Describe a Maximally Ethical Person

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

Ethics is about socially acceptable conduct among humans. In some cultures euthanasia is the ethical thing to do, while in others, ending a human life is not at all justifiable. There is no simple criteria for ethical conduct, it is continuously negotiated.

(1) Sozobe's request was that each of us describe their individual ideal of a maximally-moral person. If different respondents come up with different ideals, that is officially fine for this thread.

(2) Is ethics really just about social conventions? For example, take the abolitionists in the antebellum South that helped slaves escape. Would you say they acted immorally? They did, after all, defy the social conventions of their time and place. Such a conclusion would make no sense to me at all. But it seems inevitable for moral relativists, and you sound like a moral relativist to me.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

Duty has nothing to do with it. The hormones that a parent's body releases because of childcare are powerful, habit-forming drugs. In favoring your kids above everyone else, you are feeding a drug habit, not fulfilling a duty.

A parents love for their kids is a drug habit? Really?

In that case, everything that makes us human, from love to music to appreciation of art to to affection to the joy we get from learning; all of that is stimulated by powerful neurochemicals that drive our behavior. By that logic, even our obsession with being ethical is a drug habit.

Raising kids is necessary for our survival. It is on the level of eating. Is our drive to eat food an addiction.

But look at it this way. Your parents' love for you (drug-induced or not) made your life much better. Your affection for friends and passion for lovers makes life much better.

Even if the special love we have for lovers, families and friends is a drug, it still makes human existence as a whole much better. Isn't that the very definition of ethical?

Maybe it is an ethical drug. Or maybe everything that is ethical is a drug. Nah, I don't buy it.

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@Thomas,

To start where you started, your claim about sex is just silly. In most of western culture (all of it as far as i know, but i admit that i cannot claim to know exhaustively), incest is taboo, even if not banned outright by law. Egyptian civilizatiton, which arose more than 6000 years ago, and became the hiearchical society which one might recognize from western civilization's image of Egyptian society 5000 years ago--not only casually practiced incest, but encouraged it in their ruling dynasties. They had a good run for about 3000 years, far longer than any similar institution in the West, so i can't see any reason to suggest that incest, even at the highest levels of society, harmed them. Yet contemporary western cultures universally or almost universally condemn incest.

Female genital mutilation, circumscision, prostitution being generally illegal in our culture--there are a quite a few ethical issues related to sex.

Your dietary strictures are absurd. You assume animal suffering without substantiating it. If eating fruit does not make a plant suffer, why would eating eggs or dairy products make chickens or cattle suffer? Why would an ethical person need to be a "strict vegan?"

In Brave New World, the dead were cremated in order to harvest soft metals such as phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, etc. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

Otherwise, i don't see too much objection to your program.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

For example, take the abolitionists in the antebellum South that helped slaves escape. Would you say they acted immorally? They did, after all, defy the social conventions of their time and place.

They did challenge the social conventions of their time and place, and by so doing, managed to change them. The slavers would certainly say they acted immorally, and had their view prevailed, so would we.

Today it isn't considered unethical for a person to own billions while others just a few miles down the road can barely put food on the table each night. I think it is very unethical, and so do many others. I wonder what will be the social norm fifty years from now.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

To start where you started, your claim about sex is just silly. In most of western culture (all of it as far as i know, but i admit that i cannot claim to know exhaustively), incest is taboo, even if not banned outright by law.

From my perspective, that's because Western Culture has been wrong about the ethics of incest. No big deal --- it has been wrong about the ethics of slavery, too, as have been most other cultures.

Setanta wrote:

Female genital mutilation, circumscision, prostitution being generally illegal in our culture--there are a quite a few ethical issues related to sex.

Female genital mutilation and circumcision are forms of assault, which is unethical independent of sex. As for prostitution, prostitutes can be a hub for sexually-transmitted diseases, especially in the environment our culture developed in for most of its history. In a pre-condom world ignorant of bacteria, prohibiting prostitution makes sense for reasons of public health, and public-health regulations make ethical sense regardless of sex.

Independent of that, prostitution often comes intertwined with slavery and exploitation of minors. But in that case, it's immoral because slavery and exploitation are immoral. The immorality doesn't derive from the sexual aspects of it. Or to state it the other way around: There is nothing intrinsically unethical about any safe sex between consenting, competent adults. (And by "safe", I mean safe for nonconsenting third parties such as the Johns' wives.)

Setanta wrote:

Your dietary strictures are absurd. You assume animal suffering without substantiating it. If eating fruit does not make a plant suffer, why would eating eggs or dairy products make chickens or cattle suffer? Why would an ethical person need to be a "strict vegan?"

You're right, and I overgeneralized. Animal products from humanely-raised, painlessly-killed animals are fine. The animals' suffering arises from their treatment in the meat factories producing the lion's share of our meat, eggs, and dairy. It is this treatment that is problematic.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

The slavers would certainly say they acted immorally, and had their view prevailed, so would we.

So what if we would? People comport with lots of prevailing views that are false. People used to believe that the sun circles the Earth once a day. Even if we had never found out that the Earth rotates around itself once a day, and around the sun once a year, that would still be the truth. Our recognition of facts doesn't make them facts, it only makes us less ignorant of them. The same is true about facts like "slavery is evil", "thou shall emancipate your women", and so forth.

Cyracuz" wrote:

Today it isn't considered unethical for a person to own billions while others just a few miles down the road can barely put food on the table each night. I think it is very unethical, and so do many others. I wonder what will be the social norm fifty years from now.

I disagree that it isn't considered unethical, agree with your view about the ethics of it, and am curious about future norms about it, too.

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@Thomas,

Well, that scenario about one person having billions to spare and the person down the street struggling for food? You'd agree that it obviously isn't considered unethical universally, wouldn't you?

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In my opinion, people being people, will usually frame their ethical reasoning to allow themselves to be the correctly ethical character of their self-narrative.

This I believe is just due to many of us not having a one-hundred percent effective working moral compass. Evolution made us that way. It is all about surviving and reproducing. But, then again there is gay marriage with no biological offspring? Evolution f##cked-up? Or, does evolution also have a built in birth control mechanism? Would that make evolution have a moral compass?

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@snood,

I do agree. But neither is it considered ethical universally.

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@Thomas,

Well then we are in accord about it. You just didn't include a qualifier like "by some people" when you said "it isn't considered unethical".

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@Thomas,

I see you now acknowledge that there are at least a few ethical questions which attach to sex--whether or not you're willing to be honest about it.

Quote:

The animals' suffering arises from their treatment in the meat factories producing the lion's share of our meat, eggs, and dairy. It is this treatment that is problematic.

This is certainly the case. There are now livestock producerrs in Ontario who have their names, photographs and the name of the nearest town to their farm on the package label of the meat you're buying. I don't know if anyone has ever called the bluff of those producers to go see how they run their operations. Neither do i know how well that brand of meat sells--although the mere fact that it is still to be found in stores suggests it has not been a loss for that supermarket chain.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I see you now acknowledge that there are at least a few ethical questions which attach to sex--whether or not you're willing to be honest about it.

Gee, wasn't there a word for this kind of sentence? And didn't you teach it to me a few years back? You're a talented rhetorician, Set, whether you drown puppies for fun or not.

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@Thomas,

Kittens, i drown kittens . . . as i'm sure you'll recall, cats is the spawn of SATAN . . .

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@Thomas,

Thomas, you referred to moral relativism. I am a moral relativist intellectually because of the observation that moral systems differ from culture to culture. But I must qualify that: to be a moral relativist existentially sounds like one who has no passion behind his principles. Regarding my moral responses to situations I feel as if they are absolute. I might conceivably die or kill under the guidance of some internalized principles, but I insist nevertheless on the intellectual correctness of cultural-moral relativism.

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@JLNobody,

I love it when friends talk.

(You're both beyond my ken)

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@Thomas,

Quote:

The same is true about facts like "slavery is evil", "thou shall emancipate your women", and so forth.

Though I agree with what you are saying, I do not think there are similarities in this regard between empirical facts and sentiments like "slavery is evil".
There are no facts regarding slavery in the same way there are facts about the movement of our planet. "Slavery is evil" is no more true than "slavery is all right". There is no fundamental fact we uncover, there is just conduct we agree on by means of social interaction.

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@Cyracuz,

It just occurred to me that a "maximally ethical person" might be one who, when alone, asks herself: "How can I do right by everyone, including myself?"

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@JLNobody,

Absolutely.

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@JLNobody,

Perhaps. But there is still no guarantee that this person will appear ethical in the eyes of everybody. What if "right" is defined by this person as "feeding and housing slaves and in return making them work"? Or did you mean that the desire to do right by everybody is perhaps the "maximally ethical"?

The more I think about it, the more tangled it gets. Sometimes the ethical thing to do is to tolerate and not interfere, and other times taking a stand is the ethical course of action. When do we impose our values and when do we respect the values of others?

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@Cyracuz,

To me "maximally ethical" has to do not with the individual's specific decisions as to what is ethical (as in your slavery examples) but with the individual's general attitude, her desire to do what is right. In different cultures, of course, what is considered "right" will differ. If we were dealing here only with what is ethical--as opposed to what is an ethical person--we would be contrasting and ranking different systems of morality. I don't think that's the OP's concern here.

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Describe a Maximally Ethical Person

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