers a different set of analytical features which may be more or less useful to a particular ethical decision than the other two may be.

Like Newtonian dynamics, SR, and QM, each of which is best suited to approaching some problems and coming up with an acceptably accurate answer, but not other problems. There are some domains where they overlap, and within those domains, usually their answers agree (somewhat tautologically, as when their answers do not agree, we can be assured at least one of the systems does not extend to that domain particularly well). And yet, even with these three (excellent) systems of modeling the dynamics of interactions amongst energy, matter, and fields, there are situations we can not accurately model, e.g. turbulent flow. Do we reject the three systems we have developed, each of which have problem domains within which they provide excellent and accurate analysis, because they do not extend to every problem domain? Do we reject all three of them because there are as yet unsolved problem domains?

If your answer to these is "yes," you're not a very pragmatic person; by this, I mean - regardless of the rigour of your intellectual enterprises - they are not particularly applicable to solving problems in the world. If your analytical approach doesn't help solve problems that actually exist, it's only good for attacking made-up problems, and is thus largely a waste of my time, if not yours.

If the answer is "no," then you have already fundamentally disagreed with your own "one true system" hypothesis.

Can we at least agree that a system which leads to even one moral dilmena without a clear answer is not satisfactory?

No, I do not agree to that. That there are ethical choices in the world without clear answers can be seen by looking around. It may be that there is no ethical system which can answer every question put to it.

Virtue ethics are founded on a principle of positive outcomes. Aristotle and Plato laid out virtue ethics on the basis that pursuing virtues would lead to being a happier person, an inherently outcome-oriented idea.

Firstly, this is circular. The purpose of an ethical code is to decide what is Right and Wrong, at the core. Embracing virtue ethics because it gives hapiness supposes happiness is Right.

No, that's one purpose of ethics. Another might be to help determine what action one should take, not because any of the set of possible actions is right, or that any is wrong, but that they exist on a spectrum from more to less desirable.

Second, it is wrong anyway. Virtue Ethics do not lead to happier lifestyles. Do you have any scientific evidence to back yourself up, or do you fail on that claim by this site's ridicolously harsh standards before I even get into it?

I didn't claim that they lead to any such thing. I said that Plato and Aristotle, the originators of the virtue ethic tradition, did. If you want their evidence and reasoning, maybe you should, I dunno, read them?

[Terralthra]

I'm still much better off having been personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized than not being personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized. Perhaps things could be even better, but I've nonetheless internalised a massive benefit without working harder or producing more things, by direct consequence of someone else's effort and ingenuity.

The same is true of innovations that have reduced the price of food and clean water, reduced the price of construction, reduced the price of travel, and so forth. In fact, the single biggest benefit of industrial society has been to make common conveniences that the super-rich alone used to enjoy. The Queen of England could simply hire a Shakespeare to write her plays to be performed whenever she liked; she isn't much helped by the emergence of the film industry which just replicates this on a bigger scale. The bulk of the population on the other hand goes from having little access to arts to easy access to them. The same was done for books by the printing press, replacing illuminated folios of the super rich with mass-produced paperbacks.

Clipping out salient portions of my reply in an effort to make yourself look good doesn't actually work. Nobody browses this forum with a keyboard missing the "page up" button.

[energiewende]

I'm still much better off having been personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized than not being personally immunized in a society where most people are not immunized. Perhaps things could be even better, but I've nonetheless internalised a massive benefit without working harder or producing more things, by direct consequence of someone else's effort and ingenuity.

The same is true of innovations that have reduced the price of food and clean water, reduced the price of construction, reduced the price of travel, and so forth. In fact, the single biggest benefit of industrial society has been to make common conveniences that the super-rich alone used to enjoy. The Queen of England could simply hire a Shakespeare to write her plays to be performed whenever she liked; she isn't much helped by the emergence of the film industry which just replicates this on a bigger scale. The bulk of the population on the other hand goes from having little access to arts to easy access to them. The same was done for books by the printing press, replacing illuminated folios of the super rich with mass-produced paperbacks.

Clipping out the salient portions of my reply in an effort to make yourself look good doesn't actually work. Nobody browses this forum with a keyboard missing the "page up" button.

I clipped out the least salient portions. You were making a general argument that government is responsible for everything (if you want to argue that the government acquires a property right in a thing by hiring police to stop it being stolen, then you can argue that the government can justly enslave everyone since its police act to stop murderers), but responding to a post making a more specific claim: that the poor have benefited enormously from externalities created by the rich.

[Terralthra]

I clipped out the least salient portions. You were making a general argument that government is responsible for everything (if you want to argue that the government acquires a property right in a thing by hiring police to stop it being stolen, then you can argue that the government can justly enslave everyone since its police act to stop murderers), but responding to a post making a more specific claim: that the poor have benefited enormously from externalities created by the rich.

No, I was not making any such case. I made several specific points related directly and explicitly to a measles vaccine. Handwaving away things that the people delegate to the government, and that the government actually does as "you think the government is responsible for everything" is the sort of hare-brained thing cable news shows get away with, but that's because most people watching cable news don't rewind or pay enough attention to remember what person A said by the time person B gets through their reply. In a forum, where we can freely scroll about the debate and re-read, your attempt to dismiss arguments by ignoring them is less likely to work.

[energiewende]

I clipped out the least salient portions. You were making a general argument that government is responsible for everything (if you want to argue that the government acquires a property right in a thing by hiring police to stop it being stolen, then you can argue that the government can justly enslave everyone since its police act to stop murderers), but responding to a post making a more specific claim: that the poor have benefited enormously from externalities created by the rich.

No, I was not making any such case. I made several specific points related directly and explicitly to a measles vaccine. Handwaving away things that the people delegate to the government, and that the government actually does as "you think the government is responsible for everything" is the sort of hare-brained thing cable news shows get away with, but that's because most people watching cable news don't rewind or pay enough attention to remember what person A said by the time person B gets through their reply. In a forum, where we can freely scroll about the debate and re-read, your attempt to dismiss arguments by ignoring them is less likely to work.

The point is that the partial responsibility or not of the government for the existence of vaccines is irrelevant to the argument you are replying to. It can be perfectly true that vaccines are impossible without the FDA (although they pre-date it) and yet true that the actions of the rich create a large positive externality for the poor.

[Carinthium]

Maybe you should think about that for, like, five minutes. Every thread you post in turns into a shitfest of people telling you that you're spouting bullshit. Consider what possible conditions allow this situation to arise so repeatedly.

The fact that, metaphorically speaking, this forum is a clash of cultures. I live in a metaphorical world who agree with me, and who taught me to be the way I am.

He would have to demonstrate that two people dying unnecessarily and pointlessly is morally undesirable?

The logical thing to say would be that you can't simply claim something is so "just because". You need to establish it with rational argument. The problem is that there are three incompatible intuitions:

-It is morally undesirable for people to die unnecessarily and pointlessly
-If something is morally undesirable, there is an obligation to prevent it
-People are free to live their own lives

The problem here is obvious. The first principle also conflicts with the fact that people do not embrace Immortalism (the viewpoint that massive amounts of money should be spent to get rid of death of old age one way or another), nor donate massive amounts of money to the Third World (see Peter Singer). It is the logical choice to get rid of.

I haven't said anything about rejecting "one true system". What I said is that you have yet to lay out any particular evidence justifying your belief that there is one. That's not the same as saying there isn't one, that's saying "show me." Which you have not, in this confused mishmash. Deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics as three systematic approaches to ethical reasoning are neither of them perfect, but each offers a different set of analytical features which may be more or less useful to a particular ethical decision than the other two may be.

Like Newtonian dynamics, SR, and QM, each of which is best suited to approaching some problems and coming up with an acceptably accurate answer, but not other problems. There are some domains where they overlap, and within those domains, usually their answers agree (somewhat tautologically, as when their answers do not agree, we can be assured at least one of the systems does not extend to that domain particularly well). And yet, even with these three (excellent) systems of modeling the dynamics of interactions amongst energy, matter, and fields, there are situations we can not accurately model, e.g. turbulent flow. Do we reject the three systems we have developed, each of which have problem domains within which they provide excellent and accurate analysis, because they do not extend to every problem domain? Do we reject all three of them because there are as yet unsolved problem domains?

If your answer to these is "yes," you're not a very pragmatic person; by this, I mean - regardless of the rigour of your intellectual enterprises - they are not particularly applicable to solving problems in the world. If your analytical approach doesn't help solve problems that actually exist, it's only good for attacking made-up problems, and is thus largely a waste of my time, if not yours.

If the answer is "no," then you have already fundamentally disagreed with your own "one true system" hypothesis.

We do not consider Newtonian dynamics, Quantum mechanics, or SR to be true- we consider them to be useful sets of assumptions to be pragmatically adopted in certain circumstances. By contrast, this entire debate is about what is TRUE in ethics.

In empirical matters we have our senses to guide us. We don't have anything nearly as reliable in ethics. Therefore, without an approximation of the True system it is impossible to make any real judgements.

To clarify slightly- I am a nominalist about everything. Does that final clue solve the puzzle for you? If you're as intelligent as you think you are, it should.

No, I do not agree to that. That there are ethical choices in the world without clear answers can be seen by looking around. It may be that there is no ethical system which can answer every question put to it.

Then that means ethics is incoherent. Which means the only two plausible options are moral nihilism and "The entire study of ethics is bunk".

No, that's one purpose of ethics. Another might be to help determine what action one should take, not because any of the set of possible actions is right, or that any is wrong, but that they exist on a spectrum from more to less desirable.

This ultimately comes down to the One True System dispute. The One True System would have one or several courses of action which are morally acceptable and one or several that are morally unacceptable. There would be no shades of grey.

If you simply want to know what action to take, why not simply flip a coin?

I didn't claim that they lead to any such thing. I said that Plato and Aristotle, the originators of the virtue ethic tradition, did. If you want their evidence and reasoning, maybe you should, I dunno, read them?

Apologies- I misinterpreted you.

[K. A. Pital]

This article is basically right; in fact it is stupendous to consider the positive externalities that the small percentage of people who discovered and invented pretty much everything have 'given' to the world.

Like Nicola Tesla, who died poor?

Nothing I have done, suppose as a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh, has contributed in any way to bringing about this vast improvement in my standard of living. And yet I still get to enjoy it!

No, because a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh is pretty much outside the capitalist production system. As soon as he turns into a productive agro-worker, no longer working for himself but also feeding others, he becomes part of the global division of labour which is the very system that allows a large number of people to do science and engineering while hordes of people work to feed themselves and also those people employed in all other sectors of the economy.

Perhaps things could be even better, but I've nonetheless internalised a massive benefit without working harder or producing more things, by direct consequence of someone else's effort and ingenuity.

By the direct consequence of everyone's effort. Surplus product is the only thing that allows us to maintain an advanced division of labour; were it not so, all people would be preoccupied with simple subsistence, as it was in agrarian societies, and the number of those who invent and discover would be pathetically small.

Very few of these people were responsible for producing those developments.

It is only because industrial society did not encompass everyone at the same time; it was a gradual process of involvement. Nowadays it is preposterous, considering our totally industrialized workforce which produces everything, to say that someone does not contribute, unless he's a tribesman hunter-gatherer or a subsistence farmer somewhere in Nowheristan.

[Carinthium]

Stas Bush, a suggestion here- maybe you should explain your meta-ethics? How do you get from "Everybody is inter-dependent" to "People have moral obligations to each other"?