From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: No Liberty Without Ethics
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 11:22:18 GMT


In article <TIM.93Jan23081318@ear-ache.mit.edu>
tim@ear-ache.mit.edu (Tim Wilson) writes:

>I'm no moral philosopher: I'm no philosopher, and some would
>argue I'm not moral.  :-) But, that aside...

Everyone is a moral philosopher, it comes with the turf if
you're human.  Refusing to think about it doesn't get us off
the hook, either, it just means we stand for a different
ethics.  I think it's a very bad ethics, but I'm willing
to debate the point.

>It continues to be the rage among the self-appointed
>"conservative" protectors of morality to denigrate
>"situation ethics." People who ought to know better, like
>Bill Bennett and John Silber, as they toady up to the right
>wing, attribute their perceived decline of Western society
>to "situation ethics." 

They're apologizing for the mess and urging that it continue
forever, that's all.  They develop any serviceable
abstraction they think they need to justify the status quo.
They're anti-human.  More bad ethics.

>And while I can understand a longing
>for absolutes, I don't think you're going to find them in a
>world of five billion folk.  

Not to mention a world containing hundreds of cultures vying
for vanishing resources in the greatest extinction event the
planet has seen since the last major heavenly object
collided with the Earth, which may even have been before
life arose here.

>But on the other hand, I don't
>know if you can develop a utilitartian kind of measure to
>determine what does the greatest good for the greatest
>number.

Well, there's no time like the present to start working on
it, is there?

>Maybe what's needed is something that works well most of the
>time.  Neither absolutely nor optimally motivated, a set of
>guidelines that work well enough fairly often would probably
>do.  While that wouldn't necessarily be "situation ethics" as
>they're often decried, it would be a long way from the "this
>is right, period" attitude the absolutists seek.

Something for everybody seems called for.  There are indeed
a few things that occur in every culture, the basic needs of
living beings: food, shelter, protection from the elements
and natural dangers.  Food, housing, and physical security:
*all* people want those three things, so we might call them
absolute goods, things that are right, period.

People who are sick, crazy, living with disabilities of
several dozen kinds, too young, too old, injured, etc.,
they want to live too.  Another good would be helping them.

Provide just that little bit and right away the situation
will get a lot worse: too many survivors, gotta do something
about that.  There being already at least 10 and maybe 100
times too many humans, something has to be done about
population control.

See Dick and Jane.  See their world go to hell in a hurry.
See us cope with an impossible situation.  See Nature take
care of it -- there's at least one truth: it will be taken
care of, one way or another.

>I think ethics will be functional, and that all of us will
>be better served when we drop the pretense that there's one
>set of rules that are applicable in all situations.

Quite right.  There's only one rule: live or die.  It
applies to all situations.  What people have a hard time
with is the inescapable and very hard truth: wanting to live
yourself means you *want* others to die.  The debate is
among the former, those who want to live, deciding who is to
die if not themselves.  That decision being too painful to
make personally, we seek some abstraction to take the
responsibility off our shoulders.  The most common such
abstraction is probably religion.  Another is liberty.
Did you think this would be easy?

-- 
[Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin]
[Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson]
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