Another ethical question

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by David Floyd
I'm sorry, but morality and free markets have EVERYTHING in common. Free markets emphasize the right to do what you will with your own property, without state interference (or, obviously, the interference of others).

Is competition interference? Not to mention you have a very strange definition of free market.

Originally posted by David Floyd
Private property and the respect for property has everything to do with morality.

Private property exists only if the society says so. Nothing intrinsic about it.

[Atahualpa]

Originally posted by David Floyd
It's not a false choice at all. By saying that the only moral course of action is to sell your property, at a certain set price (or free), to another party, you are implying that that party has a moral claim to your property, at least to some extent.

Put another way, if you are saying that the only moral course of action was for the Poles to give food to the Jews, either for free or some low price, then you are saying that the the individual Poles did not retain sole moral ownership of their property, with the moral ability to do with it as they pleased. I can't accept that premise.

It is, because you are ignoring a vast set of other possibilities, by asking if it's better to not help at all or profit from it? You'd have to include the other options as well such as "just cover your expenses" or "help for free". I guess that's why shawn said it's a false choice.

And I think it's not moral to profit, because the people face a Hobson's choice, take your overpriced food or die. Likewise for example you could accept sex as payment from them. I think however that you can agree that this is not moral. They are forced into having sex with you to survive, they are forced into paying you all they have to survive. It's a Hobson's choice. No, I think you are not acting morally if you engage in profiteering.

[Mr. Harley]

DF - as the other posters already made the point, you are again parsing a series of choices into simple black and white,

if you are saying that the only moral course of action was for the Poles to give food to the Jews, either for free or some low price, then you are saying that the the individual Poles did not retain sole moral ownership of their property, with the moral ability to do with it as they pleased. I can't accept that premise.

In fact giving them food indeed may be stupid, and counterproductive, and is the legitimate point made against many liberal paradigms. I in fact alluded to that, mentioning covering expenses. If you do not charge enough to return with more food, you actually are doing less good. So you charge enough so you can continue selling to them at a fair price. You need to charge enough so you can continue to feed your family (under the premise that obtaining food from the black market takes up all your time), and you need to charge enough to pay the appropriate bribes, or accumulate enough to bribe your way out if you are caught. Sadly, this will not make the food cheap. But before you say - "See, they were not gouging" - the fact they made substantial profits and became wealthy off of this trade belies that statement.

Then you throw in the common confusor used by those who attempt to equate capitalism and free markets with morality. "...retain sole moral ownership." Since you are talking morality, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and God what is God's". "Moral ownership" is not the issue. You have, and continue to retain, ownership of your property. The desire to engage in moral actions may indeed limit your actions. You cannot profiteer (I believe I've described in the first paragraph a sufficient number of criteria that it could be defined fairly clearly) and interestly enough, you cannot take no action, as in that case you would be ignoring evil being done.

To take you example, if you see someone being held at gunpoint in an alley, you have a moral responsibility to inform the authorities immdediately. Period, end of story. If you have a firearm, and are confident in your ability and the situation itself is not highly dangerous, i.e. he is facing you, etc. then you do have a responsibility to intervene. As with my very first example, the first time I posted it, I mentioned retaining enough money to pay any bribes, if necessary. While the context may have changed, and the actions you take in this case, the moral imperative is to not ignore evil, and to walk away saying it's not my problem is a version of that (ignoring evil).

You are also confusing "Feedom" with "Morality".

I'm sorry, but morality and free markets have EVERYTHING in common. Free markets emphasize the right to do what you will with your own property, without state interference (or, obviously, the interference of others). Private property and the respect for property has everything to do with morality.

That is freedom. Replace morality with freedom, and you have a sentence that makes sense. Morality has to do with "right" and "wrong". What are you basing that on? Some might cliam to base it on their own feeling. Bull sh*t. That is a mental circle jerk. If you are attempting to find a universal, self-consistent truth, then you are dealing with ethics. The Enlightenment, Taoism, Buddhism, even post-Modernism all attempt to deal with that.

Morality on the other hand, as it is used in the majority of cases (Please note you can split hairs with me on this - the current USA tendency of linguistic sloppiness, and using Morality and Ethics interchangably weakens the language and lends itself to sloppy thinking), concerns religious thought. Muslims and Christians both may talk about moral behavior, and have some very different interpretatons. That is why I mention the Judeochristian model, to make it explicit and to simplify the argument. I think you will find both Islam and Hiduism would also agree that profiteering in this case would be wrong, so this may indeed by a "universal truth".

To reiterate from the point I made several posts ago. There are no "cut and dried" answers that absolve one of the responsibilty to think, evaluate, and above all to be self-honest. Using your own rebuttal of my AIDS example.

How so? First of all, in order to find a solution to the AIDS epidemic, people who live in the Third World simply need to stop having promiscuous sex with multiple partners.

A cheap shot, and using a straw man, as well as ignorance (and laziness, a simple Google search would have shown you that it is not that simple), as well as a misapplication of statistics.

Many women in these third world countries get it from a spouse/partner who engages in high risk sex that they have no control over. In fact the women may indeed have no right to refuse this man sex, and in fact this man may have ownership of all the fruits of her labor, making it practically impossible for her to terminate the relationship. The child born with AIDS out of this relationship, if you wish to call it that, is even more innocent.

No, these women and children do not gain a right to the AIDS drugs.

Secondly, those who have AIDS do not inherently, by virtue of their illness, gain a right to AIDS medicine they can neither produce nor afford. Morality simply states that they have a right to procure that medicine through moral means - either by developing it themselves, trading for it, receiving it as a gift, or buying it outright. They don't have an automatic claim to it, though, and any assertion to the contrary implies that private property is unimportant from a moral perspective. That's a premise I do not accept

You are talking rights (read freedom), which is also what your strawman, "...an automatic claim to it (the medicines)." Again, you are talking freedom. Morality says that indeed one should help these people, and as I mentioned the Drug Companies have done exactly that, and that the attempts in Brazil and India to build up their own drug industries while cloaking themselves in morality is obscene.

You have had many Moral Societies without modern property rights. Many small village societies had a communal system of property that treated everyday individuals with more respect and freedom than the groups that conquered them. Go look up the recent SCOTUS decison on their site - City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N. Y. Justice Ginsberg mentions the Doctrine of Conquest, a nice little ignored issue of Property Rights that says once I militarily conquer you, I get your property rights. Since large tracts of the USA are based on this, I find it interesting that you cloak your Property Rights argument with Morality. It has nothing to do with, though again I will grant that for both freedom, and the functioning of ouir modern capitalist society, it works very well. But don't cloak yourself in morality until you know more of the history of property rights, and its abuses, in our country and in all the regions the Brits conquered. Moral it was not.

[David Floyd]

Placeholder bump.

I'll be back tonight, unless I'm too drunk

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Commy
Numbers is important in these situations, true, but there is another factor to consider...potential...

Let's say I have two groups of people....

Group A is one American, one British, one Canadian, and one Japanese...

Group B is 40 farmers from Asia, all poor, all without any quality education...

If one group must die, I would kill the 40 Asians, and save the 4 other people...

Why? Because 4 (most likely) educated people can contribute to the world much more than 40 poor farmers that will probably only live another 30 years...

The group of 4 has less numbers, but more potential...they can contribute more to humanity's survival, and therefore they deserve the right to survive...

While I would have no compunction in choosing human life over animal life, you're talking about human life. There's potential in each and every human, but you're basing it off of circumstances, rather than innate potential. If those four are: Tom Cruise (US), Hugh Grant (UK), Anvil Lavigne (CAN), and Ayu Hamasaki (JP), while you might have the next Chandrasekhar in the group of 40 Asians, I find it heinous that you'd pick the first four because they had the divine luck of being born in some place not first-world.

That's not potential you're basing it on, it's luck. It's randomness. It's no more exact than how God seems to be working.

It's also hard not to raise a few eyebrows at it, since you're framing the choice in context of nationalities and ethnicities: you're making a clear division of "Superior" peoples, those who have had opportunities to grow and possibly squander them, people in four first world countries, and then contrasting them to "Inferior" peoples, all Asian.

It would have been far less offensive if you hadn't incorporated nations or specific peoples into it.

[Q Classic]

Originally posted by Berzerker
Let me make this simple ethical question a bit more challenging.

Lets say the person you have to kill is an elderly family member or friend of the family who is begging you to kill them to save the wife and kids and yourself.

This I've never understood. If they're asking for you to do that, and they're capable of ending their life, why not give them the gun, them the tool?

I wouldn't be able to raise a hand against my relatives or family friends, even if it meant saving other family members. It's not a true choice. But if they're willing to sacrifice themselves by their own hand and their own will--then I wouldn't and couldn't stop them, either.