It actually doesn't really matter whose. There are a lot of good ethical frameworks to start from that would lead to better outcomes than our current system of "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people"
It rather matters to me if in your morality some people I care about are "problems". It matters to me if your morality is based on a religion specifically -- I find no reason to follow the worlds faiths, they seem much more concerned with control and/or prohibition of individual action than with fostering good societies or people. Being specific, I find the current incarnation of Christianity in the US to be particilarly immoral -- yet if we're going to start making law based on morality this is the most likely source to be applied where I live.
So we disagree rather vehemently, except for "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people" is bad.
> This would not be moral in any serious ethical framework
We agree, but I'm not particularly talking about "serious ethical frameworks" I'm talking about the most likely scenario if we try to implement law based on morality. It will be a corrupted morality from the get-go. Hence me caring about whose morality.
> Edit: Human equality is often one of the most important topics in Ethics. Why do you think so much effort is put into depicting Others as Inhuman?
Because it takes so much to change minds to see others as inhuman?
So let's distill this down:
- You're saying law already has or should have a moral component -- we agree.
- I'm saying that whose morality matters because humans will not apply morality evenly. We aren't perfect machines. We're run in part by our biases.
- You're saying that isn't a serious ethical framework then. Agreed.
- Finally I'm saying that if we choose to implement law from this point forward with a "new morality" -- that the "new morality" will already be corrupted by the people implementing it. It won't be a "serious ethical framework" -- it will be some watered down non-perfect version that privileges an in-group over an out-group, because humans do that stuff.
So where do we go from here? Sounds like we devolved into a "no true Scotsman" fallacy?
Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
it's definitely a little of both. Founders my age (18-25 range) have spent the last 10 years of their life seeing that morally reprehensible behaviour is rewarded. Whether it be Trump, Musk, whoever - the reward circuit in their brain sees that being a scumbag results in success. The people who don't act that way keep their mouth shut or get publicly executed (metaphorically). It's funny that people still criticize Jobs for being hard when he was 10x a better person than 99% of AI founders.
I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet.
The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count.
Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber.
Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.
this is really mind-boggling to me as someone who grew up on the (old) internet.
I think the reward factor is also a large part of it, for most of the last 10 years young people have seen that unethical behaviour results in success. For a developing brain, it's easy to see how that resulted in the current state of SV.
Too true. I won't say who it was but a prominent partner in my batch referred to, essentially, a lack of morality as a "competitive advantage". I went back to the east coast after lol
the behaviour that was one socially unacceptable in Silicon Valley has become mainstream. The woke stuff went way too far and, like everything, the pendulum swung back the other direction with equal force. VCs are largely the problem as they set the tone. I have a lot of personal acquaintances that work in VC, and legitimately all of them fall on the spectrum of morally dubious to outright reprehensible.
Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
