X-VMS-To: in%"ethics-l@polygraf.bitnet"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ethics-l
Date:         Sun, 5 Apr 1992 05:15:00 EST
From:         JIM DOWNEY <JDOWNEY@RCNVMS.RCN.MASS.EDU>
Subject:      Platonism rebuffed
Comments: To: ethics-l%polygraf.bitnet@MITVMA.MIT.EDU

Ed Nilges quoted and then said:

>>Without understanding the philosophy (ethics) we can not really understand
>>the social aspects of life...  If we want to know what is good, then we must
>>have some idea of what the good is...  Measuring it in the inverse manner,
>>that is to determine what we will do and then call it good, seems to me like
>>leading the horse after the cart...

> Ok, if this is the essence of your position, Jim, it seems precisely
> wrong and a most retrograde Platonism.

Wow!  A philosophical slap in the face... Challenge accepted, sir...
en garde :)   (Said in fun)

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...

Plato saw things in terms of absolutes... And I will accept your point
that anyone adopting such a view takes an extreme and becomes an
elitist...  However, like Aristotle, I seek the "golden mean" which is
neither extreme in the positive or the negative sense...  It is
different from Kant who seeks to apply a "mean" of morality to all
(and further exacerbates the whole thing by giving us examples of what
to do, but never really defining what it is we are doing, when we
should do it or why we are doing it)...  It seeks truth in what is in
close proximity to us and in what is happening to and around us...
Aristotle's ethics is a process-oriented exploration of truth, while
Plato demands a rigid adherence to truth in its forms, even though
only reflections of the absolutes are perceivable by mankind...

Another major difference is that Plato (and Augustine thereafter)
views the human race as incapable of "doing the right thing" while
Aristotle sees a positive side to the nature of a human bean :)

> Indeed, whereas you speak
> of "elitism" as a Bad Thing in earlier posts, you reveal yourself
> as an elitist of the first water.  I shall explain.

Hey, you slapped me once... :)

> To use Wittgenstein's telling (and uncharacteristically phenomenological)
> phrase, "the world as I found it" contains no "pure" ethics which
> we can then carry to the marketplace.  You cannot determine by
> Platonic navel-gazing what the ideally just man would look like;
> for one thing, the concept is sexist and classist, for the ideally
> just man becomes one with sufficient cultivated leisure to take
> time out from earning a living to form a theory of the Good.
> THIS is elitism.

I neither implied, stated nor posited that ideas that you credit to
me...   I made the statement that there are certain foundations upon
which we can build our views of what is and what is not ethical.  I
stated that there are natural laws, inherent rights and individual
choices/vision.  I stated that there is a way to arrive at truth,
justice, equity, through reasoning and that such reasoning has to be
firmly resting upon ethical foundations that are identifiable...  And
indeed, historically, "the world as I found it," as well as "man as he
exists naturally," are Aristotelian in origin and form the basis of
Nature Theories of Ethics, not Platonism...

Platonism involves a view that man is unable to perceive the real
world, that there are absolute FORMS that can be known only to our
intellect, and that the world we perceive reflects these absolutes in
an imperfect manner; it further involves a notion that humans do evil
because they lack a proper knowledge of the absolutes... which can
only be changed by a rigid application of reason and rules...

Aristotilean ethics are based on avoiding extremes, seeking the truth
through a developmental process, understanding the process and nature
of things, man and the universe, etc...

> Instead, "the [ethical] world as I found it" is a sequence of moral
> choices made in an inescapable cultural and historical matrix, and
> I claim that at this moment in time this matrix is singularly
> nonconducive to good choices.  It's very well to accuse me of
> discoursing to the fishes on the water, but if the water is full
> of fecal matter that is killing us as moral "fishes", the discoursing
> fish is less a fool than a prophet.

You can choose to reduce it to this "matrix" of culture and history,
but that is exactly what I have been arguing against... Subjectivism,
Relativism and Egoism are the foundations of such a matrix because
they do exactly what you describe in thelast sentence above... They
hold onto the elitist belief that the cultural and individual views
they form are ethical because of culture and history, power and
authority... Not because it is a natural and good choice...

Ethics based on a nature theory ultimate ends up producing the
"greatest good for the greatest number," but built upon a foundation of
preserving individual vision and choice, natural and inherent rights,
and a recognition of the laws of nature...  The "greatest number" is
arrived at through a natural process, not arbitration, exercise of
authority, exercise of power (including the power of the majority over
a minority) or other means...

If we are to come down to cases, we must examine not only the issue of
programmers, but the issue of employment practices, the issue of
capitalism, the issue of computer uses, issues involving technology in
general, etc...  But because we can only deal with so much at a time,
we are relegated to dealing with these things one at a time, allowing
some discussion of influencing factors... But we can not go too far
afield or else we lose our grounding... This is the issue I have been
trying to address most directly...  We must know our foundations to
examine such complex cases and circumstance, or we are practicing
ethics in the same manner as a sheet flaps in the wind... randomly and
without focus of purpose...

> 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...

>     1.  Men and women are only in part free moral agents

Says who?  How do you arrive at the statement?

>     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.?

> (1) seems straightforward.  Some of our choices are made in a clear
> moral light but many of them are made in a grey area.  Otherwise
> you cannot rank Mike Milken ABOVE John Gotti, for whereas some of the
> choices Milken made were predetermined and others were in a grey
> area, Gotti's choices were clearly wrong, and he knew it.

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?

Placing a moral decision in the realm of a dilemma doesn't make your
point that we are not fully free moral agents.

> (2) is true for somewhat the same reasons corporations are legal
> persons.  It's long been accepted in common law (up to Nuremburg,
> which changes the tradition to some degree) that as Shakespeare
> has a corporal say prior to the Battle of Agincourt, "for we know
> enough, if we know we are the king's subjects: if his cause be
> wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime out of us."
> This means that corporations, not their employees, should be
> found at fault for (for example) Bhopal-style disasters.  Beyond
> that, structures are a form of moral agent in that they can cause
> imperfect human moral agents to transgress, such that part of
> the blame belongs to the human and part, to the structure.

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 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...
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).

It doesn't wash here...  It is more cultural relativism...

> 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...

> I fear that the new field of computer ethics, in somewhat the same
> way that medical ethics is being captured by those who would dictate
> to others about "the sanctity of life" (as if a society which has
> one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the developed world
> gives a good god damn about the sanctity of life), is being captured
> by those who feel that they can devise an ethical code for
> technologists top down.  My suspicion grows that this activity
> (funded in part by large computer corporations) is an attempt to
> divert the coming flood of software-bug-based lawsuits to precisely
> those individuals idealistic or silly enough to sign off on ethical
> codes.

But this is why I am advocating a return to the fundamendals of ethics
over a "new field of computing ethics" or a "new way of medical
ethics."  If we create these studies (they are studies, not fields
or disciplines sui generis) anew, then we are negating almost 4000
years of learning and ideas...  None of the dilemmas presented in
computing are new to mankind...  The technology is new, the events are
new, the immediate circumstances are new, but the issues are the same
issues we have been dealing with since the dawning of our species...
We are addressing issues of relationships, privacy, crime,
professionalism/competence, power, authority, involuntary servitude,
etc...  We have just placed them inside a new context...

I just hope someone reads this :)
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