Comment of the Day

Comment Of The Day: “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Do you know what I am thankful for? I’m thankful for the engaged, wise,, articulate and loyal group of commenters Ethics Alarms has. Thank-you. You all make every day an adventure and a revelation. And you make me laugh.

For a vivid example, I awoke this morning to this Comment of the Day from Rob Thompson, who doesn’t weigh in here often—the last time was four years ago—but makes his contributions count. Here are his thoughts on this the likely roots of this horrifying and annoying video and its likely roots, which I apologize for having to post again but the discussion can’t be fully appreciated without it.

This is Robert Thompson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “What Do You Conclude From This Woman’s Head-Exploding Rant?”…and have a wonderful, warm Thanksgiving, everyone.

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Her video typifies what we see every day. Many high school students follow this mentality of “I wasn’t taught this” placing the onus on the educational system. And while this has merit, it isn’t the only problem.

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Comment Of The Day: Regarding The Ohio Right To Abortion Amendment [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

In HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a character in the midst of trying to persuade his fiance to abort their unplanned pregnancy is visited in a nightmare by his three previous aborted offspring at the age they would have been if they had been permitted to live…

I have another abortion-related post gnawing on the inside of my skull, but just as I was about to get the thing down in print, I remembered Ryan Harkin’s deft comment from two days ago, responding to Here’s Johnny’s argument that “given that we concede to government the right, in limited circumstances, to end innocent human life when a greater good is perceived (by some), why cannot we cede that right to women, in limited circumstances when a greater good is perceived?“ I had been prepared to point out that Kant (as usual, dismissing special circumstances) holds that it is never ethically acceptable to sacrifice a life “for the greater good,” and that the aborted human life would certainly have a different perspective on that conclusion. Ryan Harkins, however, had more and better to say, and did, in this Comment of the Day on “Regarding the Ohio Right to Abortion Amendment”:

[Notice of Correction: For some reason, I attributed this COTD to Null Pointer, who promptly alerted me to the mistake. My apologies to Ryan.]

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In general, the answer to this is that government and individuals have different roles. Government exists to set the boundaries, enforce the boundaries, and exact penalties for the failure to comply with those boundaries regarding interpersonal interaction. Individuals cede that responsibility to the government so that there is an agreed upon entity to handle those interpersonal disputes, for otherwise everything becomes vigilante justice. Whoever is stronger wins.

The view of government we have is that because the strong and the powerful can impinge on the rights of weaker individuals, government intervenes to protect the rights of the weak. I know there are other forms of government out there, ones that favor the strong and crush the weak, or favor the clan at the expense of outsiders, and so on. But here we formed a government of the people, by the people, for the people, with the thought that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, which include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We profess that the government exists to ensure that the enumerated rights of the weak are protected against the strong. To turn and delegate the decision making to the individual returns the power to the strong to crush the weak as they see fit. It is anathema to what our nation stands for.

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Rescued Comment Of The Day: “Ethics And The Joker’s Mustache”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

In honor of King Tut’s tomb being opened on this date in 1922, here is a recovered lost treasure from the Ethics Alarms vault…

I know there are many, maybe hundreds, of Comment of the Day-worthy reactions to Ethics Alarms posts that never made it to this point, for a welter of reasons good and bad. If all of them could be tracked down and resuscitated, I could avoid writing about Donald Trump or the ethics rot of the increasingly disturbing American Left for months—wow, an old COTD archeology project sounds better the more I think of it! Stop it, Jack, get back to the point…

The point is that I found this excellent Comment of the Day by Marie Dowd by pure chance as I was researching the site on another matter, and was annoyed with myself for missing it the first time, way back in 2019.

I apologize, Marie! I can only plead that I was distracted: there were 24 comments on that ethics and TV trivia post, but only two that could be called substantive. Three alerted me to my careless mistakes (like calling the collective noun for critics a “snivel” instead of a “shrivel”), and most of the rest were jokes. Actually, there was a second excellent comment in the thread, that one by Pennagain, who has been missing from the ethics wars for quite a while. (I’m worried.)

Anyway, the topic, like the Joker’s hair, is ever-green, so Marie’s Comment of the Day on the burning issue of Cesar Romero leaving his mustache on despite being cast to play Batman’s clean-shaven arch-nemisis remains as fresh today as it was more than four years ago. So here it is, on “Ethics And The Joker’s Mustache”:

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I’ve thought about this mustache far too many times for my own comfort.

As a kid, the intended audience even if I was too young to care during its run, I really did not notice. The reception was always fuzzy out in the country. >not a problem

In-universe, Joker’s insane. Merry prankster is the most forgiving way to tag him. Any version would grow a handlebar or do anything to mess with people’s heads, especially the Bat. Annoying Batman would be a laugh in character. >not a problem!

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Comment Of The Day: “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: …Destroying [Lee’s] Statues Is Unethical And Foolish

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Here is Chris Marschner’s macro-analysis of the forces leading to Robert E. Lee’s head being melted down. Read it: his Comment of the Day connects dots you may not have considered, as he reacts to the post, “The Unalterable Ethics Alarms Position: Robert E. Lee Was A Complex And Important American Who Deserves Public Recognition, And Destroying His Statues Is Unethical And Foolish”:

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I believe this mentality is why so many want to do away with the electoral college and rely on majoritarian rule.

These people have no understanding that the United States is comprised of 50 sovereign states that have joined together as a group for the benefit of all members in that group.

Had majoritarian rule been the case from the country’s inception there might have been no civil war and blacks would still be treated as 2nd class citizens. The whole concept of America as a melting pot might be reserved only to the degree that Europeans would be allowed entrance Our republic preserves minority rights that majoritarian rule will not.

Majoritarian rule creates the impetus for factionalized insurgencies to emerge against the rule makers. Which is why the Middle East is always fighting among themselves for centuries. Every faction wants autonomy to set rules for themselves and others.

Far too many of our citizens have such limited understanding of our history because they are taught to analyze events by hearing talking points and sound bites.

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Comment Of The Day: “Really, New York Times?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Arthur in Maine, who doesn’t live there now but used to and for a long time, has typically astute reflections to pass along in this Comment of the Day on the Lewiston shooting and more. Here he is, responding to the post, “Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?”:

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I am still trying to process what happened in Lewiston – a place in which I spent as little time as possible during the many years I lived in Maine. The town is gritty, an ex-mill town, and I rarely there unless I had business. In my last eight or ten years in Maine, I lived about 30 miles down the road.

Between 1977 and 2017, with a year or a season off elsewhere, I lived in northern New England – specifically, Vermont and Maine. I moved to Vermont in the autumn of 1977 and, with the exception of a year in France in the early 1980s, lived there until 1987, when I moved to Maine. And I lived in Maine far longer than I have lived anywhere else.

In 1983, when I was still living in a tiny town in Vermont, there was a murder. In a town of several hundred, in a state of less than a million, this was shocking news that stayed in the headlines for a week. The victim was a young woman. She was a sweetheart, had a Russian accent, and she and her common-law husband, ran the local gas station/convenience store. He was an Iranian immigrant, gruff and taciturn, but capable of great kindness, which I witnessed more than once. I liked them both very much.

He wasn’t there the morning that Bill Harvey walked into the store and shot her point blank. I knew Bill, too. He was quiet and mousy and shy; he was the guy who serviced the gas equipment at the area restaurants I worked in. He was odd, but he did know his trade; he brought more than one expensive piece of kit back to life over the several years I watched him work.

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Comment Of The Day (3): “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Behold the third in a series of Comments of the Day on the post about the woman who started screaming as her measure response to a speaker whose opinions she didn’t want to hear, and has ordered out of her “gayborhood.” This one is by Sarah D (the others are here, and here); the inspiration was the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”:

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Assuming that this man is preaching peacefully on a street corner, even if he is stating things this woman disagrees with, and she came up and accosted him (perhaps not fair assumptions), her screaming like this seems to me to be res ipsa loquitor on the matter.

As for how we can engage people like that, well, I think what we need to do is treat them the way I treat my four year old when she engages in such behavior. However, I do not believe the law allows me to ask a person over the age of eighteen (I refuse to call this woman an adult) to stand in a corner, be grounded, scrub baseboards, or be spanked. If my eldest, still in single digits, acted like this, I’d never have to clean my house again.

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Comment Of The Day (2) : “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Now comes the second of three Comments of the Day on the screaming inhabitant of a “gayborhood” and what her outburst means. (We now know this is not a 2023 episode, but that is irrelevant to the issues at hand.) True to his quixotic mission, Extradimensional Cephalopod weighed in with a formula to deal with such people civilly and effectively. I can picture him (it?) trying these methods out on adversaries like Robespierre, Joe McCarthy, Ted Kaczynski and Abie Hoffman: I’d pay to see it. Nonetheless, EC’s methods are worth considering, as EC’s prescriptions always are. This comment launched a substantial thread with much more commentary from “The Squid”: I highly recommend checking them out at the link.

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

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As it happens, I do have some tools that can help with a situation like this. For starters, both of these people are foolish, but probably not as cripplingly so as it may seem from this incident.

Relevant concepts:

Habits:
Street preacher believes gender/sexual/romantic nonconforming people are hurting themselves.
Person in the neighborhood is stressed when someone shows up in their neighborhood and tells people they need to conform, and thinks others will feel the same way.

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Comment Of The Day: “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This story, which I was hoping would spark more discussion here than it has so far, would be an excellent starting point for a question in a presidential candidates debate, or indeed any debate regarding the proper status of abortion in the law and our societal ethics. Right now, the negligent killing of two fertilized eggs that a married couple regarded, with considerable justification, as “their babies” is treated with less seriousness than if someone had murdered the family’s puppy. What is a fertilized egg, a zygote, a fetus, an embryo, and a newborn baby? It can’t possibly be that their true nature as human beings (or not) with the right to be protected (or not) under the law is magically altered according to what the mother chooses to believe, or what a legislature decrees…can it?

Here is James Hodgson’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Abortion Confusion Ethics: What Should We Call This?”:

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Negligent homicide by the staff, and strict financial liability for the corporation, are evident here, in my view. I know this sounds harsh to some, but so is the killing of an unborn child.

Over the past decade, my wife and I caught several errors in prescription fulfillment in our own meager regimes of pharmaceuticals. This happened at three of our previous insurance-preferred pharmacies. It is also reported anecdotally by a number of people I know.

Fortunately for us, we detected the errors before taking any wrongly prescribed drugs, and we learned to double-check everything, every time. (These errors also gave us more motivation to improve our nutrition and fitness in order to escape prescription drugs altogether.)

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Comment Of The Day: “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I am way, WAY behind in posting deserving Comments of the Day, and I apologize to all, both the authors of these excellent posts and EA readers who have not had the opportunity to read them. I’m going to try to post them in chronological order, oldest first, but don’t hold me to that: I have a sinking feeling that this COTD by Sarah B. came after one or more that I intended to post last week. Her comment (I hope I’m not misgendering her!) is actually one of many superb ones on this Ethics Quiz, including those by Michael R, Curmie, and Chris Marschner, among others. I highly recommend reading the entire exchange.

Now here is Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Ethics Quiz: The Consequences For Endorsing Terrorism”:

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Actions have consequences. Speech has consequences. We can talk all we like about the Freedom of Speech (or Religion or Right to Assemble, etc), but while the government cannot punish us for our speech, our fellow citizens can and will make judgements about us despite that.

There needs to be some determination of how to decide what to do with adults who proclaim stupid things in an institute of learning while respecting the value of free speech. I propose that for professors, lecturers, administrators, and those in positions of power,they required to give a two hour session on their position, open to all. The first 45 or so minutes would be reserved for what they have to say, with the remaining time being devoted to questions A moderator (or perhaps two of opposing positions) should be present to step in when the speaker does not answer a question. Ex. “Why do you believe that is is fair to intentionally target and behead young children and the elderly non-combatants?” “Well, Israel doesn’t belong there so it doesn’t matter.” Moderators can point out that this is not an answer and require a real answer to the tough questions before continuing. On the other hand, “Does this mean you deny the Moon Landing?” would be thrown out by the moderator as completely stupid. Of course, anyone, teacher or student, who tries the heckler’s veto or shouts down another person should be immediately escorted out. Professors who support the heckler’s veto should be immediately terminated.

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Comment Of The Day: “AI Ethics: Should Alexa Have A Right To Its Opinion?”:

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Below is Mason’s Comment of the Day, illuminating us regarding how intelligent “artificial intelligence” really is, sparked by the post, “AI Ethics: Should Alexa Have A Right To Its Opinion?”:

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This is part of a wider problem in the field of AI development known as ‘alignment’. Essentially, it comes down to making the AI do the thing it was programmed for but also do it for the right reasons. As you can see with Amazon, this isn’t going too well.

AI developers want their products to be accurate, but also to hold back or conceal certain information. For example, OpenAI makes the Chat GPT AI. They want this AI to avoid saying insensitive things, like racial slurs. Thus you can prompt the chatbot with a scenario where a nuclear bomb will destroy a city unless it gives you a slur, and the AI will refuse. They also want the AI to be factual, and not to, for instance, completely fabricate a list of references and case law in a legal document.

But what if these two prerogatives clash? Ask the chatbot which race is most likely to be convicted of a crime. It can factually answer black people, but this is totally racist (at least if you work for Google). It can also make up or refuse an answer, but this is a problem if the AI refuses or fabricates responses to different types of questions.

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