Theft or fraud would definitely be preferable to the loss of the planet. Utilitarianism aside, sometimes doing the wrong thing actually is the better thing to do. Anyone who helped slaves escape via the Underground Railroad or smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany would not be considered evil for their actions, and those could easily be construed as theft (in a gross way) or fraud.
Because humans have a natural right to movement, helping slaves is not theft even if an evil social institution falsely claims it is theft. Similarly regarding eugenics, humans have a natural right to reproduce and to live, so someone assisting someone to escape that situation is in the right no matter what society they live in.
Extreme moral relativism like you’re mentioning here is just as wrong as utilitarianism.
It’s not preferable to steal than to lose the planet. Some things really are worse than death, and committing an evil action is wrong no matter what the justification the evildoer makes.
Evil is not a 100% settled matter. For example, some people believe that saving another person's life if you can is a moral obligation and to not do so would be an evil act. I gather from your refusal to even consider stealing something in order to save the planet you are in the other camp.
For most utilitarians, refusal to do good is evil because they view actions as having a certain number of positive or negative utils based on their outcomes.
For many other ethical systems, good and evil aren’t weighed against each other. Instead evil deeds may be forbidden flat out. Good deeds are optional but commendable. Since evil is forbidden and good is optional, you cannot justify good with evil - you cannot justify the unjustifiable.
Why is deontology a better system than utilitarianism? There’s a lot of reasons, but here’s two.
First deontology solves a lot of thought puzzles much more cleanly than utilitarianism does, and avoids the weirdness such as that torturing one person is ok if it makes everyone else happy (see the short fiction story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” for a empathetic example). Deontology has a strong philosophical basis outside of theology, especially beginning with Kant.
Second it prevents those in power from justifying evil deeds because of the good outcome. Take politics, where politicians will justify evil actions to their followers by arguing it’s necessary to prevent the other side from winning. If people accept a better theory of ethics, those types of arguments won’t take and politics will be forced to a higher standard.
If we are going to translate animal body language and sounds to English, then I think you won’t find any animal who doesn’t show fear in front of certain death.
Yet… we will still hunt them, we will still eat them.
Maybe not everyone in the world, but in my part of the world people butcher animals for their household during December. You have to bring home the animal, feed them for some days or weeks then do it. Yet, despite all that… we still eat animals.
This reminds me of when I was in basic training. The drill sgts would give us new recruits a task that none of us knew how to do, purposefully without guidance, and then leave. One guy would try and start doing it, always the incorrect way, and everyone else would just copy that person.
I wonder if this is exacerbated by human tendencies to not want to look bad relative to others, even if it leads to silly outcomes like intelligent people following a bad or rushed idea.
Something similar happens in public economic forecasts because those who get it wrong when others get it right are treated much more harshly than those who get it wrong when others get it wrong too.
"Don't jump off a cliff just because everyone else is doing it" basically
I guess the next logical exercise would be asking them to do something with instructions that are complete, but incorrect or at least inefficient, to teach the lesson of questioning superior orders rather than just peers. Actually, I'm honestly not sure it that's desired in military discipline or not (no direct experience here)
I drove a forklift one summer for a manufacturing plant.
I had a supervisor tell me to do something that was clearly not right and I refused. I came in the next day and they tried to write me up and I refused to sign the paperwork for it.
The one thing no one could accurately describe is why the supervisor was right.
I agree with the idea of being willing to go against authority but disagree that it's always a good career move :)
Of course it was easier for me, it was just a summer job, I was going back to Uni in the fall.
The specific example is beside the point. There are any number of events that can happen outside of a driver's control, human or computer, that could cause this or a similar predicament, e.g. the truck could have just changed lanes abruptly without signaling
Whenever you create any kind of art, be it a story, a picture, or whatever, I would argue you reveal something about yourself. I remember reading about Philippe Halsman, a photographer who did this series of portraits featuring celebrities jumping. His theory was that when his subjects were in the air they were so preoccupied that they would inadvertently let their guard down and let their true selves out. He did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe like this and afterwards when he told her his reasoning behind it she was so mortified she refused to ever work with him again
This is why I love the YouTube series Hot Ones. Nothing forces a guard to be down (and humanizes a celebrity) more than eating wings that are way too spicy :D
Some books absolutely do not lend themelves to a digital format. I'm currently in the middle of House of Leaves and there are sections of it that play with the fact they are printed on paper.
I've read House of Leaves multiple times, a few in paper and a few on my Kindle. There was no discernable difference in enjoyment between the two formats - your conclusion is false.
If you only read it on Kindle you would miss out on the whole section where the text is printed in boxes that are mirrored on opposite sides of the page. On that note, where did you even find a Kindle version?
