Tag: Ethics

Principles as a Limited Durability Product – Brecht Quote

That was straightforward. Why take things in a roundabout way now? I’m packing so they shan’t take away your job as senior physician. And because they’ve stopped saying good morning to you at the clinic, and because you’re not sleeping nowadays. I don’t want you to tell me I mustn’t go. And I’m hurrying because I don’t want to hear you telling me I must. It’s a matter of time. Principles are a matter of time. They don’t last for ever, any more than a glove does. There are good ones which last a long while. But even they only have a certain life.

The Jewish Wife
Bertolt Brecht
Note –  One of the short one act plays in Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
Brecht Collected Plays: 4

Ethical Obligation to be Optimistic

“It is an ethical obligation to look for hope; it is an ethical obligation not to despair.”

As spoken by the playwright Tony Kushner in a friendly, reasonable voice in “Wrestling With Angels,” Freida Lee Mock’s admiring documentary portrait of Mr. Kushner, those words sound like basic common sense. If we want a better world, we’d better be able to imagine it.

MOVIE REVIEW | ‘WRESTLING WITH ANGELS’, Directed by Freida Lee Mock
The Artist as Empath and Public Intellectual, Stephen Holden
NYTIMES

Moral Rules and Exceptions

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Dealing With The Exception

The exception is perhaps the greatest obstacle for any moral theory to deal with. You adopt a supposedly ideal moral system which should tell you what to do to act morally in any possible case: all you have to do is deduce the proper action from your principle or set of principles, then follow it. No problem. You’ll be doing the right thing, and acting without sin. But then you run into that odd, unexpected situation where following your rulebook doesn’t seem so neat and tidy. This new case is special, unique, and unanticipated by your ethical system. In fact, it just feels wrong to follow the rules here in this instance. Do you go with your rulebook, or your current intuition?

There are many who would step in and try to defend principled (rulebook style) ethics. They have three obvious defenses:
(1) Simply deny that apparent problems create exceptions.
(2) Hold the view that principles can be rewritten so that the apparent exceptions are no longer exceptions.
(3) Argue that each apparent exceptional case is really a case of conflicting principles, where two or more principles both apply, but one is overruled by another of greater priority.

Why You Shouldn’t Be A Person Of Principle,
Ramsey McNabb, Philosophy Now