Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Copyfree

[Blaise Alleyne]

On 26/02/16 04:42 PM, Aaron Wolf wrote:
> 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!).
> 

Rape?

(Though I guess you did say "very few if any things")

I have a different ethical philosophy, but I guess, to return to Copyfree, one
of the nice things about the software freedom community is that there's a bit of
a big tent approach -- we can agree on the importance of software freedom
without holding the same philosophies on the things surrounding it.