Things seem less gray for the author's second example- developers at Palantir designing a workflow to help ICE round up immigrants. Of course there is room for counter-points in an argument about how best to handle an immigration crisis in any country (I say "crisis" because I see it as a crisis that we are doing so little to help) but at the end of the day, our individual actions need to be made on the basis of an single ethical black-or-white question, and history and indeed the present will not look favorably upon those who fail to act in the best interest of their fellow humans.
> Haidt and Craig Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality... From their review, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges. They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity. According to Haidt and Joseph, each of the ethics formed a module, whose development was shaped by culture. They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.
Perhaps these four "building blocks" -- suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity -- are sufficient for an objective basis upon which an intersubjective understanding of morality can be determined.
Then again, even the notion of objectivity is questionable and culturally-dependent...
There's a big logical leap between (for example) observing that many cultures proscribe lying, and saying that one shouldn't lie.
See Arthur Leff's article: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2814/
1. Some philosophers have a descriptive ethic (this is what people do) rather than a prescriptive ethic (this is what people should do). This is certainly interesting, but it isn't what most people mean when they talk about ethics--it doesn't give us any guidance on how to behave ethically.
2. Some philosophers try to work backward to a prescriptive ethical principle from a set of ethical prescriptions which are widely accepted but, importantly, unproven. For example one might start from the prescriptions "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" and attempt to come up with a prescriptive ethic that unites these prescriptions. But "murder and lying are wrong, giving and learning are right" aren't objective facts even though they're widely accepted, so any prescriptive ethic that comes from these prescriptions can't be objective either. It's not coincidence, for example, that in the west, the atheist/moral realist philosophers mysteriously often start from Judeo-Christian prescriptions.
Even the "Christian Post" will agree he's "partly right": https://www.christianpost.com/news/atheist-sam-harris-right-...
That said, I haven't read the book you mentioned, so there might be something in that book which isn't in his talks which would persuade me.
I think there is such thing as an ethical Ideal, and my own ethics are an attempt to get as close to the ideal as possible. I like to think that they don't exist in a vacuum.
Selective enforcement of the law is actually unethical. If you don’t like it, you need to work to change it. Saying something is unethical just because you don’t like it is not rational. Moritality is personal, ethics are societal. Maybe your morals state open borders should be a thing, but our shared ethics don’t.
In this case, immigration law is messed up in both directions. Why do you feel like you feel like you should judge the side following the rules? Are the people who support the people following the law unethical too?
And Soldiers are legally obliged to not obey illegal orders
How do you feel about a living wage? Is it ethical to take action against people who cause wages to fall below a living wage? Note that wages go up when ICE removes people who are pushing wages down.
How do you feel about unemployment for black Americans? Is it ethical to help them by making more jobs available? ICE does that.
You can also agree with law and find agency tactics bad.
Maybe I find it despicable that I can't scam you out of money if you happen to be dumb enough to let me. There are actually cutlers int he world that are "shame on you if you get scammed"
That is the entire problem when you talk about ethics at all beyond a few truths that 99% of people can agree on.
So one could argue not following any law becomes unethical -- and the only ethical thing to do is follow the law until it is changed, which puts us at a interesting juxtaposition -- that sometimes you have to be unethical to be ethical!
This will always be the hard part of making rules or laws on things that are so subjective such as ethics.
There is wide agreement about many ethical questions through. I also think that ignoring ethics question completely is easy cop out - yes one should do it no matter what job.
I don't think that law and ethics is the same. I think that following law is ethical where law species competition rules (accounting, regulation etc).
I think the more ethical stance would be to advocate for changing the law.
I don't give "ethical pass" for not following law where you merely disagree with law or find it pointless or an obstacle to more money.
There is also difference between "breaking law" and "not joining effort to enforce the law". Again, if I find the law bad it might be unethical to join effort to enforce it, but it might still be fully ethical to follow the law and unethical to break it. For example, unnecessary hygiene food regulation.
Easy to see extreme example of law to break would be anti-jew law or fugitive slave law or something like that. The point is that breaking law is ok not merely when you disagree with law, but when it forces you to break ethics. Not just when you benefit from breaking it.
You could make a similar argument for any crime that results in prison time. Locking up murderers results directly in human misery and torn apart families. This case is far more severe: we don't allow the family to move into the prison to live with the criminal. We even separate nursing babies from their mothers.
I think the Uber example in particular assumes that following laws is itself essential. But opposing immigration laws and enforcement of them undercuts that axiom. I don't see how people resolve the tension there in a philosophically coherent way.
If we're that worried about abuse of power, we need a better conversation than "that guy is bad; vote for our guy". We need to talk about actually reforming systems, laws, and norms.
If you put personal ethics into a code, there are roughly two possibilities. One is that you put in things that were already censured at another level ("we oppose convicted serial killers") and nothing changes. The other is that you put in things which are actually contested ("we oppose all lawbreaking"), and then everyone who disagrees breaks away from the whole code, and probably benefits by working with people who support their stance.
A useful professional code tells you how to define malpractice, not immorality in general. Since professional censure and lost reputation are the consequences for breaking such a code, it had best be limited to actions which impugn the professional merit of the person committing them. That way, enforcing it is natural and self-interested; clients don't want to hire code-breakers, and other professionals don't want to be tainted by association.
I think medicine is instructive. People hold up the field as a successful example of bounding personal morality, but the Hippocratic Oath is very much a professional statement. It happens that professional behavior for doctors produces a very clear good - lives saved - but this is not actually a feature of the code. The Oath demands that the practitioner offer their subjects competence, confidentiality, and fiduciary duty; nothing more. Questions of personal morality in the workplace go unanswered, and so the Oath outlasted massive corrections in what is moral, like ceasing to treat homosexuality as an illness.
Appealing to personal morality in the workplace is fine, but it's not the same as appealing to a professional standard.
There's another problem: under certain viewpoints, it's unethical to not send the bastards to a concentration camp, gulag, etc.
I mean, if someone says "No moral viewpoints are more or less true than others; a person acts ethically as long as they think their actions are fully justified" and "People only do things they think are fully justified" then immoral action is impossible.
Honestly, adding disclaimers, hedges and requests for charitable readings in every reply gets old.
(eta: I see in my first reading of the thread parent that I missed a negation, which rather changes the sense of the thing. Prior statement stands, but I no longer feel the need to eye you suspiciously sidewise as I say it.)
I take your point, and I agree that it's worth separating debate over practicalities and small influences from debate over basic humanity. One allows for "but I still think you're well-intentioned" and the other doesn't, so only one can be sustainable within a community.
But... it's also worth remembering how far from universal even our consensus views are. I can think of a half-dozen contexts in the world today where people explicitly reject the proposition "it's wrong to murder people who haven't committed violent crimes". In many of those contexts, they're serious enough to actually go out and do that murder, and be judged favorably for doing so.
I don't disagree with you, I'm not going to knowingly invite those people over to dinner. I just think it's worth remembering how little of morality is certain across times and cultures.
unfortunately the US system combines the worst of both worlds. the few who are executed only die after years of agonizing "will they or won't they" through the various levels of appeal. and after all that we still end up exonerating people posthumously.
Many would argue it's unethical for anyone to make that decision on someone else's behalf. The fact that so many death row convicts appeal their death sentence until the bitter end would imply that they themselves don't agree with your belief.
it doesn't necessarily imply that. at each point in the appeal process, there remains the possibility of having one's case thrown out altogether or reducing the sentence even further than natural life. even if you prefer death to life in prison, it would still be rational to pursue any chance of getting out entirely or getting a substantially reduced sentence.
that said, if I could implement any policy I wanted, I would choose for life to be the most severe sentence but give the inmate the ability to choose death if they prefer.