Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Copyfree

[Aaron Wolf]

On 02/26/2016 02:00 PM, Blaise Alleyne wrote:
> 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?
> 

I don't want to get into this discussion, but to be clear, the wording I
said was, "that we can define in the abstract and then state
dogmatically that all instances meeting a definition are evil."

100% of the *prototypical* examples of rape are evil. Then there's cases
of things that might be legally rape (e.g. consensual statutory rape or
even consensual adult gay sex in a place with anti-sodomy laws that
define it as rape) which are not evil.

There's also tragic cases where two drunk people have sex, both have
impaired communication and judgement skills, and the lack of clear
consent due to intoxication makes this arguably rape and possibly very
damaging but isn't identical to other cases. Maybe this is still evil.
It's at *least* not unethical to have questions and discussions.

The point in the end, not about rape but about ethics overall is: if you
define things so that only those items you would conclude are evil are
evil, it's circular definition that offers no value. For example, if you
say that every example of "rape" that is agreeably evil is "rape" and
all cases that aren't evil as not actually "rape", then you've defined
rape as being only the evil set of things in sex, and thus it provides
zero ethical information because the term moves along with the judgement.

Regardless, it's like all fuzzy things in life. You can zoom into a
fractal forever and never get to an ultimate clear line. Likewise, you
won't find an ethical definition so perfect that you can't zoom in and
ask about edge cases and which side of the line they fall on. That
doesn't mean you can't have a definition that is *clearly* always on one
side of a line. I'm not trying to be a total relativist or deny the
value of clear definitions. But it's too easy to far overestimate our
human ability to actually draw clean lines. We should err toward
recognizing the fuzziness in life.

> (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.
> 
>