A Short Course in Ethics

1) I've never seen a more clear example of Nietzsche's "inversion of values." I'm not a libertarian, but this is straight out of Ayn Rand - the good, the strong, the responsible, owe a moral debt to the weakest, poorest, least able people in the world -- regardless of how they came to find themselves in such a parlous state.

2) Like any totalitarian ideology, it complete ignores the reality of human nature. Instead, it attempts to conform reality to simple, preconceived theories and assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that all humans are equal autonomous individuals, and the theory is that disparate individual or national outcomes are caused by the strong oppressing the weak. It ignores that a community's, society's, or nation's character is an expression of the collective nature of the people who compose it. It ignores the interlocking responsibilities - both wanted and unwanted, asked and unasked - that enable society to work.

3) His entire system of "ethics" is based upon making oneself feel superior to others. It completely ignores the problem of incentives, as Tichy mentioned - what happens when you apply Kant's Categorical Imperative to these prescriptions? There is literally no incentive to do anything productive, because a more-moral person is probably going to unilaterally decide that you, as a filthy kulak, are not morally worthy of possessing the fruits of your labor.

Truly a repugnant philosophy.

Sounds simply dreadful. Not an attractive way to live and not an attractive society to live in.

Not that normal people would ever try to live this way. I suppose you could terrorize them into saying they were trying to live this way.

By the way, breaking into buildings, stealing food, and then donating some money to a fashionable cause is thrill seeking and attention whoring, not philanthropy.

For example eating meat: if you don't eat meat because you love cows, becoming a vegetarian might actually hurt cows. If people weren't eating meat, there would certainly be a lot less cows around than are now.

I am all in favor of feeding all hungry people, but once again it is not so simple (note: not trying to pass off hardcore opinions, just thinking and playing devil's advocate). The problem are always the incentives. If you know your children will always be fed, maybe you'll worry less about having kids - you'll just have them. Eventually because of overpopulation it might become impossible to feed everyone. If people worry about having to feed their kids, maybe on average they'll only have kids when they know they can be fed. (I don't know a good solution to this).

It get's really bad when he claims that "people who don't want what they should want are usually just deluded".

The incentive problem goes further - if people are only allowed to get "equal" things, competition is eliminated, and hence also progress. In former eastern Germany, there was only one kind of car, made from plastic. It is a bit like with the cows - you think you are helping everybody, but suddenly people are forced to drive in shoddy vehicles endangering their health.

As I said, it is a dilemma, I don't know the answer. But I suspect that ultimately there will always have to be some competition and struggle. Unfortunately.

Furthermore it misses the point that ethics is ultimately an individual issue as it's individuals who make ethical decisions. The moment that you have a bunch of people in clouds planning what the world should be like you've missed the whole point, which is 'what is justice?' which is an entirely different question, but 'How should I behave?' That is, Ethics is not so much the search for a universal code of action, but the search for a principles in human behavior. With this realize that the search is not for a better means of wealth distribution but for the best set of virtues that a man can embody.

Thus the question is not whether Larry Ellison should buy another Yacht or immitate Mother Theresa, but whether he should practice is fortitude or his charity, his temperance or his, decisiveness.

Of course such things as universal codes of ethics come into play here, but they are tangential to the key issues.

For instance, we can examine the ethics of various religions when faced with peril. You have Christendom, who chose to win through losing; then you have Buddhism with it's history of non-violence, even when faced with the prospect of annihiliation of the religion in Tibet; then you have Islam, where the faithful chose to fight and defend their religion. Each of these approaches have short term and long term consequences. In the short run, violence provides for survival, but in the long run, it justifies further violence.

We have to recognize also that sometimes there are no good choices. Just the mere fact of our existence requires soil to be tilled, destruction of forests for agriculture, altering the environment.

It's always hard to be good.

Read Kant, for an introduction to the basics of deontology.

Read up some more recent work which tries to fix the problems of both. I don't off-hand remember anyone recent who tried to convincingly fix either system, so I don't have any handy references, but:

Here's a much better overall introduction to morality: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/

After going through that, I recommend the author's book: http://www.amazon.com/Common-Morality-Deciding-What-Do/dp/01...

How can one balance everyone's good? In order to do so you would need to be able to take the world in its entirety as those in the thought experiment do. We can't do this, so the suggestion is that we trust what people want. The problem is not only do people not have the foresight to know what they want their wants change relative to their haves. 'Need' would have been a better choice with a given definition. Because we can not balance everyone's good I suggest everyone must be chiefly responsible for themselves and their charges. They should be expected to be honest about their desires and, to be fair to others, they should be as little burden as possible. Such that the greatest good is caring for ones own needs first while avoiding hindering others from acquiring their own base needs. The only thing needed now is a definition of 'need', but I would probably just choose a level on Maslow's hierarchy.

I probably communicated as poorly as the author, so my point is: communication is an interesting problem, and these are week assumptions and poorly communicated as it is too easy for an alternate, though in my case similar, theory of ethics to be built.

I have friends who, to save money, break into buildings on the MIT campus to steal food and drink and naps and showers. They use the money they save to promote the public good. It seems like these criminals, not the average workaday law-abiding citizen, should be our moral exemplars

What if every student, faculty member, staff member, alumnus, and donor want food, drink, and grounds to be used in an ordered way. How are their collective wants less important than some few "poor" people? I don't see how that jump was made.

The problem is that we can't make a system like that for ethics. There are too many variables, they don't always fit well together, and often the "correct" ethical decision depends on what ethics others are using. Some ethical systems only work if everyone uses them; others cease to work if everyone uses them; others only work if nobody tries to game the system. It's a messy topic, and not one that can be easily reduced to an elegant ruleset.

Not that this should stop anyone from trying. Just do it for the exercise itself. Don't expect a particularly useful result.