Ethics and Morality Inaugural Failure

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amanasleep: May 21, 2008

Arglebargle III posted:

So do all anarchists think that coercion is never moral or ethical? Or is that just my ~statist~ misunderstanding?

Also, utilitarianism is nice until you realize that the definition of "good" is up in the air. Then you're sort of back to square one.

Brave New World is a great example of how utilitarianism can short-circuit itself. If you design people who are always happy and feed them food and sex and drugs their whole lives you have the perfect society, according to utilitarian calculus.

Yes to all this, and I think that many attempts at moral systems start by asking the wrong question. "What is best?" leads to all sorts of garbage that is indistinguishable from Conan.txt. Since Freedom and Happiness have no imaginable limits they cannot be positive measures of collective good since there are no practical ways to balance or measure these qualities, and you get absurdities like what if the freedom and happiness of a child murderer is so stratospherically high that it outweighs the suffering and death of the victim, or even all of humanity?

I prefer to ask "What is worst" and work backwards until I'm reasonably comfortable. This produces a radically inconsistent philosophy unless you really want to start parsing Jean-Luc Nancy and Theodor Adorno, but it is much more useful in the real world of terrible things.

So, starting at the worst:

1. The complete eradication of all life in the universe.
2. Eradication of all life on earth.
3. World War (unlimited killing but short of killing all life).
4. Genocide.
5. Slavery.
6. Totalitarian Dictatorship.
7. War.
8. Apartheid.
9. Non-Totalitarian Dictatorship.

You can see here that I value collective political ethics first, as the successful implementation of ethics on this level creates the space for the ethical freedom of individuals to occur. It is only after you have avoided eradication of all life, genocide, slavery, dictatorship, institutionalized oppression, and exited wartime that you can start talking about the normalizing of individual ethics (of course, human morality and ethics of course also exist in the midst of these terrible things, but they are constrained so much by the needs of survival that they are not recognizable to those not in those situations).

edit: If you want to note that I have ranked these, you're right. And although everybody can probably agree that it's OK if the Grand Council of the Multiverse popped in to tell the people of Earth that the planet had to be ~~demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass~~ obliterated to prevent the destruction of the multiverse, some might balk at comparing Slavery to Genocide. Just remember that these are purely negative hierarchies of outcomes, not moral equivalences. The only thing that separates them are the difficulty of humanity surviving and/or overcoming them. On that score slavery is preferable to genocide in that an enslaved people may one day rise up and overthrow their oppressors, no matter how totally they are dominated at any point in time, whereas Genocide precludes this and is final for the victims.

The point is prioritizing overcoming the worst stuff before you spout off about property rights.

amanasleep fucked around with this message at 08:31 on May 23, 2014

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