Your ethics.....

Rule 1= Try not to be a *unt

I just follow the principle of treating others as I would like to be treated myself and using good old fashioned common sense and logical thinking.

Ok, here we go

The trolley problem is interesting as a thought experiment, but in a real world situation, very few people would deliberately push the fat man or pull the switch to divert the train, because we don't have the perfect knowledge of the causes and effects related to our actions or inactions

What if I pull the lever to divert the track and watch in horror as the 3 people who were on the track manage to get out of the way and wouldn't have been killed even if the train wasn't diverted, meanwhile the one person on the track attracts the attention of some bystanders who rush in to save him and suddenly there are 4 people who get hit by the train...

Humans have limited information to make every decision, and we have to make judgements in real time based on guesses about what the outcomes are going to be.

People feel more responsible to act when they're in direct proximity to a crisis. If you're the first person to arrive at a car crash at a remote location, you're much more likely to stop even if you're not a doctor or if you don't have any skills in dealing with emergencies. If you're a passer by at an accident and there are loads of other people around, you're much more likely to let someone else deal with it. This isn't because you're immoral, it's because you can realistically presume that others are better qualified to help, and that too many people interfering can make things worse.

If you hear about an earthquake in Haiti, you might be prompted to send a small donation to help the recovery efforts, but if there's a neighbour who you know, whose house was burnt down and they are in a desperate situation, you're much more likely to spend many hours and a larger portion of your income in assisting them clean up and rebuilding their house.

This is because we feel a greater responsibility to help people who are near to us, and we expect that others feel the same.

Some people like Peter Singer try to equate two acts 1. you walk past a pond with a drowning child who you could easily save, and 2. there are children in africa starving who you could easily save with a small charitable donation.

Singer argues that you would be considered a monster if you refused to save the drowning child because it wasn't your responsibility, but it's morally no different to refusing to save the starving children in Africa.

In reality, it's a different moral situation. With the drowning child, that life is entirely in your hands. Only you can save her, and if you do nothing, that child will surely die.

With the example of African children, the responsibility is diluted throughout the world, where the first people who fail these children are the people who have made the political and economic choices that prevent them from getting access to food. There might be bandits or thieves hoarding the aid donations, there might be corrupt officials who are diverting resources away from those most in need.. The primary responsibility is at a closer proximity to the people in need, and there is also the uncertainty about what the best course of action to save the most lives is. The history of development is paved with well intentioned projects doing more harm than good, there are governance issues that need to be addressed to move people off dependence on aid, and towards sustainable economic positions... Or the people who vote for candidates in elections who promise to increase the amount of international state aid is we give our of our taxation, are we more moral than those who give a fixed donation each month to african charities, but consistently vote for candidates who promise to cut state aid and promote self serving economic policies that will guarantee that developing nations never catch up?

Is the person who gives away all of his income to keep people alive after earthquakes and tsunamis more moral than the person who works really hard to improve governance in global political structures and to rebalance the global economy so that people are less reliant on international aid?

Or is the person who works hard to make sure that rivers and ponds have life bouys and maintians slipways and access to the water to keep children from falling in in the first place less moral than the person who jumps in to save the child. Or is the person in local government who refuses funding for life bouys at that pond equally as immoral as the person who doesn't jump in to save the child...


My personal ethics is broadly utilitarian, we ought to act in a way that results in the best outcomes, ie promotes positive well being, and reduces suffering, but I don't do the calculus on each moral decision, I focus on the values that underly the decisions that people make in order to judge them good or evil.

Greed can be amongst the most immoral of attributes. People who already have everything they need, using their economic social and political capital to get more for themselves and less for everyone else is hugely immoral.
If people can learn to be satisfied with their fair share, then there is enough on this planet to go around and we'll be able to work together to sort out the mess we've made of our environment


Authoritarianism is another characteristic that tends towards immorality. Its tied in with arrogance, people who think they know better than everyone else, and thinks that they ought to have the power to impose that will on others regardless of their view on the matter
If people are prepared to listen and reason through the issues, we'll manage to free ourselves from the broken systems that are preserved only through inertia and heirarchical system that survive by the preservation of self interest by those with the most power.

Dishonesty is the trait that binds most immoral actions together. Telling lies isn't the same as being a fundamentally dishonest person. I tell my kids that Santa will bring them presents at christmas. That's not true, but it's a 'white lie' The kinds of dishonesty I'm talking about are people who deliberately distort facts and logic and reason in order to promote their preferred course of action even if they know that they're wrong.
Here we have all the scammers, the politicians who lie at election time so they can do the opposite after they're in power, religious leaders who try to indoctrinate people with false promises and false threats, medical woo merchants who prey on vulnerable people who are looking for relief from their suffering, marketing and commercial actors who promote their goods and services in underhanded ways knowing that they can never deliver on their promises....

mariaalice wrote: »

The vale of ignorance is a very good way of looking at issues in a wider context.

The "veil of ignorance" is a method of determining the morality of political issues proposed in 1971 by American philosopher John Rawls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

Yeah, that's the gold standard in designing a just and fair society. The system we have now, where everyone needs to promote their own self interest breaks down when there is a big disparity in the lobbying power of some groups over others.

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

Groucho Marx

I find ethics to be a very weird thing to talk about.
By that I mean there are soooooo many factors involved. Ethics depend on the person and everyone is different. Also other things effect a person's ethics such as personal gain - like if someone else did something you would say how wrong it was but yet when you did the same yourself and you got something positive out of it? well suddenly that's different. What you did really wasn't that wrong / you were "forced" to do that etc.