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But most of all, the legal profession has failed. Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uph

• _lce0 10y ago
  > Why is there so little moral left in this world? You can buy moral pretty much everywhere nowadays ;-)
  • samstave 10y ago
    However, it would appear that you cannot punish the lack of it anywhere....
• psadri 10y ago
  Why should there have been any morals in the first place? Does nature by default have morals?
  • r0muald 10y ago
    But there have been morals for a long time. So either humankind is part of nature, and then it's safe to conclude that nature has morals (no matter how little right now, it's certainly part of humankind), or we're out of nature and there's no advantage in pointing out that nature has no morals.
    • T-A 10y ago
      Or there have been claims of morals for a long time. As in, "what serves my interests is moral".
  • phn 10y ago
    The question is, do we want to be like the rest of the animals, survival of the fittest and all that jazz. Or do we want to hold ourselves to a higher standard? I don't condemn people who accept the first option as the absolute truth, but I'd like to believe we can make this blue marble a better place than that somehow.
    • marcosdumay 10y ago
      Hum, unavoidable natural law vs. what some people want. I guess we don't have much of a choice here. The best we can do is hack natural selection trying to get some collectivism out of it. And if we want to hack natural selection, the GP question is exactly the kind of stuff we should be trying to answer in order to develop the (social) tech we'll need.
  • glup 10y ago
    Nature by default doesn't have nuclear weapons, stock exchanges, global supply chains, industrial manufacturing, central banks, etc. Humans need morals (and norms more generally) in order to ensure that the above serve us rather than hurt us. Morals are a cultural technology like language or counting, and like those they may be (at least in their strong form) uniquely human.
    • woodman 10y ago
      It seems pretty common among social animals, violators get cut from the herd or monkey stomped.
    • tmptmp 10y ago
      >>Nature by default doesn't have nuclear weapons.... While I agree with your sentiment, just would like to point this out that nature does have nuclear weapons, pretty scary ones for that matter: the stars. Also, if we take these things to their logical conclusion, then the nuclear weapons created by human beings are, of course, created by nature - in this case, indirectly, using the humans. This is just to point out the logical aspects of the arguments. Other than that, I do agree with you that we, the humans, need morals to sustain a better life for most human beings.
      • return0 10y ago
        These are nuclear, but not weapons. Nature doesn't have an enemy.
        • tmptmp 10y ago
          >>Nature doesn't have an enemy. How are you so sure? Have you talked with Nature by any chance? Has Nature given you this statement, say, in English? I am not trying to be sarcastic here, I am dead serious. I for example, think that Nature likes to fight many of its creatures against each other. e.g. polio viruses against human beings I may be wrong, but one cannot be so sure.
          • 10y ago
  • woodman 10y ago
    You are going to have a tough time finding the answer unless you really pin down your terms. I'll skip that part and just pretend that you said "universal preference" instead of "morals". Yes, I think that there is universal preference - but to keep it simple we will just consider things of like kindness (inanimate objects, bacteria, humans, etc). For example: all things being equal, humans prefer life to death (ex afterlife). The only serious challenge to that, I've found, is the idea of the greedy gene - genetic immortality. Upon that rock you can build your church of moral precepts - but just a heads up, it will look very different from what we have now. I think that is why moral violations are so common, because they aren't consistent with reality - you face the same problem with violations of IT security guidelines that are similarly divorced from reality.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Does nature by default have morals? Define nature, and, particularly, what things are excluded from it.
  • keane 10y ago
    >>[mgraupner] Why is there so little moral left in this world? >>[psadri] Does nature by default have morals? Morality is the differentiation of actions proper and improper; generally defined 'morals' is that language that contains imperatives: what humans should do (as sentences, called 'norms'). When we wonder why there seems to be a lack of behavior that follows these morals in the world, we approach the concept of morality from a descriptive sense (we observe that human behavior has changed). Increased insight in this pursuit is found when we examine how humans themselves have approached morality from a normative sense (what is actually proper and improper). When humans have considered morality they have come to understand that the morals humans proclaim—again, language that contains imperatives—either correspond to real, objective moral facts ("Moral Realism") or are merely invented delusions expressing human emotions ("Moral Nonrealism"). Prior to the Enlightenment, there was a category of accepted knowledge outside of empirically observed nature (e.g., the non-natural, supramundane, supernatural, etc). The Enlightenment itself was a shift in human thinking that rejected this category as invalid, switching our criteria of acceptable knowledge to the material, to the empirically observed. The shift in thinking did not happen all at once. Certain beliefs remained, held over from earlier times—somewhat as dependencies—until they could be examined and dismantled individually if they lacked empiric evidence. Western society's assumption that objective Moral Facts existed in a material universe remained for some time until examined by David Hume in 1738 in his A Treatise of Human Nature. Here Hume observed the difficult reality of the relationship between facts (that which is) and values (that which we claim ought to be), concluding that we cannot assert prescriptive or normative values based on descriptive facts. Hume's Is-Ought observation upset the world, and has resulted in our modern condition. If empirical observation is categorically never able to locate oughts, a world that accepts Empiricism alone is one forced from Moral Realism to Moral Nonrealism: morals no longer correspond to Objective Facts, but can only be understood as invented whims and emotions, which—apart from society's ability to enforce or inflict punishment for as a conditional consequence (what Kant termed 'hypothetical morality')—can be ignored without consequence. The transition from a society whose intellectuals and leaders held Moral Realism (viz, Christendom) to one where artists, philosophers, and intelligentsia hold Moral Nonrealism (the Modern West) has been a long, painful process since 1738. The Marquis de Sade astutely summed up the painful condition of man following Hume's revolution in thought saying "If there is no God, then everything that Is, is Right" and the majority of Western thought since then has either been in reaction against this belief (i.e., revivals of Evangelical Christianity) or experiments exploring this accepted world (e.g., Surrealism, Dada, Modern Art, Existentialism, Egoism/Individualism/Anarchism, Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, etc). From the introduction to Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor by the American Heidegger-scholar and philosopher Charles Guignon: Briefly put, the issue is this. Either God exists or He does not exist...if God does not exist, then the picture of the universe formulated by mechanistic materialism must be true. But, in this case, given the point of view of modern science (what Ivan calls "Euclidean reason"), the universe consists of nothing but meaningless material objects in causal interaction, effects follows cause according to the laws of physics, people are determined to do what they do, no one is guilty of anything, and so there are no such things as right or wrong, good or bad. Or, more precisely, the ideals of justice, goodness, benevolence, dignity, and so on turn out to be purely human inventions, the results of projecting our needs and wishes onto brute, meaningless matter, and so they are illusions lacking any basis in the order of things. ...Dostoevsky regarded [this] as the inevitable outcome of the perfectionist stance of detachment and moral superiority: the idea that, for higher people, "everything is lawful." [If] "God is dead"...then why not step outside the law and do whatever you want? From this standpoint, morality looks like a suckers game. The paradox [of] Westernized ideals, then, is that its austere discipline of detachment and self-transformation tends to undermine its own moral underpinnings. In the end this form of idealism spawns a self-serving moral nihilism.
  • enraged_camel 10y ago
    Some primates have demonstrated understanding of moral concepts such as fairness. In one experiment, two monkeys were "paid" (in bananas) for doing some type of work. The twist was that occasionally, one of the monkeys would get paid nothing despite doing the work. After a while, the monkey getting more bananas started to refuse them if the other monkey didn't get any.
• ccvannorman 10y ago
  we are monkeys clamoring for attention and power in a constant prisoner's dilemma. At scale it pays for some people to be giant dicks
• libertymcateer 10y ago
  I think it is a bullshit indictment. I'm a corporate lawyer who does a lot of cross borders work. I'm ethical - the lawyers I work with are ethical. The vast majority of lawyers are ethical. If anything, the Panama Papers should be an object lesson that one firm or group of lawyers can be responsible for a huge proportion of activity in a given sector. Do you think, for a minute, that other firms have this astoundingly high rate of forming off-shore companies? I can assure you it is not the case. Accordingly, to extrapolate that because one law firm in a central American country is (allegedly) corrupt that the entire profession is worth throwing out is just nonsense of the highest order. It's childish and counterproductively naive. How can you possibly hope to reform a system when you paint it with such a broad brush you are utterly blind to its reality? The strong odds are that there was chicanery (quite possibly, a lot of it) at Mossack Fonseca. However, my money is on the fact that the substantial, if not overwhelming, majority of companies set up by the firm were for legal purposes and no laws were broken. If you want to argue that these laws themselves are problematic - sure, I am right there with you. Let's talk about reforming the laws in these small tax-haven nations and meaningful internal tax reform in major western economies that will prevent off-shoring from happening in the first place. Those are productive discussions - lets have them. That the Panama Papers may have furthered these discussions is also great. But the idea that we should be castigating attorneys for taking advantage of legal loopholes that exist in their clients favor is utterly absurd. If you fail to take advantage of those loopholes you wind up getting sued for malpractice, plain and simple. While I am deeply interested in the further releases of Panama Papers, and I fully support tax reform, a huge strengthening of whistleblower laws, and a whole bunch of other things that puts me, as a lawyer, closer to the 'pirate' end of the spectrum than then 'legal maximalist' side of the spectrum - I have to say, when I read the words of the purported, unverified "John Doe" - he seems to me to be catastrophically naive in his critique of the legal profession and he is all too happy to assign blame with a fire-hose while appearing totally uninterested in performing a surgical analysis of the pressure points where, if achievable reforms were made, real change could result. Fundamentally, this screed is not a mature call to action. It is a "fuck you" to the system writ large by someone who appears to be more interested in burning things down than figuring out how to fix them. I'll stand by and watch the flames - but I do not, nor should you, expect that it will be anything more than a campground fire. In order to get real reform achieved - guess what? - you need the buy in of the lawyers too - not just incidentally, but centrally. We write and enforce the laws. Calling us all assholes is not a great way to start that conversation.
• glup 10y ago
  This question gnaws at my bones, too. Best answer so far wrt the upper middle class: logics of capitalism (competition, accumulation) combined with ethnic/cultural/ideological/socioeconomic isolation makes it hard to identify with (most) other people. With reduced empathy for those affected by exploitation, we construct a new set of mythologies to normalize the exploitation (increasing efficiency of markets). Moral objections are then dismissed as quaint, naive, and/or utopian. It also seems like material scarcity and instability make it harder to converge on norms like morality (for good game-theoretic reasons). But why would a private individual with $10M have a position in a company that provides payday loans? Beats me.
  • enraged_camel 10y ago
    >>But why would a private individual with $10M have a position in a company that provides payday loans? Beats me. Payday loan firms are enormously profitable, because they prey upon people who are in dire need of cash. The private individual you mention has managed to accumulate his wealth by exploiting those people.
    • yompers888 10y ago
      Can you support this claim? I don't dispute the fact that the interest rates are astronomical, but I am skeptical about how the profitability pans out once you deal with the enormous risk of the borrowing group. I imagine most of the upside lies in trying to prey upon people who are in less dire need of credit than they think, because then they can have their enormous upside without as enormous a risk. Your assertion suggests that there's money on the table if only someone will step up to take it, and I find that to be a damning implication for an argument, absent strong proof.
• ryandrake 10y ago
  Because of Moloch? http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/