Ethics – Page 2 – Harmonia Philosophica

The Boeing case: Not Boeing’s fault! It is our ethics!

Last week several emails exchanged between Boeing employees were revealed, in which those employees seemed to know about the problems of the 737 MAX airplane and even ridicule the authorities and the airlines for believing them that there were no problems. The investigation is ongoing.
One cannot of course know from now the result of the investigation. However the comment I would like to make has nothing to do with that per se. What I would like to comment is the all increasing cases of corporate scandals at the highest levels and of the highest severity, severity which only seems to increase as time passes.

The Enron case…

The mortgages scandal…

Apple and sweatshops in China…

Cambridge Analytica…

Boeing and the 737 MAX…

More and more we are being held witness to grand corporations breaking the law or bending it to a point where lives, the economy at a large scale or basic human rights are at stake.

Why does this happen?

Viewing this as a result of ad hoc errors, miscalculations, or even one-time fraudulent behavior by specific “bad” people who are not the norm simply won’t do it. No, the exceptions are becoming more and more and we have to consider whether the rule we believe that applies truly holds. Are big corporations really ethical? CAN they be ethical in a place where profit is the one and only goal?

The answer is a simple NO.

And this answer also offers an insight on WHY those incidents take place, while offering us a glimpse to the future as well. The western man’s dream is that of making money. We have for a long time now lost connection with basic spirituality. We have lost touch with those principles which actually make us humans and have relied on an arbitrary tool (money) to define our happiness. This may sound corny, but it is true.

Trading was thought of as an inferior activity in ancient Greece. Traders were treated as inferior people during the era where philosophy flourished. Answering the metaphysical questions of humanity seemed more important than selling things and generating profit for Aristotle and Plato. Can you blame them? The Byzantine Empire also held trade in low esteem; actually charging for interest was not allowed back then.

And then came Protestantism. And then people started trading. And then people started making money. And from that point onward, nothing else mattered. I am not blaming Protestantism for Boeing of course. If it wasn’t that, it would any other religious movement that would be used by people to make an excuse for their need to wealth and power, instead of the need of the cosmos for us to stay humble and accepting (Christian values).

Related article: The source of Ethics

We want control and power. We wish for more when we have enough. And after we get it, we want even more. Greediness and arrogance is what characterizes us. And there is no end in the tunnel. That is why no matter how successful one company is, it does not seem to have enough. And there is no way to get more and more by legal means. There is always a limit to how much money a company can earn in a regulated environment, let alone an environment with ethical values (we don’t such environment, just saying). So it is logical and expected that big companies tried to find a way to circumvent rules and regulations to achieve their (almost by definition) un-achievable goals.

Who sets these goals?
Society.
Who forms society?
You. The man next to you. Everyone.

No, again I am not saying that you and me are to be blamed for critical flaws that Boeing hid from the authorities. Just should be served in that case. However everyone is to blame for the way everyone puts money and profits in the throne of the King. If everyone sees success in profits and failure is lack of them, then it is only logical that companies would try to get more of them.

Wait a minute! you could say. When we celebrate successful companies for having profits, we do so with the assumption that the profits would be made legally! No one approves of a company breaking the law or making profits the wrong way!

But this is what is great here! Most of the above cases were conducted either legally (e.g. Cambridge Analytica) or on the verge of the boundary between legal and illegal (e.g. the mortgages scandal or Apple and its factories in China)! If Apple has factories with people working under gruesome conditions in a country which allows such conditions, is that illegal? If a bank provides mortgages to people who cannot repay but everything is approved as per the bank processes and the regulators say nothing and then others are buying derivatives based on those mortgages isn’t the whole system to blame? If the FAA approved the 737 MAX is it Boeing to blame? If the airlines approved the fact that no training was needed for this completely new plane, is it Boeing to blame? Or also the whole culture of “Profit is the King”?

So no, the legal or illegal character of the actions is not what those scandals have in common. Law can be circumvented or changed (for better or worse). There is something much fundamental and much darker lurking in the depths of our degraded era…

How could an airline consider not having any training in simulators for a plane with such changes, only because there didn’t want to pay for this training? How could people profit on loans on homeless people only to earn some more money? How could the European regulator blindly trust the FAA for a new plane which would carry lives in the sky?

Can you start seeing that something lurking in the dark taking shape?
Performing such actions and at that level, especially actions which affect human lives and the basic human rights, is conducted not only because either the law or the regulatory authorities processes have holes. The biggest cause for all of the above, is the big holes we have in our ethical foundations. Because no matter how many excuses a company or a person can find based on the law or the regulations, there are would be no excuses if there existed a solid ethical foundation to which everyone should comply with. Even cases which were clearly illegal from the first minute and which resulted in people getting in prison (as in the Enron case), would be completely avoidable if ethics were instilled in society as a whole. If the King was declared naked.

No, PROFIT is not the ultimate goal!

Do that sound corny? Yes. And I do not care. It is ethics we need. Not profits. The more we look only at those the more such scandals as the above will increase and increase with no end in sight. Why stop at 10 billion dollars profit when you can make 20? Why stop at 20 when you can make 50?

Who could provide this ethical foundation?

Well, for this we can re-iterate the beginning of this article…

“Trading was thought of as an inferior activity in ancient Greece”…

Do you see now?

We have lost our grasp of what is right and what is wrong. We have broken our moral compass (God) a long time ago. And now we are just wandering with no goal except the goals we set…

And still…

That dark shape in the dark is afraid…

Of us listening to the voice we used to listen to…

“Thou shalt not lie”…

Against Abortions – Summary of arguments

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

Modern civilization is the civilization of “rights”. And this entails the non-existence of any “obligations”. The abortions case is the best example illustrating such a way of thinking.

Abortions are seen today as a “human right”. Never before had anything so dark been painted with so glorious colors. Never before had such an unethical action been characterized as exactly the opposite (i.e. ethical).

In short, abortion is another word for saying “kill a baby in the womb”.
There is no debate for that. It is what it is. Even the hardest of proponents of abortions cannot really refute this self-evident truth. There is a baby in the womb and then a doctor (although I would really be hesitant to call someone who does something like that a “doctor”) comes, tears the baby in pieces and then there is no baby. As simple as that. In some other cases, as it was presented during the Planned Parenthood trial in 2019, the baby is taken out of the womb alive and left out to simply die.

So again: Abortion is another word for saying “kill a baby in the womb”.

The question is: Could that be a “right” of someone today?

Modern death-loving civilization says yes. Because modern civilization is a civilization without Christianity and, thus, without ethics. Because ethics cannot be something which is based on personal opinion or on the preferences of the majority. And yet, this is what modern civilization believes. We have built our society on moving sand; what is ethical and what is not is merely the opinion of the many. And most people today do not want obligations, they want rights.

Related article: The source of ethics

A right to live your life as you wish. A right to do whatever you want. A right to kill babies. No, the modern man or woman does not even consider this as something problematic, since they have been accustomed to living within a context of total freedom. And there is nothing that the free man (or woman) has to worry about! It is his life (her life… its life… you know, pronouns don’t matter anymore… this is another great achievement of our civilization) and he will live it as he wants! (yes, men can get pregnant too, haven’t you heard about it?)

But enough is enough.

And even if Harmonia Philosophica is usually dealing with the most complex of existential philosophical and metaphysical problems, today is the day when we will deal with something much more important: Life. Life as we experience it here on this planet, as a baby experiences it in the womb of its mother (no, men cannot get pregnant!), as a baby feels it while it gets brutally torn apart because its mother does not want to have the obligation to raise and prefers to chill out drinking martinis instead. And yes, there are also more difficult cases where abortion (killing of babies) could seem as a potential option and these cases are also addressed below. Because at the end, it does not matter how good philosophers we are if we miss the evil that is sitting right next to us. At the end it doesn’t matter if we formulate a better ontological argument for the existence of God if we fail to see the babies killed right next to us.

The list below holds some arguments against killing of babies (abortion). The goal is to make it as clear as possible for everyone that abortion is evil in every sense. Again, this is just to inform of the arguments and by no means a way to impose anything; if the article here touches anyone is a whole other story. But even if it doesn’t, I care not. I just need to say this.

Summary of arguments against abortion

My body! No, it is not “your” body: The baby is not yours. It is another separate organism with its own DNA! So no, you do not have any right of life or death over it. (actually you do not have a life or death right over anyone)
What about women who get raped? Rape is a horrible crime. But the answer to it is not abortion. The answer to a rape is the apprehension of whoever did it, his trial and his sentencing to prison after he is found guilty. Not the killing of another third person (the baby) who has nothing to with the crime! Killing a baby won’t make the rape go away or the woman feel any better. Such cases are difficult enough on their own; adding the killing of a baby will not make things any better for the unfortunate woman who experienced such a crime.
It is not alive! Define “life” then. Because if something which breaths, has all the human organs and also exhibits brain function is not ‘alive’ for you, then we have a serious gap in understanding the obvious that we need to bridge. If you doubt about a baby being alive, why not doubt if you are alive too?
It is legal! Sure it is. That doesn’t make it right or ethical! Remember that the Nazis had passed a law for the killing of Jews. So all those killings of Jews during the Holocaust were done in the context of a law of the state. Does that make these killing right? Ethics is not based on what is legal. Another good example is the discrimination against black people in the US in the recent past. Again this was done with state laws! And again, this was utterly and completely unethical! No the laws are not a moral compass, they are just a snapshot of the way people in a society think at a given point in time.
Most people agree that abortions are a human right! So most people are wrong. This would not be the first time. The majority of people today are atheists and materialists as per the requirements or our deeply anti-christian era. So citing them as an argument is actually nothing more than citing Germany’s 1940’s writings as an argument for killing Jews.
What about children with disabilities? What about them? Would you kill someone for being deaf? Would you kill a baby if you learned it will be blind? Congratulations, you just killed Andrea Bocelli. Even children with Down syndrome are now able to study at the university. Is it difficult for the parents? Sure it is. Extremely difficult in most cases. I wouldn’t wish that experience to anyone. Nobody said otherwise. But facing difficulties does not justify murder. Eugenics is not the answer to problems. Unless of course you are a Nazi.
If the mother is in danger, we should abort! So you are saying essentially that when my life is in danger I can kill someone else to save my life. This could be an option for some, but not for others. And this option is getting harder when this other is your own child. If the parents are ready to kill their own children to save their lives (while the opposite should be the norm) then we are talking for some seriously dystopian era we live in. I am not saying that this is an easy option. But again my personal opinion and my personal fear of death do not define what is right or wrong here. And yes, there are cases where the mother sacrificed her own life to save her unborn child! (see here)
Babies are killed in a humane way! Well, actually there is no such argument by the abortion-lovers. I just wanted to mention this again because it is a point which makes the absurdity of the pro-abortion arguments even more cruel. Babies, as I mentioned above, are killed in the most gruesome way. To the contrary, animals are killed today in much more humane ways. How can abortion proponents know the absolutely horrible ways babies are killed and still support abortion? This is really beyond my comprehension!

It is possible that the above change the mind of someone who reads them, although I doubt that will be the case. Whoever reads such arguments in such articles, has already made his or her mind.

But even if only one person thinks differently after reading this article, that would be enough…

Because it is not your body.

And if you are really true to yourself…

It is not even “your” life…

Worms under the Golden Palm… (How movies are a testament to our lower ethical values)

I have recently seen the South Korean movie “Parasite”, which has recently won also the 2019 Palme d’Or in Cannes Film Festival. As many view the movie as good, which I do too, some also pinpointed the philosophical and sociological questions posed by the movie.

WARNING: Spoilers for the movie “Parasite” and “Joker” will follow!

In short, the movie shows how some low-class people infiltrate the cosmos of a high-class family to earn their trust and money. The plot quickly escalates: The infiltrators initially start with forging some papers to get a job and they finally end up killing people under some very peculiar circumstances.

As the movie tries to show the extremely difficult situation in which the protagonists’ family lives in, it is easy to see it as an attempt to justify – or at least explain – their actions. Extreme poverty and lack of options do provide (at least for some people) a justification for actions which are portrayed by the official justice system as ‘criminal’. However this is not only wrong, but could also be dangerous in the context of a society.

What I do agree with, is that tough society conditions could be a way to explain why someone is behaving in a criminal way. But this explanation has limitations: it is only an explanation and not a justification or an excuse. To elaborate more on this: Harsh conditions make it more probable that someone will behave immorally, but that does not make this right! Sure, if you are very poor you could have more chances to be bad and you would easily have more motivation to do so in order to feed your family for example, but that wouldn’t remove a pinch from the immorality of your actions if those are such. This explanation is what your lawyer would invoke in the court to get you a better sentence, but they would not be accepted as an excuse by a higher authority (call me God). Unless of course you repent which is a different story.

Wait a minute! someone might object. We were talking about criminal actions and now you mention God! How did that happen!?

Well, as I have elaborated in the article “The source of ethics”, there is no point in talking ethics and morality outside the realm of God. In a godless world, there is no point in discussing anything actually. If there is no higher authority setting the standards, we might as well set our own and everything goes! Is that nihilistic? Yes. It is. As is our current society.

The highest standards for morality were set on Earth by Jesus Christ. It is in relation to those standards that we are to compare our actions. He is the measure we should use, not the measure that fits us best. No matter what the excuse (“I was poor”, “I was under stress”, “I had to eat and was so hungry” etc), an evil action is an evil action. Of course – and this is obvious – we are not in the mind of either Jesus or God. So we could not be certain for which actions are actually moral and which are not, although we do have some good indications. For example we all agree that killing is something bad no matter what. You are poor and killed someone? I don’t care. You shouldn’t. (For Jesus it would be evil perhaps even to think about killing someone, but let’s stick to the basics now)

This lowering of our standards is exactly the problem of this movie and with many other movies nowadays. Joker for example also portrays a picture of an ill man who does what he does because of bad society. At the end, the criminal is almost shown as a hero who managed to stand up against the evil of modern society who brought him to the position he was in. Again, for Christ this would not work as an excuse. Sorry Joker. A sequel of “Parasite” would easily be the trial of the protagonists and them going to jail for the crimes they did. But again, that wouldn’t sell much. (And that is perhaps the problem for everything we see lately in the cinema)

Man should always strive for the best.

Theosis should be our ultimate goal.

Unless of course we believe we are worms.Crawling in the dirt.Watching movies…Under a gold palm tree…

Ethics, Robots, Free will…

Can there be ethics without free will?

The sister-site Harmonia Philosophica @ Blogger provides some insight…

Check out “Philosophy Wire: Ethics without free will… No ethics at all…“.

Somehow making our new robots obey orders doesn’t sound like a good idea. Obeying orders was the foundation of the deepest evil even known to mankind…

The fallacy of Education as a Source of Ethics

Harmonia Philosophica keeps on contributing to the philosophical research of what is ethical. The source of ethics is one great question that has been around for millennia and the answer could need a collective holistic approach in how we think. To that end, a new paper has been published by Spyridon Kakos, the details of which can be found below.

In short, even though people today believe that education could solve all the morality issues of modern shallow civilization, this paper argues for the exact opposite! Education seems not only unrelated to making people more ethical, but it could also have a negative effect regarding morality as Rousseau postulated centuries ago…

New paper published: “The fallacy of Education as a Source of Ethics“

Abstract: For centuries, the major story of enlightenment was that education is and should be the cornerstone of our society. We try to educate people to make them respectable members of society, something which we inherently relate to being “better persons”, firmly believing that education makes humans less prone to evil. Today, modern research seems to validate that premise: statistics verify that more education results to less crime. But is this picture accurate and does this mean anything regarding morality per se? This paper tries to examine the facts with a more critical eye and determine whether education is indeed a source of ethics or not. The results of the analysis show that what we understand as education is not only unrelated to ethics but can also be a factor resulting in the degradation of morality in humans. Rousseau’s arguments against science and arts are re-enforced with arguments stemming from other great philosophers and from modern experience itself. Using modern statistical analysis regarding the correlation of crime and education and through the examination of the modern regression in ethical issues, it becomes evident that education cannot and should not be a source of ethics. Knowing what is ethical is not as important as living an ethical life. Pharisees were the first to be denied the entrance to the kingdom of God. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”.

Source to download the paper: PhilPapers

Alternatively, one can download the paper from here as per below link.

The fallacy of Education as a Source of Ethics Download