The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: No education (was purity)



ioannis@flinet.com  wrote on 02.12.97 in <19971202074653.28302@ohiox>:

> On Tue, Dec 02, 1997 at 12:11:43AM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > Ioannis Tambouras:
> > > If you think that ethics is a subject that we "intuitively know", I
> > > dare say you are sadly mistaken.
> >
> > I think that this is a _very_ dangerous line. It is very important
> > for the continued and further well-being and civilization of our
> > society that  continue to make, and make more often,
> > personal decisions about ethics, morality, etc.
>
>  Dangerous, or not, is another another subject all together.

Not really.

>  What I said is well established (except for the intuitionists). It
>  is easy to appreciate the ideas behind each of the theories, but how
>  do we determine whether they are correct? That is a daunting question.
>  Unfortunately people tend to accept or reject ideas based on their
> intuitive  appeal: if it sounds good, they accept it; or if it rubs the
> wrong way,  they discard it. This is not a satisfactory way to proceed if we
> want to  discover the truth -- if there is such thing. How an idea strikes

With regard to ethics, there is good reason to believe that there actually  
is no better way - different people will have different reasons for liking  
or disliking those ideas, but as far as I can see, the important  
difference between ethics and physics is that there simply is no universal  
truth you could find out about. (Note that this sentence can be  
interpretedtwo ways - either there is no truth, or else you can't find out  
about it. Let me point out that this difference is of absolutely no  
practical importance at all.)

Now, without an universal truth, what is the basis for deciding which  
ideas to adopt and which to reject?

It's all pretty much arbitrary.

Personally, I think that there are two general positions here, one being  
"good is what I want", the other "good is what minimizes social conflict",  
and most strategies are some mix of these two basics - sometimes in really  
strange ways.

>  find such theories. Considering that these theories have been around
>  for thousands of years, for most of them do resurface
>  under different name, it is (I think) unlikely that we will ever prove
>  anything that is of practical use. But what else can we do?

See above :-)

>  To form and resolve sound arguments requires training, Aristotle
>  was saying.

That, however, is not the same as training in ethics. For example,  
everyone with a solid science education should have the necessary training  
for it.

>  philosophers

Well, let's say I'm seriously underimpressed by these guys.

You know how people look at pictures from Picasso, and say "my kid could  
do this"? (And it's not completely wrong, either, even if things aren't  
quite as simple as those people think.)

When I look at output from philosophers, I usually tend to think "not only  
_could_ I do that, I could do it better". Of course, I fully expect (most  
of) the philosophers to disagree.

>     Ethics, like others have said, is a very touchy subject and I will
>  definetly will not start discussing it on this list ( though I have given
>  three lectures to students last year and only one was insulted).
>  I stand by what I said, for it this subject is not too different than
>  geography, physics, or statistics. The only difference is that there has
>  not been much progress.

It's extremely different. That you don't see this means, to me, that _you_  
are completely unqualified to talk about it. Of course, I don't expect you  
to agree.


MfG Kai


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