My View Of Ethics

by Doug McLellan

9/15/97

 

It is commonly supposed that people do things (actions) and that some of these actions are good and that some are bad.  I am disinclined to deny this.  For example I am now sitting in a food service establishment and writing in a notebook.

This behavior of mine -- this sitting and this writing -- is neither good nor bad.  Some of my actions, like giving the cat the food my parents left me for it so it doesn’t starve, are good.  And some, like breaking the property of people, are bad.  One time I was on a couch and I kicked this guy’s glass-covered poster off the wall so that it would shatter and it shattered.  This was a bad action and I should not have done it.

Ethicists are people who talk a lot and write a lot and I guess think a lot about questions involving good and bad.  One question they talk about a lot is “what is good?”.  And then they can say stuff like, helping poor people is good and then we go help poor people and the world is better then.

But sometimes ethicists disagree about whats good and bad.  Usually they disagree about shooting good people in such a way that there results a net decrease in the number of good people shot by bad people, but sometimes they disagree about stuff that actually happens, like giving money to black people who are bad at tests instead of to white people who are good at tests.  Its important that we resolve these disagreements because we want a good world and not a bad one and if we thought giving more money to whites was good and really it was bad, then we screwed up.

So how do you know.  Well its really complicated, its not like the ten commandments where you just look it up in a list and it says don’t do it.  Its really complicated.  A lot of times there’s something everybody knows is bad like murder, and one guy will go, X is just like murder so it’s bad.  But then the other guy will go no, X is more like keeping murder from happening, so it’s like un-murder.  So it’s good.  To see if X is more like murder or un-murder you have to think about it a lot.  X is like abortion or something.

The other day I was at a football game, and in front of me was this tough-looking old guy, like Jack Palance, and in front of him were these college guys who kept standing up even when it was second-and-two and you knew they were just going to run and it wasn’t going to be very interesting.  And the old guy tells them to sit down so he can see but they keep standing so he yanks down really hard on one guy’s shirt, and he turns around and goes, “what the fuck, don’t touch me!”  The old guy said, “I’m not afraid of you, I can kick your ass.”  Then the kid went, “Where’d that come from?  I just said don’t touch me.”  I think he kept standing a little longer to show he wasn’t scared, but then he sat down.  The question is, who is a bigger jerk?  I think they were both jerks.  I think everybody should get along.

The holocaust was like the worst thing that ever happened.