You have raised questions that resonate as you so rightly point out at different levels, a real mish mash.

I'll be back.

But somehow I think I will be condemning the rich and praising the poor. And admitting that nothing really can be changed.

life is the consequence. one might call the present alive in the same vein even if there were nothing but suns and dead planets; things are still happening and the unknown future is still arriving. when one thinks of the buddhist proscription against killing any life whatsoever, think of the butterfly effect, i.e.; that a butterfly flapping it's wings in chicago does have some miniscule effect on the weather in china.

i have starved numerous times, once quite deeply into malnutrition so much so my landlady feared finding me dead. it wasn't nor would ever be acceptable to steal for survival sake. my thinking, though diminished considerably, almost totally even, eschews such a low level, it simply does. one has or hasn't emotions of conscience to contend with. see http://hare.org and/or read his book, 'Without Conscience'. nor would i kill in self-defense. should blackwater come to haul me off at 2am, blasting my way out leaves me little different than they. i'd rather think of what Martin Luther King would do. or as sun tzu says: "To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in dissipating the enemy's opposition without fighting."
(like bruce lee exemplified in the boat scene in Enter The Dragon. *koff*)
morality impels us to trandscendance.

freedom. yes, i believe in the sovereignty of the individual and so believe in others' right to bear arms for self defense. i enjoy guns myself. they feel good and have aesthetic qualities in appearance and make loud noise. i could just as easily if not more enjoy them shooting blanks.

i defend myself well and easily, calmly and confidently, with a minimalistic fashion. perspective is everything. but should it come down to my life or theirs, i wouldn't take a life.

okayfine, the conundrums. like the infamous torture conundrum used on '24', most posed conundrums are framed. the underlying openendedness leaves us with possibility. i do not accept anything as impossible. we are suffering through days of pointed and deliberate stupidity. there are millions of other realities. and more. the possibilities are staggering. morality, in a larger view, is as fundamental as logic, and as practically unignorable. this is easier to view when dealing with issues of honesty. consider violence another form of dishonesty. physical violence in that sense is not so different from intellectual violence.

are we not all cosmic agonists? (i noted tonight how the word was used on this page: http://www.salvia.net/en/chemistry.htm ....*koff*)

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OT: in the past week or two i have come to absolutely love this site. i'd known somewhat about it for the longest time, and had it bookmarked, but never really explored it before. i do so enjoy it. (especially when i can't sleep and it's oh-dark-ay-em and nowhere else has anything happening i care to participate in.) odd duck that i am, with atypical strengths and weaknesses, i'm a picky fit -but this site is very compatible to me. an extraordinarily high comfort level too. i like the site structure, the formatting and appearance, the people and the content they produce, and the readership they represent to each other. rah. (yes, i should use caps.... mea culpa....)

You've touched on some fundamental issues but I think the issue at its core is the control of the public dialog. If the public dialog says it's OK to kill young maidens on the off chance that it might bring rain for a good harvest season, then that's the morality that will likely take hold.

A couple of pull quotes from your post brought this to mind.

"steal the money to buy medicine for your child"

This reminded me of a John Stossel story on the altruism of market economics. Stossel had written a piece shortly after Hurricane Katrina and the devastation and deprivation of New Orleans. Some vendor was selling bottled water at outrageous prices. Now "outrageous" is a relative term and that's what Stossel's story on market economics was about. By charging say $20 for a half liter bottle of water, the vendor was price gouging in a time of duress. But Stossel's view was that rather than gouging the vendor was using market forces to ensure that only those most in need of a product would be purchasing it. There would be no wasteful buying. If a father had a newborn child that hadn't had a drink of any kind in two days, then he would be willing to spend that level of money. In contrast, someone who wasn't in such great need, wouldn't. Price gouging was turned into a moral virtue by Stossel. Needless to say, not long after this piece appeared in the news there were congressional hearings on the price increases for gasoline after Katrina and some oil CEO used the same claim of virtue for the oil companies behavior, ensuring that only those in great need would actually use the scarce gasoline. Price gouging as a feature, not a bug!

So the market becomes the ultimate determiner of morality.

That lead me to think of the situation where the vendor selling bottled water at 20 bucks a half liter has a father with a fluid deprived newborn come in who, due to the non-functioning utilities - financial included - doesn't have $20 cash. He's only got $10 on him. He has the wealth, it's just that's it's not accessible. The banks are closed and the ATMs are down. He does have a fully functional gun though. When the vendor refuses to accept the offer of $10, the father takes out his gun and shoots the vendor and takes a bottle of water for his child and leaves the store.

Using the logic of market morality, doesn't the willingness of the father to kill prove that his market need was great and therefore as worthy of acceptance as the price gouging of the vendor, prior to being shot? I think it does since the only morality is the morality of market forces. So by my understanding, John Stossel economics says price gouging is fine in that it determines true need, and murder is also fine since it too displays a veracity of need.

Enough of the bullshit morality plays. This is what pisses me off when people talk about how great markets are in determining supply, demand, pricing and distribution. Even if that were the case, markets are almost never truly open and unaffected by external forces. An external force such as the "gun" in my examination of the water bottle story. But the "gun" is always there, usually in the laws of the lands with the societal imposition of some entity with a "monopoly on violence." Are the laws then "moral?" Who determines the laws and the morality?

This gets me back to what I see as the fundamental problem in America, the control of the public dialog. Incredibly, right now in America and at least since the Reagan era, we, as a society, have been told that greed is something, not to be viewed as a sin or evil to be shunned, but rather as something that is a great determiner of the best and most worthy among us. Whether it be an individual or a company or a nation. Greed motivates us. If we're not greedy then we're actually lazy. The greediest compete in the market of products and ideas and the lazy and unmotivated are cast aside. Greed is the ideal. It is the fundamental of the market. Anything that limits greed limits potential achievement and therefore greed must not be restricted but instead revered.

Consideration of others, thoughts of community (other than phony sanctimonious speechifying) will be condemned as "socialism" or worse, failed communism. A great evil to be damned as loudly and as often as possible. Greed is the virtue. Empathy, community and shared effort and responsibility are the horrors to be avoided at all costs.

Whenever I read about the evils of socialism I can't help but think of all those great "westerns" from the '30s, '40s and '50s. Flicks that had small "one horse" towns formed by the chuck wagon pioneers that were the communities that faced the adversity of truly open markets - living off the land. They helped each other and looked out for each other. Those movies viewed those communities as American ideals. Maybe Karl Marx got his ideas from the pioneers. Their behavior sure seemed more like socialism than capitalism. We don't see movies like that anymore.

Public dialog. Control of the public dialog.

You've mentioned recently the F.D. Roosevelt era. Considering how the Internet, the "information super-highway," is currently being divided up by a very few mega companies, I can't help but wonder what the interstate highway system that America has would have been like if the current political climate existed back when that system was built. Likely a patch work of private toll roads that are poorly maintained (why bother when you've got the only usable roads in the area - a monopoly - markets? - don't make me laugh). Maybe Newberry's suburban sprawl wouldn't have happened since the tolls would have been massive. Could that be a market virtue?

The truly amazing thing about how corrupt our public dialog has become is that while the people that claim the ultimate virtue of greed also get to claim the mantle of Jesus Christ, who one would think would be viewed as the anti-thesis of greed. This could only be possible with a total control of the nature of the dialog that is allowed to progress through the front channels of discourse - the press, the media and in many cases, the small talk while waiting on some line, say for bottled water. That's where the demonizing of "liberal" comes in and the projection of demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, spewing non-stop hate, onto the public discourse are essential and fundamental. The young maidens to be sacrificed for a good harvest are the "liberals" and "phony soldiers" among us. That becomes protected speech, while MoveOn.org type truth to power gets denounced in the highest halls of government.

Without control of the public dialog, little of the diminution and demoralization of America since the Reagan era could have happened. Politicians would have to run on real merits rather than phony ones since they'd be accurately described as such in the public dialog.

I know, it's a fantasy utopia, but then wasn't that what the American experiment in democracy was all about?

P.S.

Another quote that caught my eye -

"simply put, Iraqi deaths don't matter, because they aren't American deaths"

I remember in the days and weeks after Katrina in New Orleans when the projections of loss of life were huge, the body count was steadily rising until .. the body count was stopped, literally under the point of a gun. The fear was that the count would exceed the dead of the ultimate American horror - 9/11. Bodies were left to rot, never to be discovered or discovered months and years later when the public was looking elsewhere and the accounting papers had long since been shredded.

It isn't that the deaths weren't American. It's that the morality of "freedom" was greatly weakened when the death count of innocents was comparable to the worst of Saddam Hussein, the evil that was the claimed basis for the war (at one point anyway).

the meme is known: faith vs politics and the american dream aka On ontology and organisations voluntary

its all a feedback loop:

great post zuma and Yes welcome to the Agonist!

maybe Alinsky is right: Means and ends are so qualitatively interrelated that the true question has never been the proverbial one, 'Does the End justify the Means?' but always has been 'Does this particular end justify this particular means?'"

Stanley Hauerwas reflects on Yoder.
and
Jeffrey Perl suffocation in the polis

Yet like so many at the agonist, I have a safe life, food in my belly, no fear that they will come at night to take me away.

If anti-social is to become almost eremetical, to speak out and to refuse to stand up for a "common good" that has become corrupted by the needs and fantasies of the rich, so be it. The poor will always be with us, the downtrodden, and we, we who have so much do we sit silent, inactive or do we try to change, locally at first, then nationally then internationally. "think globally, act locally" was a great catch cry.

Freud depicted the work of society in the most repellent terms: “to help make everyone’s wish — the wish to harm others — come true. . . . The primordial wish to do harm breaks out in war — in homicidal acts sanctioned by society as heroic or, in any case, legal.” The hermeneutics of suspicion, of which Freud’s writings on war are exemplary, is a specialty of modern thought; yet the arguments that Freud, Sartre, Foucault, and the rest make seem always incomplete, veering off, as if inevitably, before reaching their logical terminus. If even heroism and altruism, let alone standard social conduct, are oblique expressions of aggression, cruelty, and the will to power (as the hermeneutics of suspicion maintains), then the obvious conclusion to reach is that human beings are not fit company for each other. Hence the best models for a decent relationship to society would be stylites, dendrites, and (on the hearty end of this spectrum) mendicants. The standard means of veering off from this conclusion is to blame one’s own society, or aspects of contemporary society, and then to propose improvements. - Jeffrey Perl.

I say my prayers, and smile at the strangers and yet I must be a coward, after pondering it all I went out and bought a pack of cigarettes.

Sometimes the end justifies the means. But a good intention is not the only requisite. One also requires honesty, transparency, introspection, the ability to admit and learn from mistakes and any number of other attributes that can basically be summarised via the word "integrity". I think humans know this instinctively, and do our best to ensure that it is so.

Many social advances can be seen as the introduction of formal systems to ensure this integrity. Sometimes we must deprive someone of their liberty or property to redress wrongs and protect society. But we've introduced the criminal justice system and the rule of law to ensure our integrity. Taking wealth from individuals via taxation is necessary to invest in common infrastructure. But we ensure the integrity of the system - that the money is spent wisely and common goods managed competently - via the formal system known as democracy. Even in international relations we have formal systems; the UN, embassies, the IAEA etc. Though they may be flawed, they are all we've got at the moment.

But sometimes there are no formal systems at all, or the systems in place are inadequate or subvertable - as all systems fundamentally are. Then we have to rely on the integrity of the individual. Even in the "steal medicine for a sick child" case, we judge the parent leniently, because we can identify with his integrity: he is aware that what he is doing is wrong, but knows that he has no choice. Conversely, someone who acts with the best of intentions is judged harshly if they fail to execute, and lack the integrity to evaluate their own performance or learn from their mistakes. (E.g., The doctor botching life-saving operations, or perhaps GWB's misadventure in the middle east.)

Unfortunately, it seems to me these days, and particularly in the USA, the most admired personal traits are things like stubbornness, impetuousness, and blind faith, things which are essentially the antithesis of integrity. The hysterical nature of public discourse does not help either. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to change that...

ow mommy, western philosophical wankery makes my head hurt. (it'll make you grow hair, not on your palms, but inside your ears, how'd you think the old guys get it?)
Ian, really, go do a "Walden" this weekend. the mind of man cannot appreciate all in this world w/o being in it. observe nature, and you will observe us. morality, schnorality. there is only life and death and change. but there might be a harmony, don't know fer sure...

http://agonist.org/20060802/i_came_over_here_because_i_wanted_to_kill_people

and shudder.

to understand matters such as this.

Listen to the inner voice.

(Bush isn't listening.)

I did inhale.

is not "am I moral"
but am I fully human.

I think judging by intentions is a terrible idea in a world where wealthy interests dominate media. Look at the attention Greenspan's book is getting, or the way Milton Friedman or Boris Yeltsin are admired in the U.S. These days, using intentions as a yardstick amounts to handing perpetrators of economic genocide an opportunity to dance away from richly deserved public infamy, not to speak of the asset-stripping and hard time they also deserve.

Also, in the category of things that are considered unequivocally good in some venues, let me just use the example of Ghandi. His successful non-violent efforts to rid India of British domination are admired with near universal consensus in the U.S. Yet, looked at from the viewpoint of India's Muslim minority, Ghandi's success was a terrible setback. In this case and many others, I don't think using a moral lens even ought to be our first priority. Much more useful, I would think, to begin with the more modest goal of operating with cultural competence. Learn the language, study the history. Until we do that I see no way to evaluate the consequences of our well-intentioned actions in the first place.

Finally, in general terms, whatever the merits of the debate about intervening in places like Darfur, maybe it is a bit fussy and sheltered of us to measure the angels on the heads of such pins given the context. By context I mean the presence of so much flagrant, blood-drenched evil all around us. How about Don Rumsfeld protecting those patents so desperate nations can't provide cheap generics for AIDS victims? What about the tens of millions of victims of vulture capitalism in Russia or the sex-trafficking of children because of the vicious asset-stripping of the former Southeast Asian tiger economies?

My best hopes for a more moral future? Decentralised power. Local economies with more power both to feed and protect themselves. Maybe a little historical luck too. Keep the Great Satan bogged down in the Oiligarchies long enough for South America to become too strong to fall victim to our predations again. Maybe one day soon it will be time to learn Spanish and get over my phobia of insects.

The intention, to the extent we are able ought to be compassion. I think the end is happiness, but unfortunately the means to the end appears to be suffering. Suffering the change, we grow and move toward a wholeness that is something like happiness. Until, it all changes again.

Morality? I don't know what that is. And as far as applying all these mish mashed 'values' of happiness, means, ends, morality, ethics. I get lost. Ian's examples are perfect. Premeditated, unmeditated, accidental. His example was murder, but these aspects equally apply to kindness. There is the premeditated kindnesses that we plan and want to give, there are the unmeditated moments of kindness, the dollar impulsively given to someone asking for money. And there is the accidental kindness we never even knew we did.

There is the premeditated, unmeditated and accidentally messed up lives too, and how do we respond. There are those who willingly doggedly repeatedly mess up their lives. There are those who in a moment of anger do something and pay for it the rest of their lives, and then there are those children who through no fault of their own are born into nightmares.

So there is justice in it somehow too, pulling it all back to intention. Do we help the ones who's intentions created the mess in the first place. Or - Do we help without regard to cause, give kindness undeserved to the undeserving. The two sides of the coin. Or is there really only the one side. I feel the pull of justice often enough, I dislike stupidity, bad choices, feel little compulsion to help someone who put themselves in a hole. But is that right?? I don't think so. Honestly, this blog irritates me more than any other, but at the same time I feel the arguments, the focus on the poor (something I have no experience of) has had some effect.

Don't even know what I am trying to say. But it was interesting that this was the post this morning.

why not? you answer first

in terms of morality, the painful question isn't "do i steal medicine for my sick child" - it's "do i steal medicine from my neighbor's sick child for my own sick child". in that sense, it is abundantly clear that if you're going to construct rationalizations for preemptive or aggressive warfare, you may as well skip the morality business.

if some foreign despot has nukes that i am concerned he or she "might" use.....am i justified in destroying his country, just to be sure? it is perhaps a reasonable concern with no easy answer. however, what we do know is that surety is also a concept incompatible with the science of warfare, which is more appropriately about cost vs. benefit analysis. one goes into war knowing that it will be expensive, if one has any sense at all.

a reasonable person avoids conflict rather than seeks it, strives to limit and/or mitigate it as much as possible when it occurs, strives to make it as brief as possible when it occurs, and then agonizes [in resonance with the name of this blog] how to learn from the experience to avoid it in the future. we are not currently governed by reasonable people, and will be paying the price for their unreasonableness for generations.

There is no morality at all.

We are all of us stealing, from the future generation, anything this earth provides. In terms of reality, there is only justice. You slip off a high place, you fall. Old Mother Earth does not care if we live or die.

When the great Tao is forgotten
Kindness and morality arise...

If you know you are doing the right thing, it does not matter if others see it as "moral" or not.

If you know what you are doing is wrong, it does not matter if others see you as moral. It's still wrong.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin

Here is a good basic look at moral philosophy, one of the few texts I kept from college.

The Elements of Moral Philosophy

Theft: depends on what property, and what you mean by "property". No one goes in my wallet, but damn near anybody who isn't dumping trash or lighting fires can walk across my woods, even if they pick some berries on the way. Ownership is a spectrum between "mine and only mine" to "shared interest". Man, I wish people would get that through their heads. Particularly rich people.

Intention matters, but really only in deciding what the consequences (punishment) should be. If you did wrong, you did wrong even if you didn't mean to. But punishment is a completely different subject from morality.

Ends are only as good the means used to get there. Taking a taxi to one block before the end of a marathon doesn't make you a winner.

Morality is a kind of (cultural) shorthand - behave this way and you won't get in trouble. That doesn't mean it's always right, by any means. Just the local approximation.

Two people must solve a problem that has profound consequences for other people. The problem before the two encompasses such questions of morality like the ones mentioned by Ian above. It is assumed that each person is approaching the problem in a unilateral way. The solution each of the persons come up with may have affects on their own lives though not as profound as the affect on some of the other people. That is to say that no solution should be considered that requires one person or the other to sacrifice their life or liberty but given these constraints I will define a right thing to do about the problem as something both persons know, at least in the back of their mind, that will result in the best possible outcome for everyone not including the two people. That is to say that the right decision could mean that some people might be harmed and some disadvantage may come to one or both of the two problem solvers.

Person number one is known to have integrity; that is he or she always tries to do the right thing regardless of his or her own interests. Person number two is not known to always behave with such integrity; sometimes he or she pursues his or her own interests over the right thing to do even when number two knows, at least in the back of his or her mind, what is the right thing to do as I've defined it and will sometimes do something else. Therefore, person number two cannot be trusted to make a moral decision about the problem. Person number one might make mistake but can be trusted otherwise.

Having the integrity to make such a decision is a rare thing but the United States has rarely shown integrity in these kinds of matters; even entering WWII. In fact the US always acts in its own interests internationally even in tactical matters. The US is like person number 2 in my example only worse. That is why the United States cannot behave in a moral way regarding unilateral military interventions.