What comprises an ethical decision according to theory? For the Consequentialist the crux is always in determining and executing the best consequences.* This means that making a consequentialist decision involves two steps. First is to imagine different possible futures and evaluate them. Once the evaluation is done, the consequentialist chooses the future scenario that maximizes the ‘Good’ (or what have you) and works towards realizing that scenario. Being moral is having skill in figuring out […]
Category: ethics
Charity and OOPs
Given an Object Oriented Ontology ethics can present a problem.* It is not obvious how to fit ethics into an object oriented view: even if objects have ethical properties, ethics itself has to be considered just as arbitrary as any other property. One could, of course, hold some Deontological, Consequentialist or other ethical viewpoint, but this position would have to be justified on other grounds, since O.O.O. is silent on the matter. Hence having ethics […]
Holy crap, it’s The Matrix for chickens
No, really: http://io9.com/5885510/holy-crap-its-the-matrix-for-chickens [Sent to me by my brother. Thanks bro!]
the lowest desires of modern people
… Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the lowest desires of modern people, namely the superficial curiosity about the latest discoveries of science. This quote is from the beginning of Wittgenstein’s “A Lecture on Ethics” or whatever the […]
Truth is… and other short thoughts
Truth is whatever you are willing to wager your sanity on. This works because sanity is relative to people, so if you are willing to wager your sanity on something, so should other people. Deontology has a problem because no one can definitively tell you what it is to follow a rule. So deontologists can’t fault others for appealing to unexplained concepts without undermining their own argument. Whereas the meanings of particular words may be […]
A note on ethics: Mutual Enrichment
Our ethical responsibility is to do our best to enrich the lives of others and to give others the opportunity to enrich us. Everyone understands what it is to have an enriched life: everyone has had a friend, learned something of worth, or made the world a better place at some point (even by accident). Moreover, once you understand how your life has been enriched, then you understand how you could act in a similar […]
K*nt F*cker
I was at a bar on Friday. One of my friends says, “Hey Noah, there’s another philosopher here, come talk.” So I go and chat. She wrote a MA thesis on Levinas. But somehow we got to ethics. I started making fun of virtue ethics, which she believed in. Something about me saying she had tomatoes being cultivated in her head got her riled up. Since I had said I was unimpressed with Singer earlier, […]
Psychopharmacological Enhancement
The only ways to enhance the mind is to learn or evolve. Since evolution is out of our hands, all that is left is to learn. Drugs that purport psychopharmacological enhancement do not do what their name states: they may change certain psychological factors but there is no drug that will make you smarter. This would be to eat from the tree of knowledge. However drugs may be able to let you do things that […]
The Terminator Television Show
There is a television show coming out in the new year called “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”. At first I was massively excited. My father said that he thought it is taking place in between the first and second movies when Sarah was learning to be a hardcore bad-ass. I thought this was a brilliant idea: someone traveling through Mexico and the U.S. with a baby engaged in what amount to ostensibly terrorist activities. All […]
‘Gone Baby Gone’ is worth watching
Go see ‘Gone Baby Gone‘. It’s got good acting, some twists and good ol’ fashion moral ambiguity. The kind of ambiguity that was around before everything started feeling like a politically correct press release and is going to be around once again when we come to our senses. And nothing against PR departments and carefully crafted images but I happen to like the areas in between what we we are comfortable with: when […]