0010 - Hard to Joke About Ethics

Dysevidentia

The Full Rant Text [1:36] -
I argue a lot of politics online. Sometimes that leads to interesting interactions, but not this week. Representative Kevin McCarthy posted some non-sense and I called him a traitor and said he wasn’t a good source because he was a liar. Of course his supporters leapt to his defense. The arguments rapidly got mired in name calling and every republican fear being projected onto me.

Let me slow down for a moment and pick just one.

The United States can accurately be described as a Democratic Republic Magistocracy with Kleptocratic and Pornocratic tendencies all while supporting a robust Capitalistic Oligarchy and a Militaristic Hegemony.

That sounds really negative and there is a lot to unpack there. I view it as a list of things to improve not a shit list and I won’t unpack it, but I will share some simplified definitions:

Democracy - a government where people vote on stuff.

Republic - a government where people choose leaders who do the day to day governing.

Magistocracy - Leadership by magistrates, judges.

Kleptocracy - Leadership by thieves.

Pornocracy - a government so corrupt and willing to embrace drama that it reminds one of the porn industry. In front of and behind the camera.

Capitalistic - A culture that elevates money.

Militiaristic - A culture relating strongly to warfare.

Hegemony - A group of countries all taking leadership from one.

So, knowing all these about the United States you can imagine my frustration when people say stuff like: wE aRe DeMoCraCy NoT a rEpUblic. And how that is compounded when intelligent people like Legal Eagle repeat that phrase not realizing it is a thought terminating cliche used as part of shitty political debate.

With all of that complex categorical nuance it can be hard to discuss ethics in our leadership.

People argue that the constitution allowed for McCarthy to try to vote away our election results, and it does. It allows for that so congress isn’t forced to accept fraudulent results from the states and we had no evidence of fraud. So maybe we shouldn’t be taking our ethical ques from government and laws which I already described as a Kleptocracy and Pornocracy.

So where should we get ethics?

Some reach to the bible and try to determine what jesus would do. I think that horseshit because there isn’t much evidence to support religion, but that doesn’t really matter because the bible doesn’t really have much to say about modern problems. The bible doesn’t say a lot about zoning or pollution. Even places where religious books appear to have some say like, abortion, taxation, or usury, it still takes human judgment to interpret that. Notice how the pious can’t agree on these topics?

Between the lack of being real and general lack of agreement religion is a not a good source of ethics.

Some people might reflexively reach for science. But it doesn't matter how much you learn about the facts and reality of what is. It doesn’t matter how much you study evolution, for example, because that can’t tell you if genetically engineered corn is ethical. That study can tell you if the engineered genes can leak out into the ecosystem or not or if those genes will hurt people eating them. You can’t infer a value judgement from the raw data alone, you need to use human judgement at some point.

Put another way, science can’t tell us what we want to do, but once we decide what we want to do we can decide how best to approach our goals using science. It is up to us whether we do that ethically or optimize for something else.

I am going to pick on one extremely contentious but stale topic for a deeper example.

In April 2011, one soldier now named Chelsea Manning, but at the time Bradley Manning, leaked a video of an attack helicopter killing some journalists. I think we can all agree killing people and journalists unprovoked is bad, and if you can’t then fuck off.

But they were in a war zone and reviewing the full 38 minute video makes it look like the pilots mistook bulky cameras for weapons. They asked for permission to shoot, they took some precautions, clearly not enough but more than one might expect for a warzone.

Look at the full length video in the show notes. The full video is not clear, and these kinds of mistakes happen in earnest in war, communication is hard even on the best days. People seriously discussed punishing or firing the pilots and their commanders. The ethics around this is way less clear than it could be. How do we consider accidents or people who might be using accidents to cover up mistakes when thinking about ethics?

Then the leaker, Chelsea, who claimed to just want to expose corruption also released three quarters of a million other files. She was tried and held with less than the entirety of due process. She was a soldier and subject to the UCMJ, a sort of military only law, in addition to normal law. And leaking such vast amounts put her in a special category, but also the relative ease she did it made leniency seem plausible. To leak this much when the laws were written would have taken semi trailers full of stuff. Should punishment be harsh or lenient. The press coverage at the time made her holding conditions seem like borderline torture. There were accusations that this treatment was in part because she was trans. Then her sentence was commuted 7 years from what might have been lifelong incarceration.

There were so many mitigating factors. Chelsea tried to go through appropriate channels and it seemed that to everyone involved that Chelsea thought she was doing the right thing even though all of her superiors in the government disagreed that it was actually the right thing. How much should intention and goals factor in?

Is any of that right or wrong?

This topic is clearly too much for me to cover in a rant, but this scenario has enough moving parts to be used in thought experiments.

Think bigotry against trans people is good? If Chelsea had access to cheaper counseling and not the hypermasculine environment that is the US Military she might not have wanted to leak these documents. That is pretty damningly anti-bigotry and seems on firm footing with the evidence.

Should we have not gone to war in the first place? Most listening now probably think it was a bad idea, but when we started the war was overwhelmingly popular. We had evidence from previous wars and perhaps we could have known better

Should leakers be punished more or could leaks possibly be prevented by increasing the amount of material that leaves through the official channels? The evidence seems to show that beyond a certain point punishment is not an effective deterrent and at some point national security is important and needs to be protected so we can’t just release everything. So maybe we should encourage a strictly volunteer military instead of coercing membership by paying for college with the GI Bill. If college were federally paid for then Chelsea Manning may never have entered what was obviously a difficult situation.

I can’t do this topic justice, I want to revisit it more in a future episode perhaps as a central topic. But we can keep asking hypotheticals about this situation because it is so public and has so much visible nuance.

There are a lot of questions here and on ethics in general. I cannot provide good answers. I can say how I approach ethics. Here is how much I take for granted. I have no evidence that this is right beyond my own intuition, but I do believe this needs to be the foundation for human ethics. Just four words “we should minimize suffering”.

That short sentence does a lot of heavy lifting. It implies that we know how. With enough science and data we can know how. You won’t find that sentiment in most hol...