unspeakablehorror | Entries tagged with ethics

It's important to be able to clearly articulate the actions you think are good or evil, and not just the people. People do a lot of things: some good, some evil, some morally neutral. The actions that are ascribed to people are sometimes falsehoods or half-truths, to serve either the purposes of positive or negative propaganda towards them. Thus different people will have different conceptions of whether a given individual is good or evil, even outside of any disagreement in politics or philosophy (which is also quite common).

To talk of good and evil people is a flawed shorthand to refer to what does have a moral evaluation: action. In fact a person can never be good or evil, they can only choose good or evil, and choosing one at one time does not preclude choosing another at another time. One symptom of allowing this flawed shorthand to guide our judgements is to be unwilling to acknowlege when actions one considers good are done by people one considers evil, or actions one considers evil are done by people one considers good. Another is an undue worry over whether oneself is good or evil, rather than evaluating the different actions one chooses separately. Just as others cannot staticly be good or evil, neither can you.

It is natural to have both positive and negative emotions to other people, both those you know personally and those you know of only from the reports of others. But it is important to distinguish these feelings from your moral evaluation of others, because it is fine to like or dislike people for behavior that is morally inconsequential or even morally neutral, but it is a problem to ascribe great good or evil to such inconsequential or neutral behavior.

Basically, I think we do both ourselves and others a disservice when we ascribe good and evil as a function of being rather than of changing action, or when we allow ourself to conflate personal feelings with moral judgments.

It's critically important not to view listening to oppressed people as a passive activity where you simply accept what is said without understanding. You must make an effort to integrate what people say into a cohesive political framework in order to help. Listening requires no less thought than speaking, and sometimes considerably more. Additionally, when it comes to standing up for oppressed people, it's necessary to take a position based on more than what the first (or last) oppressed person to voice an opinion around you says. Because the people you happen to encounter are not going to reflect everyone's opinion in a given group. And because you need to have more than knowledge to take a stand; you also need to have principles.

If two people from the same group have conflicting opinions (practically inevitable) you have to decide who you are going to back up. You don't need to forever stick with that decision; sometimes new information or further thought can lead you to a different conclusion than your original one. But it's impossible to stand for anything if your opinion changes with the slightest disagreement to it, regardless of if the person disagreeing is part of the oppressed group you're trying to support.

There is no substitute for having firm convictions, just as there is no substitute for getting the perspectives of the oppressed. You need both to have a political position of any integrity.

I think a single person cannot devote adequate time and effort to every deserving cause. There are many causes that need attention that I am not giving. What I do find frustrating, especially as someone who sees liberation efforts as deeply intertwined, are people who resent attention given to causes outside their own focus.

No, that liberation effort does not have enough attention either. That liberation effort is also far from over. Do not believe you can forward the liberation of some by trampling over that of others. Those who will expend the effort to help those you will not should be appreciated, not denigrated.

To me it's important not to condition rights on whether whether or not someone is a 'good person'. I think there are, in fact, very many ways to do evil, and I don't think there's anyone, including myself, that could measure up to all of the ethical precepts I consider important. And I think an ethical code that doesn't have any application in the real world is pretty pointless.

I feel strongly that people don't need to meet some particular threshold of usefulness to deserve life and happiness. It's great when we can contribute to improving society, but we deserve protection even if we can't. The value of a life is inherent, not a function of how productive an individual can be.

I'm an ethical vegan, so that's the primary reason I avoid meat and other animal products. Doesn't mean I don't think there aren't other benefits to doing so, just that even if there weren't, I would still be vegan, because I'm vegan first and foremost for the animals. This also means, for example, that while I value getting good nutrition, I'm not going to prioritize making all my food 100% maximally healthy, especially if that comes at the detriment of my enjoyment of my food. And though veganism is quite important for environmentalism, even if it weren't, it would still be a moral imperative for me, just as the survival and happiness of humans is a moral imperative to me irrespective of whether that is maximally beneficial for the environment (though environmentalism is also inextricably tied to justice both for humans and other animals). To me, veganism is about avoiding killing and exploiting animals, and that's it.

But I will sacrifice some enjoyment if necessary to avoid killing and exploiting others. Because I value the lives and happiness of other animals. And it doesn't matter to me that I can't save all or even most of them, because ethics is not about fixing everything and knowing all the answers. It's about learning what you can, and doing the best you can.

And for the same reason I do what I can to avoid funding the exploitation of other humans, I do what I can to avoid funding the exploitation of other animals, even though I know that in both cases, it's impossible to avoid funding all exploitation or even murder just in order to survive, because the very core of society is built on systems of death and exploitation. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't do whatever I can to help dismantle those systems.

I think there's a very inconsistent view of what ethics is if it is at times viewed as concern for others and at other times viewed as a position of personal 'purity'. I don't think ethics should be reduced to a points system for the benefit of the individual--I think that's turning a supposed concern for others into a lifestyle intended for personal benefit. And while I don't think many people do this all of the time, I think many do it some of the time.

I think a person stops viewing themselves as human once they start seeing themselves in terms of 'purity'. That is not about helping others, but about trying to elevate oneself above them.

Though I often find it difficult to articulate, I think the model of ethics where individuals are 'good' or 'bad' people is fundamentally flawed. I think people spend a lot of time worrying that they're a 'bad' person, or 'evil'.

I don't think that matters, and I think the anguish about it is largely unproductive. I don't think feeling bad about something tends to lead to people trying to correct the flawed action. I think a lot of times, it either leads to people sinking into depression and inactivity or 'fixing' the issue by deciding that the decision wasn't bad after all. Either way, the actual problem is not addressed. I also think that a lot of the time, the things people feel most bad about are not the things that actually need to be addressed, but rather things that society unjustly persecutes them for, such as how they were born, their personal appearance, or what they choose to do with their own body. For all these reasons, I just don't think stewing in guilt and shame is very helpful.

At the same time, I think the choices we make matter a lot. Because I think particular decisions can be good or evil. But I think the most important tools for ethics are a willingness to analyze the effects of our actions, and a willingness to try do what we can to correct them, not guilt or shame, and certainly not the complacency of believing we are 'a good person'. It's not possible to 'be' a good or evil person because good and evil aren't states of being, they are a consequence of ever changing actions. Better then to speak about doing good or evil.

I just don't see how it's meaningful to say that all people, or even just most people, have the same value system. Even for very basic things like pain, death, the future existence of humanity, the basic sustainability of the Earth, and being kind to each other, people can have drastically different values relating to these things. And once you get any more specific than that, opinions are all over the place.

I also don't buy value systems converging due to survival needs, both because a.) different environments can create different survival needs and b.) people can and do act against their own values in situations where survival conflicts with those values.

This is one reason why my position is that there is no such thing as a foolproof method of persuasion, and specifically that having someone agree with you about the facts of the world doesn't necessarily entail that they will agree with you on ethical questions.

One thing I try to avoid is justifying all of my actions with respect to my ethics. That is, trying to come up with a reason for why a particular action I've done is not just understandable, but good. Thing is, I don't always act in pure accordance with my ethics. In fact, I often don't. This could be because I'm unaware of the breach of ethics, because I'm having a bad day, because I've prioritized practicality or selfishness over my ethics, or because it's just literally not possible in that particular situation (such as if there is a conflict between two of my ethical imperatives where satisfying one would require violating another in that context), to name a few possibilities.

I think an acceptance that I don't always live up to my own ethics is better than trying to mold my ethics into something that will justify my every act. I think the latter just ends up molding one's ethics more and more into a series of arguments that what is should be, and that's no way to actually improve the world. We should do our best to make our actions in line with our ethics, but I believe it's the wrong way around to do that by trying to change our ethics merely to justify our actions.

I'm reading an academic resource on moral relativism and wow this stuff is really complicated. From this I surmise that I am a descriptive relativist, which is to say I believe different people and groups hold different moral beliefs. No position on the many other types of relativism listed here as that is a lot of reading I have not done, but yeah, I think different people subscribe to different ethical systems, and that we don't, at the core, all share the same beliefs. This can be seen in such experiences as Someone is Wrong on the Internet.

While I do have a strong reaction to people's real life moral positions, and definitely do avoid certain people based on such, I also can't really avoid everyone who I strongly disagree with on certain important matters. Because that happens to be everyone I've ever met in my entire life. I think that would also be pretty pointless and wouldn't really help me accomplish anything based on those moral positions.

At the same time I don't think I can ever be the type of person who's blithely untroubled by other people disagreeing with things that I consider fundamental ethical precepts. I just think that's weird. Like is something even really part of someone's ethical code if it doesn't bother them if people disagree with it?

I don't think appeals to nature are a good moral justification for an action or behavior (which may not be any more 'natural' than the things such an appeal is meant to exclude.)

Disease is natural. Pain and suffering is natural. Furthermore, these aren't just incidental facets of nature, but deeply entrenched and seemingly inextricable ones. That doesn't make them good, and people seem to want to avoid them for themselves and anyone they care about.

I sure wish people would come up with better arguments for their beliefs than that something is natural. I mean, this kind of appeal is often used to justify, say, anti-vax ideology, and I've seen many people rightfully criticize such appeals in that context, but that doesn't stop this from being a type of uncritically accepted reasoning outside of that context. I've seen many people who clearly argue that natural is not the same as good in regards to beliefs like anti-vax ideology, but then will morally justify certain aspects of their own behavior or society on the idea that it's 'natural'.

One thing that I think is important to distinguish between is when people are lying, and when they are using legitimate facts in a way intended to construct a particular narrative and attempt to diminish the attention towards certain other facts. I think this is important to distinguish between, because if a person gets caught calling facts lies then that can do a lot to undercut their own argument. A fact does not become untrue simply because it is being employed in a disingenuous way. It's better to instead acknowledge the truth of the information while also putting it into a different or larger context.

A fact is just information that can be viewed from multiple different perspectives--by itself it's not a call to any particular action or ultimate validation of any particular worldview. The same fact can and is often used to support multiple different arguments, depending on the context in which it is used. Nevertheless, if a perspective cannot survive the existence or knowledge of an inconvenient fact, then it is the perspective that needs to be modified or discarded, not the fact. If a fact is being used in a way that one disagrees with, it's the narrative that is constructed around it that one should challenge, and not the fact itself.

How did it happen that so many people I've seen understand gray morality as 'it's desirable to be both good and evil' and not 'it's desirable to show how our choices are often not simplistically good or evil and how portraying them as such can itself feed into great evil'?

I think one dynamic that contributes to a lot of cruelty is when one primarily expects responsibility from others, but understanding and forgiveness for themselves. The inverse of this attitude is, of course, also deeply harmful--if we are always expected to be the responsible one forgiving and understanding others. What is needed is fair, reasonable, and consistent expectations in this regard.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40592-020-00116-y?error=cookies_not_supported&code=84dddb62-8052-48b3-854e-11a86fbc84a4

I advise reading the tags to decide if you want to engage with the contents below the cut or the article itself. In the contents below, I discuss the implications of the contents of the linked article.

( discussion of experimental ethics... )

Science is a very important tool for assessing the world around us, and a very important area of philosophy, but I feel like a lot of times people forget that it is a tool for a very specific purpose, with very specific limits.

Science is a form of observation. Its purpose is to help illuminate us about what is. This is a very important purpose. But it is not the only thing we as humans seek to know or understand. We also seek to decide what should be, and science cannot tell us that. It can help guide us in determining actions we might take to achieve a particular goal, but it cannot tell us if that goal is worth achieving.

The institutions of science are also not synonymous with the process that is science. Science at its core requires a dedication to observation, to replication, and to replicability. For a wide variety of reasons, the institutions and individuals that perform science do not always act in line with these ideals. This does not mean we should ignore these institutions and individuals, but we should try to be aware of their limitations and evaluate their work according to the principles of science, not the fame or prestige associated with their name.

Science simply isn't an ethical framework. There are plenty of philosophical frameworks which encompass or even focus on the question of ethics. And we need to employ these other frameworks to have meaningful discussions about politics and ethics.

Morality* is one of those things that I think simply can't ever be entirely objective, because it's fundamentally about people's goals. It's one thing to discover what is, another to decide what should be. If one person wants something fundamentally different from another person, no one can 'prove' which one wants the 'right' outcome. Which is not to say that this precludes any useful discussion of morality, because another aspect of such things is that most people value more than one thing, and people often agree on outcomes but disagree on the means to achieve those outcomes. Appealing to other common goals or discussing data for viewpoints can sometimes be worthwhile. But this does mean that there simply isn't always even a theoretical way to reconcile all disagreements of morality.

*Morality used here to refer simply to what people see as desirable outcomes. I clarify this since people may associate strong connotations with this word, and more formal philosophies may ascribe different definitions to it.

One of those things that really gets me is when people go out of their way to, like, highlight one specific ship as being morally wrong rather than saying 'shipping enemies to lovers is immoral' or something like that. Like, I obviously don't agree with the latter example, but I can respect a statement like that for its consistency at least. And I think it's fine if people are just like 'I can't stand this ship because of the associations I have with it' but they're not categorically saying that if someone likes that pairing then they *must* advocate some horrifying real-life thing or other. Like I personally hate the word 'squick' and could never use it to describe my dislike of certain things because it simply doesn't carry the right emotional tone for me lol. But while there are a lot of fictional things I find deeply unpleasant, I don't assume that the intensity of my emotional reaction to something can tell me if that thing is immoral or not. I also don't assume that I have to get over disliking things that I don't think are immoral, because people are allowed to dislike things without having to justify that dislike to others. I just think it's useful to be able to separate 'it's categorically immoral to like this' and 'I'm instating a boundary that I don't want people to bring this up with me' and to just...really firmly separate those two concepts.

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Entries tagged with ethics

Evaluating Ethics

Listening With Conviction

Activism Cannot Be a Zero-Sum Game

Ethics Should Not Be Contengent on Ethical Behavior

Inherent Value

Ethical Veganism

Ethics Isn't a Personal Points System

Being Good or Evil Isn't Possible

Dissimilar Ethics

Actions and Ethics

The Many Varieties of Relativism

Ethics as A Social Creature

Nature is not a Guide to Morality

Challenging Lies vs Challenging Truths

Gray Morality

Expectations

Human cerebral organoids and consciousness: a double-edged sword

Science and Ethics

Thoughts on Morality

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