4 ms·

I find it weird to derive ethics from fictional examples at all. The reason is “ex falso quod libet”, i.e. that one can derive any statement from a false (in th

I find it weird to derive ethics from fictional examples at all. The reason is “ex falso quod libet”, i.e. that one can derive any statement from a false (in this case, fictional) proposition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

PythonicAlpha 10y ago
Fictional is not always "wrong" or "false" as you claim. There are so many fictional books which have so much to teach. You can think of Star Wars how you like, but condemning fictional stories as bad only because they are no "true" stories -- is very short-sighted in my eyes. (and in my opinion a totally wrong understanding of the principles of logic). There are also so many "true" stories, where you can draw the wrong ethics from!! (newest events included!)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Anderkent 10y ago
  The problem of course is that even if some fictional stories contain the right moral lessons, the ones that would work out in the real world, you can't tell them from the ones that are 'wrong' and 'false'. At best you can find stories that tell lessons you already agree with. And while 'real' stories might still be doctored by the writer to send a particular message and mislead you to a conclusion, at least they're constrained by the facts.
  - PythonicAlpha 10y ago
    Even, when you have a totally true and unbiased report of a true story, will it always lead to the right ethics? I very much doubt so. There where to many people living, that brought suffering to others without ever been punished. Many people that slaughtered others, where living a wealthy life till their end. And others, that did good, ended in poverty. No, "true" life sometimes teaches the wrong ethics. Or should we find our ethics in slaughtering each others?
    - stale2002 10y ago
      Just because something is abhorrent doesn't make it "false". Bad people get away with terrible things all the time. No amount of moralizing changes this true fact.
      - PythonicAlpha 10y ago
        I don't know, which kind of ethics you would prefer.
        stale2002 10y ago
        The one that doesn't lie to me? Just because it is possible to get away with bad things, doesn't mean you should do them. A good ethics system should address this.
bem94 10y ago
I don't think the point is to actually derive ethics from fiction. It's the other way around. We express our ethics, morals and associated conundrums through fiction as a way of explaining them. This is especially important when those ethical problems are not always encountered directly or knowingly by the people who face them, in this case, by engineers who aren't fully aware of the societal impact of their work.
halomru 10y ago
By the same line of reasoning it should be impossible to derive ethics from thought experiments.
MereInterest 10y ago
The purpose is not to have a fictional work as some basis for deriving morals. Rather, it is to test our moral sense in extreme conditions, to see how it reacts, and to see whether the theory we have still holds up. As an example, consider theft. As a society, we have a strong aversion to theft. This aversion is enshrined in our laws, our religions, and even our grammar (e.g. "my pen" as opposed to "your pen"). So, we would consider "Do not steal." as a general moral guideline, functional in all scenarios. But we haven't tested it in all scenarios. Let's consider somebody who steals for the purpose of helping another, commits no other crimes, and dedicates his life to helping others, even when it harms himself. Would we still consider the theft to be immoral? I would say no, and showing such a case is the primary purpose of "Les Miserables". We have pushed our general "Do not steal." outside of usual usage, and have found that it does not apply at extreme cases. Similarly, the author of the article is saying that Rogue One is a good test of the existing moral principle "Do not build intentionally flawed buildings." This moral principle works in most day-to-day cases. However, in the case of building a Death Star for an oppressive regime, this moral principle may not hold.
padobson 10y ago
The true dilemmas of life, ethical or otherwise, can't be expressed as inductive or deductive arguments. At best, you can put together an abductive argument that ends up looking like a pros and cons list - and even still it's a judgement call, and not one that's readily communicable to contemporaries or posterity. Buddha, Jesus, Plato/Socrates, Swift, Nietzsche - seriously, if you throw a dart at a random distribution of centuries, the greatest moral thinker from that century used fictional constructs of some kind to illustrate their point. The 21st century is not going to be any different. But there's an even bigger problem here that borders on illiteracy. Believing that ideas fleshed out in fiction serve no practical purpose completely ignores the history of all ideas, not just moral ones. Great fiction thinks. If you want to learn about love, read Shakespeare. Texts on the mating habits of higher primates are not going to help your romantic life. If you want to learn about friendship, The Lord of the Rings is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. If you want to learn about government, Homer or Jonathan Swift can teach you more about the machinations of power than Machiavelli or John Locke. I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra.
- bem94 10y ago
  > I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra. Well said.
- EdHominem 10y ago
  > ___ is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. You could replace that with "A Bucket of Clams" and the sentence is still true.
  - padobson 10y ago
    Ha! Have an upvote. But seriously, if you can't make friends with a bucket of clams, you're just not trying.
ianamartin 10y ago
What are you even talking about? Humans have always looked to fiction to derive morality. The ancient Greek Mythologies, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran . . . literally everything that most people value as presenting foundation for ethics and morality is completely fictional. And even if you take one or more of those documents to be literally true and a source of historical fact, even Jesus used parables--fiction--to explain moral principles. This is really one of the strangest appeals to logic I've ever encountered.
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  I think you're subtly contradicting yourself here. While humans have, for millennia, used fiction to enshrine and explain morality, I don't think a sensible case can be made for suggesting we use it to derive or define morality. Unless, as in the case of holy scriptures, one argues that adherents derive morality from that which has been enshrined in the fictional source. But still, the fiction itself enshrines the moral teachings, and readers derive whatever they do from it (and even then, inconsistently at best).

PythonicAlpha 10y ago

Fictional is not always "wrong" or "false" as you claim. There are so many fictional books which have so much to teach. You can think of Star Wars how you like, but condemning fictional stories as bad only because they are no "true" stories -- is very short-sighted in my eyes. (and in my opinion a totally wrong understanding of the principles of logic). There are also so many "true" stories, where you can draw the wrong ethics from!! (newest events included!)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Anderkent 10y ago
The problem of course is that even if some fictional stories contain the right moral lessons, the ones that would work out in the real world, you can't tell them from the ones that are 'wrong' and 'false'. At best you can find stories that tell lessons you already agree with. And while 'real' stories might still be doctored by the writer to send a particular message and mislead you to a conclusion, at least they're constrained by the facts.
- PythonicAlpha 10y ago
  Even, when you have a totally true and unbiased report of a true story, will it always lead to the right ethics? I very much doubt so. There where to many people living, that brought suffering to others without ever been punished. Many people that slaughtered others, where living a wealthy life till their end. And others, that did good, ended in poverty. No, "true" life sometimes teaches the wrong ethics. Or should we find our ethics in slaughtering each others?
  - stale2002 10y ago
    Just because something is abhorrent doesn't make it "false". Bad people get away with terrible things all the time. No amount of moralizing changes this true fact.
    - PythonicAlpha 10y ago
      I don't know, which kind of ethics you would prefer.
      - stale2002 10y ago
        The one that doesn't lie to me? Just because it is possible to get away with bad things, doesn't mean you should do them. A good ethics system should address this.

bem94 10y ago

I don't think the point is to actually derive ethics from fiction. It's the other way around. We express our ethics, morals and associated conundrums through fiction as a way of explaining them. This is especially important when those ethical problems are not always encountered directly or knowingly by the people who face them, in this case, by engineers who aren't fully aware of the societal impact of their work.

halomru 10y ago

By the same line of reasoning it should be impossible to derive ethics from thought experiments.

MereInterest 10y ago

The purpose is not to have a fictional work as some basis for deriving morals. Rather, it is to test our moral sense in extreme conditions, to see how it reacts, and to see whether the theory we have still holds up. As an example, consider theft. As a society, we have a strong aversion to theft. This aversion is enshrined in our laws, our religions, and even our grammar (e.g. "my pen" as opposed to "your pen"). So, we would consider "Do not steal." as a general moral guideline, functional in all scenarios. But we haven't tested it in all scenarios. Let's consider somebody who steals for the purpose of helping another, commits no other crimes, and dedicates his life to helping others, even when it harms himself. Would we still consider the theft to be immoral? I would say no, and showing such a case is the primary purpose of "Les Miserables". We have pushed our general "Do not steal." outside of usual usage, and have found that it does not apply at extreme cases. Similarly, the author of the article is saying that Rogue One is a good test of the existing moral principle "Do not build intentionally flawed buildings." This moral principle works in most day-to-day cases. However, in the case of building a Death Star for an oppressive regime, this moral principle may not hold.

padobson 10y ago

The true dilemmas of life, ethical or otherwise, can't be expressed as inductive or deductive arguments. At best, you can put together an abductive argument that ends up looking like a pros and cons list - and even still it's a judgement call, and not one that's readily communicable to contemporaries or posterity. Buddha, Jesus, Plato/Socrates, Swift, Nietzsche - seriously, if you throw a dart at a random distribution of centuries, the greatest moral thinker from that century used fictional constructs of some kind to illustrate their point. The 21st century is not going to be any different. But there's an even bigger problem here that borders on illiteracy. Believing that ideas fleshed out in fiction serve no practical purpose completely ignores the history of all ideas, not just moral ones. Great fiction thinks. If you want to learn about love, read Shakespeare. Texts on the mating habits of higher primates are not going to help your romantic life. If you want to learn about friendship, The Lord of the Rings is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. If you want to learn about government, Homer or Jonathan Swift can teach you more about the machinations of power than Machiavelli or John Locke. I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra.

bem94 10y ago
> I believe the reason is that fiction speaks to the whole mind, not just the part of the brain that parses language and performs algebra. Well said.
EdHominem 10y ago
> ___ is going to offer better advice than anything Freud wrote. You could replace that with "A Bucket of Clams" and the sentence is still true.
- padobson 10y ago
  Ha! Have an upvote. But seriously, if you can't make friends with a bucket of clams, you're just not trying.

ianamartin 10y ago

What are you even talking about? Humans have always looked to fiction to derive morality. The ancient Greek Mythologies, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran . . . literally everything that most people value as presenting foundation for ethics and morality is completely fictional. And even if you take one or more of those documents to be literally true and a source of historical fact, even Jesus used parables--fiction--to explain moral principles. This is really one of the strangest appeals to logic I've ever encountered.

bobwaycott 10y ago
I think you're subtly contradicting yourself here. While humans have, for millennia, used fiction to enshrine and explain morality, I don't think a sensible case can be made for suggesting we use it to derive or define morality. Unless, as in the case of holy scriptures, one argues that adherents derive morality from that which has been enshrined in the fictional source. But still, the fiction itself enshrines the moral teachings, and readers derive whatever they do from it (and even then, inconsistently at best).