logo Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register.
2024-03-19 01:33:55 CoV Wiki
Learn more about the Church of Virus
Home Help Search Login Register
News: Open for business: The CoV Store!

  Church of Virus BBS
  General
  Philosophy & Religion

  Ethics Redux
« previous next »
Pages: [1] Reply Notify of replies Send the topic Print 
   Author  Topic: Ethics Redux  (Read 9880 times)
Hermit
Archon
*****

Posts: 4290
Reputation: 8.92
Rate Hermit



Prime example of a practically perfect person

View Profile WWW
Ethics Redux
« on: 2017-08-19 10:32:49 »
Reply with quote

On the one hand, morality is based on our ability to empathize, and is an entirely situational rule of thumb on how to behave normatively in that society without wasting too much time thinking about it, taught to infants by society. Morality is reflexive.

Ethics are considered and so vastly superior but also more expensive than morality. Ethics have developed over time but still lag our technological capacity, largely because of the idiocy of people affirming personal projections of primitive morality in the guise of religion.

Any effective ethical system needs to be grounded in the intersection of "the greatest good for the greatest number" moderated by the strict application of "the platinum rule", and based on the genetic reality that when prioritizing conflicting interests that we need to consider those most like ourselves to those least like ourselves. Something not recognised by most current systems is that the people of the future are always going to outnumber the present generation, even once we have reduced our population to the sustainable 600 million or so (which is an urgent prerequisite to survival), at least if we don't kill ourselves off first. This is why, in addition to a transition to communism, which adds ethics to economics, we have to place conservation of the biosphere above current interests. What the Hermits refer to as evaluism.

PS Medicine has contributed more to the development of ethics than all the priests and philosophers of all the societies that have ever existed, but medicine alone is not sufficient to care for humans within a framework of societies which are mathematically provably dependent for their very existence on equality and sustainability for their continued existence (see Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, Eugenia Kalnay (2014). "Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies" [em]Ecological Economics[/em]
Volume 101, May 2014, Pages 90-102, Elsevier, [url=https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014]https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014
accessed 2017-08-19[/url]). If it is not already too late, and it probably is, we need to embed this awareness into our ethical systems if humanity is to have any future at all. Religion stands squarely opposed to this noble effort. As Joseph Cambell put it, "Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modem men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modem life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man's place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now far too small, and men's stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk. " Joseph Cambell (1960), "The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology", Secker Warburg, London accessed 2017-08-19
Report to moderator   Logged

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #1 on: 2017-08-19 23:44:16 »
Reply with quote

Communism? That seems like a non-sequitur, please elaborate on the reasoning here.
Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #2 on: 2017-08-26 10:52:43 »
Reply with quote

https://www.prageru.com/courses/history/why-isnt-communism-hated-nazism

tl;dw: Communism is responsible for far more deaths and misery than Fascism though it isn't as overtly evil.
Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #3 on: 2017-08-26 10:57:56 »
Reply with quote

Hermit, I suspect you were convinced of the necessity of Communism by the HANDY model you referenced. It does look compelling but it is only a model. When you see the real world effects like the Holdomor and Great Leap Forward and the situation today in Venezeula then you have to question the model.

« Last Edit: 2017-08-26 10:58:30 by David Lucifer » Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #4 on: 2017-09-01 11:32:10 »
Reply with quote

https://twitter.com/JBickertonUK/status/902961618492981248

Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #5 on: 2017-09-01 11:33:14 »
Reply with quote

https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/903302114599981056

Report to moderator   Logged
David Lucifer
Archon
*****

Posts: 2641
Reputation: 8.90
Rate David Lucifer



Enlighten me.

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #6 on: 2017-09-13 20:21:18 »
Reply with quote

A Century of Ghastly Communist Sadism

By A. Barton Hinkle, reason.com

View Original

September 11th, 2017

"Let there be floods of blood," declared Krasnaia gazeta, the official newspaper of the Red Army in 1918. From the enemies of the revolution, there should be "more blood, as much as possible."

A few months before, the Bolsheviks had seized power from the provisional government that had been installed in the final days of Russia's Romanov dynasty. The revolution ushered in what would become a century of ghastly sadism.

The world will mark the 100th anniversary of that revolution this November 7. Yet while the Soviet Union is no more and communism has been discredited in most eyes for many years, it is hard even now to grasp the sheer scale of agony imposed by the brutal ideology of collectivism.

Few now dare question the degree of human misery that communism inflicted. Yet there were many, during its height, who fell victim to what Solzhenitsyn called "the desire not to know." They either refused to acknowledge the facts staring them in the face, or actively tried to cover them over with lies.

Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer for denying the truth of Soviet famine, might be the most famous. (The Times eventually conceded that Duranty's coverage was disgraceful, but the Pulitzer board has never revoked the award.) Yet there were legions of others, a few of whom continue to insist even today that communism really was not so bad.

For some time, debate also roiled over whether Joseph Stalin's summary executions, liquidations, forced labor camps, and endless other crimes against the Russian people were a departure from the so-called ideals of the revolution, or their all-but-inevitable result. The opening of Soviet archives put that debate to rest: Russian communism was a regime of terror from the very beginning.

In 1918 Iakov Peters, deputy to Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the secret police, declared that "anyone daring to agitate against the Soviet government will immediately be arrested and placed in a concentration camp." The enemies of the working class, he promised, would be met with "mass terror."

For sanction, Peters had the word of none other than Lenin himself. "Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers," Lenin ordered in 1918. "Publish their names. Take from them all the grain. Designate hostages. Do it in such a way so that for hundreds of versts around people will see, tremble, know, shout: They are strangling, strangling to death the bloodsucker kulaks." (The term "kulak" referred to peasants well-off enough to hire workers.) "It is necessary secretly—and urgently—to prepare the terror," he ordered shortly thereafter.

Over the next several months the secret police of the Cheka carried out mass executions in a campaign that would become known as the Red Terror. In "Red Victory," W. Bruce Lincoln writes that one early estimate claimed the Cheka shot "more than eight thousand people in the twenty provinces of Central Russia before the end of July 1919, but by all accounts that figure was a gross understimate."

It was also just the beginning.

In 1997, a French publisher published "The Black Book of communism," which tried to place a definitive figure on the number of people who died by communism's hand: 65 million in China, 20 million in the Soviet Union, 2 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, and so on—more than 90 million lives, all told.

Many of them died by famine. But the famines were man-made disasters: the result of expropriation, forced collectivization, and other policies. In 2013, Yang Jisheng told The Guardian about the effects of the Great Famine in China, which killed tens of millions between 1958 and 1961: "People died in the family and they didn't bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible."

The publication of the Black Book precipitated a debate over whether communism was as bad as Naziism. There might be a technically correct answer to that question, but it seems perverted to ask. It's like asking whether you'd rather watch your children murdered by strangling or by drowning. Taking sides in such a debate at all borders on depraved.

But depravity was woven into the sinews of communism by its very nature. The history of the movement is a history of sadistic "struggle sessions" during the Cultural Revolution, of gulags and psychiatric wards in Russia, of the torture and murder of teachers, doctors, and other intellectuals in Cambodia, and on and on.

This confounds those who look at the idea of communism and see something noble: a classless society in which everyone is, blessedly, equal—where there is no want, no envy, and no greed. Yet while that vision, however fanciful, might hold some surface appeal, it ignores the necessary means to the desired end. Because the only practical manner by which such a society conceivably might be attained is to subordinate the individual to the collective, wholly and utterly. Individual wants and wishes—indeed, any personal autonomy except of the most minimal sort—must be set aside for the sake of the planned society.

Human freedom, in communist society, is an obstacle to higher ends, since it interferes with social regulation and can even lead people to question the government. As Friedrich Engles himself wrote: "Political liberty is sham-liberty."

Despite this gruesome butcher's bill, you still find those who harbor a soft spot for communism. You see it in the posters and T-shirts lionizing the murderous Che Guevara. And in The New York Times' current series on the "Red Century," which includes pieces on "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism" ("Yes, there was repression behind the Iron Curtain. But it wasn't sexual") and "Lenin's Eco-Warriors" ("How did Russia... become a global pioneer in conservation? Much of the answer begins with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.")

Pause for a moment to read those sentences with "Naziism" and "Hitler" in place of "socialism" and "Lenin." Yes, Hitler murdered millions of Jews, but...

But?

Moral vacuity like that partly explains the results of a poll last year for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. It found that 21 percent of young people said they would be willing to vote for a communist. It also found that a third of millennials think more people died under George W. Bush than under Stalin. Twenty-five percent of millennials who had heard of Lenin had a positive view of him.

Santayana probably was not speaking the literal truth when he said those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. But forgetting the past certainly makes its repetition, or at least its imitation, more likely. Which is why the world would be doing the future a favor if it spent the next couple of months reflecting somberly on the past century of communism's blood-soaked history.

This column originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Report to moderator   Logged
Hermit
Archon
*****

Posts: 4290
Reputation: 8.92
Rate Hermit



Prime example of a practically perfect person

View Profile WWW
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #7 on: 2018-01-26 04:01:59 »
Reply with quote

I'd reply, but you need context I don't have time for.

In essence, WW II and the horrors in the USSR were driven by British and American interests and pathologies, and communism had as much to do with motivating deaths as atheism, which is almost nothing to none at all.

In the meantime, I recommend you read Patrick J Buchanon's "Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World".
Report to moderator   Logged

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Hermit
Archon
*****

Posts: 4290
Reputation: 8.92
Rate Hermit



Prime example of a practically perfect person

View Profile WWW
Re:Ethics Redux
« Reply #8 on: 2018-01-26 04:05:20 »
Reply with quote

The Handy Model is supported by recent analyses of other cultures not included as the basis for the model, most recently the peer reviewed studies of inequality and unsustainability in the Bronze Age, which confirms the model's powerful predictive capacity.
Report to moderator   Logged

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Pages: [1] Reply Notify of replies Send the topic Print 
Jump to:


Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Church of Virus BBS | Powered by YaBB SE
© 2001-2002, YaBB SE Dev Team. All Rights Reserved.

Please support the CoV.
Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS! RSS feed