Morality As Sci Fi

The Needs of the Few Outweigh the Needs of the Many

Jared Kushner 'likely' paid little or no income taxes for years: NYTimes
David Shepardson
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-kushner/jared-kushner-likely-paid-little-or-no-income-taxes-for-years-nytimes-idUSKCN1MN0TK

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, likely paid little or no federal income taxes between 2009 and 2016, the New York Times reported on Saturday, citing confidential financial documents...

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The Brand New Prometheus

Frontispiece from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Two good articles on gene editing. 

Make up your own mind. I do not believe in doing too much opinionating: too much like work.

The Conversation

The future of genetic enhancement is not in the West
https://theconversation.com/the-future-of-genetic-enhancement-is-not-in-the-west-63246


Forget about designer babies – gene editing won’t work on complex traits like intelligence
https://theconversation.com/forget-about-designer-babies-gene-editing-wont-work-on-complex-traits-like-intelligence-51557


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The Ticking-Bomb Man Cometh

 Black Sunday

I have decided to rewrite the moral dilemma of the Ticking Time-Bomb Problem. This was used - and probably still is being used - to debate the morality of using torture to persuade a terrorist who has planted a bomb ticking away a couple of hours in a crowded venue to tell us where the infernal device is.

We have touched on the goofiness of moral simulation in The Trolley Man Cometh   [http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-trolley-problem.html ]  already and I am going to subject everyone to it again.

Alan Dershowitz - whom we have all recently seen in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story - argued for torture. I copy part of a review of his book:

TORTURING THE TICKING BOMB TERRORIST: AN ANALYSIS OF JUDICIALLY SANCTIONED TORTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF TERRORISM
Chanterelle Sung

WHY TERRORISM WORKS: UNDERSTANDING THE THREAT, RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE. By Alan Dershowitz. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2002. Pp. 260.

Abstract: Alan Dershowitz’s book examines recent acts of global terrorism and analyzes the reasons why terrorism is successful. In an effort to reduce the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks, Dershowitz discusses different proposals that would deter terrorism while striking a balance between security and liberty. One of Dershowitz’s most controversial proposals calls for the use of judicially sanctioned torture to force a terrorist suspect to reveal information that would prevent an imminent terrorist attack. This Book Review explores the justifications for judicially sanctioned torture and ultimately argues that such a proposal would be morally and legally prohibited.

Introduction

In the wake of September 11, 2001, FBI agents suggested that they might resort to torture to compel terrorist suspects to reveal information necessary to prevent a recurrence.1 A senior FBI aide stated, “it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we won’t have a choice, and we are probably getting there.”2

While many countries have condemned torture, the reemergence of this issue in public debate reflects the extent to which terrorism currently threatens national security.3 In his timely book, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge, Alan Dershowitz analyzes the reasons why terrorism has succeeded thus far and offers proposals to deter terrorism while striking the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties.4 Dershowitz confronts and raises many difficult moral and legal questions regarding the extent to which our democratic society can effectively deter terrorism while continuing to uphold fundamental values of liberty and privacy.5 He argues that it is possible to deter terrorism on both a macro level, by confronting different types of terrorism, and on a micro level, through controlling it on a smaller scale.6

Dershowitz begins with the premise that some terrorists are rational actors who crave attention to their cause.7 Policies that address the root causes of terrorists’ behavior, therefore, do not deter them but merely reward them with the attention that they crave.8 Thus, in order to deter terrorism and preserve national security, society must punish terrorists through collective accountability and incapacitation.9 To this end, Dershowitz offers various proposals to increase our sense of security without eroding the liberty that is central to a democratic society.10 ...

 (emphasis mine)

First, even economists are admitting that markets are not really based on the behavior of "rational" actors, and the so-called rational actor is a construct we use to make things easy to analyze, sort of like reducing turbulent water flow to linear equations.
To begin with this premise... well, he should have stopped, dropped, shut 'em down, and closed up shop! Right there!

Second, as pointed out in The Trolley Man Cometh,  and as evidenced by Mr. Dershowitz's use of a construct called "rational actor", we may change the scenario any way we desire. The sky is - literally! - the limit.

So all that remains to be done to refute the Ticking Time-Bomb Problem is to rewrite the script!
In the world of imaginary morals, NOTHING is forbidden. Ask the Marquis de Sade, ask the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, ask Mr. 50 Shades Grey.

In the alt-script of The Ticking Bomb, the terrorist has nano-bots within his blood stream that monitor the state of the organism (his body) and if stress applied to the body surpasses a certain level, the ticking bomb goes off ahead of schedule.

Or, the terrorist has hired a group of trained stochastic runners (or "couriers" as Mr. Trump prefers) to move the ticking bomb around to random crowded venues every 20 minutes or so. This group will -like - pose as a flash mob singing Mozart or some other innocuous thing that NO rational actor would think of linking to terrorism........

Morality is action.
Good actions are learned...
So, how are we educating the youth?

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The Trolley Man Cometh

Have been talking about the Trolley Problem. I find it very much like the Ticking-Bomb Problem.
In the Ticking-Bomb Problem, we had a moral situation where many people - I think including Alan Dershovitz - argued that we should be morally justified to use torture to elicit the exact location of the ticking bomb from the terrorist before the bomb goes off, killing quite a few people.
The whole thing is choreographed like Die Hard, but a lot of people take it seriously as a moral argument.

The Trolley Problem is similar to me in that it is a goofy language and imagination game of hypotheticals.

First, let us read about the Trolley Problem.

The Huffington Post
Behind the Absurd Popularity of Trolley Problem Memes
06/01/2016 07:15 pm ET | Updated Jul 05, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linch-zhang/behind-the-absurd-popular_b_10247650.html

The internet is no stranger to sudden bursts of popularity. From the hundreds of millions of views of Rebecca Black’s Friday to the million of fans of the science-based stick figure cartoon XKCD, we’re quite used to seeing sudden inexplicable jumps in popularity. Nonetheless, it it is still quite surprising to see the explosive growth of Trolley Problem Memes, a page built around variations of a simple ethical thought experiment, little known outside the corridors of academic philosophy.

The basic set-up: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. What do you do?

Sounds pretty simple, right? But what if you add a twist? What if, instead of pressing a lever, you had to push a fat man down a bridge in the hopes of stopping a trolley? What if the situation is probabilistic instead of deterministic? What if you could combine questions of epistemology or metaphysics to a seemingly straightforward question of ethics? What if you could reference philosophy, pop culture and history, and add a dash of weirdly macabre humor?

This is the premise of trolley problem memes. You’d think it’d get old really quickly, yet at almost 2 months of age and over 40,000 followers on Facebook, TPM is very much alive and kicking.

It’s difficult to overstate just how remarkable this is. As of May 31st, Trolley Problem Memes has 44,020 followers (less than 2 months after its creation). The great utilitarian John Stuart Mill has a mere 25,000 followers, while Peter Singer, arguably the single most famous ethicist today, has just 31,000 likes on Facebook. The Facebook group Utilitarianism has just over 1,000 members, while the philosophically-inclined do-gooder group “Effective Altruism“ has about 10,000. Nihilist Memes currently has more followers (763,000 likes), but nihilism has always been more popular among the jaded angsty teen crowd. To put it bluntly, the popularity of Trolley Problem Memes is simply inexplicable.

To attempt to explain the inexplicable, I had a Skype interview with Aljoša Toplak and Haris Sehic, the two young Slovenian creators of Trolley Problem Memes: ....

and so on.

I myself envisage a situation in which I push old Fatty off the bridge on day 1. However, the police do not apprehend the terrorist who tied the blokes to the trolley tracks. Thus, on day 2 there are five more of the best citizens secured to the rails.
I push Fatty #2 off the bridge.
This continues until the fifth day dawns. The police have let the terrorist slip through their fingers, there are five people on the tracks, I am on the bridge above and - inexplicably - a number of chubby guys and dolls are sauntering by, even though my face must be well-known from the evening news.

So do I kill a fifth fat person? If I do I would negate the numerical advantage, morality-wise, of killing a fewer number of people. Now if I push, the fatalities would equal 5, the same they would have equalled on day 1 had I not pushed Mr. Arbuckle off the bridge.

And I have every right to re-write the scenario. It's all imagination anyway while we are arguing about it. If there really were a trolley bearing down on a mournful pentad, would we be arguing the morality of the case?


There is a lot of this moronic simulation of reality that goes on.
I mean, anything and everything goes in these scenarios of moral, politics, and religion, whereas in reality you would be lucky to have a couple of strands of a frayed safety line to pull you out of harm's way. In real life, the Personal Flotation Devices are always stuffed away up towards the bows of the boat next to the biffy - desperately in need of flushing! - and the fire extinguishers are nowhere to be found.

How would I handle the Trolley Problem? I would react as I have been trained to do throughout my entire life history.

That's why if we draw the Trolley Problem as it would probably really, really happen as in the lower panel of the drawing below:

and I would wish that the guy at the switch had a religious upbringing, possibly had been a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout, served as a deacon at his church,  and whose most vile curse was "Jiminy crickets!"

Upbringing and Education are EVERYTHING when crunch time cometh.

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The Marquis de Sade Revisited

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

The drawing of the Marquis de Sade shows the intensity of madness, not intelligence. He rubs his hand and it stands out like a hand of glory, does it not? A hand of glory that persists in our imaginations, magick, magick limb!

I was reading The Maverick Philosopher:
Callicles as Precursor of De Sade
http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2016/03/callicles-as-precursor-of-de-sade.html

At Gorgias 492, tr. Helmbold, the divine Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Callicles:

A man who is going to live a full life must allow his desires to
become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his
passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them
through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting
desire as it comes into his heart.

[. . .]

The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this:
luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are
really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of
fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of
stuff and nonsense!

Now let us consider what the decidedly undivine Marquis de Sade has Mme. Delbene say in Julliette or Vice Amply Rewarded:

. . . I am going to dismiss this equally absurd and childish obligation which enjoins us not to do unto others that which unto us we would not have done. It is the precise contrary Nature recommends, since Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself, at the expense of no matter whom...

To me, de Sade is the story of the wastrel French aristocracy before the Revolution, not philosophy. Only the wealthy would have the time and money to expend in endless debauchery, and only the perversely wealthy would seek to maintain a social inequality which allowed them to imprison the majority of the population in powerless squalor - the better position from which to abuse them.

The story repeats.

The film Spotlight which retold the Boston Globe's exposure of the Bishop of Boston's cover-up of abuse was all about predatory power and position, was it not? And the rising gap between the rich and the not-rich will lead us into a future of even newer perversions concocted by our new technologies and philosophies, will it not?

The post ends:

The natural man, in the grip of his lusts, is a natural sophist: what can be done is eo ipso permissible to do. Reason in a philosopher without God easily becomes unhinged.

And we have been here recently. Eo Ipso - by that very fact - that is, by the very fact that something may be done implies necessarily that it is permissible to do that something. Not that it should be done, but it may be done without crime. (I am not clear on the concept "natural man", but I believe it is a topic much delved into by those heavy with the grey-matter.)

The very fact that one may abuse or rape, that one may wage wars based on funky ideologies, that one may cut down rain forests or pollute the waterways for profit... the fact that these things are possible have made them become legitimate pursuits in our present society over the past century or longer.

We are the heedless aristocrats.
It reminds me of the film The Aristocrats: an insane repetition of scatology......

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Moral Absolutes In Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

I received a comment from Anonymous on an old post about Mel Gibson's great film, Apocalypto:

Well, I think Durant's quote has moral sense as well. A society that loses its moral bearings loses its direction. If right and wrong become relative to personal interpretation, then there can be no unifying principle to hold the civilization together. It is a "house divided against itself."  There is no truth or fairness in trade, respecting the elders, or loving ones neighbor. Every man is a law unto himself. on Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Will Durant

So I had to actually stop and think.
First, it immediately brings to mind ancient writings from Ancient Egypt's Time of Troubles, which I think preceded the Middle Kingdom after the breakdown of the old Kingdom. When I start thinking about something, I usually start around Ancient Egypt, although sometimes I start back in the ancient Sahara desert at a time when there were numerous paleo-lakes and greenery where there now is only sand. I definitely do not go back to the Big Bang.

The business about each man being a law unto himself brings to mind gun laws and stand-your-ground laws, indicating that the moral breakdown of any society - not just ours - may actually be surprisingly enough a normative breakdown! That is, moral failure may be promulgated by a society's laws.
The fact that these laws probably were designed to prevent social breakdown adds a layer of irony to the murky business.

Interesting.

However, I mentioned that I perceived the problem in Apocalypto to be not a lose of moral bearings, but a radical adoption of pernicious norms: the tribe taking slaves for sacrifice has committed itself to a vile and baneful course of action with a unanimity of evil darkness that is portrayed in overwhelming color and detail!

Nobody lives without moral bearings.
What is important is the Story of Morals that we have learned since childhood: is it supportive, is it nurturing, does it inculcate virtue and not moral weakness and indulgence?
And what of the Training in Morals? Do we all "walk the walk" and not merely "talk the talk"?

And most importantly, can we distinguish between Good and Evil?
Even in an Age of Political Correctness, the religious rituals of the Central American tribes as portrayed in the film Apocalypto must deserve the name of perniciously vile and evil practices, not merely because of the suffering and death, but because of the extra-human and inhuman scale at which they take place, a scale which seeks to maximize the negative emotional powers available in the awe inspired by naked evil!

If there were no God, then everything would not be allowed!
If there were no God, we would have the added burden of being virtuous as well as proofing our own moral code.
So much of the pain of the 20th and 21st century has been due to the illogical conclusion that mankind is not innately moral, and this is due to the fact that the quest for Good is so difficult and time-consuming that we choose not to do it.
Rather, we accept our morals ready-made from someone else. That someone else could be anyone, even Jim Jones of Jonestown.

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Oath Breakers

We Don't Need No Oaths!

After Scalia’s Death, Don’t Let GOP Senators Break Their Sacred Oath
Jay MichaelsonMarch 3, 2016
http://forward.com/opinion/334848/after-scalias-death-dont-let-gop-senators-break-their-sacred-oath/

Dozens of Republican senators, many professing religious piety, have stated that they will not discharge their duty set forth in the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads, in part, “The president shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint… Judges of the Supreme Court.”

Have they considered the religious consequences of their inaction?

When United States senators take office, they say this oath: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.” ...

Will God or Politics win this moral issue?
I have already placed my bet.

 Senator Grassley, Another Breaker of Oaths

"Them oaths of office are subject to Sun-Set laws; they don't last ferever."

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Talk Is Usually Cheap

 Going Up or Coming Down?

Donald Trump wants to make America great once more.
His supporters respond to that message, and they fervently wish to make America great once more. The devil-in-the-detail is how does one go about doing such a thing as "making so-and-so great once more"?

How do we go about making anything take on a moral quality? How do we re-claim a virtue or a good quality?

In the past few weeks, I have read that our society needs to learn humility again. In the aftermath of certain Supreme Court decisions, I have read that certain segments of the population may need to withdraw into a "Benedictine" virtual cloister to be able to live in a world of same-sex marriage and ObamaCare.
There was also some nonsense about universal service in various capacities on the theory that The Selective Service System of World War II was a paradigm for the teaching and learning of the virtue of loving one's country and one's society; a bit of nonsense that omitted the role of unspeakable evil's ability to call forth an opposition of self-denying feats of strength from us, the common men of the world.

I do not criticize a call to virtue, but I do think that such appeals fail to realize that being virtuous is a long-term experience that requires a lot of time and effort.

Furthermore, if our country is no longer "great" or lacks some other old-timey virtue it once had,  we should ask ourselves how it came about that those wonderful qualities were lost or lapsed. Can such virtues, once in abeyance, be switched on again within seconds? Are we ourselves in any way responsible for the diminution of virtue, or was it all due to other people who are lazy in a moral way?
And no matter how intensely we want something, if that "something" is Virtue, it takes years of commitment on our part.
Remember the old saying "Whatever does not kill us makes us stronger"?

That pretty much can sum up how Virtue is learned: we face the worst, and we emerge intact, yet we are changed.

Mr. Trump has recommended fighting ISIS by bombing the heck out of Iraq's oil fields.

I think that interesting suggestion makes it clear that Mr. Trump believes that Greatness is a virtue that,
(1) someone else caused to lapse, and
(2) is somehow still floating around in our souls fervent with desire, and
(3) can be decisively re-invigorating by quick actions, and
(4) the ends justify the means...

for since "bombing the heck out of so-and-so" is not in itself a virtuous act, it is the fact that WE bomb the heck out of so-and-so that is the Virtuous Act.

If Trump is elected, I will go "short" on this place.

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Let Them Eat Cake!

 House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky.

Or,as I believe is more historically correct, let them eat brioche is closer to what Marie Antoinette actually spoke before the deluge" "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche."

http://news.yahoo.com/policy-snags-hold-1-1-trillion-spending-bill-080608675--finance.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — Time running short, Republicans and Democrats agreed Tuesday on a $1.1 trillion spending bill to avoid a government shutdown and delay a politically-charged struggle over President Barack Obama's new immigration policy until the new year.
In an unexpected move, lawmakers also agreed on legislation expected to be incorporated into the spending measure that will permit a reduction in benefits for current retirees at economically distressed multiemployer pension plans. Supporters said it was part of an effort to prevent a slow-motion collapse of a system that provides retirement income to millions, but critics objected vehemently.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House to the bill...

These pensions have been sending out alarms for over 20 years.

This is how the present generation of politicians handles these problems: break the promises, break the retirees backs, break any vestige of honesty and honor.

We are living in times where our "rulers" are aggressively stupid and craven. Our leaders cannot analyze and fix; they can only make unreal promises, and then make us all walk a short plank.
After a generation of death and despair, the sun will come up again, and history will forget us.


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Asymmetrical Villainy 2

Continuing the discussion in the post Asymmetrical Villainy
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2014/02/asymmetrical-villainy.html

"Edward Snowden, hero or villain?"

I observe the recent article in The Daily Beast (April 4, 2014):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/04/state-department-secret-letter-warned-don-t-release-cia-torture-report.html

In April of last year, Vice President Joe Biden called for a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention programs to be declassified. More than two months later, The Daily Beast has learned, the State Department told Congress in a classified letter that declassifying the report could endanger American lives abroad and harm relations with foreign countries.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 11-3 to recommend declassifying the summary and conclusion of the report on Bush-era CIA detention and interrogation programs, prepared by their Democratic staff. Their investigation set off a public battle between the CIA and the Committee’s Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, who has accused the CIA of spying on the Committee’s investigation. The CIA will now be involved in reviewing and redacting any portions of the report that will be made public.

Two Republican senators who voted against declassification, Marco Rubio and James Risch, issued a statement after the vote revealing they had been warned by the State Department that declassification was not only an intelligence risk but also a threat to U.S. conduct of foreign policy.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee today voted to send a one-sided, partisan report to the CIA and White House for declassification despite warnings from the State Department and our allies indicating that declassification of this report could endanger the lives of American diplomats and citizens overseas and jeopardize U.S. relations with other countries. Therefore, we could not support declassification of this product at this time,” they said...

Back in February, when we argued over Snowden's mythic status, hero or villain, the one who posed the question and who was the sole person who stated "villain" had various arguments:

These came down to a basic proposition that Mr. Snowden's dumped vast amounts of data to the media, and this data had the potential to hurt people...

So that is where we are. We hurt people; admitting we hurt people, hurts people. Thus we cannot admit it, we cannot perform the language act, for we have logic and persuasion to cajole us from doing that ghastly apologia...

But try and stop us from the physical act of torture!
Torture we can do, and with a will!

Everything we do can hurt someone. We do not let the lethal nature of action prohibit us from venturing into wars and insurrections. We only let the killing-like nature of actions prevent us from stopping, from explaining, from dissuading us from similar future folly.

Hurting people does not stop us from hurting people by war, torture, etc.
However, hurting people is a sufficient condition to degrade our society, endanger our freedoms, and undermine our Constitution.

--

Asymmetrical Villainy

By the pool of the John's Island Club, the subject was politics, or near-politics. (Somewhat like talking about American televangelists is near-religion... not the real deal but they mill around in the same ball park.)

The subject went to Edward Snowden, and the person who raised the topic said,

"Edward Snowden, hero or villain?"

and we went around the table.

I was first. I hesitated about one second, letting a flurry of thoughts rise like startled sea gulls from the beachscape of my mind.

"Hero," I said.

Three of us said hero, and we said it definitely. We did not cavil with some nonsense like

"I think... hero.... yes. Hero."

Just the one word "hero".

The person who raised the question said

"Villain."

just as definitely.

Maybe more definitely. She had a list of reasons ready, and they were not the solid block of monolithic emotional reasons I would have given at first; they were the product of rational analysis and thought. At this time I was interested suddenly in how "analog" the emotional mind is and how "digital" and discrete is reason. (Emotion is like a an entire ivory tusk, while reason is more like Mah-Jong tiles .)
These came down to a basic proposition that Mr. Snowden's dumped vast amounts of data to the media, and this data had the potential to hurt people.

Some people would have argued this point, but we did not, for the proof would be in the future pudding.

However, I was struck by the new concept of "villain". I am sure that Mr. Snowden agonized over his decision, being aware that he could very well become a man without a country.
If he were not being paid for his information, he would lose his country, home, and way of life in pursuit of some idealized notion of human rights and human privacy and who knows what other moral goods.

So if he did not sell his data, it seemed as if he was either (1) a hero, or (2) a villain who perpetrated his dastardly deeds for all the same reasons and sufferings which befall heroic figures in Western myths and stories.

And that is why the world is so often mysterious, for all is not Professor Xavier and Magneto of the old comic books; rather it is Professor Xavier and Magneto of the modern films, where the good remains nebulous (and only the shadowy government agencies are truly "evil").  And it is "nebulous" in the sense that the good is hard to see and find, not that it is hazy by its very nature. In no way does "nebulous" imply something like the popular philosophy notion of "relative".

All mankind of goodwill will find out in the final winnowing who was a hero and who the villain... maybe.

Maybe we shall all be heroes and heroines.

Or not.

--

Hostage's Dilemma

Some people asked me to explain some stuff about my post Security?  (http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/12/security.html ), in which there is:

Director of the National Security Agency Gen. Keith Alexander doesn't believe amnesty is the answer to ending Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents.

In an interview that aired on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Alexander likened the scenario to a hostage situation: If an individual was to shoot 10 of 50 hostages, Alexander explained, he shouldn't be set free in exchange for the 40 remaining hostages.

"I think people have to be held accountable for their actions," Alexander said. "Because what we don't want is the next person to do the same thing, race off to Hong Kong and to Moscow with another set of data knowing they can strike the same deal." ...

My first comment on this was:

 1) There is absolutely no parallel between a hostage situation, in which people are killed, and a leaking of secrets one or two at a time. Go back to whatever thing you call an office and re-think this.

and the question was why I said this. It seemed that the seriatim commission of crimes was sort of a parallel, and as such General Alexander was "more correct" than was I.

Logically, I thought of it as:

There is an entity, X, who gathers together a number of other entities. This gathering contravenes some law or statute of the land, and this is crime 1.

Subsequently, X does the illegal action Y  - crime 2 - on the group of objects he has gathered, and he does it to the objects one at a time, leaving a gap between occasions of doing Y.

So fill in the blanks with "forcibly takes hostages" or "surreptitiously steals secrets", "kills a hostage" or "releases a secret", and you have two situations that do not resemble each other in the least:
(a) a man forcibly takes a group on hostages, then he kills them one at a time until his demands are met;
(b) a man steals secrets, then he releases transcripts of secret data.

The only thing they have in common is a criminal act involving the gathering of discrete items, and then subsequently committing another crime involving members of that group. The criminal acts themselves are far from being commensurate. It seems to me that General Alexander uses a moral logic that is capable of seeing a parallel between stealing some Girl Scout cookies, then willingly eating them one at a time, with something like a slow motion genocide in Ruanda.

Of course, General Alexander was not at the point of saying that accountability should be the same for each action... at least, I do not think that's where his head was at.
But then what was he saying, other than each of us bears responsibility for one's actions? Hardly great news requiring the Sunday morning talk-a-thon.
And if someone who has been sinned against chooses to forgive his oppressor, who are we to say no? Who are we to maintain our draconian judgement superior?

We may as well force the Amish of Nickel Mines to reconsider, and to learn to hate the gunman who killed their children.

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Sometimes

 

Albert the Great, Writer on Moral Agency

Sometimes I actually learn something, or at least it seems as if I have.

Over the last week, I have mused upon the moral logic of moral choices, wondering in what manner moral logic differs from everyday logic: why there is no simple rule of deduction from moral premises to moral conclusions to guide our actions.

A great number of people would stop right here and say that my description of moral choice is nonsense.
I cannot help that.
I plunge on.
The outcome of moral logic, the moral choice, does not flow from facts and premises and hypotheses. There is something else; the emotional life intervenes and prioritizes values and colors all the logic in very subjective ways.

It is the nature of emotions to be subjective and individual. That part of our being is very much ourselves. We life in a vast universe and large solar systems, and are part of intricate societies with habits, laws, and rules which are not of our making, and which may well be inimical to us.
But the realm of emotion is our own, and it is the moonrise kingdom of each and every human being alone.

How do we find something common, then, in the emotional contents of moral logics?

We learn from William Ralph Inge the hints that lead us to Virtue.
Virtue is the unifying force.
When we choose the more noble path to follow, and leave behind those paths which are the routes of people who are not noble nor virtuous, we choose Virtue, and by choosing Virtue, we choose the way which will ennoble us.

Does it matter is we be ennobled?
We go this way only once, so we decide whether to be noble or ignoble; we choose whether to be virtuous or to be unvirtuous.
Nowadays, we usually take a pose, and we pretend that virtue is meaningless, the world is finite, and this is all there is.... a dead end.... so why prettify a dead end with virtue?

Virtue transforms the world, because it is the magic within the emotional nature of mankind.
If you ignore Virtue, the world remains dead rocks.
If you choose Virtue, the world gains the soul of human emotion, and becomes as new as you are capable of sustaining novelty and blessings.

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The Force Of Moral Arguments

Arguments on moral issues do not rely solely upon logic for their validity. There is something else present.

In normal logic, the methods of deduction of conclusions from premises are logical structures which form the "carriers" of truth.
In the usual example:

premise 1
All men are mortal.

premise 2
Socrates is a man.

 conclusion
(Therefore,) Socrates is mortal.

The sentence "Socrates is mortal" upon it own merits is not known to be true or false. The truth of "Socrates is mortal" emerges from the entire deduction above; lack one crucial element, and the mortality of Socrates becomes problematic.

However, this is not enough in moral arguments. We bring "values" to the logical table, and we usually insist that the logical deduction itself is not sufficient, nut that it must also "mesh" with our values.
If the conclusion outrages our values, we will condemn the logical conclusion, and search elsewhere.

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A Convenient Morality

Afghan oficials have claimed that numerous civilians were killed in a recent strike.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/08/afghan-nato-air-strike-civilians

Afghan officials have said an apparent Nato air strike has killed 15 people – nine of them civilians, including women and children – in an eastern province where the Taliban remain strong. Nato said 10 militants had died in the strike, and that it had no reports of any civilian deaths...

NATO sources mention no civilians. Perhaps they cannot see them. Just a few years ago, NATO planes were devastating Afghani wedding parties, whose celebrations they mistook for a form of coed jihad. 

I am tired of the convenient morality of the Washington suits, including that of Mr. Obama.
It all seems to come down to whose ox is gored, or whose civilians are killed, and whether they be killed by our friends (yay!) or our enemies (boo!).

International morality is as trite as that now.

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Experiments With The Good

 

Ignatius Loyola

We live in a great time of Science.
Great
We also live in a great poverty of moral goodness.

Take a page from science: conduct long experiments on being good. Then review the results. Get other people involved and purify the group morality of our age.

This does not involve reading; this involves living the moral goodness that is within us.
Fast, be humble, turn the other cheek.
Experiment with the ways of being good instead of setting things like "Turn the other cheek" up as some sort of paradigm, then ignoring it in practice.

See what happens. Discuss. Meditate.

Drop every notion that does not apply to godliness from your mind: all political views, all reasons for doing things, all excuses and alibis, all dislikes and hatreds. See what happens.

It  is time for Goodness. I am going to set at least one day of each year as a day of fast and moral experiment and meditation (remember that meditation is not "mulling over").
All this has been attempted in the past, however. I think of the Practices of St. Ignatius Loyola as more of a "experimental" regimen of the spirit, rather than the usual and customary description of "spiritual exercises".

So let's update the spiritual exercises and attain the progress that has been made in material regimes!

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Gun Ethos

(1)

The Gun Ethos is an extreme form of Individualism.

This statement is corroborated by the simple fact that even though the quasi-sacred Second Amendment speaks of groups called "militias", no such groups exist today, and most guns are used for the exploits of the individual: it is the individual who hunts and the individual who has accidents and the individual who kills.

The people who are pressing for any form of gun control or gun laws are thinking of guns within the context of a community.

This is obvious from the group of people from Newtown, Massachusetts, who press for laws that recognize that guns are a social fact as well as an individual fact, and they travel as a group to argue for their ideas.

Both of these viewpoints are experienced in the perplexing narrative of the Individual standing against their own democratically elected Government, which melds together the story of the "Good Individual" and the story of the "Bad Group".

Once again, we see the dim realization here that we as individuals are unable to form extended groups that incorporate our ideals: our examples of group-mind are debased, tyrannical, and entirely inadequate to the needs of attaining the highest aspirations of mankind and religion.

Tragically, we address here the ethically most trivial fact: guns, while ignoring the ethically most important facts: how good individuals go bad as a group, and how a community may escape from the taint of group debasement and attain greatness.


(2)

The detail from Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam is used to illustrate the dichotomy between the Individual and the Group, or the Community.
In its essence, the One desire that there be Many, and all the perplexities and messiness of Groups and Democracies are contained within that divine act.



(3)

What are some virtues of Community?

PLOS Blogs   Saturday, May 4, 2013

Confessions of a D Orbital
By Ricki Lewis, PhD
Posted: May 2, 2013

... “Work in groups? In organic?” I blurted, astonished.

“A group without a lot of smart people can get the right answer more frequently than just a smart person. This is very important in solving problems in the future,” Fowler said, insisting that today’s students are different. They eagerly work together, free of the anger and competitive streak that pervaded my own class, when everyone did anything to get the highest grades possible, lest they fail at the lofty goal of getting into med school. I even saw one student, whose name I still remember, spit into someone’s flask in lab, to better his own grade...

While discovering an answer is not at all the same thing as acting ethically, we know that we find it easier to be good with friends help and belief in us...
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Medical Definitions and Practices

 Heart Transplant Procedure

How much of our communal lives is devoted to discussions of Medicine? A good deal is; we discuss issues from Health Care and Health Insurance on the basis of economics to Abortion on the basis of morality and philosophy and religious belief.
In short, Medicine is discussed under almost all the categories which make societies work: Economics, Business, Morality, Ethics, Religion, Philosophy, Politics...

I suggest that Medical Practice may substitute for Life: in essence, let us run a simulation of Life by looking at medical practices and our discussions and involvement in them.

In particular, let's look at how medical practitioners define medical terms.

Discover Magazine
The Beating Heart Donors

The article cited above deals with organ donations, and how those affairs are defined and run. Read it and pay attention to how the important terms are defined. In particular, we are interested here in how "death" is defined, because we are dealing with organ donations from individuals who are declared to be dead.

I quote the beginning paragraphs below:

In 1968, thirteen men gathered at the Harvard Medical School to virtually undo 5,000 years of the study of death. In a three-month period, the Harvard committee (full name: the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death) hammered out a simple set of criteria that today allows doctors to declare a person dead in less time than it takes to get a decent eye exam. A good deal of medical language was used, but in the end the committee’s criteria switched the debate from biology to philosophy. Before many years went by, it became accepted by most of the medical establishment that death wasn’t defined by a heart that could not be restarted, or lungs that could not breathe. No, you were considered dead when you suffered a loss of personhood.

But before we see what substituting philosophy for science actually means to real patients, let’s look at the criteria the Harvard authors believed indicated that a patient had a “permanently nonfunctioning brain”:

• Unreceptivity and unresponsivity. “Even the most intensely painful stimuli evoke no vocal or other response, not even a groan, withdrawal of a limb or quickening of respiration,” by the committee’s standard.

• No movements or spontaneous breathing (being aided by a respirator does not count). Doctors must watch patients for at least one hour to make sure they make no spontaneous muscular movements or spontaneous respiration. To test the latter, physicians are to turn off the respirator for three minutes to see if the patient attempts to breathe on his own (the apnea test).

• No reflexes. To look for reflexes, doctors are to shine a light in the eyes to make sure the pupils are dilated. Muscles are tested. Ice water is poured in the ears.

• Flat EEG. Doctors should use electroencephalography, a test “of great confirmatory value,” to make sure that the patient has flat brain waves.

The committee said all of the above tests had to be repeated at least 24 hours later with no change, but it added two caveats: hypothermia and drug intoxication can mimic brain death. And since 1968, the list of mimicking conditions has grown longer.

Despite heroic efforts to clarify and justify the definition of death, it remains opaque, confusing, and inconsistent. 

Although the Harvard criteria were based on zero patients and no experiments were conducted either with humans or animals, they soon became the standard for declaring people dead in several states, and in 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) was sanctioned by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. The UDDA is based on the Harvard Ad Hoc Committee’s report. That a four-page article defining death should be codified by all 50 states within 13 years is staggering.

 To me, the point of all this exercise is to wake me from my slumber induced by the anesthesia of Authority, and see what is actually going on:  and what is going on is an imperfect process which - even though we tend to impute great validity to it because it is a product of great Authority - remains imperfect and may become more so.

We are all imperfect.

Who, then, is qualified to pass perfect judgement upon other weighty questions, such as when does Life begin, and Abortion?
Not I.
I am not qualified, yet I must decide...  and that is a strange thing, is it not?
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PS.
Another facet of organ donation is that are various agents and agencies involved, some of which are paid for organs located and used.
The only party which is absolutely prohibited from receiving money is the donor or their family; everyone else may make some money on the deal.
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On A Ethical Scale Of 1 To 5...

 Mark Zuckerberg, Billionaire Genius and Demi-God

..., 1 being the lowest, meaning "bad" or almost no "good" at all, and 5 meaning the highest possible amount of "good", where would you rank such-and-such?

Is "good" an absolute, or does it exist in a range of values, somethings being "better" than others?

It seems to me that Fundamentalist philosophies and religions tend to view things as absolutes, whereas the non-Fundamentalist forms do not, and thus require a good deal more work and thought and study to come to a moral conclusion.
It reminds me of Isaac Singer's Rabbi of Goray, who was relatively lenient on the issue of divorce on the appeal of women, versus the Rabbi of Lublin, who was very strict: as a result, women from all over the East journeyed to Goray to see the Rabbi, who did not see divorce in absolute terms, but in terms which were modified by differing circumstances, differing life-histories.

So today in MarketWatch, David Weidner writes:

So long, suckers — I’m leaving Wall Street 
Commentary: Some lessons from 15 years observing the industry,

and ends with:

... remember: Greed is good, but good is better.

and that sums it up, so now I must wonder whether mankind again is a bunch of savages dancing  (or yelling out buy-sell orders)  in front of heartless and mindless idols of graven images, or whether there is a progress - a spiritual progress! - available to us of "better" and "better".

All things can become "better". There is no absolute Science, Economics, nor Morality. Just as we may descend, so we may ascend.

There is in these times a feeling that mankind is inherently evil.
I cannot believe such a proposition, even when it is modified by the doctrine of Original Sin.
We exist in a range of values, and we have free will to choose where we shall go. The accumulation of woes and sorrows we are struggling through now are the fruits of our choosing Greed and not something Better! (And I shall think about this when I ponder Mark Zuckerberg's sale of his stock at the obviously over-priced opening IPO price, and the eventual decline of 10%, which amounts to a billionaire stealing money from schlubs...  it really "zucks!"... even though if we were to ask him on a scale of 1 to 5 how would he rate himself as a positive benefactor to humanity, he would probably say that he's a "big old Fi-i-ive!")
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Science and Religion(Morality): Proibido Afixar Azulejos! 2

So we have formulated a logical moral paradox, so what?
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/04/logic-of-science-and-logic-of-religion.html

I do not really know. I just do not think I ever saw a logical moral paradox. There have always been tough moral questions one wrestles with, but not a moral logical one.
Haven't a clue about it... although I am thinking along the lines of meta-language... like, who doesn't?
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