island94.org

I greatly enjoy this leap of ethics in my spam folder over the weekend:

Hi,

My name is David Smith, I am a Project Coordinator with UNICEF’s Office of Emergency Programs (EMOPS) we are the focal point for emergency Assistance, humanitarian policies, staff security and support to UNICEF Offices in the field, as well as strategic coordination with external Humanitarian partners both within and outside the United Nations system. It is indeed with great optimism that I am writing you because I had to ensure that whoever I would contact in regards to this transaction must be someone I can trust.

Last year, series of donations amounting to US$5.8M (Five Million Eight Hundred Thousand Dollars) were made to our organization. These donations were later earmarked for developmental projects in two West African countries. The problem is when funds are released for these sort of projects especially In Africa, they are most often misused or in some cases believe it or not, embezzled by corrupt government officials there.

This practice has gone on for so long and not very much has been done about it and  I have always been made to understand that my work is based on humanitarian grounds and I have done this work to the best of my ability but there is very little to show for it for somebody in my position.

As a result, I have painstakingly decided to divert some of these funds as a retirement benefit because even if this money is released, it will still  be stolen by officials in Africa anyway.

This is why I am contacting you, because I need your acceptance and co-operation in allowing these funds to be transferred to you as the Sub-contractor of these projects in Africa.

At least he goes on to offer a 50/50 split.

Despite it being a class on Critical Thinking I’m a little grossed out by “ethical, empathic and just” behavior being described as a deductive exercise.  But then again, I did agree with Justice Sotomayor’s “wise-Latina” remark.

The above is  Dr. Richard Paul and Dr. Linda Elder’s Miniature Guide to Understanding the Foundations of Ethical Reasoning.

I just finished reading The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.  I posted upon the book earlier

, but I wanted to paste in the conclusion, which I think presents an interesting closure to their introductory thesis: “doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing”—a thesis the authors make a compelling case for.

The knowledge of knowledge compels. It compels us to adopt an attitude of permanent vigilance against the temptation of certainty. It compels us to recognize that certainty is not a proof of truth. It compels us to realize that the world everyone sees is not the world but a world which we bring forth with others. It compels us to see that the world will be different only if we live differently. It compels us because, when we know that we know, we cannot deny to ourselves or to others that we know.

Choke

That is why everything we said in this book, through our knowledge of our knowledge, implies an ethics that we cannot evade, an ethics that has its reference point in the awareness of the biological and social structure of human beings, an ethics that springs from human reflection and puts human reflection right at the core as a constitutive social phenomenon. If we know that our world is necessarily the world we bring forth with others, every time we are in conflict with another human being with whom we want to remain in coexistence, we cannot affirm what for us is certain (an absolute truth) because that would negate the other person. If we want to coexist with the other person, we must see that his certainty—however undesirable it may seem to us—is as legitimate and valid as our own because, like our own, that certainty expresses his conservation of structural coupling in a domain of existence—however undesirable it may seem to us.  Hence, the only possibility for coexistence is to opt for a broader perspective, a domain of existence in which both parties fit in bringing forth of a common world.  A conflict is always a mutual negation. It can never be solved in the domain where it takes place if the disputants are “certain.” A conflict can go away only if we move to another domain where coexistence takes place. The knowledge of this knowledge constitutes the social imperative for a human-centered ethics.

Quoting the conclusion here doesn’t do it justice since this comes proceeding 9 closely interlinked chapters, but I think the authors make a powerful statement.

But, to follow up, I’ve been wanting to throw the following quote into a post for quite sometime.  The quote is from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and, as the book takes place in the future, is ostensibly a statement of our current times:

The Last Dragon psp “You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices. It was all because of moral relativism.  You see, in that sort of a climate, where you are not allowed to criticize others—after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?

“Now, this lead to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticize others’ shortcomings.  And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices.  For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticize another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done.  In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour—you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another.  Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to ferreting out of hypocrisy.”

I want to add this quote because I think it throws into sharp relief the emphasized statement in the first quote: “every time we are in conflict with another human being with whom we want to remain in coexistence”. The ethical statement makes the case that all viewpoints are personally valid, but need not be embraced let alone tolerated inter-personally nor socially—nor geo-politically, if you want to go there.  Though there is—as the case is strongly made in the Tree of Knowledge—an expansion of self, and thus knowledge, and thus realm of action, in that understanding of others. Which is important indeed.

(Also regarding that last quote: I also really dislike it when people whine about hypocrisy.)

I could care less about the politics, but it’s interesting to see that a congresswoman was caught “plagiarizing” (“borrowing” or “incorporating” if you want to play the pronoun game) in a newspaper column via “a program that monitors high school and college student papers for acts of copying and forgery”. (via ThinkProgress.org)

I didn’t realize that people were using things like Turn It In for non-schoolwork.

Not that I’d want to cite Johnny 10th Grader, but I wonder if their algorithm/database would work for looking for references (which then you could *properly* cite).