Ethics (was: Re: TERRORISM: Is genocide the logical solution?)

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Sep 19 2001 - 00:19:12 MDT


At 02:40 PM 9/18/01 +1000, I wrote, in far too compressed and abstract terms:

>I'm a kind of iterated stochastic prudentialist [blah blah]

which my dear friend Barbara translated for me as:

< avoiding risk when
possible, learning from experience, and basing their actions on a set of
rules which are only broken if experience proves that they weren't such good
rules after all. Of course there are some who don't bother to analyze the
consequences of their acts and thus never stray from their default dicta. >

That's what I should have said the first time. :)

A quick look around the net took me to what seems like a nice place to
start a discussion of the ethics of liberty, should we choose to take that
path into a new thread:

http://www.hazlitt.org/e-texts/morality/

I haven't read the book yet, but its summary of prudential ethics and its
social consequences seems sound.

Damien Broderick



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