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Saying that the ends does not justify the means is an absurd abstraction equivalent to sayin

Page history last edited by Mike 11 years, 2 months ago

 

Saying that the ends does not justify the means is an absurd abstraction equivalent to saying that a thing is not worth what it costs.

Reasons to agree:

  1.   

Reasons to disagree: 

  1. It is an absurd comparison. Purchasing something does not involve breaking any moral laws. You can go through life without breaking moral laws. There is no need to do bad things. 

Interest / Motivation of those who agree:

  1. Not wanting to live by societies rules 

 

Interest / Motivation of those who disagree:

  1. Wanting to live in a world where other people follow a minimum set of ethical rules, and don't view them as "expendable" to the greater good.  

Books that agree:

  1. Situation Ethics: The New Morality By Joseph F. Fletcher  

Books that disagree:

  1.  

People who agree 

  1.  

People who disagree 

  1. Mike Laub 
  2. Ann Romney  

Web pages that agree

  1.  

Web pages that disagree 

  1.  

Reasons to agree this proposal or belief has ethical means or methods

  1.  

Reasons to agree this proposal or belief has ethical ends or results

  1.  

Reasons to disagree this proposal or belief has ethical means or methods

  1.  

Reasons to disagree this proposal or belief has ethical ends or results

  1.  

Images that can be said to agree

  1.   
  2.  

Images that can be said to disagree

  1.  

Videos that agree:

  1.  

Videos that disagree:

  1.  

 

 

 


We can use algebra to represent each term, and make it more formal mathematical, with the below formula and explanation of each term:

Ranking this conclusion by the ratio of reasons to agree vs. disagree (please add your reason to agree or disagree)

 

  • n: Number of "steps" the current arguments is removed from conclusion
  • A(n,i)/n: When n=1 we are looking at arguments that are used directly to support or oppose a conclusion. The 2nd subscript is "i". This is used to indicate that we total all the reasons to agree. So when n=1, we could have 5 "i's" indicating there are 5 reasons to agree. These would be labeled A(1,1), A(1,2), A(1,3), A(1,4), and A(1,5). N on the bottom indicates that reasons to agree with reasons to agree only contribute ½ a point to the overall conclusion. Thus reasons to agree with reasons to agree with reasons to agree would only contribute 1/3 of a point, and so on.
  • D(n,j)/n Ds are reasons to disagree, and work the same as As but the number of reasons to disagree, are subtracted from the conclusion score. Therefore, if you have more reasons to disagree, you will have a negative score. "J" is used, just to indicate that each reason is independent of the other.If the ends don't justify the means than how can this be morally right
  • The denominator is the total number of reasons to agree or disagree. This normalizes the equation, resulting the conclusion score (CS) representing the total percentage of reasons that agree. The conclusion score will range between -100% and 100% (or -1 and +1)
  •  
  • L: Linkage Score. The above equation would work very well, if people submitted arguments that they honestly felt supported or opposed conclusions. We could probably find informal ways of making this work, similar to how Wikipedia trusts people, and has a team of editors to ensure quality. However, we could also introduce formal ways to discourage people from using bad logic. For instance, people could submit that the "grass is green" as a reason to support the conclusion that we should legalize drugs. The belief that the grass is green, will have some good reasons to support it, and may have a high score. At first, to avoid this problem, I would just have editors remove bad faith arguments. But a formalized process would be to have for each argument a linkage score, between -1 and +1 that gets multiplied by the argument's score that represents the percentage of that argument's points that should be given to the conclusions points. See LinkageScore for more

 

Conclusion Score = [(6/1)xL - (3/1)xL]/(6+3)] (because I don't have this working yet with linkage scores lets assume L=1 for each argument) = (6-3)/9 = 33% valid. This might not sound good, but looking at the math you can see that values will range between -100% and +100% 

 


 

We should give more points to conclusions that have higher perceived ethicality of their methods and results

It's important for people to decide how strongly they support these conclusions and to consistently apply these rules. Often people are very flexible with their logic. For instance they will say that the ends justify their means when it supports their conclusion, but they will reject this line of argument when it opposes this argument.

 

Computers can help us with this. People can give a score to a particular philosophical question, a computer could then run the math, and tell you, based on those assumptions, which conclusions are more valid. This can help people be consistent with their thinking, and find logical fallacies.

 

The idea score should give more points to conclusions that have a consensus that the means (methods used to obtain the result) are ethical

 

There are mathematical ways we can give more points to conclusions that have higher perceived ethicality of their methods and results

 

For people who are good at math, this equation could be more formally represented with the fallowing equation and definitions.

Definitions

·         PES=Perceived Ethics Score: This can be added directly to the conclusion score, or we could use a multiplier on the ethics score, before adding the ethics score to the overall conclusion score.

·         Means

     o   EMA (Ethical Means Asked) = The number of people who gave a score to the ethics of the means (or method) of a proposal.

     o   EMEMA (Ethical Means): The score an individual gives a proposal for how ethical the means (or method) are (between 1 and 10).

     o   = A constant, such as 5, so that if 100% of a group of 50 people agree, than it will carry more weight

     o   10 = This is not required, and could be removed if we ask people to pick a number between 0 and 1. People may think this is weird, and so using 10 will help the math represent the average score being a number between 0 and 1, so that if the average score was 8, our equation would give us .8, or a validity of 80%.

·         Ends

     o   EEA = The number of people who gave a score to the ethics of the ends (or results) of a proposal.

     o   EEEEA (Ethical Ends): The score an individual gives a proposal for how ethical the ends (or results) are (between 1 and 10).

     o   EMA (Ethical Means Asked) = The number of people who gave a score to the ethics of the means (or method) of a proposal.

     o   10 = See above

     o   EEJ (Ethical Ends Justify):  The percentage of people who think that the ends (goals) justify the means (methods).

There are mathematical ways we can give more points to conclusions that have more reasons to believe they have ethical methods and results

I propose the basic Ethics Method score outlined below:

 

However, once this is working, we could tweak it a bit. It may be slightly more complicated, but I believe will give us better results.

 

Many beliefs have explicit actions. For instance, Barack Obama proposed that "we raise taxes for families who make more than $250,000 a year". This statement is a single action proposal. However, a single action can have many related ethical arguments.  For instance we can investigate the broader ethical question of a national income tax, or the ethics of a progressive national income tax, or the ethics of a specific national income tax that does not take into account cost of living, or family size.

 

Of course, if you familiarize yourself with my other equations, you will notice that I already count reasons to agree or disagree with each proposal. So for this item, we could just submit the argument about the ethics of a conclusion, as a standard argument. However, I see extra value of tagging an argument as a specific ethical argument that is related to either the method or the result.

 

Because an argument about the ethics of any of these sub-arguments, can also have arguments about their validity, we need to re-introduce the "Linkage score", and the use of n to represent the number of steps the sub-argument is away from the conclusion that we are currently giving a score: 

 

 

·         n = number of "steps" the current arguments is removed from conclusion

 

We can use algebra to represent each term, and make it look a little more mathematical, with the below formula:

 

·         n:                     Number of "steps" the current arguments is removed from conclusion

·         AAEMn,i)/n:                  Arguments that Agree that a proposal has Ethical Methods. When n=1 we are looking at arguments that are used directly to support the belief that a conclusion's methods are ethical. The 2nd subscript is "i". This is used to indicate that we total all the reasons to agree. So when n=1, we could have 5 "i's" indicating there are 5 reasons to agree. These would be labeled A(1,1), A(1,2), A(1,3), A(1,4), and A(1,5). N on the bottom indicates that reasons to agree with reasons to agree only contribute ½ a point to the overall conclusion. Thus reasons to agree with reasons to agree with reasons to agree would only contribute 1/3 of a point, and so on.

·         ADEM(n,j)/n                  Arguments that Disagree that a proposal has Ethical Methods. Ds are reasons to disagree, and work the same as As but the number of reasons to disagree, are subtracted from the conclusion score. Therefore, if you have more reasons to disagree, you will have a negative score.  "J" is used, just to indicate that each reason to disagree is independent of a reason to agree.

·         The denominator is the total number of reasons to agree or disagree. This normalizes the equation, resulting the conclusion score (CS) representing the total percentage of reasons that agree. The conclusion score will range between -100% and 100% (or -1 and +1)

Many beliefs have explicit actions. For instance, Barack Obama proposed that we raise taxes for families who make more than $250,000 a year. This has unstated results. This may be somewhat complicated because people may disagree if a proposal really requires particular actions.

 

There are computer programming ways we can give more points to conclusions that have higher perceived ethicality of their methods and results, or more reasons to believe they are ethical.

 

Most all equations can be implemented on computers. All we have to do is build a forum that collects the above data. Then it is a simple matter of applying the above equations.  

 

Visit this website to help me get these algorithms going.

http://code.google.com/p/ideastockexchange/

 

Background, context, definitions, and assumptions:

 


 

 

 

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