Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ethics-l
Date:         Fri, 10 Apr 1992 22:10:22 EDT
From:         Ed Nilges <EGNILGES@PUCC.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Platonism rebuffed
              5 Apr 1992 05:15:00 EST from <JDOWNEY@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>

On Sun, 5 Apr 1992 05:15:00 EST JIM DOWNEY said:
>
>Now how can a reference to Aquinas and Aristotle be Platonism when we
>know that it was Augustine that was the Platonist?  Although Aristotle
>was certainly a disciple of Plato, and many ideas are shared, there
>are some fundamental differences...  Some that are often misunderstood
>and  mis-stated... Such is the case within your challenge...

Both Aristotle and Plato developed their thought in a slave-based
society.  Both Aquinas and Augustine worked in a feudal matrix.  I
suggest that if we treat either of these poles as exhaustive, we
will recreate in some measure the slave or feudal aspects of their
society.  Whereas Kant was informed by the Enlightenment.  I know it
is the fashion to decry the Enlightenment and point to the slaughters
of the French Revolution, as if slaughter was invented by Voltaire
and as if humans looked to intellectuals for excuses for bloodletting.
I reject this fashion.

Aristotle was servant/slave of Philip of Macedon, was he not?  We can
therefore view his thought as Platonism with a human face; Platonism
from the point of view of the house slave.

As to Aquinas, his Scholasticism is of equal relevance to computer
ethics as the Platonism of Augustine.

By Platonism I mean ANY system that is based, not on radical democracy,
but instead on some sort of class structure.  I claim that Plato's
genius was such that systems that attempt to depart from his within
a class structure COLLAPSE into Platonism.  Yes, Aristotle recommended
empirical study as contrasted with Plato's navel-gazing.  But such
was Aristotle's authority as transmitted via the Moslem world to the
European middle ages that references to his texts were substituted
for empirical research by an intellectual class of priests and clerks.
>
>
>> Looking at the social/cultural matrix before devising a non-
>> situational ethical code is not "determining what we will do and
>> then calling it moral."  It is simply the recognition of two
>> propositions:
>
>It is cultural relativism...

That's cool with me.

>
>>     1.  Men and women are only in part free moral agents
>
>Says who?  How do you arrive at the statement?

Says me.  Our moral choices are conditioned, and conditioned necessarily,
by historical and social factors.  These factors do not determine our
choices 100% but nonetheless they are present.  This means that
Aristotle and Aquinas, who posit (in the case of Aristotle) a moral
agent as a property and slave-owning male and (in the case of Aquinas)
a property-owning feudal lord or cleric, are of limited relevance to
(say) an 21-year old woman BSCS from San Dimas with, say, bulimia.
>
>>     2.  Structures and institutions are moral agents
>
>If this is so, then why have we so high a recidivist rate for prisons,
>drug abuse, prostitution, etc.  We have courts, we have prisons, we
>have rehab centers... How is that these societal structure and
>institutions, and the capacity of these to be moral agents, have not
>brought about morality...  Why is it that we have the FBI and yet we
>still have cracking, copyright infringement, security breaches, etc.?

(Sigh).  You misunderstood my "moral agent" to mean "good moral agent"
whereas "moral agent" MEANS "a person or entity capable of having
an effect, FOR GOOD OR EVIL, in the moral sphere." Actually, also,
it needs to be stressed that courts, prisons and rehab centers do
much good.  But as moral agents they can also do as much evil as, say,
universities.
>
>But this addresses degree of innocence or guilt, and the
>quality/quantity of a criminal act, not free agency... And why do you
>see Milken any less or more of a moral person than Gotti?  Is one
>crime more or less a crime than the other?  Are you advocating the
>idea of a "victimless crime"?  Or just a less victimizing crime?

I hold to a dirty-hands theory such that moral choice is STILL
relevant, perhaps even MORE relevant, after the point at which
one becomes a Milken or even a Teflon Don.  Read Dostoevsky,
or W. B. Yeats' poem "Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop": morality
is more important to criminals than it is to nice people.  I view
Milken's crimes as attenuated by the good he did in financing
struggling firms in a way that Gotti's crimes are not attenuated,
and I believe that discussions of morality must take place in this
murky "film noir" realm, rather than in the empyrean, where those
who know nothing of the dark side will discuss how to avoid walking
on the dark side.  I side with Plato, and St. Paul: "for all have
sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God."

>
>And this is exactly why in English and American law today we no longer
>have a full acceptance of the idea of "sovereign immunity" and why
>recent Supreme Court decisions have said that the INDIVIDUAL
>government agents AND the agency can be held accountable for
>negligence, misinformation, torts, etc.

But we may expect the absurdly conservative Supreme Court we now have
to NEVER apply these marvelous rules to CORPORATIONS, source of far
more torts than government.  Corporations, under this doctrine, shall
always be able to find an individual "fall guy", and (using fine words
about "individual responsibility"), corporations will be able to avoid
penalty for their torts.
>
>But if we buy your posit, then we have to say that the person(s) who made
>the mistake(s) that caused Bhopal (i.e. the manger who did not address
>the safety issues, the engineer who saw a leak and didn't shut down
>the plant for repairs, etc.) do not have any share in the tragedy...

In the Challenger disaster, the engineers for Morton Thiokol warned
managers that the O rings on the shuttle could fail in the unusually
cold weather that obtained on the day of the crash.  However, their
managers convinced them (partially by their veiled control of the
engineer's very jobs!) that management knew what it was doing.  One
engineer was asked to "stop thinking like an engineer; think like a
manager."  Your fine-sounding but absurdly overdrawn appeal to
INDIVIDUAL responsibility demands that every technician be prepared
at a moment's notice to be a whistleblower, in a society than
ensures that whistleblowers are always punished.  You also try to
make me make the strong claim that the engineers in (say) the
Challenger disaster have clean hands; they don't.  But it is clear
to me that justice won't fully be served until the very system of
"stop thinking like an engineer, eg. a person with integrity, and
start thinking like an empty suit" is dismantled.

The Challenger engineers had dirty hands, for (under pressure) they
signed-off on the O rings.  This does NOT imply that they should
be punished, for their guilt is attenuated by their initial
resistance to management demands.  The managers, and the Morton
Thiokol SYSTEM of "please the managers and fuck the slide rule
boys"), is guilty.

Again, computer people need to be very careful about these fine-
sounding ethics conferences and codes.  Their very idealism can
be used against them for they are, by participating in discussions
of ethics, signing-off on a need to be ethical over and above
obeying the boss.  This means it is they who may be sacrificed
in a society that punishes individuals but allows, for example,
ad agencies to peddle Camel cigarettes to children.

>That means if I was in the military and ordered to kill civilians by a
>ranking officer that I would be harmless from consequence (we know how
>this was viewed in the Calley case).

That's amusing.  Rusty Calley was held responsible.  But because of
domestic political considerations and because he killed Third World
people, Rusty Calley was allowed to serve a reduced sentence in his
own home.  Your example makes it clear that vast systems will attenuate
or exagerrate individual culpability in order to presevre themselves.

>> Successful addiction recovery has long been based
>> on precisely the recognition of "powerlessness", and acceptance
>> that the addictive substance is making part of one's choices.
>
>That is one model of treatment that has been widely accepted, but do
>the emipirical data support the notion that it is successful...  That
>is a case-in-point that fails you because we are seeing some studies
>that show as low as tewnty-five to thirty percent ACTUAL recovery
>rates, while we see up to a 70% recidivism/substitution (of substance)
>rate...  I guess it would depend on your definition of success...

You neglect to point out that AA-based and other 12 Step programs'
LIMITED success is, even at the scale you quote, much, much higher
than ANY other treatment methodology, especially methods that treat
the patient as a free moral agent, appealing to his "rationality",
and methods that treat the patient with drugs (fighting fire with
fire.)
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