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attila77 is offline attila77
2009-07-08 , 21:00
Posts: 3,319 | Thanked: 5,610 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Finland
#41
Originally Posted by fms View Post
While slave holders have not considered slaves people, we do: slaves pretty much abided by social taboos, so there is no reason to not consider them people. Thus, what slave holders did to their slaves violated taboos and made them evil, no matter what slave holders themselves thought.
Hey, by your logic, a slave holder is just a CEO of his (slave) enterprise (perfectly legal in some historic periods) and thus cannot be evil. How about Nero, Louis XIV or any Absolute ? Were they violating taboos ? They were governments technically (even if one-man), so that's ok, too, no evil there ? Or are current day goverments and companies run by aliens and/or robots without an actual human 'calling the shots' ?

But, please, do continue trying to find holes in my logic
The biggest hole is that we are unable to see what taboos we are breaking TODAY as we clearly don't think we're breaking them (just like you say for slave owners). Our own social absurdities will become universally declared as such only when a sufficient social/historical distance (=change) is established. Will it be considered decadent that we have people whom we pay just to laugh at them ? Or that wealth defines how good of a health care you can get ? Or that we have death penalties in many states ? Or that we (even if reluctantly) support 'as a necessity' actions that result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people ? Only time will tell.
 
fms is offline fms
2009-07-08 , 21:22
Posts: 1,418 | Thanked: 1,541 times | Joined on Feb 2008
#42
Originally Posted by attila77 View Post
a slave holder is just a CEO of his (slave) enterprise (perfectly legal in some historic periods) and thus cannot be evil.
No. I never said or implied so. A slave holder is just a slave holder, a person. The only entities I ever mentioned in this thread were governments and corporations. Both are well defined legal entities, and your slave holder is neither. Furthermore, a corporate CEO is also a person and bears moral responsibility for his actions, while corporation (not being a person) does not.

The biggest hole is that we are unable to see what taboos we are breaking TODAY as we clearly don't think we're breaking them (just like you say for slave owners).
Actually, we are able to see the taboos we are breaking. People kill each other, steal, lie, break vows, make profit at the cost of making other people miserable. These are all basic things that, if committed at a large scale, will cause the society to crumble. Once again, I would like to point out that I do not consider the latest legal fads, such as "stealing copyrighted content" or "using politically incorrect words" as essential. These are not violations that would make you "evil" from the ethical point of view.
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attila77 is offline attila77
2009-07-08 , 22:57
Posts: 3,319 | Thanked: 5,610 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Finland
#43
Originally Posted by fms View Post
No. I never said or implied so. A slave holder is just a slave holder, a person. The only entities I ever mentioned in this thread were governments and corporations. Both are well defined legal entities, and your slave holder is neither. Furthermore, a corporate CEO is also a person and bears moral responsibility for his actions, while corporation (not being a person) does not.
Okay, I think we have arrived to the point when we're drowning each other in terminology. When people say 'the government of X is evil' they DO refer the persons that are in charge of the actions of that legal entity. Might not be linguistically correct, but it's easier to refer to the entity than start reciting names of the CEO, it's backers, board of directors, etc.

Actually, we are able to see the taboos we are breaking. People kill each other, steal, lie, break vows, make profit at the cost of making other people miserable. These are all basic things that, if committed at a large scale, will cause the society to crumble.
No, we only see those as deviations from our 'standards' and those do not define whether that deviation will be judged as positive or negative from a historical distance. Rosa Parks was also breaking a taboo, ditto for abolition - lot of people DID think "if committed at a large scale, will cause the society to crumble".
 
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Texrat is offline Texrat
2009-07-09 , 00:34
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#44
Originally Posted by fms View Post
If you mean so called "intellectual property theft", it does not fall under the original definition of theft, as the victim is not losing any tangible goods. There is absolutely no reason why it should fall under the "do not steal" taboo, whatever record companies say.
That's an invalid opinion made with total disregard for the history and usefulness of IP.

Without IP, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now over the invention called the internet via inventions such as PCs and cell phones.

It's ironic (and naive) how people today demand the fruit, but hate the tree.
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Texrat is offline Texrat
2009-07-09 , 00:35
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#45
Originally Posted by fms View Post
But, please, do continue trying to find holes in my logic
Who has to try?

The "logical" limb you've climbed out onto is thin and shaky.
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ColdFusion is offline ColdFusion
2009-07-09 , 06:30
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#46
Originally Posted by fms View Post
Thus, what slave holders did to their slaves violated taboos and made them evil, no matter what slave holders themselves thought.
By our standards. At their time it was perfectly OK and even encouraged by legislations. So the taboos HAVE changed, can you understand that? And that's just one example. Homosexuality and paedophilia have constantly gone up and down the moral ladder through history. We laugh at islamist fundamentalists that they are living in a society like in the middle ages, because that's how people for the most part actually LIVED in the middle ages.

Are you just trolling or what?

The debate over IP is very big to discuss it alongside the moral discussion here. The usefulness of patents and IP has decreased because it has departed from the idea to "spur innovation" and is used as a tool to secure monopolies. We have to find some other way to spur innovation that doesn't have profit as a goal.
 
fms is offline fms
2009-07-09 , 06:36
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#47
Originally Posted by ColdFusion View Post
By our standards. At their time it was perfectly OK and even encouraged by legislations.
No. Even by their standards it was not ok. They knew it too, that is why they insisted on labeling slaves as something less than human.
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fms is offline fms
2009-07-09 , 06:43
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#48
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
That's an invalid opinion made with total disregard for the history and usefulness of IP. Without IP, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now over the invention called the internet via inventions such as PCs and cell phones.
You are mistaking legal taboos for ethical ones. The concept of intellectual property is quite recent one and it has no relation to the traditional set of social taboos. It does not matter how useful intellectual property is for certain groups or industries in the frame of this discussion.
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ColdFusion is offline ColdFusion
2009-07-09 , 07:44
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#49
Originally Posted by fms View Post
No. Even by their standards it was not ok. They knew it too, that is why they insisted on labeling slaves as something less than human.
That is simply not true. In the colonial US even the church said that it was normal. Even freed slaves aspired to become slave-holders themselves.

Slavery, not equal human rights, is in the core of humanity.
Nearly all of the stable societies of the past were built and functioned with slavery.

Only when it became more cheap and efficient to use machines was slavery abolished. Of course even today not everywhere it is cheap and efficient so slavery continuous in the form of sweatshops and blood diamonds and so on.
 
fms is offline fms
2009-07-09 , 07:59
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#50
Originally Posted by ColdFusion View Post
That is simply not true. In the colonial US even the church said that it was normal. Even freed slaves aspired to become slave-holders themselves.
Outside of the colonial US though, the opinion has been somewhat different, hasn't it? Just because you bend your ethical standards to help your current business model, does not mean they become invalid.

Slavery, not equal human rights, is in the core of humanity. Nearly all of the stable societies of the past were built and functioned with slavery.
Who told you that? Any references?
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