4 ms·
> "Morally good" is dependent on perspective. Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective".
by wordupmaking 9y ago
> "Morally good" is dependent on perspective.
Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it.
Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance.
When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.
- insulanus 9y agoI think trendia's point is not that those people are correct, but that people are influenced by their surroundings; that it is the orgsmizstion we must change, not the people in it.
- wordupmaking 9y agoThough if you subtract the working people for it from an organization, what remains? Not that I disagree, in the same sense that it's too easy to solely blame soldiers for the wars civilians enable politicians to send them into. Of course the folks at the NSA didn't wake up one morning and just decided to be a bit too creepy on their own. But at the same time, no person is a completely passive receptacle for the social pressures of elusive active people, to a degree everybody is responsible for what they take part in. Otherwise, anything/anyone you could point to in criticism and for the purpose of changing any organization could in turn say "don't change me, change my environment", in an endless circle. But it's all made up of people in the end, so why not everybody own their own shit right away? Free will might be pretense anyway, so why not go the full mile. Many things are also gradual processes, and often kind of a feedback loop. In this case I think it's safe to assume anyone who mentions during the interview they'd proudly blow the whistle on any seriously evil stuff they happen to come across, if the official path through superiors gets blocked, would not get hired. Can this be fixed iteratively, or would it make more sense to make a whole new set of organizations, attracting people from wholly different buckets of the population, and once those are up to speed turn the old ones off? Not super realistic, but maybe still more realistic than waiting for people who are entrenched and off the deep end, with a full support network and lots of bucks on the line.. they seem to get worse, not better.