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From: gadfly@ihlpa.UUCP (Gadfly)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Poor People/Lazy People
Message-ID: <2017@ihlpa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-Oct-86 16:03:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihlpa.2017
Posted: Thu Oct  9 16:03:00 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 11-Oct-86 04:32:41 EDT
References: <1010@cad.cs.cmu.edu> <1050001@hpspkla.HP.COM> <1079@kontron.UUCP> <2000@ihlpa.UUCP> <195@gouldsd.UUCP>
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--
>                                                   ... Essentially, if you
> are so courageous as to be your brother's keeper, YOU HAVE A MORAL IMPERATIVE
> to help EVERYONE that is needy, cold, wet, hungry, poor, oppressed, imprisoned,
> denied the right to vote, beaten, etc, etc. It is against your previous
> statement that you "*do* have such obligations" if you are going to decide
> to only help the poor of Amerika. In fact, people who get so upon their
> high horse, speaking of the moral duty of yuppie-designer-brained people,
> yet have the time to talk about it, are obviously failing to fulfill their
> self-assigned duty. While you wrote those words above, hundreds of people
> all over the world were suffering from one disorder or another. Why weren't
> you, oh saviour of humanity, doing something about it ? ...
> 
> mjr

How do you know that I'm not?  I'm not a doctor nor a farmer, so my physical
presence in underdeveloped areas might not be of much use.  It would behoove
you, mjr, to study some real moral philosophy.  By stating that you, I, and
everyone has some set of obligations to others does not mean that we must
spend every waking hour nurturing the less fortunate.  There are some who do
hold this belief, and I am in awe of their courage.

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but you can divide most ethical codes
into two camps: (1) deontology, which posits a set of absolutes and appropriate
behaviors which derive from them; and (2) utilitarianism, which sets out a
relativistic algorithm (viz: greatest good for the greatest number) which one
adopts behaviors in order to maximize.  We of course ignore all flavors of
ethical egoism (in a nutshell, "what's good for me is good") as garbage.
But even constrained to (1) or (2), we have quite a bit of freedom to
decide whom we help and how much.

And then, one's moral code is an ideal to live up to.  If I ought to be
helping *everyone*, then I am not as good or complete a person as I could
be if I did so.  That's the point.  These damned Randists go beyond simply
"looking out for ol' number one."  After all, we all do that to some
degree.  But they've raised selfishness to a bloody sacrament.

                    *** ***
JE MAINTIENDRAI   ***** *****
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