I love the moral maze
Jul. 29th, 2007 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
map_of_the_worldits so full of crap
it was doing a program about honesty and weather people are less honest than they used to be and it was saying that 75% of people don't care about buying fake fashion brands. and how this was bad because consumers are lining criminals pockets, well isn't the way to deal with that to get rid of big name and high fashion brands in the first place? Anyway big clothing companies are invariably morally criminaly/ dishonest if not exactly behaving illegally anyway what with tax loopholes and sweatshop labour so I really cant see what the problem there is.
aaand then apparently 2/3rds of the middle class routinely cheat business or government. and so what, i have no problem with cheating businesses, they have too much money and power anyway. not so sure about the government, though wonder if they did that survey with the working class. I have no problem with benefit cheats, in my experience it is just people earning an extra tenner hear and there and really if benefits were enough to live on I really think benefit fraud would go down.
and it said "seven members of the cabinet owned up to being drug criminals" since when is being a criminal directly linked with dishonesty? doesn't the fact they admitted it mean they are not being dishonest? Anyway what is this crap, it really really irritates me. generally people think about drugs one of two ways 1) they are bad 2)they are not bad. if you think there's nothing wrong with drugs then you wont care who took what when. If you do think drugs are bad surely you would understand that people do crazy dangerous sometimes illegal things when young which has absolutely no bearing to who they are now for crying out loud? michael portilo was all like what other country in the world would politicians have been that honest? Really in most countries i shouldn't think anyone cares if their politicains took drugs when they were nineteen!
And its kind of SHOCK REPORT POLITICIANS LIE. surely this is neither new nor news? haven't they always done it? we are just more aware of it these days.
lots of talk about what a crock moral relativism is and that there is an absolute empirical reality. I do think there is an absolute empirical reality but i don't think people can reach it because everything is filtered through the sum of everything we are so of course we are going to see things differently. I also think that the point where people start behaving as if they have the one great truth is where things get scary and people start getting tortured.
and then Michael portillo (aw bless) is saying that tony Blair didn't lie over WMD. EVERYBODY KNOWS HE DID. really what is that about?
one of the witnesses said that public morality was crumbling because Christianity was loosing its foothold. Because evrybody knows what honest upstanding citezens christians are. Then the argument thats its because of postmodernism and because of Marxism and went on to say that Marxism saw truth telling as a bourgeois concept. That's not what i learnt about marxism. what I learnt about Marxism was that a capitalist society was going to be full of lies about power and inequality etc and the only way to change that society was to uncover those lies by telling the truth
lots of blame on po-mo as well while apparently having no understanding of it.lots of banging on about Derrida and I'm thinking do these people understand Derrida/remember what he said because christ I don't and i studied him two years ago not twenty!
and discusions on how people were taught to "create a narative" with no regard to what was true or not, that's not what the phrase "create a narrative" means to me, it means you take a string of true events and make sense of them, not you make shit up.
lots of talk about the difference between white lies and black lies. I don't think there is any difference, i think the problem with lying is not about the damage that can be done or the level of selfishness of the person lying but in the erosion of trust between people. also i would never lie to children i wouldn't tell my kids that father Christmas or the tooth fairy existed because i want them to be able to trust me. But that might just be because all through my childhood I was told really damaging lies.
Mary warnock who is a moral philosopher said that shame was a really important concept. I think its a really damaging concept, a really damaging emotion because shame makes people do things not because they are right but because other people will judge them badly if they don't, women have had shame heaped on them for ever for being too sexual, for having been raped etc.
but she also said that society has got more honest not less because there is a lot less hypocrisy than there used to be.
Advertising is a lie, all of it. Does that correlate to a more dishonest society.(if so isn't that the fault of capitalism/consumerism) in fact i think advertising is the worst sort of lie because it is both actual and emotional and teaches people that they should have a higher status/more stuff so they pretend they do and don't even get me started on using creativity to lie to people its a complete perversion
I get itchy anyway whenever anyone starts banging on about absoloute moral values and absoloute moral truth because I know I will never be on the winning team with that argument. Bisexual atheist multiple feminist with mental health issues? yeah um, I think it might be my truth they are trying to erase.I really really think the only moral values are: do not hurt people or let people get hurt unless your life is in danger.
how does imaginative truth work.
I don't think truthfulness and honesty are the same thing are they?
I try not to lie but I do do so. I dont lie to people who matter to me, and who I matter to but I would lie to protect myself and other people and i have no problem lying to banks or governments etc.
it was doing a program about honesty and weather people are less honest than they used to be and it was saying that 75% of people don't care about buying fake fashion brands. and how this was bad because consumers are lining criminals pockets, well isn't the way to deal with that to get rid of big name and high fashion brands in the first place? Anyway big clothing companies are invariably morally criminaly/ dishonest if not exactly behaving illegally anyway what with tax loopholes and sweatshop labour so I really cant see what the problem there is.
aaand then apparently 2/3rds of the middle class routinely cheat business or government. and so what, i have no problem with cheating businesses, they have too much money and power anyway. not so sure about the government, though wonder if they did that survey with the working class. I have no problem with benefit cheats, in my experience it is just people earning an extra tenner hear and there and really if benefits were enough to live on I really think benefit fraud would go down.
and it said "seven members of the cabinet owned up to being drug criminals" since when is being a criminal directly linked with dishonesty? doesn't the fact they admitted it mean they are not being dishonest? Anyway what is this crap, it really really irritates me. generally people think about drugs one of two ways 1) they are bad 2)they are not bad. if you think there's nothing wrong with drugs then you wont care who took what when. If you do think drugs are bad surely you would understand that people do crazy dangerous sometimes illegal things when young which has absolutely no bearing to who they are now for crying out loud? michael portilo was all like what other country in the world would politicians have been that honest? Really in most countries i shouldn't think anyone cares if their politicains took drugs when they were nineteen!
And its kind of SHOCK REPORT POLITICIANS LIE. surely this is neither new nor news? haven't they always done it? we are just more aware of it these days.
lots of talk about what a crock moral relativism is and that there is an absolute empirical reality. I do think there is an absolute empirical reality but i don't think people can reach it because everything is filtered through the sum of everything we are so of course we are going to see things differently. I also think that the point where people start behaving as if they have the one great truth is where things get scary and people start getting tortured.
and then Michael portillo (aw bless) is saying that tony Blair didn't lie over WMD. EVERYBODY KNOWS HE DID. really what is that about?
one of the witnesses said that public morality was crumbling because Christianity was loosing its foothold. Because evrybody knows what honest upstanding citezens christians are. Then the argument thats its because of postmodernism and because of Marxism and went on to say that Marxism saw truth telling as a bourgeois concept. That's not what i learnt about marxism. what I learnt about Marxism was that a capitalist society was going to be full of lies about power and inequality etc and the only way to change that society was to uncover those lies by telling the truth
lots of blame on po-mo as well while apparently having no understanding of it.lots of banging on about Derrida and I'm thinking do these people understand Derrida/remember what he said because christ I don't and i studied him two years ago not twenty!
and discusions on how people were taught to "create a narative" with no regard to what was true or not, that's not what the phrase "create a narrative" means to me, it means you take a string of true events and make sense of them, not you make shit up.
lots of talk about the difference between white lies and black lies. I don't think there is any difference, i think the problem with lying is not about the damage that can be done or the level of selfishness of the person lying but in the erosion of trust between people. also i would never lie to children i wouldn't tell my kids that father Christmas or the tooth fairy existed because i want them to be able to trust me. But that might just be because all through my childhood I was told really damaging lies.
Mary warnock who is a moral philosopher said that shame was a really important concept. I think its a really damaging concept, a really damaging emotion because shame makes people do things not because they are right but because other people will judge them badly if they don't, women have had shame heaped on them for ever for being too sexual, for having been raped etc.
but she also said that society has got more honest not less because there is a lot less hypocrisy than there used to be.
Advertising is a lie, all of it. Does that correlate to a more dishonest society.(if so isn't that the fault of capitalism/consumerism) in fact i think advertising is the worst sort of lie because it is both actual and emotional and teaches people that they should have a higher status/more stuff so they pretend they do and don't even get me started on using creativity to lie to people its a complete perversion
I get itchy anyway whenever anyone starts banging on about absoloute moral values and absoloute moral truth because I know I will never be on the winning team with that argument. Bisexual atheist multiple feminist with mental health issues? yeah um, I think it might be my truth they are trying to erase.I really really think the only moral values are: do not hurt people or let people get hurt unless your life is in danger.
how does imaginative truth work.
I don't think truthfulness and honesty are the same thing are they?
I try not to lie but I do do so. I dont lie to people who matter to me, and who I matter to but I would lie to protect myself and other people and i have no problem lying to banks or governments etc.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-30 01:41 pm (UTC)I can't really explain it because I'm lame.
The whole drug-politician thing pisses me off. How many politicians had a drink when they were younger? And alcohol has been linked with depression and anger issues and blah blah blah. However you stand on drugs, to deny that alcohol/tobacco are also drugs is just WRONG. If they're smoking it NOW, and every day, it's probably an issue. But how much more of an issue than who they are getting their money from?
Morality is so dependent on situation too. If a starving man steals a loaf of bread that is different from a well-fed man stealing a load of bread is different again from a competing baker stealing a loaf of bread to research the secret recipe (or whatever).
I think you have to be honest about your own principles more than anything, and your principles should be well-thought out ones you can substantiate, not gleaned from The Sun.
I had an arguement with Sarah G about The Sun. :( She said it was "The People's Newspaper", and she asked me if The Guardian had given out water to flood victims. I was like "pictures of naked women aren't news", and she said "that's only page three!". Two minutes later she was talking about how she loved reading the Sports Pages and playing a game where they tried to find a page that DIDN'T have topless pictures on it.
There's no freaking consitency at all, talking to her, and it's SO frsutrating.