CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

If one complains about monopolies in general, hardly any of that complain can be directed at natural monopolies which appear to be quite rare compared to the government-backed ones.

The natural monopolies are invisible to your eyes due to regulation.

The lack of regulation in specific industries has nothing to do with the capability of government to rein in monopolies, but everything to do with regulatory capture.

c1ue, who on Earth believes that, "destruction of the government will solve all the ills of today," hm? I expect that you would know a great deal about the market price of straw and hay, given that you are perhaps the most prolific manufacturer of strawmen I've ever witnessed.

Anyone who believes that taxation is unnecessary directly and completely believes also that government is unnecessary, because you cannot have one without the other.

To pretend that these issues are unrelated is hypocrisy.

What libertarian-minded people are concerned with the most, given that they are libertarian-minded, is freedom. That means freedom of commerce and of association and of personal life. While a true "libertarian" may be indistinguishable from an anarchist, I'd like to think that most libertarian-minded people do see some value in some government in establishing a framework to allow for maximized liberty by law. This is not an irrational opinion. Given the system in place now, government poses a much more obvious and tenable threat to freedom than do monopolies or giant conglomerations.

This would be much more credible if the reality wasn't that libertarians just want their own way even if everyone else - a majority or even a super-majority - disagree.

It is very much the political equivalent of taking your ball home because you don't like the way the game is played.

Over and over I keep hearing the same meme: my 'natural rights' are being violated even though the laws which are doing so exist from due process of our existing political system.

What you are saying then is that you only agree with our existing political system if it accomplishes what you want out of it, otherwise it is immoral.

As I've pointed out again and again: morality is a function of society. If society says taxation is moral, why then are libertarians defining taxation differently?

Take child labor as an example. Before children were working 60 hour weeks in the days before child labor laws, what were they doing? There were high rates of starvation and death, particularly among parish/poorhouse children, where the remnants of feudalism thrived. In England, government (not corporations) actually sent or sold children into involuntary servitude, such as through the Guild system of legally enforced apprenticeships.

Are you seriously trying to say that child labor was wonderful because it helped children work their way into prosperity?

Child labor was there because it was cheap. Women were more expensive. Unskilled men were more expensive than women. And so forth.

Children are better off today not because of their past labor, but because overall society's productivity and wealth has grown, and children ultimately are a better societal investment if they are educated rather than fed into industry as the bottom tier labor resource.

As for your example, these conditions existed because of rentier monopolization of land. In the past, there were large areas which were open for use as much due to an inability to easily define boundaries as anything else.

After fencing became cheap, those who lived on or used this open land were no longer able to do so.

If you're going to use historical examples, at least try to be factual.

[WDCRob]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

I hardly think Pittsburgh or Cleveland c. 1970 were the work of a few bad apples, or that mining deaths pre- regulation were isolated incidents. My home state of WV was largely owned by mining interests for more than a hundred years. And even today the populace got little relief from mountain top mining, or the poisoning of waterways until the feds got involved.

i.e. - your narrative is simply not true.

More generally it sure seems like Libertarians want the exact same thing from government that everybody else does - those things that they cannot do for themselves.

If you grow up in a protected position there are precious few things you need from government and so you argue that government ought only to provide for the general defense, enforce property laws and keep the peace. Which explains why Libertarians are overwhelmingly educated, white, wealthy and male. I got mine, jack.

Grow up in different circumstances, and, whaddyaknow, you're more likely to have a more expansive view of what government should do.

Which is why we have elections - as c1ue pointed out.

For my own part I like John Rawl's 'Original Position' argument that suggests a just society is the one closest to what would result if the laws and rules were agreed upon before anyone knew their own position in society and was unaware of their personal skills, talents, intelligence or strength.

[shiny!]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

For my own part I like John Rawl's 'Original Position' argument that suggests a just society is the one closest to what would result if the laws and rules were agreed upon before anyone knew their own position in society and was unaware of their personal skills, talents, intelligence or strength.

What an interesting concept!

Speaking personally as a libertarian, it's not that I don't want government involved in services, I just don't want the FEDERAL government involved in so many things. It's bloated, inefficient, expensive, and overreaching it's mandate. I want more authority at the state and local level.

[Sharky]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Are you seriously trying to say that child labor was wonderful because it helped children work their way into prosperity?

No. I'm saying that child labor allowed many kids to survive until the area around them developed to the point where it was wealthy enough that they no longer needed to work. I'm also saying that I think child labor is better than child death, which was where many kids ended up in the centuries before working in places like cotton mills was an option.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Work in the mills meant death. Life expectancy for any other group of children was higher, country, city non-mill workers, everybody else lived longer.

[WDCRob]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

What an interesting concept!

Speaking personally as a libertarian, it's not that I don't want government involved in services, I just don't want the FEDERAL government involved in so many things. It's bloated, inefficient, expensive, and overreaching it's mandate. I want more authority at the state and local level.

Heya Shiny - glad you like it!

I agree with you on Fed vs State on a lot of things, but once you start dying and sacrificing on behalf of the whole, comparisons of inequity move beyond the guy down the same dirt road too.

In other words... it's really hard to rally citizens of all 50 states to support big needs or big ideas (surviving the Depression, wars, the shared experience of 9/11) and then tell blacks and women that they have to go back to being 2nd class citizens, or rural farmers that they don't deserve the same base-level comforts (electricity, paved roads, running water) that others have once the crisis is over.

IMO shared sacrifice and shared pain = shared expectations about the future and a more homogenous definition of fairness.

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

No. I'm saying that child labor allowed many kids to survive until the area around them developed to the point where it was wealthy enough that they no longer needed to work. I'm also saying that I think child labor is better than child death, which was where many kids ended up in the centuries before working in places like cotton mills was an option.

If you mean survive in the sense that they otherwise had no other means of survival, and ignoring the fact that these children were placed in this position due to displacement from their former villages, then yes you are correct.

That argument is identical to saying that slaves on the cotton plantations were placed in the position of eventually being freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and gaining citizenship in the United States - thereby having far better lives than their counterparts in Africa.

Or in other words, wrong.

[Sutter Cane]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

What an interesting concept!

Speaking personally as a libertarian, it's not that I don't want government involved in services, I just don't want the FEDERAL government involved in so many things. It's bloated, inefficient, expensive, and overreaching it's mandate. I want more authority at the state and local level.

I hear this constantly from libertarians, but it doesn't jibe with the reality that I see. Who is easier to buy, a state regulator or a national one? When there is corruption at the state level, who is called in to deal with it if not federal authorities? States have a terrible track record of self-policing. I see state governments as being far more prone to corruption, cronyism, and mischief than even our federal government (and we've seen their track record...).

I also see libertarian calls to end federal agencies like the EPA and Department of Education as hopelessly naive. I don't see local authorities doing a good job of self regulating, say, education, without federal oversight. If the rural elementary and high schools I attended had been left solely in the hands of local authorities without any other oversight, they would have taught creationism instead of evolution and had a mandatory prayer every morning, and probably worse.

Hell, I remember my parent's disgust when I was in elementary school and a local woman who had never actually graduated high school was elected to the school board! Yes, they elected a woman who didn't even have a high school diploma to make decisions about how the high school was run. She wasn't qualified, was actually thoroughly incompetent, but she had lived in the community her whole life and that's what mattered. Decisions she made were at the local, grass-roots level, just like libertarians claim should be better than any coming from a federal authority. I shudder to think what would have happened had there been no outside authorities to oversee what went on at the school.

Multiply this by thousands of communities around the country, and the idea that we don't need a Department of Education to enforce some kind of national standards seems completely ridiculous. Can it be run more efficiently? Of course. Is No Child Left Behind a failure? Yes. But to say that more authority at the local level with less national involvement would be any better seems unrealistic to me. Fix what's broke, don't trash everything governmental in a misguided notion that no national regulation will work better than what we have now.

[Ghent12]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

The natural monopolies are invisible to your eyes due to regulation.

The lack of regulation in specific industries has nothing to do with the capability of government to rein in monopolies, but everything to do with regulatory capture.

Indeed, "successful" regulation is possible and so is regulatory capture. What actually matters most and is typically the crucial determining factor in whether some regulatory capacity is captured or not is the level of accountability that the people affected by the industry and/or regulation have over the regulators. In the cases of bureaucracies on the federal level, generally the level of accountability that the regulators have to the citizens affected by the industries and regulations approaches zero as the size and scope of the bureaucracy expands. Occasionally the system "works" the way it's supposed to, and various members of Congress address the problems within a given federal department or bureau. The norm, however, is that the bureaucracies are generally unaccountable to the general public unless and until the national spotlight shines down on them.

Currently, we seem to have the worst of both worlds in terms of accountability. Problems within a given system, industry, or regulation of an industry will and can be addressed only with considerable political effort; otherwise you can and probably will fall through the cracks. Only the squeakiest wheels determine where oil is put via reaction, but there is no proactive maintenance.

Anyone who believes that taxation is unnecessary directly and completely believes also that government is unnecessary, because you cannot have one without the other.

To pretend that these issues are unrelated is hypocrisy.

You have again erected a strawman, whose serial number is probably in the hundred-thousands. It is the manner of taxation which matters most, and that is what almost every sufficiently libertarian-minded person tends to focus on. One need not collect revenue for a government via what ultimately amounts to the threat of a jail sentence.

This would be much more credible if the reality wasn't that libertarians just want their own way even if everyone else - a majority or even a super-majority - disagree.

A majority of people is a dangerous, dangerous thing. A super-majority can be even more dangerous; a mob united against the individual. Democracy is a terrible form of government that is empirically capable of any type of atrocity. Ironically, a government susceptible to the whims of the people at large is generally not what most libertarian-minded people tend to prefer, at least in my experience. The non-anarchist types of libertarians whom I have encountered generally prefer a republican form of government, where the government's purposes are focused and directed exclusively (or almost exclusively) on maximizing personal and economic liberty by law, which may or may not include various services such as national defense, dispute addressing systems (courts), disposition of uniquely limited "real estate" such as the RF spectrum, and so forth depending on the individual asked. Accountable to the people in a general sense, yes, but not nearly as much as the current semi-republican, semi-democratic system.

It is very much the political equivalent of taking your ball home because you don't like the way the game is played.

Over and over I keep hearing the same meme: my 'natural rights' are being violated even though the laws which are doing so exist from due process of our existing political system.

What you are saying then is that you only agree with our existing political system if it accomplishes what you want out of it, otherwise it is immoral.

As I've pointed out again and again: morality is a function of society. If society says taxation is moral, why then are libertarians defining taxation differently?

You say morality is a function of society, but I say it's a function of the individual, as essentially everything is. If morality were a function of society, and I were to have different morals than you, would you say we belong to different societies? If you have no problem with nudity on TV but your neighbor sees it as heinous and wrong, do you two live in different societies? This is all semantics, but the point is that society is made up of individuals, and every individual has their own moral compass or calculus. The ultimate benefit of a libertarian-leaning framework for government is that everyone is afforded the best practical opportunity to exercise their morals how they see fit, while being generally restricted from infringing on the morals of others, even if they form a mob/majority to do so (i.e., not forcing things such as taxation upon others for earning an income).

Of course, there are many different breeds of "libertarians," and many of them would probably have a problem with being classified by such a collectivist term anyways.

I hear this constantly from libertarians, but it doesn't jibe with the reality that I see. Who is easier to buy, a state regulator or a national one? When there is corruption at the state level, who is called in to deal with it if not federal authorities? States have a terrible track record of self-policing. I see state governments as being far more prone to corruption, cronyism, and mischief than even our federal government (and we've seen their track record...).

Well dyed-in-the-wool libertarians are essentially anarchists, so there would be basically no way to prevent corporations from exercising the abuse of monopoly pricing power, or from local political powers to abuse their power. Libertarian-leaning republicans (small r) are a different breed, and recognize the importance of some sort of framework established for the specific purpose of preventing abuse. If you want to talk about track records, the current system leaves much to be desired because it is not focused on preventing abuse or corruption; it is focused wherever the public spotlight shines, and essentially nowhere else.

I also see libertarian calls to end federal agencies like the EPA and Department of Education as hopelessly naive. I don't see local authorities doing a good job of self regulating, say, education, without federal oversight. If the rural elementary and high schools I attended had been left solely in the hands of local authorities without any other oversight, they would have taught creationism instead of evolution and had a mandatory prayer every morning, and probably worse.

Hell, I remember my parent's disgust when I was in elementary school and a local woman who had never actually graduated high school was elected to the school board! Yes, they elected a woman who didn't even have a high school diploma to make decisions about how the high school was run. She wasn't qualified, was actually thoroughly incompetent, but she had lived in the community her whole life and that's what mattered. Decisions she made were at the local, grass-roots level, just like libertarians claim should be better than any coming from a federal authority. I shudder to think what would have happened had there been no outside authorities to oversee what went on at the school.

Multiply this by thousands of communities around the country, and the idea that we don't need a Department of Education to enforce some kind of national standards seems completely ridiculous. Can it be run more efficiently? Of course. Is No Child Left Behind a failure? Yes. But to say that more authority at the local level with less national involvement would be any better seems unrealistic to me. Fix what's broke, don't trash everything governmental in a misguided notion that no national regulation will work better than what we have now.

The beauty of a (small r) republican system where political power is mostly localized and the 10th Amendment actually matters is that any given individual concerned about how politics works has about 50 laboratories to choose from.

A state government may be easier to capture than the federal one, but what about a state government focused primarily on its citizens version of maximizing liberty with the backup of a federal system designed to do the same? That's a wholly different animal from what we have now.

Let me ask you this, if I may pry into the anecdote you gave. Did the DoE stop the school board member, or remove her from her post? What benefit did the DoE give to the schools under that school board?

[astonas]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

You say morality is a function of society, but I say it's a function of the individual, as essentially everything is. If morality were a function of society, and I were to have different morals than you, would you say we belong to different societies?

Sorry for nit-picking, but in this case I think it clarifies the essential element of the whole dispute. You appear to be joining morality, which is dependent on the society you associate yourself with (ie. which group's mores, or norms, you conform to) with ethics, which is the set of values and consequent rules you individually adopt to define what is right/wrong. The difference is not merely semantic, since these two often-confused but nonetheless independent concepts actually do result in conflicting drives, even at times within individuals. A given action or policy may be moral, but not ethical, or ethical, but not moral.

Two hyperbolic examples, chosen for clarity of differentiation rather than realism or relevance:
If you live in, and agree with, a society which endorses putting jews in concentration camps, it is not immoral to turn one in (since that is what your society endorses), though it is still unethical if your personal value system places freedom and life above the societal good. If, however, you do not subscribe to that society's norms (mores), but instead to the sub-society of a resistance movement, it would be immoral to turn an individual in, even though it might still be ethical (if you personally believe (a la Plato's Republic) that forfeiting even the individual's life at the will of the greatest number of people is the higher good). So the same precise action, depending on your peer group and personal belief system, may be correctly defined as either moral or immoral, ethical or not, based on context.

This extreme example was chosen for a reason: We in our time and place have developed very different moral and ethical structures than were dominant in WW2 Germany (or for that matter the slavery-era south). The significant question is clearly not so much what policies in our society are moral or ethical, but whether our society's mores, and our own ethical systems, are progressing towards a better place over time (i.e., more reflective of the underlying causal relationships of reality), or regressing towards unsupportable illogic.

Libertarianism by its nature generally asserts that ethics should reign over morals, and at first glance this may seem logical: people can and should should think for themselves. One fundamental challenge for this view is that human beings have evolved as a social species, and retain a lot of programming from that time. Thus while it might be possible in an ideal sense, true and universal ethical dominance is not actually implementable in reality, any more than true communism is. Any person who tries to live at this extreme end of this spectrum will eventually be strung up by his community. So the question really becomes: to what extent does one compromise one's own views for the benefits of living in a society? Even the most hard-core modern libertarians hold that some form of society must exist, and provide some core services. Similarly, no socialist outside of North Korea would assert that society can be completely dominant, since that ignores the fact that it is individual desires that drive and motivate people to action.

And thus we may reframe the present debate as being simply a question of improving transactional value over time: What aspects of society do you believe are valuable, and what are you willing to give up to receive them? And more importantly: how can we find a way to give up less, while getting more? (Think for example along the lines of: technology, infrastructure, investments in education, etc.)

So as in my rather stark examples, the real questions of societal change boil down, not to what one thinks, but to who one considers one's "society" to be, and what values one holds above all others. Are we first and foremost Americans? Or are we divided and classified by our profession or class? (Bankers vs burger-flippers, "1%" vs. "99%") I fear that in adopting the divisive language of classification, the protesters are unwittingly beginning down the same destructive road as those they excoriate. And similarly, by seeking to include a wide variety of values, they are indirectly obscuring or postponing the selection of their most important values, in an analogue to the way that those they deplore all act out of slightly different, but still self-serving value systems.

If this is to be the movement that provides a real and lasting shift in our society, I'm afraid I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that it has some evolving to do. Its current pathway is set to provide many sparks, but very little heat or light. Until the question switches from "What is good for the 99%" to "What is good for the 100%" I'm not sure if any real progress can be made at all.

[mesyn191]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Until the question switches from "What is good for the 99%" to "What is good for the 100%" I'm not sure if any real progress can be made at all.

Nah. That sounds like false framing to put it mildly. The situation is so wildly out of whack for those 99%'ers vs that 1% that what the OWS want isn't really favoring the 99% at the expense of that 1%. Its fixing the system that the 1% broke to favor themselves at the 99%'ers expense.

After all those 1%'ers sure don't seem too interested in helping these people out and are the ones benefiting from the status quo and have been for decades. What if they're the ones really pushing the class divides because they view themselves as entitled and would like to keep it that way?

OWS will likely fail IMO but not for the reasons you seem to think. I think it'll fail because the protestors are so disorganized, misinformed, and incoherent. I've heard OWS called the "tea party of the left", to me they're just another "tea party" period, and will likely be about as effective. As long as the economic situation continues to deteriorate for the 99%'ers those people will continue to get angry though and they'll start to organize more effectively eventually.

[c1ue]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Sorry for nit-picking, but in this case I think it clarifies the essential element of the whole dispute. You appear to be joining morality, which is dependent on the society you associate yourself with (ie. which group's mores, or norms, you conform to) with ethics, which is the set of values and consequent rules you individually adopt to define what is right/wrong. The difference is not merely semantic, since these two often-confused but nonetheless independent concepts actually do result in conflicting drives, even at times within individuals. A given action or policy may be moral, but not ethical, or ethical, but not moral.

Indeed, I have said so many times though not as succinctly as you put here. Given that Ghent12 and his libertarian cohorts have repeated the same argument over and over, I'll not bother rehashing that yet again.

And your examples furthermore presume there is some objective set of ethics which 'all' people should adhere to irregardless.

My own view is that ethics is more variable between individuals than even morality over time; given this it is impossible to reconcile ethics over morality.

As for morality vs. society - I use society because frankly society acts immoral as much as it acts 'moral'. Society encompasses the totality of what people allow to exist - from completely acceptable, to barely acceptable, to barely unacceptable, to completely unacceptable but not enforced. Clearly the latter half of the spectrum is 'immoral' but can exist in large portions of society and for long periods of time.

The arc of African-American rights from Emancipation Proclamation to the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, to the subconscious 'not-me' racism of most people, encapsulates this well.

Furthermore I would note that it is a well documented scientific finding that most people find dramatically different appearing other people to be strange, frightening, and 'bad'.

Is therefore racism ethical or unethical? Moral or immoral?

Ditto suicide: Western societies, entirely due to Christianity, view suicide as 'bad'.

Eastern societies, on the other hand, and no doubt due to Buddhism/reincarnation, view suicide as a social and/or moral choice.

Be that as it may, my view all along has been that an individual can and should have full rights so long as said rights do not infringe on other individuals. Taxation is necessary for government, government in turn provides the regulatory and other framework for society, and thus to attempt to avoid all taxation by framing it as violating individual rights is pure obstructionism.

And note that I don't mean any and all taxation is fine and warranted. Overall taxation is necessary; in the particulars there are many specific taxes which are pure profiteering such as cigarette taxes.

If this is to be the movement that provides a real and lasting shift in our society, I'm afraid I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that it has some evolving to do. Its current pathway is set to provide many sparks, but very little heat or light. Until the question switches from "What is good for the 99%" to "What is good for the 100%" I'm not sure if any real progress can be made at all.

Again, while I haven't followed the OWS creed closely, not that there is one yet, from what I've seen the spokespeople are not seeking to redistribute, as much as to seek justice.

I don't think too many people on iTulip are of the view that no criminal acts were undertaken in the runup to the latest bubble, or that justice has been served post-bubble, or that the economic policies of the past decade are in any way beneficial to the 100% in any measure.

[astonas]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

Nah. That sounds like false framing to put it mildly. The situation is so wildly out of whack for those 99%'ers vs that 1% that what the OWS want isn't really favoring the 99% at the expense of that 1%. Its fixing the system that the 1% broke to favor themselves at the 99%'ers expense.

After all those 1%'ers sure don't seem too interested in helping these people out and are the ones benefiting from the status quo and have been for decades. What if they're the ones really pushing the class divides because they view themselves as entitled and would like to keep it that way?

OWS will likely fail IMO but not for the reasons you seem to think. I think it'll fail because the protestors are so disorganized, misinformed, and incoherent. I've heard OWS called the "tea party of the left", to me they're just another "tea party" period, and will likely be about as effective. As long as the economic situation continues to deteriorate for the 99%'ers those people will continue to get angry though and they'll start to organize more effectively eventually.

I think that you may have misunderstood me. If one insists on looking for a solution that punishes an entrenched power in a society to benefit another segment of that society, it is very hard to enact change. The entrenched power has little reason to give anything up. If, on the other hand, one seeks to find a system that works better - overall - rather than acts purely to redistribute, then it is possible to get the 1% to buy in, even if it may not be in their short term benefit (because a more efficient system is to everyone's benefit in the long term). The very fact that we are talking about 1% VS. 99% at all is evidence that they are branding their cause in a sub-optimal way. The problem is the us OR them approach, as opposed to us AND them. There are plenty of valid arguments that could be advanced that the wealthy would also benefit from a system that is more stable, has less bubbles, has greater transparency, is more efficient etc. So far I haven't heard any of that.

I'm not saying that the 99% don't deserve more power, or that the system isn't stacked against them. I'm just saying the wording of their rhetoric so far makes it less likely that they'll get it.

[mesyn191]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

I think that you may have misunderstood me.

I think I get what you're saying, you're trying to say they should frame things in a less combative manner if they really want things to change or at least to get the change they want with less effort right?

I don't think that will pan out though. I mean no one is getting punished here really (well, unless you're poor or middle class...) but that change that benefits the 99% at the 1%'s expense is talked about at all as "punishment" is just sickening. And I'm not blaming or accusing you of anything either, lots of people I know put it like that, after all that is the angle that many media sources push right? And who controls big media? It certainly isn't the 99%'ers or OWS, its the 1%. I'd say they've already chosen how to frame things irregardless of what the 99%'ers or OWS want and did so well before OWS or the 99%'ers were ever heard of either.

If, on the other hand, one seeks to find a system that works better - overall - rather than acts purely to redistribute, then it is possible to get the 1% to buy in, even if it may not be in their short term benefit (because a more efficient system is to everyone's benefit in the long term).

I think you're way too optimistic about the class divide perception and how easy it is to cross it these days. What you're saying makes sense, I just don't believe it can work out that way anymore. The 1%'ers have been thoroughly attacking and denigrating even mild attempts at change well before OWS or the 99%'ers were ever heard of. Change that favors the 99% is already framed as "punishment" and "class warfare" in the big media since at least early this year.

[astonas]

Re: CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About...

And your examples furthermore presume there is some objective set of ethics which 'all' people should adhere to irregardless.

My intent was to provide extreme examples to demonstrate that society has made great strides compared to some dramatic examples of the past - where morality and ethics might have been in an easy-to-understand logical conflict, with serious consequences. I would never intentionally assert that a single objective set of ethics exists, as that is counter to my understanding of the definition of the term "ethics". If I left that impression, I apologize for the miscommunication. My goal was to communicate exactly the opposite meaning.

The best that can objectively be said of an ethical framework is that it has been well-considered, is logical, is grounded in reality, and is self-consistent. The introduction of universality fundamentally mixes concepts of morality (shared values) into the discussion of ethics (personal values). They are clearly related in terms of how they form and are practiced, but I believe the distinction needs to be made. Ethics influence your choices even in the absence of consequences to or from others. People will always act differently in groups than they do alone, even if it regards only something as trivially simple as, say, drinking from the milk bottle in the fridge instead of getting a glass when one lives alone, or wearing only underwear when at home alone.

Similarly, I would not suggest that a single community with a consensus on how to act could be immoral - since the definition of morality is the community's consensus. I would instead say that one community (or a sub-group) has a different moral code than another. The aggregate community of "the United States today" has agreed that the community of "the United States of yesteryear" has held some beliefs we now consider to be horrible, which led to the practice of slavery, the Trail of Tears, etc. The importance of using this terminology is that it does not claim that our current framework is the best framework that may exist. The usages of "immoral" that you cite do. We may in 50 years look back on many of the actions or policies of today, and believe them to be wrong as well. When one uses a strict definition of morality, it encourages us to think about how we can continue to find ways to improve our understanding and judgements, beyond where we find ourselves today. Calling something "moral," "immoral," "good," or "bad," encourages intellectual laziness, by presupposing that we, today, have a complete understanding of what should be considered right and wrong. I believe that we have made great progress, but would not assert that we have "arrived" at the universal truth in this regard. The history of mankind would mock this present-centric viewpoint, held throughout the ages, in an ever-changing world.

The separation between morality and ethics also has immediate practical consequences on this website: it forces one to acknowledge that a trade-off exists between private and public interests. "I must compromise on something I value for the privilege of living in a society with others not like me." Only when these tradeoffs are acknowledged to exist can a society negotiate towards, for example, an agreed-upon set of laws. I formed my first post in this thread when I perceived that the muddling of these concepts was preventing a productive discussion. If one party in a discussion believes that they should primarily follow only their own, individual value system, and that this choice should be respected a priori by society, they are implicitly denying that tradeoffs are necessary to form a moral structure, and are thereby not joining the discussion in good faith.

To continue such a discussion is therefore pointless, unless all parties are willing to agree that we make trade-offs that necessarily compromise our personal value systems for the benefit of living with and relating to others. In this context, what matters is not how fervently believe in your own values, as compared to your discussion partner, but how well you can logically support the trade-offs you are advocating for.

I know that the bread-and-butter of internet forums is the strident clash of opposing value systems, but there is still a difference between pointless clashes, and productive ones. I was really just making an appeal for keeping things productive.