RE: virus: Morality -Reply
Vicki Rosenzweig (rosenzweig@NY.hq.acm.org)
Fri, 01 Mar 1996 13:31:00 -0800 (PST)
Craig,
The problem is that most people know what is moral and what
isn't--and they can't agree. There are people who believe that sex is
immoral, if the people involved aren't a married heterosexual couple
trying to conceive a child. There are others of us who believe that all
acts of love and pleasure are at least acceptable, and quite possible
acts of virtue. Is it moral to compel a woman to bear a child? You can
find plenty of Americans to defend any answer to that question (except
possibly "I don't know"). Humans don't even have an innate sense of
the answer to a relatively simple question like how much is 2 plus 2,
let alone to complicated questions of conflicting rights or interests.
The ethics I think we need to address are precisely those where two
rights or interests conflict: for example, does your right to travel as you
wish override my right to unpolluted air to breathe, or vice versa, until
we invent a non-polluting teleportation system? More realistically, where
should we put the balance? (I'm not proposing we debate transport
policy here, just giving an example of conflicting claims where neither
party is obviously evil.) I don't know whether you consider masturbation
or drug use evil, but if you do, the remedy is simple: don't do them.
Vicki Rosenzweig
[I'm sorry to bother the list with this; my pin-headed mail software won't
show me Craig's email address, and he didn't put it in the message.]
----------
From: virus-owner
To: virus
Subject: virus: Morality -Reply
Date: Friday, March 01, 1996 9:14AM
To be honest with ourselves we know what is Moral. If we are being evil
we know it. God does not really care what we do. In fact it does not
even know what we do. The Religous rite in our contry uses this word
as a tool to kill with. Nice is Nice Evil is Evil we need no God to tell us
a
thing.
Craig