Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Copyfree

[Aaron Wolf]

On 02/26/2016 01:22 PM, Blaise Alleyne wrote:
> On 26/02/16 04:13 PM, Alexander Berntsen wrote:
>> On 26/02/16 22:06, Blaise Alleyne wrote:
>>> It does mean that bludgeoning people / copyright isn't always
>>> wrong.
>> Something can be bad yet necessary. One can e.g. reject power as a bad
>> thing, but still accept that children should perhaps not have the
>> freedom to choose their own diet, should their choices lead to a
>> harmful diet; there is no conflict here. One can bludgeon someone to
>> escape murder and copyright software to prevent someone from making
>> software nonfree, all the while maintaining that bludgeoning and
>> copyright are evils.
>>
> 
> Guess we have a diffrent ethical philosophy then. I don't think it's ever
> ethically okay to *do* evil, even though there may be situations in which we
> *tolerate* evil effects of good or neutral actions, because we can't separate
> out the evil effects.
> 
> To get the discussion back on track... whatever the ethical philosophy, I 
> think
> we agree that copyright is sometimes necessary or at least useful, that,
> ethically speaking, copyright isn't something to be avoided always at all 
> costs.
> 
>>> It is, perhaps, morally neutral, or maybe only prima facie wrong,
>>> but not intrinsically/always wrong.
>> I do not accept morals.
>>
>> As for copyright as well as bludgeoning people, I think both are --
>> ethically speaking -- evils.
>>
> 
> So... s/morally/ethically/g
> 

FWIW, I hold the ethical philosophy that there exist very few if any
things that we can define in the abstract and then state dogmatically
that all instances meeting a definition are evil.

Abstractly, murder is evil. That doesn't mean we don't need to have a
trial process for any case where there's no doubt about who committed a
murder. The actual circumstances in each case are complex and relevant
to making ethical judgments.

Abstractly, it is wrong to put restrictions on non-rivalrous resources
that could otherwise be free and open to all as public goods. That
doesn't mean every specific case within the context of real-world
circumstances can be automatically judged simply by knowing our dogma
and no room for consideration about the details of the case.

The whole reason that things like the Trolley Problem exist in
philosophy is because ethics *is* fuzzy. Attempts to create simplistic
absolute dogma and deny fuzziness are generally misguided. At the best,
we can treat simple ethical aphorisms as *guidelines* rather than
strict, hard definitions. The primary motivation to say "X is evil,
period, no discussion needed" comes from people who want the world to be
simple and want to avoid difficult questions. It doesn't come out of a
motivation to be more ethical (this assertion is just a generality, of
course!).