On Tuesday 24 May 2005 22:26, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > "Absolute Ethics" does not exist. > > Hmmm... interesting statement. Would you approve of an Ethical system in > which Murder was ethical? Or that theft (real world theft, not "theft" of > copyrighted material) was? After all, absolute ethics does not exist. > > Absolute ethics is a system of ethics that is deduced from logic and from > basic, undisputable facts of existence. Whatever it is, saying it does not > exists, is saying that logic is impotent. While not everything can be > conclusively deduced from logic, many things can, and even ethics were > demonstrated to be. Logic works from a set of premises. Different premises result in different conclusions using the same rules of logic. That doesn't make logic impotent.
Unfortunately there's no absolute, universally accepted set of ethics premises. People disagree, e.g., over God's existence, nature and commandments to humanity. So there's no absolute ethics either. Your system may be 'absolute', but a lot of other people still don't accept it and probably call their own system absolute, too. Everyone agrees that murder is unethical - that's practically the definition of the word. It's just that different people have different rules for determining when a killing is murder, and when it's an allowed action - an execution, perhaps, or killing out of mercy, in self-defense, in war, in revenge, in execution of your god's orders, while being insane and not answerable for your actions, to save another's life, etc etc. > If 20% or possibly more of Israelis enjoy downloading or sharing media > files, doesn't it make sense to assume it is not really a crime? What's enjoyment have to do with it? Enjoyment doesn't prove that something is legal _or_ that it is ethical. The lack of others' suffering is what proves the latter, and only the law books can prove the former. -- Dan Armak Gentoo Linux developer (KDE) Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951
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