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.
