Question: Does the NSA have an obligation to be ethical?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/3331
They even reaffirmed it late last year.
(sorry for the google cache link; www.nsa.gov (AkamaiGHost?) is currently returning 503 Service Unavailable)
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-yz7S-...
Society only functions properly when people act ethically. We have laws in place for punishing those who harm others in various ways (financially, physically, etc.), as a means to discourage bad behaviour. In theory there's supposed to be international law, but sadly no-one seems to pay much attention to it.
And I'm not one bit interested in doing what pleases you. I'm only interested in doing what pleases ME (as is every other person on Earth, although most will never admit it out of cowardice).
So no, I don't have ANY obligation at all towards you.
Now, is it in my best interest to treat you nice and contribute to your well-being? Yes, in most circumstances I'd have to admit that it is.
Have a lovely day!
"Pleasing" deals with emotions, so we can drop the facade of hyper-rationality right there. Cooperation is beneficial for an itdividuums' survival, as you rightfully state. It is indeed of such importance that the standards of cooperation have been internalized long ago – for non-sociopaths, altruism is an end in itself and creates positive feelings.
And if you insist on your way of looking at it you actually stopped half-way: what "pleases you" is /also/ just a useful heuristic to maximize you reproductive success. The warm feeling you get from winning the lottery is no more or less real than the warm feeling (other) people get when they see someone happily getting married.
For this whole system the borders between the individual and the group are fluid. While certainly, all else being equal, the individual's need usually trumps the group's, it is anything but clear-cut in most real scenarios. You may be willing to sacrifice someones life to save your own, but that can change if the other person is you daughter, when you get to old age or when it's not a 1:1 sacrifice but merely an assumption of a non-zero risk of death.
> ... but that can change if the other person is you daughter ... old age ...
It isn't as complicated as you're making it out to be, the decision made by the individual depends on the maximization of their goals. So that depends on the weight they assign to the importance of genetic immortality, reproductive years remaining, justice in an afterlife, etc. Sure, not everybody is a perfectly rational actor applying game theory in their daily interactions, but individuals are much more self interested than you're describing - even with family.
I'm mostly taking offense with the characterization of such "feelings" as "not real" or of lesser value than the "pure" thought of rational egoism:
1. If we take altruism as a highly developed extension of egoism, it's worth to consider it an invaluable heuristic trained over thousands of generations to intuitively make good decisions. Where a cold analysis may tell you that giving money to a poor person is wasteful, I'd say that the warm fuzzy feeling we get from giving is an encoding of results gained over millennia of experience.
This also touches another point: I'd suspect that most altruistic behaviors are actually net-negative for the individual but, when practiced by large parts of the population are beneficial for everyone. Here, emotions serve as a prehistoric solution to the tragedy of the commons. It's an idée fixe in some circles, most notably libertarians and the Ayn Rand crowd to replace this with a system of contracts or simply force but that disregards (amongst other things) that almost no idea in psychology has more empirical support than the beneficial effects of helping.
2. If we consider altruism as an emergent behavior, a sort of instinctual moral code, it should be revered as one of the highest achievements of humanity on a level with art or science.
Well without getting into value judgement, you seem to be on board with the idea that emotions are a much higher level of abstraction above the cold logic of genetic survival. I'd welcome an emotional appeal in a public policy discussion as much as I'd welcome a javascript based boot loader. There is a time and place for everything, but emotion is given far too much weight.
Altruism is by definition a net negative for the individual, and I agree that it is very likely deeply rooted in our gene pool. But I certainly wouldn't hold it up as any kind of great achievement, especially considering how frequently it is exploited as a weakness by those in power ("think of the children"). I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where it can be considered a vestigial adaptation, in the same way we have unused muscles for controlling the orientation of our ears, but I hope that one day we'll be able to survive without the genetic compulsion to self-sacrifice.
It has been a long time since I gave Ayn Rand any thought, but your characterization seems pretty far off the mark to me. Have you read her books? She hated libertarians, the use of force, and she didn't want to replace altruism - she wanted it gone. Her reasoning is pretty well founded, as history is full of well intended and ill-conceived calls for sacrifice - the road to hell is paved with good intentions, etc. As far as contracts... I'd love for the world to have that level of clarity. That is why the US is such an attractive setting for business vs many other well developed economies (Mexico for instance), businesses hate uncertainty.
This simply isn't true. Humans engage in many self sacrificing behaviors for a variety of reasons. We're a social species with complex instincts and tendencies in how we form groups and collaborate. People who understand humanity is not a cartoon of individual self interest are not cowards.
1. The most pressing issue for debates is terrorism response. [1]
2. Lawmakers and the Executive are elected on this mandate and spend significant resources (estimated $100Bn per year). [2]
3. The NSA performs all of its functions based off of requirements generated by ODNI, DoD, the Chief Executive, and congress. [3]
4. Most individuals care deeply about privacy and think there should be greater limits to what the government collects. However, less than 10% have changed their habits to improve their privacy posture. I conjecture that this suggests that privacy is not a priority compared to physical and financial security to most citizens. [4]
In this case I think it is fair to say that the best interests of American society and its economy are being thwarted by security concerns of a plurality of citizens. The right course of action is for privacy debates to be publicized. The Pew report referenced in #4 shows a far greater skew toward privacy action after being informed of government and commercial surveillance.
[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/15/in-debates-v...
[2] http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/16/news/economy/cost-of-fightin...
[3] http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/int023.html
[4] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-ab...