Reverse image search yielded a bunch of tumblr blogs and nothing else so I don’t know the artist unfortunately. If anyone does I’ll add it to the post
Skybreakers be like
It could just be the circles I run in, but lately I see the opposite problem prevailing. People just decide that if a law doesn’t suit their “ethics” or whimsy in the moment, they can go ahead and ignore it.
Silly stuff like “I dont want to spend 90 seconds finding a parking spot and walking into/put of the store, so I’ll just leave my car right in front of the store entrance. Who cares about traffic patterns or emergency services or blacking access ramps for mobility impaired people?”
Or more serious things. Some friends of mine recently bought a vacant lot near me intending to build a house, and a workshop for their business. It’s on a hillside so they would need to spend ~$3k to have a contractor grade the property. But they needed to handle the permitting themselves… Which needs an engineer to verify their changes won’t destabilize the land and endanger their neighbors. Analyze the drainage to ensure their changes won’t cause flooding. Environmental impact survey to check for endangered and protected species on tbe property. Comes out to $7k. All of a sudden my extreme left-wing, progressive friends sound just like my conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving, ranting about how the big government won’t let them do anything. Meanwhile, since I live nearby I have been feeling a lot more comfortable knowing that my neighbors are required to go through these processes before doing any projects that could impact me. We have been getting more extreme weather lately and I had a landslide on my own property a few years ago.
They also wanted to build a separate workshop building for their business. It is just the two of them now, but they hope to grow and have employees, and want to have some seperstion between the work space and their living space. Which means extra parking, and the workshop needs stuff like a bathroom and break room. And the business needs regular truckloads of pallets of chemicals that they use. And they also use resin 3D printers which need to ventilate toxic fumes outside. This property is zoned for residential and entirely surrounded by single-family homes. Their plan was to just build and hope they were too small to get noticed by the city.
Would they be able to do all of these things without causing disaster? Probably. In my own uneducated opinion, I think they were probabky correct that there are nk endangered species present, that their plans would result in thr land being more stable rather than less, that drainage would not be concerned, and that there business woukd be small and quiet enough that the neighbors would not notice or care.
But none of that is the point. Everyone who does this stuff always thinks its fine. Disasters like that are things that happen to OTHER people, not me! A LOT of regulations are written in blood, but people want to ignore them because they are inconvenient or a hassle or they just don’t want to consider the impact to anyone else. Often laws are there to remind us of the ethical considerations we would otherwise overlook.
Rugged individualism and its consequences. In a society where people’s lives revolve around their community this would not be an issue.
Judge Dredd scowl intensifies
The law: KYS
Them: Oh, well, the law is the law suicides
The law’s fine print: (KYS as in Keep Yourself Safe)
This is literally the ACLU.
René Descartes be like
I’m so tired of hearing that blinding headlights are perfectly fine because they’re legal and the car came like that
okay, Jared, but you’re still an asshole for having them and blinding me at the four way stop so I almost ran over somebody in the crosswalk because they were absolutely invisible due to the glare from your lowbeams even though they just walked right in front of you.
While true, please don’t drive if you can’t see. Better to wait a few seconds than kill or maim someone.
you can’t go down the road stopping every time you’re blinded when it’s every fourth car that’s shining laser beams into your eyes. that would be a different kind of dangerous.
in my example, it was actually the driver ahead of me that couldn’t see the pedestrian and nearly hit them; I was barely able to discern them as they crossed in front of the asshole headlights, because I’m very aware of this exact situation. but I certainly don’t blame them for not seeing the pedestrian - they were basically completely invisible, including during the approach on the sidewalk, again because of the stock lowbeam LED headlights shining into our faces. I’ve seen people nearly get into frontals as well because the oncoming car was turning, but nobody could see it because of the headlight glare. personally, yes, I generally don’t go if I’m not sure it’s clear, which is why I watch during intersection approaches so carefully, so that I know what might be hidden behind headlights. but the ugly truth is that sometimes you have to keep driving when you’re blinded, because the alternative is more dangerous. (that does not apply at a four-way stop)
When I was in college, I had an ethics class where the class was presented with a conundrum, and here’s the gist of it:
A man was hired to write something. He was instructed that he had to make sure to put a copyright notice into the work. (This was the time when if you didn’t specifically put in a copyright, then it was automatically public domain.) For whatever reason, the man did all of the work, but did not add the copyright statement. Then, he quits the job, takes all of the work home with him and sells it. Were his actions ethical?
An overwhelming majority of the people in my class argued that his actions were ethical, to be paid to make a product and then take the product home with you and sell it yourself. So, at the time, I thought either that was some sort of psychology class experiment that I didn’t know I was part of, or people are far more unethical than I ever imagined.
Obviously, the main argument for their side was that it wasn’t wrong to take public domain material because it’s not illegal.
I realized the truth much later. The average person, even the average college student, doesn’t really think about things very much. They have never in their lives tried to think about whether something is ethical, and have spent their entire existence guided by emotions like a dog or something. So, asking them to think through a problem with only one step is about the maximum they’re capable of. So, because they are basically incapable of thinking, when given an ethical problem that is even slightly complicated, they can just default to “it’s legal,” and then they don’t have to think.
Most people don’t think about morality beyond societal expectations, rather than what’s ethical according to more universal principles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
So yeah, I would say something else was happening in that story. The students had an intuitive or innate sense of what was ethical here and couldn’t articulate it against the well-honed apologia created to support an unethical system.
Intellectual property is a crime against humanity. It takes a universal innate quality of sensing thinking beings and then wraps it in violence saying that we will literally use the force of violence if we have to in order to punish you acting on natural process that are prosocial and help humanity.
The only reason intellectual property needs to exist in the first place is because we proactively starve the masses and then set up a system where they can only survive is they make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.
The students in the class intuitively understood that a human being doing work and then benefitting from that work is far more ethical than a human being doing work and then being forced by law to never ever benefit from that work again simply because that person was starving and agreeing to that abusive contract was the only way they could get their next meal.
I’d argue that trying to find and exploit loopholes in ethics is in itself unethical. “Do not <verb>” is not an invitation to find creative ways to <verb> without “technically” <verb>ing.
Welcome to the lesson taught by the entire Old Testament.
“It’s legal” is a great example of ‘Thought-stoppers’. Little phrases that people use so that they do not have to do the mental work of thinking of the larger systemic issue. “They will think of something” is a great one when it comes to climate blow back and technological issues.
But all thought stoppers are like ignorance, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. So when people tend to go to reductionist thinking on complex issues, you tend to get a form of conformity that can be manipulated. Not consistently but enough to cause large power structures. Alas, for every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.
There’s a phrase I thought up, which might be a thought stopper or reverse stopper depending on your perspective.
“If it’s popular, it’s not illegal.”
Imagine you’re a cop sitting across from Rosa Parks the day she refuses to give up her seat. Do you arrest her?
Legality should be informed by ethics, and generally they only larger systemic result I care about is “If it’s right, and the law is far from my morality, I’ll trust that the law will catch up to my breach.”
The small danger to acknowledge is when a popular act is driven by hatred or bigotry, rather than actual societal outcomes. There’s no one simple way to address that, but dialog and visibility helps.
FYI it’s dire, just to set it straight.
Also called a thought-terminating cliché. I don’t really know how to confront these because they’re spoken by people who have already given up on the clearly arduous task of thinking about something for longer than the duration of a short-form video
I do genuinely think that short from content has done far more damage to society than even the more pessimistic people give it. It is the final form of ‘The medium is the message’, the medium is saying that everything should be brief and surface level at best.
Don’t get me wrong there is a skill to brevity, especially in writing. Some books could be a fifth the length and they would only benefit form that. But short form video ain’t it this. Peoples attention spans are simply gone, I do not know if they can ever be brought back.
Damn, I would have argued it is ethical because corporations shouldn’t exist and workers “stealing” from them is actually just an appropriation of what was already rightfully theirs.
Yeah I got to say the more and more I think about it, the more I think it is ethical. Because if you want to use his work in perpetuity you should hire him for the amount of time you use it. Or work out some kind of long-term profit sharing. If it’s for a one-time use of their skills you shouldn’t get to own the copyright of it. So yeah I’m going to say completely ethical.
I argue that we should abolish copyright. However to be a bit more pragmatic, if we were to keep copyright, it should be for 10 years from publication. You can apply to have it extended another 10 years but with a fee attached to approve it per work. This means people can still have some control of the work for a decade after completion and if it is still worth while, they can get another decade. But after that, it is public domain.
The problem doesn’t mention that it’s a corporation. He could be stealing from a one person shop.
How the fuck is being paid to do something for someone and stealing it ethical, that’s some god damn fucking mental gymnastics
There’s not even a corporation in the question!
Who said anything about stealing it? The person who paid still received the writing. They just didn’t get a copyright too.
Oh I don’t believe capitalism is ethical. I think capitalist employment is a coercive relationship based on the threat of starvation and homelessness. I don’t believe in private property and therefore view commodities as belonging to those who produce them.
Imagine you are in precarious circumstances. You aren’t sure if you will have food or housing in the next month. Guy comes up to you, says he’ll pay you to design and produce x commodity for the exact hourly wage you need to get meet your immediate material needs. You produce x commodity and manage to live a little longer. He copyrights x commodity and sells it for immense profit. Zero labor on his part. Is this ethical or is it exploitation?
Property is theft
So in your system you can never do any paid work for someone else?
Bad take
Yes, I’m glad you’re getting it.
Imagine a world where because O negative is the universal blood donor, everyone in the world came to the conclusion that the most ethical thing to do is to make them donate blood as often as possible.
So we then decide that it must be protected. So we decide they must donate, must avoid dangerous professions, mustn’t be allowed to leave one country to live somewhere else, must marry other O negative blood having people and produce o-negative blood having children.
At what point when you curtail movement/freedom, can’t choose who you marry, whether you have children, what professions a person can have etc have you created a caste class is one step above slavery (it might even be slavery honestly because you’re also removing their bodily autonomy). This is turning a group of people into a commodity while firmly ignoring their humanity.
Ethics informs law. But ethics is flawed because people are flawed. People as a whole can be just as self serving as the individual and just as stupid (see mob mentality).
There are some people in this comments section who say some facinatingly horrible things because for some reason they assume that somehow a true democracy makes people less self serving and horrible. Despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
my political opinion? uh, being a good fucking person
Obviously our idea (which we of course share because we are good people) of a good person is objectively correct.
That’s right, OP, the law doesn’t define ethical behavior – this community’s rules do. Thank you for trying to find the artist; five ethics points have been credited to your account, which can be spent to pay down your sin points at any participating location.
Can I have some ethics points? I did some sinning that I’d like to pay down before I do some more sinning.
How many points does it take to escape this hell?
Your current amount +1. Always out of reach
Legal and moral have two definitions for a reason.
So many people, especially conservative alpha males, are the biggest beta subs to positions of authority. Back the blue, please Mr officer man, step all over me.
Conservatives in general have a hard on for authority. Its why cuckoldry and “the general way their hypocritical ass politics/religious beliefs are” are so common
This explains cuckoldry for me in a way that makes sense. I don’t know that I should be thanking you for this cursed knowledge, but still, thanks for that.
Don’t forget ethics. Legal is codified authority, moral is a social construct as defined by doctrine, ethics is what one holds dear internally beyond those two. Thus ethics differs between all people.
Ethics are actually the applied studies of morals. An ethic system is a set of moral rules.
This is why, as much as I love seeing videos of shitty people having a shitty time, I always hated shows like COPS, because they often depended on the premise of “going against the police means you’re the shitty one that deserves a shitty time”. Assuming most people who like to watch even needed that bit and weren’t just looking for videos of someone having a bad time.
And shitty YouTube producers are keeping the tradition going, though on the bright side it makes the clickbaity video images and titles easier to ignore when I can hear the “smartass bootlicker narrator voice” before even clicking. Oddly enough, that narrator would often bug me even more than the police abusing their power.
Let me put my lawyer hat on real quick. Hmm, it seems the answer to your important legal question is: it depends. That’ll be $500.
For the people thst practice law, it is not uncommon to have charges dropped even if the law was very clearly violated, because it just doesn’t feel.right to penalize them.
E.g., a battered spouse kills their partner or a parent is caught stealing baby formula in small amounts. Such cases regularly get thrown out
I like to think about it as in the “violence is bad”, but violence to stop violence is always good; or “lying is bad”, but lying to save someone’s else life (or even your own life) it’s objectively good.
In the Confucian philosophy of Li, it is loosely translated to ‘right’ or ‘equity’. It is considered that those that enforce laws but are willing to bend them based on what seems right on ethical and virtuous means, those are people that have good Li. To know that while the laws are written in ink and stone, they do not have to be enforced in the same manner.
