Internet Ethics and a Search for Community.

[Sharky]

Re: Internet Ethics and a Search for Community.

The notion of morality as determined by the ethos of a community, as opposed to morality as essentially just an individual quality, provides a more satisfactory explanation for the perennial quandary of whether ethics should be "situational" or not.

The way I look at this is that morality is contextual. For example, it is moral to be honest, and immoral to lie. But if someone were to break into my home, threaten me at gunpoint and demand to know the location of someone or something of value to me, it would not be immoral to lie.

Certain rules may be fundamental to the well being of a community, and properly persist across generations and millenia, regardless of context. At the same, the same such rule might matter little, might apply in the opposite or might not even be applicable to some other community of some quite distinct nature.

Aren't rules different from morals? It seems to me that morality and principles have to come first; after that, community rules are OK, as long as they don't violate my morals or principles (which includes being able to leave the group if I choose not to follow them).

When you rail against collectivism, may I suggest you might be railing against statist collectivism, that being the increasing centralization of all "public" (outside our skins (*)) matters into a single, omnipotent state. May I suggest further that the proper alternative and antidote to statist collectivism is a multiplicity of diverse communities and associations of various purposes and provinces.

Statist collectivism is certainly the most egregious form. It seems to me that the problems with communities happen when force or fraud start to be involved, when the "freedom to associate" is no longer "free," or when members of one group start to think of themselves as superior to other groups. For example, racism is a long-standing issue related to collectivism. Religion is another. Class warfare is another.

Even in a non-state form, when people begin to feel that membership in some group is more important than their own life or liberty, things tend to move rapidly toward some form of gang warfare: groups fighting each other. The state need not be involved, although it's easy for it to get swept up in the passion of the times.

(*) I generally very much enjoy Stefan Molyneux's work. Even though I don't 100% agree with him, he makes some very good, thought-provoking arguments.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Internet Ethics and a Search for Community.

I'm still viewing this video. It's good, and it expresses well some of my views above with which you seem to specifically disagree.

There is another YouTube interview with Bill Gairdner at Absolutes. It is perhaps more coherent and has better audio than the Stefan Molyneux interview I linked above. You might check it out as well.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Internet Ethics and a Search for Community.

This good discussion so far has been a distraction from my opening thesis:

The essential problem is that we lack an independent and healthy community defining a proper ethos for the higher layers of the Web.

Instead the definition and enforcement of the necessary ethos for this layer has been assumed by an already all too powerful central oligarchy of governing nations, agencies and corporations.

My concern was with the central state assuming too much power over Web content.

We require ethical norms on the Web, as in any other public arena.

But this does not mean we should hand over control of Web content to a central state.

[Sharky]

Re: Internet Ethics and a Search for Community.

A community is more than the sum of its parts.

Sure, although that doesn't answer my question. You could also say that one individual is more than any community.

Health is not binary. Morality is not black and white.

Morality may not always be black and white, but most of the time it is. To say otherwise is to believe that morality is somehow subjective; that what's moral for me may not be moral for you. I don't buy that.

The presence of ambiguity and conflict in the application of a world view does not invalidate that view. It is rather more the contrary, in that the absence of such casts grave doubts on the validity of that view.

I wasn't trying to suggest that. I was trying to ask how, in your view, you would respond in a certain situation, where conflict exists. An answer to that question is at the heart of the ethics of communities.

Communities so clearly have properties that are more than just the collective properties of their members that it baffles me that anyone could imagine otherwise.

I don't deny that communities have properties. What I do deny is that communities are living entities that are somehow separate from their members.

I rather expected an ad hominem rebuttal to my reference to Chomsky.

I wasn't attacking Chomsky the person; I was attacking his ideas.

However I did not find the attributes you attribute to him in that video. I heard him railing against the tyranny of the American Empire, with some specifics.

As far as specific points from the video:

-- He says that the primary driving force behind modern industrial civilization has been material gain. I don't agree. I think the driving forces have been life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Material gain is simply a side-effect. People don't acquire goods for no reason. They acquire things because it helps them to live happier, healthier, longer, better lives.

-- He says that the idea that private vices yield public benefits is somehow acceptable, while the background video showed what looked like pollution from some industrial or mining activities. The concept of a "vice" implies a value judgment. Vice according to who? Yes, pollution is ugly, the side-effects are long-lasting and wide-ranging, and I don't support or condone it when I have a choice. But can you really say that it's always worse than the alternative, which may be death or starvation for those who wouldn't otherwise have jobs? It's easy to say such things when you're on the outside of the community of employees and customers who benefit from such companies. Fraud, on the other hand, is different: I don't think fraud is ever acceptable, nor is the use of force, except in self-defense (again, contextual). In any moral community, those actions aren't vices, they're crimes.

-- He says that it is long-understood that a society based on the principles above will destroy itself in time. I call BS. Industrialization is too new to be able to know such things. Also, that statement ignores the tremendous good that has come from industrialization; the countless lives that have been improved and even made possible by it. As an example, look at the abject poverty in London in the 16th century, including the torrents of sewage and other pollution that were being released into the Thames, compared to the way things are today.

-- He says that modern industrialization entails suffering, but neglects the fact that the level of suffering is orders of magnitude less now than it was before industrialization.

-- He talks about the "general population" as though it is a living entity that can make choices. There is no such entity. Only individuals can make choices.

That only covers the first 70 seconds of the video, but the rest has a similar feel to me, although I mostly agree with the point he made about the "privileged elites" who are dominating media, except I blame government for the problem, not the elites themselves, because government is responsible for allowing the monopoly of the airwaves to continue through licensing restrictions, etc.

I'm still viewing this video. It's good, and it expresses well some of my views above with which you seem to specifically disagree.

Take a look and tell me what you hear.

I got 10 minutes in and they hadn't said anything I could latch onto to keep my interest. I may try again later.