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Post by Don on Nov 18, 2017 11:48:48 GMT -5
IMO, yes. Theft under cover of "law" is still theft in my eyes. Coercing people under cover of "law" is still the intiation of force in my eyes. I'm a political atheist. I don't believe in collective "rights" anymore. I think both of you are confusing/conflating "ethics" and "morals." They are related but not the same. Britannica doesn't see much of a difference in the two terms. Care to elucidate?
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Post by Optimus on Nov 18, 2017 12:12:48 GMT -5
Oh, well if an author of an opinion blog article on Britannica doesn't see much of a difference, I must be wrong. Without getting into a pedantic debate on the differences between Aristotelian, Kantian, and utilitarian concepts of ethics, I suppose I should've defined my parameters a bit more clearly. And I'm gonna admittedly backpedal on this and say that it's simply my position and not universally accepted (but honest, what idea is universally accepted?). When one talks about a politician's "ethics," it's usually referenced within the context of him/her acting as a politician, so to me that seems to be referencing contextual, " applied ethics;" i.e., the systematized rules/protocols which constrain a person's behavior within a specific context. When one talks about a politician's "morals," to me that addresses the politician's personal beliefs about right or wrong. The distinction can be clearly illustrated with the example of pharmacists and whether they will dispense emergency contraception. A conservative Christian pharmacist working at a public drugstore who believes that abortion is morally wrong and that levonorgestrel (Plan B) is akin to an abortion, might refuse to fill a woman's prescription for Plan B. Her refusal is likely a violation of the ethical code of the company she works as well as the American Pharmacists Association, but it is not a moral violation. It is an unethical action but not an immoral one. Conversely, if she DOES fill the prescription, she would be taking an immoral (for her), but ethical action. No one has to agree with me on this, of course, and I suppose my view on this actually is as pedantic as I'd wanted to avoid, but my ethics professor in undergrad was pretty firm about this distinction, and that was his field of study, so it's always stuck with me. Everyone's free to disagree with me here. It won't hurt my feelings.
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Post by robeiae on Nov 18, 2017 17:49:08 GMT -5
Morality can be the basis for ethical positions/codes (i.e. morality informs ethics), but ethics aren't a basis for morality.
In Opty's example above, the company could have an ethical code that is based on the same moral position held by the pharmacist, so her refusal could be both morally correct (for her) and consistent with the ethical code of her company. But what couldn't happen here is for her company's ethical code to be the basis of the morality of the action. For instance, if she followed the company's ethical code--no matter what it was--in this situation, that would not automatically mean that her action was morality correct for her.
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Post by michaelw on Nov 19, 2017 2:31:35 GMT -5
This was an interesting digression. I've normally seen the ethics/morality distinction as rooted in a distinction between external vs internal sources, which I think jibes pretty well with the pharmacist hypothetical. I might say that a pharmacist's code of ethics is external, and that a person's private view of Plan B is internal in the sense that the immorality of it flows from the person's own conscience. I could definitely see someone who was highly religious taking issue with that, though. Someone might readily argue that both their ethics and morals come from external sources (from God, in the case of the latter). Of course, even something like that seems fraught with difficulties, IMO. If someone told me they were a blank slate and had no sense of whether, say, murder was wrong until they read the Decalogue, I think I'd be skeptical.
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Post by Don on Nov 19, 2017 6:07:28 GMT -5
Okay, I asked about the difference because I didn't understand what it implied in the context of Opty's comment about confusing the two.
Let me see if I understand the difference, now. Based on what I've read here, refusing to register for the draft might be personally moral, but would be an unethical act. Refusal to pay taxes to fund the empire's war machine could be personally moral, bout would be an unethical act.
"Just following orders" is ethical, but not necessarily moral. Those convicted at Nuremberg weren't convicted for ethical, but moral, violations.
So ethics is an excuse to substitute some authority's moral judgement for one's own.
Have I got it right now?
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Post by Amadan on Nov 19, 2017 9:04:58 GMT -5
Okay, I asked about the difference because I didn't understand what it implied in the context of Opty's comment about confusing the two. Let me see if I understand the difference, now. Based on what I've read here, refusing to register for the draft might be personally moral, but would be an unethical act. Refusal to pay taxes to fund the empire's war machine could be personally moral, bout would be an unethical act. "Just following orders" is ethical, but not necessarily moral. Those convicted at Nuremberg weren't convicted for ethical, but moral, violations. So ethics is an excuse to substitute some authority's moral judgement for one's own. Have I got it right now? No, and you know you haven't, you've just constructed a straw man to hammer your favorite nail again. Come on, Don. You are smart enough to engage intelligently in a discussion that actually has the potential of going beyond "Gummint bad, sheeple baaaah!"
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Post by Don on Nov 19, 2017 20:46:05 GMT -5
Okay, I asked about the difference because I didn't understand what it implied in the context of Opty's comment about confusing the two. Let me see if I understand the difference, now. Based on what I've read here, refusing to register for the draft might be personally moral, but would be an unethical act. Refusal to pay taxes to fund the empire's war machine could be personally moral, bout would be an unethical act. "Just following orders" is ethical, but not necessarily moral. Those convicted at Nuremberg weren't convicted for ethical, but moral, violations. So ethics is an excuse to substitute some authority's moral judgement for one's own. Have I got it right now? No, and you know you haven't, you've just constructed a straw man to hammer your favorite nail again. Come on, Don. You are smart enough to engage intelligently in a discussion that actually has the potential of going beyond "Gummint bad, sheeple baaaah!" How so? In what substantive way do my examples differ from opty's birth control example and rob's analysis? Apparently, ethics are top-down, or collective, and morals are individualistic. In the examples given, collective ethics supposedly trump individual moral choices. That's pretty clearly substituting some authority's moral judgement for one's own. What have I got wrong?
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Post by robeiae on Nov 20, 2017 8:30:18 GMT -5
Okay, I asked about the difference because I didn't understand what it implied in the context of Opty's comment about confusing the two. Let me see if I understand the difference, now. Based on what I've read here, refusing to register for the draft might be personally moral, but would be an unethical act. Refusal to pay taxes to fund the empire's war machine could be personally moral, bout would be an unethical act. "Just following orders" is ethical, but not necessarily moral. Those convicted at Nuremberg weren't convicted for ethical, but moral, violations. So ethics is an excuse to substitute some authority's moral judgement for one's own. Have I got it right now? No. Refusing to register for the draft could be the result of one's personal morality, for sure. And one could argue that everyone else should follow suit (not register for the draft) because x, y, and z, thus making it an ethical choice for others. But not registering would not be unethical, it would be illegal. Laws are not ethical standards. The tax example follows the same course.
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Post by Amadan on Nov 20, 2017 10:04:08 GMT -5
Law != morality, but arbitrarily breaking any law you don't personally agree with doesn't make you a highly moral individualist, it makes you a narcissist.
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