All Morals & Ethics are Biased, Self-Serving - Exhibit A - The Brahmin & the Royal

[Ramaraksha]

As Stanley Milgram has shown us, we humans are capable of some pretty disgusting and despicable acts
I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving
I present Exhibit A - and I will have a few more as we go on
Take Caste - Everyone agrees that it is pure evil, people should not be set apart that way
At the highest level in Caste are the Brahmins - and what did they do to deserve this level? - well, they were born in the right family!
That's it!
But wait, let's do a simple word change and see what happens
Change Brahmin to Royalty and now suddenly there is an about-face
The Royals are given riches, praised, idolized, looked up to & what have they done to deserve all this? Well, they were born in the right family!
They won the birth lottery!
That's it!
But contrast the treatment of these two - one is abused, called evil, wrong while the other is praised sky-high, given riches to live the easy good life!
A simple change in a word is all that it took for even the best of minds to be rendered blind!
huh?
.
But then when one hears Caste the image is of dark-skinned far-away poor people following a non-Abrahamic religion
Whereas Royalty conjures up the image of us, white people following an Abrahamic religion
Might Makes Right - not morals, principles or ethics
.
BTW other religions have caste as well, they just don't call it that
Jews are and were the lower castes for centuries - condemned for simply being Jews
Gypsies in Europe - same thing, Blacks here in the US
Muslims have lower "castes" - Ahmadiyas, Hazaras - deemed not Muslim enough, hated and discriminated

 

[pood]

As Stanley Milgram has shown us, we humans are capable of some pretty disgusting and despicable acts
I do believe all morals, principles and ethics are subjective, biased and self-serving
I present Exhibit A - and I will have a few more as we go on
Take Caste - Everyone agrees that it is pure evil, people should not be set apart that way
At the highest level in Caste are the Brahmins - and what did they do to deserve this level? - well, they were born in the right family!
That's it!
But wait, let's do a simple word change and see what happens
Change Brahmin to Royalty and now suddenly there is an about-face
The Royals are given riches, praised, idolized, looked up to & what have they done to deserve all this? Well, they were born in the right family!
They won the birth lottery!
That's it!
But contrast the treatment of these two - one is abused, called evil, wrong while the other is praised sky-high, given riches to live the easy good life!
A simple change in a word is all that it took for even the best of minds to be rendered blind!
huh?
.

Don’t follow you. I, and most people outside of deluded suckers, have no use for either Brahmins or royalty. You may have noticed that most royal families have lost their powers in the last couple of centuries and are now mainly just cultural props?

 

[steve_bank]

Morality is whatever the social consensus says it is.

When I was born in 1951 discrimination against blacks and gays were encoded in laws.

Now it is not. The majority consensus channeled. There is still minority dissent.


The old Japanese public ritual suicide.

 

[BH]

Long ago people in leadership knew there was no way for everyone to have everything those at the top had.

So they had to come up with excuses why they were able to enjoy abundance and not others.

In Europe, it was the fates that decided what ones station was in life, and later it was attributed to God. However, in Christian theology at least the poor person's soul was just as important as the rich or noble person's soul and a basic level of decency was expected to be shown to everyone even if the ideal was not followed.

To me, the Hindu version is the cruelest. Those on the lower end of the classes deserved it for what they did in the past life. It gave a rationale to why people were on the bottom, but it also gave people higher up reason to not have any empathy for them though from what I understand of Hinduism the higher classes were not supposed to make things any worse for their social lowers on purpose.

What is needed is just honesty. Not everyone can have everything. Either they just don't have the luck or circumstances, or their brain just may not fizz in such a way to have the skills to get it and also realize we are going to take care of our own first and make sure our little ones are kept in good shape and standing. Yes, people screw up, do illegal or bad things that ruin their chances, But even if no one ever fucked up and by some miracle everyone had in demand highest abilities and skills there still would not be enough high paying or prestigious jobs to go around for everyone to have one.

 

[bilby]

But even if no one ever fucked up and by some miracle everyone had in demand highest abilities and skills there still would not be enough high paying or prestigious jobs to go around for everyone to have one.

By medieval standards, there are, and we are fairly close to giving such pay and prestige to everybody.

Certainly as a society we can (in the developed world) easily afford for every person to live in a comfortable home with heating in winter and airconditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry.

If that doesn't strike you as wealth or prestige, then you haven't grasped what life was like for most of history (and still is like for many in the developing world).

In the Roman and medieval periods, the idea that everyone could live with such security and wealth was an impossible dream. Today, it's easily affordable and achievable, but for the handful of fuckwits who didn't get the memo and who still think that amassing billions in personal wealth is a better idea than sharing the wealth such that everyone has a decent basic living, before we allow a handful of prestigious guys to become hyper-rich.

 

[BH]

I agree with you on the basics of lufe but dont think we can give everyone a billionaire level life standard. You are right it is wrong and sad the basics are not being met.

 

[bilby]

I don't think it is in any way a good thing to give anyone a billionaire life standard.

I can't see that there's any difference between the life of a billionaire and that of a person with a few tens of millions, other than that a billionaire has disproportionate political influence.

Giving a small number of people disproportionate political influence is, IMO, a very bad thing.

What can a billionaire do, that a person with (say) $50 million cannot do?

All of the answers I can come up with are things that IMO are the proper provenance of democratically accountable government, and should not be permitted to private individuals who lack accountability for any widespread harm their actions cause to the population at large.

 

[bilby]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

 

[pood]

“We can gave democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” — Louis D. Brandeis

And now, because of a bunch of knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, lip-drooling, pig-ignorant redneck morons in the red states, many of whom don’t have a proper pot to piss in, Trump and Musk are dismantling democracy and completing the process of ripping off the many to benefit the few. I hope you are happy, you yammering MAGGOT morons.

 

[Jarhyn]

Morality is whatever the social consensus says it is.

When I was born in 1951 discrimination against blacks and gays were encoded in laws.

Now it is not. The majority consensus channeled. There is still minority dissent.


The old Japanese public ritual suicide.

Common morality maybe. Actual ethics? Not so much.

Ethics is what you get when you have a model for responsibility, combined with a moral rule.

Whether there is a solution to the is/ought problem determines whether ethics discusses something that is generally/objectively true, or whether it discusses something that is only based on individual arbitrary statements.

 

[steve_bank]

I disagree Jaryn.

Unless you claim a source of an absolute morality as do Christians, then morality and ethics's are a social consensus.

One way I heard it described is morality is a code of behavior, ethics is how you adhere to the moral code.

In the old Japanese culture it was moral for your superior as a Samurai to order you to commit s. It would be unethical for you as a subordinate Samurai to refuse.

 

[Bronzeage]

Ethics and morality exist to preserve the group. This was a lot simpler when the group was a lot smaller. The foundation of all morality is two simple rules, don't kill people in your group and don't steal stuff from people in your group. Murder and theft still happens in the group, but the group will figure out how to deal with it. With these two rules, a person doesn't have to constantly guard their stuff and can fall asleep without fear of being clubbed and robbed by the person next to you.

After that, it's just a matter of definitions. Who is in your group? What exactly is someone else's stuff? The problem we face today is the group is very large. Some people think it's the entire world, but we are always classifying someone as a different group, just so we can kill them without upsetting people in our own group.

The definitions get very complicated and after multiple generations, some of them don't really apply as well as once, but it's difficult to change these things. We look at other cultures and see their archaic rules as weird of barbaric, but every rule was put in place to address a problem. That problem may not have arisen for the past several thousand years, but we're still applying the solution.

 

[Jarhyn]

I disagree Jaryn.

Unless you claim a source of an absolute morality as do Christians, then morality and ethics's are a social consensus.

One way I heard it described is morality is a code of behavior, ethics is how you adhere to the moral code.

In the old Japanese culture it was moral for your superior as a Samurai to order you to commit s. It would be unethical for you as a subordinate Samurai to refuse.

You can disagree all you want, it doesn't make you right. Either there are generalizable concepts about goals and goal oriented behavior or there arent, and it swings entirely on whether there is a solution to the is/ought problem.

It's not about "an absolute source" so much as "a true fact" existing "about the class" in the same way that it is a true fact about all two's compliment binary numbers that end with 0 mod 2, are zero.

It's a question of math.

You are saying no, so I would like you to show me your proof, please.

 

[Bomb#20]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

Why do you need a computer when what you're going to do with it is spray hate at a minority group and mind viruses of zero-sum-game economic idiocy at impressionable host brains? Clearly you don't need one, so clearly you should not be allowed to have one, since clearly what a person is allowed to have should be determined by what his self-appointed betters decide he needs.

 

[Bomb#20]

By medieval standards, there are, and we are fairly close to giving such pay and prestige to everybody.

Certainly as a society we can (in the developed world) easily afford for every person to live in a comfortable home with heating in winter and airconditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry.

If that doesn't strike you as wealth or prestige, then you haven't grasped what life was like for most of history (and still is like for many in the developing world).

In the Roman and medieval periods, the idea that everyone could live with such security and wealth was an impossible dream. Today, it's easily affordable and achievable, but for the handful of <recommended hatred targets> who didn't get the memo and who still think that amassing billions in personal wealth is a better idea than sharing the wealth such that everyone has a decent basic living, before we allow a handful of prestigious guys to become hyper-rich.

The zero-sum-game thinking, it burns! Does this look to you like a list of countries making progress toward providing everyone a comfortable home with heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry?

Show

Afghanistan
Angola
Benin
Bhutan
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Congo, Democratic Republic of the
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Haiti
Kiribati
Laos
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Maldives
Mozambique
Myanmar
Nepal
North Korea
Samoa
Sao Tome and Principe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Solomon Islands
Somalia
South Sudan
Sudan
Syria
Tanzania
Timor-Leste
Togo
Tuvalu
Uganda
Vanuatu
Yemen
Zambia
Zimbabwe

 

[bilby]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

Why do you need a computer when what you're going to do with it is spray hate at a minority group and mind viruses of zero-sum-game economic idiocy at impressionable host brains? Clearly you don't need one, so clearly you should not be allowed to have one, since clearly what a person is allowed to have should be determined by what his self-appointed betters decide he needs.

It wasn't a rhetorical question.

I think the answer is "in order to obtain political power, despite the efforts made over the last few centuries to dismantle aristocracy and replace it with rrpresentative democracy".

But I am keen to know ehether there are other, less ignoble, benefits to a person that arise due to having many thousands of times the wealth needed to enjoy pretty much anything our society can provide.

 

[bilby]

Does this look to you like a list of countries making progress toward providing everyone a comfortable home with heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry?

Does this look to you like a claim about any of those countries?

Certainly as a society we can (in the developed world) easily afford for every person to live in a comfortable home with heating in winter and airconditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry.

 

[bilby]

The zero-sum-game thinking, it burns!

I am not engaged in zero-sum-game thinking. Your uncharitable assumptions about what people you disagree with are thinking are not necessarily correct.

 

[pood]

Does this look to you like a list of countries making progress toward providing everyone a comfortable home with heating in winter and air conditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry?

Does this look to you like a claim about any of those countries?

Certainly as a society we can (in the developed world) easily afford for every person to live in a comfortable home with heating in winter and airconditioning in summer, and with enough food that they need never go to bed hungry.

I was gong to say that somehow your point whizzed over his head, but figured I’d leave it to you.

 

[The AntiChris]

Bear in mind that Elon Musk has a personal wealth sufficient to create about 8,000 such people, with that $50 million lifestyle.

Why does anyone need eight thousand times as much money as is necessary to have pretty much any experience it is possible to have?

Why do you need a computer when what you're going to do with it is spray hate at a minority group and mind viruses of zero-sum-game economic idiocy at impressionable host brains? Clearly you don't need one, so clearly you should not be allowed to have one, since clearly what a person is allowed to have should be determined by what his self-appointed betters decide he needs.

Just a tad uncharitable.