Idle Thoughts -- The Myth of Amoral Business

In your view Is the "myth of amoral business" true? Why or why not?

In the myth of amoral business, businessmen often excuse their own excesses by declaring that the purpose of business is to make a profit. They declare that there is no other purpose. Therefore ethics and morality are irrelevant to a business.

This attitude became very popular back in the Reagan years when a similar phrase was also very popular, "greed is good."

This attitude has certainly been believed by many businessmen, including some who made themselves quite wealthy, both in the past and in the present. There are difficulties with this position, both moral and practical.

If a businessman acts in a manner that is truly unethical, he can hardly expect others to treat him any better. By establishing that complete ruthlessness is the order of the day, he invites others to be completely ruthless toward him. This alone should give any businessman reason to avoid this particular declaration.

Furthermore, it is bad business to conduct yourself in this matter. Businesses depend heavily upon repeat customers and customer loyalty. What customer will be loyal to a businessman who thinks that he has a right to abuse and deceive his customers? Only in a monopoly situation when a customer has no alternative will this function.

Furthermore, even if there is a monopoly, businessmen should remember that customers are also voters. People who feel that they are being cheated and abused by businesses will begin to elect reform candidates who declare that once they get in office they will heavily regulate the industry in question. The less ethically the businessman conducts himslef, the more severely he can expect be regulated, and perhaps arrested, when his angry customers finish at the ballot box.

But there is also a moral aspect. Every human being is a member of the society. Those who abuse a position of trust in that society are certainly not behaving in a moral manner. Even if your relationship with the businessman is a personal one, how much will you trust someone who has clearly stated that he believes he has no moral obligation in his business dealings?

The idea that businesses should be run solely for profit is shortsighted and self-destructive. It is also not as scientific as those who believe in the myth of amoral business would like to believe. Every biologist knows that evolution does not mean that the strongest and most aggressive wins. Evolution means that the best adapted wins. And the best adapted may be the most cooperative, not the most aggressive.

What this really is social Darwinism, a distortion of evolutionary science which should be called social Spencerianism, since Spencer believed it before Darwin's theory was published and simply took over and distorted the scientific theory for his own purposes.

Businesses and businessmen are members of society. They have the same duties and responsibilities shared by all members of society. That is to say, we should all work cooperatively for mutual benefit.

Idle Thoughts -- Privacy? What Privacy?

Evaluate the concept of privacy in the the context of the social media : how much private information should a person be willing to put on Facebook, for instance, and how much control should a person retain over his or her information? Explain.

The issue of privacy in terms of social media is huge problem.

First, everyone needs to take responsibility for his own actions. Everyone needs to be careful about what they publish. After all, it's no longer private if you make it public. If you wouldn't stand up in front of an audience of strangers and say or do a particular thing, then you shouldn't do so on your Facebook page. By their very nature, social media are not private.

Having said that, it is reasonable that you should be able to post for a group of friends and expect that only your friends would have access to it. This is stated in the context of the fact that social media are free only because they gather information about you which is then sold. What information they gather, and how it is shared are fair questions. Certainly social media should not be data mining or gathering information about members which is unreasonable. Which leaves us with the question, what is reasonable and what is unreasonable?

Many of these answers can't be answered immediately. Perceptions of privacy evolve with changing social situations. It is interesting to watch the process in action as sites gather more and more information, and often find themselves apologizing to their members when they have gone too far, whereupon they readjust their policies.

It's a state of dynamic tension. Customers want only a limited amount of information shared in order to gain service, while the sites want to gather the maximum amount of information to maximize their profits. The give-and-take can be painful, but ultimately it will create new social standards.

Idle Thoughts -- Need to Know

If you were a journalist , how might you describe the proper balance between the public's right to know and the need for national security ? Would it make a diffence if you were not a journalist but a member of law enforcement? Or a school teacher? Or a military person? 

If I were a journalist, the balance between the public's right to know and national security would be a very difficult one. Journalists are trained to be very carefully objective. That is, that they should report the facts which they uncover and let others decide what to do about those facts.

But even a reporter is an American citizen. There is an obligation not to reveal things which will bring harm to our country or to our soldiers. It should be noted that bringing harm to a political party or an elected official is not the same thing is causing harm to the country in general.

Let's look at an actual case. On December 4, 1941 The Chicago Tribune printed the top-secret Rainbow Five Plan in which the US military reported its preparedness for war and what it would take to become fully prepared. Among other revelations, this verbatim report of the plan revealed that the United States would be unable to be fully prepared for war for at least 18 months from beginning to do so. The newspaper published it because it was anti-Roosevelt and wanted to embarrass him politically, showing he was preparing for war, which he had denied. Of course, they also notified Germany and Japan of the total unpreparedness of United States, an act which can only be described as treason, although the United States was not at that moment at war with these individuals, both countries were planning to attack the United States. The Chicago Tribune gave invaluable information and assistance to Adolf Hitler and Gen. Tojo, helping them to kill both Americans and our other allies.

Japan's attack three days later was not influenced by the Rainbow Five Plans revelation because it already been launched. However, postwar documents revealed that Hitler used the secret information to inflict brutal harm on England in a desperate attempt to make that country surrender before America could be ready in the 18 month period. There is no doubt that many lives were lost because of this despicable and treasonous act. Worse, it was done to gain a political advantage against a domestic political enemy, the then sitting president.

In that case journalism clearly went too far. But where to draw the line? That is a question which can only be answered by looking at every individual case. Each case is different, and an individual must use his best judgment in any given case to decide what to report and what to keep secret.

Another example. When Daniel Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers, many called him a traitor. However, what he revealed did not give significant help to our Vietnamese enemies. Instead, it revealed the lies and deceits that had been told to the American people in order to deceive us into supporting the Vietnam War. Ellsberg was acting in a patriotic manner. He did the right thing.

The difference between the two revelations was that one helped our enemies in a significant way. It even helped them to kill American soldiers. In the other case, only our government was embarrassed by it's own bad actions. I see a clear difference between the two situations.

A law enforcement officer would see things differently than a journalist. That is to be expected. One of the primary functions of a journalist in a free society is to restrict the government. As a journalist, it is your job report when the government does bad things. In the two cases I reported above, clearly both journalists thought they were doing the right thing by showing up the hypocrisy of the US president. The difference is that one helped America's enemies kill Americans, the other did not.

The law-enforcement officer, unlike the reporter, has a different job. He is part of the government. He represents the police power of the state. It is in fact, the journalist's job to keep an eye on the police as well as other arms of the government to make sure they behave properly in a free society. The reporter represents the American people. The law-enforcement officer represents the government. Both are supposed to serve the American people, but in different capacities. A reporter should be seeking out government failures, that is beyond an officer's scope of duty.

The schoolteacher also serves the public in a different capacity. Again, it is not the teacher's job to seek out failures in the government. Any teacher should be concerned with educating the children in his or her care, not seeking out corruption.

The military position is even more restricted. Their duty is to serve the government and in so doing, the people. In the military situation, even more so than in a law-enforcement situation, personnel serve in a hierarchical structure of command. All legal orders must be obeyed, and should be obeyed without question. Without this structure a military organization will cease to function effectively. Yet every American soldier takes an oath of loyalty to the Constitution of United States. That is their primary duty. This means that they may be forced to reveal unconstitutional actions of their own government, perhaps even in defiance of their superior officers.

In fact, any of these citizens, whatever their other positions, have the obligations that all citizens have. If we discover government corruption or illegal acts being committed by the government, we should report them. Perhaps the best place to report them is to a reporter. It may not be our job to seek them out, but if they come to our attention the course of performing our normal duties, we cannot simply ignore them. To do so would be to fail in our duty as citizens of a free nation.

The point, then, becomes is the government security classification justified? In the case of Rainbow Five Plan reviewing it was horrifically damaging. In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the classification of been applied for the sole purpose of allowing the president to lie to the American people. In each case, the decision must be made as to whether the classification of secrets was justified or not.

I end by repeating my statement, this judgment must be made by each individual based upon the facts of that particular case.

Idle Thoughts -- Pro What?

Give an account of the most prominent pro-life and pro-chioce arguments. In your view, which is the strongest argument on each side? Why ?

The pro-life movement is different internationally from the pro-life movement in America. The pro-life movement in America focuses almost exclusively upon abortion and occasionally upon assisted suicide. These two items are included in the international definition, but it also extends to quality of life for the severely disabled, the death penalty, and an anti war position.

And now we enter into the strange contradiction of those who say that they are pro-life. They are opposed to abortion and to assisted suicide in the strongest emotional terms. Yet, here in the United States, most of these people are also deeply wedded to the death penalty. They also attended the strongest supporters of military actions which resulted in many deaths.

This is particularly strange because the pro-life movement in other countries, as exemplified by the positions of the Catholic Church, are in favor of all life. That is to say, they are as against the death penalty and wars as they are against abortion

This logical contradiction is easily explained. In American politics the emotional issues are utilized as a substitute for logical thought. Thus, an American who says he is pro-life but believes in the death penalty and in frequent foreign military interventions which result in many deaths sees no contradiction between these two positions because one feels right while the other feels wrong. Logic is not an issue in this case.

Many feel this is a totally irrational position, and they certainly have a point. However, to those were holding these positions there's no hypocrisy or contradiction involved. As far as they are concerned, they are trusting their guts. That is to say, they are trusting that their emotions will give them a more accurate picture of what is right and wrong, of what is moral, than will rational thought. In fact, many of them are offended at the idea that rational thought could yield morality. After all, they believe that atheists must be immoral since in their belief system all morality flows from God and it is clear that that which makes you feel good is that which God approves while that which makes you feel bad is that which God disapproves.

The obvious problem with this is much of what we feel is right or wrong is dependent upon societal prejudices, our parents' beliefs, the way we were raised, and many other factors which are highly subjective.

Now back to the American focus, which is on abortion. In so far as the pro-life movement denies people personal choice it would be called conservative. This is in cases such as assisted suicide and abortion. In cases where this pro-life ethic would conflict with government control as in the case of death penalty or war it becomes liberal.

This explains why in America these items are regarded as isolated from each other. The international movement tends not not care whether these issue is conservative or liberal, it tends to judge each situation upon its own moral values. In America, however, it becomes very important to be a part of a strict and rigid group.

So, American conservatives do not wish to support any liberal positions, therefore they exclude war and the death penalty from their position. American liberals tend to be more accepting of the international view, so tend to keep all points united.

The pro-choice movement insists upon several points which must remain legal:

1. Contraception use must remain available to any sexually active individual regardless of his or her age or the parents' beliefs.

2. Emergency contraception use, which can be regarded as a separate issue from one, because it is possible that an emergency contraceptive utilization might prevent a fertilized egg from implantation, must be available. Many pro-life members consider this to be an act of abortion, and therefore, a form of murder.

3. Abortion during the first two trimesters of pregnancy must be available, safe, and legal.

4. Parenthood for loving couples is a right, regardless of sexual orientation.

The American pro-life movement insists upon the following points:

1. Contraception use is acceptable to some, but not all, pro-lifers under certain circumstances. Some condemn contraceptive use in general. Others believe that contraceptives may be used but only if certain conditions are met. If an individual is a minor, his or her parents must approve the contraceptive use or it must be denied to the children under any circumstances.

2. Individuals who religiously object to the use of contraceptives should not be required to provide them even to their employees through health insurance.

3. No contraceptives should be used which prevent a fertilized egg from implanting. Once a human egg has been fertilized it is a full human being and has all the rights of any other human being. This includes the right not to be killed via abortion.

4. Abortion is murder and both doctors and patients engaging in the act should be arrested and punished for the crime.

5. Children should not be taught about contraceptive methodologies except by their parents. This includes sexually active teenagers. The only truly acceptable method of birth control is absence.

6. Parenthood should be allowed only for loving heterosexual couples in a legally and religiously sanctioned marriage.

7. The government must enforce these rules.

And having given that background, to return to the question about the strengths of the arguments:

Let's take the items one by one...pro-choice.

1. The best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies and all the health problems that result, including abortion, is effective contraception. This is a solution which both sides should be able to approve. It simply makes sense.

2. Preventing a fertilized egg from implanting is a very minor thing. A fertilized egg is simply one single cell. To say that one single cell is the same thing as a baby or an adult human being is absolutely absurd. Millions of fertilized eggs are lost to pregnant women around the world every year, and no one even notices. The argument that it could become a human being, that it has the potential to become a human being, is silly. Any nucleated cell in your body has that potential with the correct scientific advances.

3. The reason for having abortions remaining safe, available, and legal is simple. The idea of the pro-life movement that by banning something legally you can make it go away is nonsense. Through out human history there have been abortions and attempts at abortion. They often involve toxic substances and physical violence to the body. They often result in the death of both mother and child. The idea that you are saving a life by killing both the baby and the mother is patently nonsense. Personally, I find abortion repulsive and wrong. But I find illegal abortion even more repulsive and more wrong. Abortion is not a good thing, but it is a necessary evil which protects young women from harming themselves.

4. Study after study has shown that children raised in a stable marriage between two parents, regardless of the sexual orientation of those parents, are very well-adjusted and live good lives. There is no moral reason to ban same-sex couples from adopting.

Again, the issues one by one… pro life.

1. Parents normally do, and should, have great control over their children's lives. Issues such as contraception certainly are issues in which parents should have a voice. How can the government take away a parent's right to guide his or her children's moral and ethical behavior?

(And my counter argument: However, this control does weaken as the child becomes older and becomes more and more able to make his or her own choices. Furthermore, the government does not allow parents to deny suffering children basic medical care. A balance is required here. Parents are not absolute dictators. They do not own their children. The children also have rights.)

2. The government should not force people to do things which are against their religious beliefs. Employers who are against contraceptives should not be required to provide them through medical insurance.

(My counter argument: public employers who are providing insurance are engaged in public activities. While churches should not be required provide such insurance, people who engage in a secular business should be governed by secular, not religious rules. Also, there are people who religiously believe that other races, usually Blacks, are inferior and should not be granted medical care. If you accept this argument it means that those people, due to their sincere religious belief, should not be required to get insurance to their Black employees, only their White ones. )

3. Once a human egg has been fertilized it has all the potential to become a full human being. Therefore, it is a full human being. We must treat fertilized eggs exactly as we treat other human beings. They have all the rights every human being has.

(My counter argument: Already described above. Simply because the cell has the potential become a full human being means only that it is a single cell that has that potential. Are we to bury our fingernail clippings? When I clip off the bit of skin on my hangnail should we give that a full funeral?  Also, remember my point about a person has a chance to save a refrigerator full of frozen fertilized eggs, perhaps hundreds of individuals, or a single live baby. Anyone who would not choose the baby is some kind of monster. Clearly a baby is much more than any number of fertilized eggs. The argument is ludicrous.)

4. Any fetus at any stage of development, even a simply fertilized egg, is a full human being because it has the potential to grow and become a human being. Therefore it is murder to kill this group of cells. No society can survive which tolerates murder. The government must enforce this law.

(My counterargument: The same as the counterargument above. However, I add the more developed a fetus is the more clearly more closely comes to being human. This is why abortion should be regulated.)

5. Abstinence solves all problems. If teens and adults are abstinent no one gets pregnant early, there's no need for abortion, there are no sexual transmitted diseases, and the world is much healthier place.

(My counterargument: Yes, in an ideal world this would be true. But in this world, the idea that abstinence will solve all problems is either a very bad joke or an absolute refusal to face reality. Sex will happen. Even the Puritans faced this problem, with many marriages occurring because a woman became pregnant. Pretending there is a magic solution to a real problem does not solve the problem.)

6. God intended men and women to marry. This is obvious because only a man and woman can make a new life. Same-sex couples are unnatural and must be banned by any moral society. This is especially true if they are raising children. Immoral people should not be allowed to raise children.

(My counter argument: Homosexual relationships have been observed in nature in hundreds of different species. If you define natural as that which happens in nature, homosexuality is entirely natural.)

7. Governments must have laws or society will fail. Since pro life positions are moral, approved by God and follow natural law, they must be enforced.

(My counter argument: Pro life positions on abortion and contraceptives are not moral, except by the standards of a fanatical minority. Most Americans believe in safe, legally regulated, limited abortions.  The minority must not be allowed to dictate to the majority.)

Best arguments both sides.

Pro-life

Abortion is destroying a potential human life. The bigger the fetus grows, the more complex it becomes, the closer it is to being fully human. Our instinctive revulsion at abortion does have a solid basis.

Pro-choice

Reality is real. Sometimes it is harsh, even brutal. Nevertheless, it is real. Governments must make reasonable adaptations to reality. We do not live in an idealized fantasy world but one that must contain within it many compromises. What we must do, what our governments must do, is the best we can under difficult circumstances.

Idle Thoughts -- Marriage, Holy Matrimony or Civll Contract?

Half the class is gay! So the professor's afraid it will get heated. So now, what is the importance of marriage ? Is it effective ?

One of the things that people tend to forget in the marriage debate is that there are really two different kinds of marriage here in America. Although on the surface they seem much the same, there are fundamental differences that can be very profound.

Back when we were having the first debates about this, I took a position that was unsurprising for a lifelong reader of science fiction. It seemed to me then, and it still seems to me now, that we can resolve this entire issue simply by following the lead presented in many science-fiction stories about the "far future". That is, recognize legal marriage for exactly what it is, a legal contract.

Instead of marriage law comprising an entire separate branch of the judicial system, it should be a subdivision of corporate law. After all, from a legal point of view, marriage is a legal contract. Contract law, not marriage law, should be applied to the breaking up of these very personal corporations.

All of the problems our nation has had over issues of marriage, whether they go back to cross racial marriages, or whether first cousins should be allowed to marry, or the current problem with gay unions, can all be resolved with the simple recognition that marriage as a religious and spiritual union of two people falls directly in the religious area of life. Marriage as a financial contract falls firmly under contract law.

Governments traditionally have been unable to see this in the United States. However, in Europe being married often has had nothing to do with any kind of ceremony but involved simply presenting the right licenses and papers and signing a book. When both parties and the witnesses have signed said book, the marriage was complete.

Those who wished to have a religious ceremony were welcome to do so (except in the atheistic Soviet Union), but the legal act was something that was entirely different.

Again, so much of the confusion arises because we use the word marriage for both acts. We call a legal contract with legal expectations and requirements a marriage. We call a spiritual union between two people who love each other a marriage. At the very least, we should call the one a civil marriage and the other a spiritual marriage.

Many churches, including the Catholic Church, are aware of this differentiation. It is entirely possible for a Catholic to be married for the third or fourth time, legally; while the Church insists that that individual is still married to his or her first spouse, religiously.

So, even if we adopted these differentiations, does marriage work?

I'll answer this in pieces.

Individually.

Marriage works so well for some that they remain married all their lives. I recall one couple who had been married for 50 years being interviewed. Asked how their marriage had lasted so long the husband thought about it for a moment and said, "Well every now and then, for maybe a year or two, we'd just stop talking to each other. Then we 'd get over it."

As strange as it sounds, it obviously worked for them. And that is my point. Marriage is a very personal and individual thing in terms of the spiritual union between two people. What works for one pair may not work for the next. But some marriages are obviously very very successful.

Even a relatively short-term marriage could be seen as individually successful. Some people manage to break up and remain friends. They are even capable of getting together and working for the benefit of their children. I would have to call such a marriage successful, even though it ended in divorce.

Financially.

Similarly, we find many marriages which are successful financially. The couples perform their appropriate duties, mutually supporting each other and their children. They contribute to the economy of the nation and each other's well-being. There may or may not be love in such a marriage. But it is nevertheless successful.

Again, this can happen in long-term or short-term marriages. Of course, there's always a financial disruption in the case of divorce. However, it is entirely possible for both couples to recover from the event successfully, at least financial terms. (Studies do show that men tend to recover more rapidly and thoroughly from a divorce in financial terms than women.)

Socially.

From a societal point of view, the purpose of marriage is to create an effective financial team which also provides effective upbringing for the next generation. It is often commented that any nation's greatest resource is its children. This being so, marriage can clearly provide an excellent foundation for raising that next generation and developing that resource.

This becomes a serious problem in the case of divorce. It has been shown that children of divorce are less emotionally secure than children of a happily married couple.

Importance.

Whatever we think of marriage, I believe it is with us forever. Many species pair bond. Clearly human beings fall within that group. We are not one of the animals that gather together large harems. It may seem that this is contradicted by certain societies in which actual harems are created, but note that only the very wealthiest and most powerful individuals are permitted to do this. In most cases marriage is either between two individuals or a very small group of individuals.

I believe it is quite clear that humanity has evolved to marry.

That is, we generally bond, one partner to another, at least for periods of time. It is been said that humans are a serially monogamous species. Meaning we are monogamous for a period of time with one individual, then break up and find another individual with whom we are monogamous for a time.

The fact that jealousy is a problem even in small group marriages shows the natural state of humanity tends toward pair bonding. Going back to be entirely atheistic and supposedly unemotional Soviet Union, people fell in love and got married. Struggling against this is struggling against the essence of human nature. It is a losing battle.

Speaker for the Gays

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9909314/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history



Comments on a friend's post regarding the movie Ender's Game and the author of the original book.

Excellent article. And I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with Jordan. I suspect that Jordan has not read Speaker for the Dead, which completes the picture. You need to remember that in terms of Enders Game, we believed an alien species has decided to exterminate us! In our terror we strike out against them, not to commit genocide, but to save ourselves. This is made clear in Speaker for the Dead, which also adds an historical perspective to the events of Ender's Game.

Let me add that unlike Hitler's fantasy that the Jews had to be exterminated because they were a threat to humanity, the "Buggers" had brutally attacked us without provocation.

Final note: I like Ender's Game, but Speaker for the Dead is a vastly superior book.

Why We Are Not in "The Shallows".

From the New York Times Book Review -- ...he paired a machine and a human chess player in a collaboration. Like a centaur, the hybrid would have the strength of each of its components: the processing power of a large logic circuit and the intuition of a human brain’s wetware. The result: human-machine teams, even when they didn’t include the best grandmasters or most powerful computers, consistently beat teams composed solely of human grandmasters or superfast machines.

Thompson’s point is that “artificial intelligence” — defined as machines that can think on their own just like or better than humans — is not yet (and may never be) as powerful as “intelligence amplification,” the symbiotic smarts that occur when human cognition is augmented by a close interaction with computers. --

Exactly. Computers are not going to replace us. They will become another part of us. We are going to become something new, humans who are fully computer enabled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/smarter-than-you-think-by-clive-thompson.html?nl=books&adxnnl=1&emc=edit_bk_20131101&adxnnlx=1383332510-XEKPgEnhhvJS5vGvO0o2/g