Right And Good

Perhaps you can help us figure out how to construct SchoolsForCivilization. Isn't it much better to build a civilized alternative than to just complain?

Obviously, yes

I have not been there yet (SchoolsForCivilization), but if we cannot learn the lessons of history because refuse to perceive where we are now and what we are really doing now without buttering our behviour up as a self righteous fight against evil.

Flavours Evil (depends on fashion):

Terrorism, barabarity, communism, democracy, red menace, tyranny, zionism, anti-Semitism, Semitism, feminism, capitalism, minimalism, drugs, sex, heathenism, Catholicism, big goverment, small government, ..... ) There is little chance of SchoolsForCivilization. Humans do not keep inventing new ways to stuff things up we keep recycling the old ones.

So you'd rather throw up your hands in despair? Then why bother to write this? Don't you hope to do some good by your complaint? Or are you just trying to discourage the rest of us who still hope to improve things?

Is it better to be an irrational fanatic devoted (hopefully) to the right cause (the right cause being the one which generates good results, not the one with the best "intentions"), or a rational and lucid cynic steeped in despair? Even if you favour one or the other, I hope you'll see there's room for disagreement.

right cause? good results? Ahem? Wot? Objective definitions, please.

Good is that which has positive value in itself. Right is that which achieves good. Is it good to lie? No. Is it right to lie in order to prevent a death? Yes. It's just the typical distinction between means and ends. Having two separate words for "positive" merely allows you to talk about a situation that's simultaneously means and ends.

So are the goals of SchoolsForCivilization good? Yes. Would such a movement ever actually realize them ... ? And wasting your time on a movement that's never going to achieve anything isn't right.

Okay, I'll buy right as defined in terms of good, but now we need a usable definition for good, as "positive value in itself," while it sounds closer, still admits of too much subjective interpretation.

I won't argue that the definition should be junked, but it's incomplete, in that value is always value to someone or something or someones or somethings, and the someones having that value appreciation can't be omitted. Value for chickens doesn't help us much, and value for humans may be insufficient in scope. How can we clean that up?

Richard, you've gotten distracted. Can we continue?

Sorry. <grin> You did a pretty good job explaining 'value'.

As for the 'good', that's a hard problem. The good is defined in many different ways which can be categorized as either morality or ethics. Human rights is a type of morality. Professional ethics is ethics. Rationalized self-interest is individual ethics.

Different moralities and ethics define different contexts in which one can determine what is good. They can and do conflict with each other and there doesn't seem to be any a priori way to resolve the conflicts.

So "the good" is a somewhat arcane and obsolete concept, still useful if you don't want to go into details. Saying that something is not good means something along the lines of "under no reasonable morality or ethics is X permitted".

Okay ... you're promoting the SchoolsForCivilization as "good" so let us address that context. Presumably there is some group (collection?) of entities which will derive benefit. Let's see if there's a workable meaning of "good" that describes that.

We can't afford to get fuzzy with "good" because otherwise you lose any reference point for "bad", and "bad" seems to be something worth doing battle over (at least verbally). I'm sure you can see how silly it would sound to have a clear vision of what's "evil" but no equally clear vision of "good" - it leads to arguments that end in "Why is that evil?" |-| "Because it's not good." |-| "What do you mean 'good'?" |-| "Well, it's complicated ..."

Let us then be diligent in our address of "what is 'good'?" so we at least have a foundation for those inevitable good/evil discussions.

I'm not actually promoting SchoolsForCivilization as good, that was someone else. I merely assume it on the grounds that it's plausible at first glance, and it doesn't seem like it would be interesting to argue they're not good.

I'd also like to note that in normal usage 'good' is fuzzier than 'evil'. Evil is an extreme concept, whereas 'good' includes almost everything between the extremes. OTOH, in moral philosophy it seems like 'the good' might be as extreme as as evil.

So. There are at least two different types of 'good' which SchoolsForCivilization might promote. The first is human rights, which derive from human morality. The second is first world ethics.

Well, okay. Rats. This leaves us with a rather huge generality. Two, actually. It must be frustrating to know what you mean but be unable to articulate it. I will grant that we're not going to get an absolute good, but so far we have nothing we can get our teeth on.

Isn't there some irreducible minimum thing (or set) one can point to, and say "this is the most basic good; whatever forwards this may be considered good" -- surely it's not some unknowable thing?

Both ethics and morality are defined over groups. The smaller groups are embedded within larger groups so both moralities and ethics admit a nesting relation which creates a partially-ordered set. For example,

Individual ethics > doctor ethics > professional ethics > human ethics

The first talks about how you deal with everyone else as a person. The second how you deal with patients and nurses as a doctor. The third how you deal with clients as a professional. The last how you deal with non-humans as a human.

For morality, you also have such a relation.

self-morality > commune morality > human rights

The first talks about how you should deal with other members of the group if they are all clones of you (an interesting intellectual game). The second how you should deal with other members of your commune. The third with how you should deal with fellow human beings.

Now, you can probably come up with a set of good/evil things by taking the intersection of all ethics and moralities relevant to a person but it will be an artificial construction. If you don't do that, then the most you can say is that the more people (or less knowledge about the particularities of the people involved) is involved in a morality, the more fundamental it is. So human rights is more fundamental than commune morality which is more fundamental than self-morality. A very interesting is whether given two self-consistent non-empty moralities, there exist a third such morality that is more fundamental to both of them. The relation between different ethics is much more complex. For example, there would be little problem in being cruel to animals while being an upstanding doctor. And given that, it's difficult to compare unmatched ethics and moralities (where human rights and human ethics are matched).

Uhhm, okay. Going for a really compact definition of "good" here, and clearly that's not it. It seems that for most definitions of "bad" one finds that "bad" to a greater or lesser degree is that which causes death (or "ends life"), so it would seem to follow that the most basic "good" would be "life" or "being alive" or some similar beginning.

Morality and Ethics would then have to be resolved, at some level, in terms of "life" (or "being alive" [or ...]). Even "interactions of 'life' with 'life' which result in ... [something]" need this as an element. The complexity of the system is understood to be non-trivial, but I think "being alive" (even on some graduated scale) is central to what "good" is.

If you examine the number and variety of situations in which people would rather die than continue existing under the conditions they do, you should quickly get the feeling that putting "being alive" at the center of things will cause you to have to add epicycles to make anything work out. As it happens, being alive is perfectly fine at the periphery since almost any worthwhile activity requires you to be alive to cause it, experience it, or appreciate it.

Richard, I'll be back to continue this (busy for a couple days); some insensitive PHB wants me to write actual code. The nerve! -- gh

Continued was not this.