They can have my classic background when they pry it out of my cold dead hands......hehe.
That Penny Arcade Controversy
- Thread starter Morrus
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They can have my classic background when they pry it out of my cold dead hands......hehe.
...and back!
Now that is some fine parsing.
Not really fine parsing at all: ethics are externally imposed, but may be internalized. Morals are internal guides that may be externalized.
To illustrate, let's look at bribery and the business ethics systems of the USA, Russia and Finland.
Most people would take the moral stance that bribery is wrong. However, the business ethics of those 3 countries differ on it. In the USA, the position is congruent, and a company caught engaging in bribery at the personal, institutional or governmental level can get fined and will face a backlash, possibly even fines or other criminal penalties. Any bribery will be secret,
In Russia, bribery has been normalized. It is a cost of doing business. It isn't publicly discussed, even though it may be openly practiced. Backlash over bribery is infrequent and minimal.
Finland, however, walks a pragmatic line. It is considered wrong, and is punishable. But if a Finnish company must do business in a country where bribery is the norm, they can and will. They just have to report it to the government and to their shareholders on their annual reports.
A person who believes bribery to be morally wrong and who would never bribe or accept a bribe working for an American company may do just fine...but the same person working for a Russian company could plateau quickly, and in a Finnish company may not get to do certain jobs in certain countries,
As to all of that...I think you're missing my point if you can't see the moral element of my assertions.
Free speech- verbally, literarily, symbolically or economically- is a fundamental human right, whether it is exercised individually or in the aggregate. The last- voting with your feet/ the power of the purse- is every bit as valid as the others.
A person or group of persons is acting morally when they exercise that right to express displeasure & disagreement over the speech or actions of another.* IOW, a person, group of persons or companies/institutes are well within their moral rights to:
1) say they dislike your speech
2) write that they dislike your speech
3) demonstrate that they dislike your speech via something like a sit in protest or boycott
4) cause you economic harm by refusing to do business and/or pursuade others to do likewise via any of the above.
(And, of course, It is usually NOT moral to use violence to express that same disagreement.)
When you ask whether a particular form of exercising that fundamental right should be used or not is a different question. That isn't a question of morality, it is a question of whether or not the response is proportionate to the initiating event.
To which I say, proportionality is a non-issue.
If today the KKK demonstrated on the streetcorner by my Dad's new office (like they did by his old one in '82), and only got 20 ralliiers to show up, am I limited to having only about that number of counter-protesters? Am I forbidden from choosing not to patronize the businesses of those Klansmen who demonstrated unmasked? Or from publicizing that they are Klansmen? (By doing so, I'm clearly expecting to cause them to lose business.)
Of course not.
In fact, the more conter-protesters who show and the more economic harm the Klansmen suffer for publically espousing their view, the more it demonstrates the breadth and depth of society's displeasure and intolerance of their divisive rhetoric. In fact, that's part of the story how Edwin Edwards beat David Duke in Lousiana's governor's race in the late 1980s.
All that said, how the PA guys exercised their fundamental right to free speech CLEARLY wasn't to the level of KKK rhetoric.
But that does not change the moral right of those who strongly disagreed with them and what they said & did as the situation evolved to use their same fundamental rights to the fullest.
It may not seem civil, and it may even escalate the issue, but it is not immoral.
They told a joke, some thought it insensitive. Think what you may about it, their reaction to that critique was initially awkward then followed with something deliberately provocative. Well, they got an overwhelming response.
(If you want, you can PM me about the similarietes & differences between this and the cartoons that riled radical Islamists a while back, but that would be too political for the boards themselves.)
* that applies to speech we like and don't like. That is why ACLU Lawyers will defend the KKK in court, even if they are Jeeish or black or what have you.
Thanks! Now I'm trying to zoom in on the your framework some...
If the companies had agreed to allow it on their platform would Walmart have been morally at fault for not distributing it? If so, I have three follow-ups: Is a company morally at fault if they don't distribute something that comes to them that they find morally objectionable? (e.g. any store with magazines should carry porn, any store with videos should carry it too, a religious store should carry religious books going against their views, etc...) What if the creative thing wouldn't sell in the quantity to make them a profit? What if the store was designed for a special purpose (say children, victims of sexual assault)?
Say the companies let them sell the game, would it be immoral for them to deny them the right to say it is compatible with their system? If so, the follow-up is, would it be immoral for WotC and Paizo to enforce their licensing schemes since it would be limiting other people's creative expression? (Say the case of making a full system that's designed to be like 3.5, advertised as being such, and uses the protected IP creations like Illithids and what not that could cause them financial harm? Or what about making a bondage/torture supplement and wanting it advertised as D&D compliant that they think is morally objectionable? Or what if they were just opposed because they think it would hurt the value of their brand?)
Tangenting off those, is enforcement of intellectual property law immoral, or just some types of it? (Trademark protection? Copyright protection of derivative works?)
A step further, is enforcement of laws against distributing things like child pornography (say using existing material so no new material is gathered) or laws against selling products made of endangered species (again assuming no new animals were hurt) immoral too? Or is that taken care of by balancing the relative wrongness?
What restrictions on graffiti of public property are morally defensible?
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We could go further. Is it immoral of Alzrius to not post a statement I want him to post on his Facebook page? Is he suppressing my free expression by refusing to do it? (Assuming he has one, of course).
(I'm not saying I totally disagree with everything he's saying, but I think there's a strong subject for debate there).
No right is absolute, and all rights have associated duties.
Your right to free expression stops when it supercedes my right to disagree or to be free of repercussion.
The PA guys were free to do what they did. That right is not an aegis against speech or action opposed to them that impacts them negatively.
Rockstar games was within their rights to put out any game they wanted, but there was no corresponding duty on anyone's part to distribute or sell it.
The problem I see is that the KKK are clearly evil. PA's initiating "offense" wasn't.
Somebody spotting a KluelessKockKnocker with a placard on the corner and rousing up a counter-protest is all nice a good.
Somebody with the reading comprehension of my dog read a PA strip and decided that because it featured the R word, it must have been a personal attack against his personal cause and started a riot on that faulty assumption.
Speech based on a falsehood is on dubious moral ground. If we had perfect detection of falsehood, I would rule it unprotected and illegal.
We don't have such technology to validate everything anybody says. But that doesn't mean that we as a society have to roll over when Readtards can't get their facts correct and they lobby for their way on the basis of incorrect information.
JRRNeiklot
First Post
Nevermind. Old news.
Based on the half-or-so of the posts in the .tumblr feed I skimmed or read, I thought the riot didn't start over the "initiating offense", but rather over PA's response to those who were offended (the part where PA mocked people were concerned about our culture fostering an attitude where rape happens a lot and people are afraid to report it, where they mocked the idea that trigger warnings ever had a use, and where they made a shirt glorifying the incarnation of rape to make a point about people who attacked his personal cause, and where they seemed to plug into the misogynistic gamer/tech stereotype... ). A lot of the bloggers offended by the later started their posts by defending the intent of the original strip.
Is it not ok to be offended by what people say when they're mad about being falsely accused of something (even if they keep saying it for a while)?
If someone intentionally peppers their posts with things they know will be offensive to some people, just to make the point that they have the right to be offensive, isn't it ok for people to be offended (at the poor form, if nothing else)?
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Alzrius
The EN World kitten
dannyalcatraz said:
That strikes me as being rather fine parsing, since you're going to have a hard time telling if someone's moral code is something they developed themselves or simply internalized an external code. If you can count up from 1 to the number 5, or count down from 10 to the number 5, if all you see is the number 5 itself, you're not going to know if it was reached by counting up from 1 or down from 10.
I'll be honest when I say that I'm not sure what you're trying to illustrate here. If it's that there are different frameworks that people need to navigate, often simultaneously, throughout the course of normal life, then that's obvious to the point of going without saying. What I'm trying to do is isolate the discussion to where something falls only within the framework of morality. You seem intent on showing that something that is found to have moral fault can be found legitimate in some other spectra, which is likely the case, but it's not what I'm speaking to.
Yes, a person who believes bribery is morally wrong (and, consequently, does not do it) will reach a plateau if they work for a company in Russia...so?
I disagree, since as I'm reading it you're saying that there's a legitimacy to an immoral action if it's found to be the appropriate response in some other criteria of judgment. That may be so, but it doesn't satisfy the moral argument.
I think that it's important to denote the difference here between human rights and (the framework of) morality. Human rights are considered to be inalienable freedoms and/entitlements - they hold that you are guaranteed certain things, or are not subject to certain things, in this life. What I'm talking about is a system by which an action can be judged for how good/not good/bad it is.
Now, one can certainly use "whether or not an action violates human rights" as a criteria for passing judgment on a given action, but that's not the framework I'm using (though, again, there is some overlap).
Since I haven't explained the framework I'm using so far in this thread, I think it would be helpful to do so here. I use a moral framework called deontology, or nonconsequentialism (I'm aware that the actual discipline of philosophy that uses these names is far more nuanced than what I'm outlining here - philosophy majors, please forgive me - but the basic framework is the same).
To be brief, the intent of a person performing an action doesn't matter, from a moral dimension - you can't ever know what their intent is (people usually don't say that, and even if they do, how do you know they're being honest?), and so it can't be a criteria for judgment. Likewise, consequences don't matter for the purposes of moral judgment - judging an action by its consequences is saying that the ends are more important than the means, which is self-evidently problematic (e.g. it doesn't matter what you do so long as it turns out "good"), and makes all such actions moral question marks until the results are "determined" (meaning that their morality can change over time as new consequences are evaluated as time goes by).
(The one caveat here is that it does matter if intent is present or not - if something is done completely without intent, e.g. you trip and fall and in doing so accidentally stab someone with that scissors you're holding - then it's the same as an act of nature; that is, it doesn't rise to the level of being an "action" for purposes of moral evaluation.)
Ergo, the only thing left to judge is the nature of the action itself. How do we do that? In this case, by ranking the action on one of three tiers:
The highest tier is negative duties. These are the things that have moral fault (e.g. are "bad") if you do them. They're usually phrased as actions to refrain from. "Do not murder someone" is a good example.
The second tier is the positive duties. These are the things you must do; that is, the things that have moral virtue (e.g. are "good") if you do them, and have moral fault if you do not. "Provide aid, if possible, to someone in your immediate proximity who is severely injured and requires assistance, if doing so does not endanger others," is a good example.
The third tier is supererogatory actions, the actions that are above and beyond the call of duty. These are the things that have moral virtue if you do them, but do not have moral fault if you do not. "Donate to charity" is a good example here - you're doing good if you spend a weekend working at a homeless shelter, but if you decide to spend the weekend relaxing instead, you are not a bad person because of that.
(It should also be noted that there are actions that lack a moral dimension altogether, and so do not appear on this framework. Asking "what's the moral dimension of painting a sailboat versus a bowl of fruit" has no moral aspect to it.)
The reason for the tiered ranking is that, in the event of a conflict between the two tiers, the higher tier is the one that should be satisfied. If two people are dying, and you can save them by murdering an innocent bystander and harvesting their organs, do you do so? According to the above framework (see the examples for tiers one and two), no. Murder is a tier one offense, whereas not rendering aid to people around you who need it is a tier two offense...if you're in a position where you have to choose between them, you choose to prioritize tier one over tier two.
One thing that must be noted here is that specificity of action is paramount when using this framework. Notice how extremely specific the example for the second tier is? That's necessary, because ambiguity of what sort of action a given action is renders this system less useful. Saying that "do not kill" is part of your first tier is great, except that "kill" includes murder, killing in self-defense, and a surgeon whose patient didn't survive. The more specific each action is, the more useful this system is.
Finally, I want to stress that this framework is not moral absolutism because everyone determines for themselves what actions rank where (presuming that they're using this system). In fact, that's largely what the controversy with Penny Arcade boils down to - the pro-dickwolf people are essentially arguing that showing sensitivity towards issues of social justice in artwork is a supererogatory action; it's good if an artist does it, but it's not immoral if they don't. The anti-dickwolf crowd disagrees, saying that sensitivity to social justice in media is a tier two issue: it's good if an artist does it, but it's immoral if they fail to do so.
In that context, I personally find the pro-dickwolf crowd's argument to be the more compelling one, simply because I'm not comfortable with the idea of acknowledging that there's any sort of artwork (that is, any kind of free speech/creative expression) that could be labelled "immoral."
I say that because, to me, there's a shade of difference between "dislike" for something and calling it "immoral." The former is purely an expression of finding something to lack personal appeal, while still acknowledging that others may find it to have worth and that the thing has a right to exist. The latter (immorality) is to say that something not only lacks virtue, but that (you believe) it also introduces a detriment to society as a whole; that it's actually making life worse for (all) people, and so you do not respect its right to exist, and as such that immoral thing deserves to be suppressed/destroyed/removed from society as a whole.
I completely agree with the first three points. Having and expressing an opinion is fine; saying, doing, or showing what you think or feel about something is just that, a personal expression. That's also true for choosing not to patronize something - you're under no moral obligation to actively engage with some market enterprise.
It's when you start taking action to try and prevent anyone else from engaging with it that I become uncomfortable, because that starts to toe the line of censoring the thing. If I don't like a book being made available in the library, that's one thing - I don't have to check it out. It's something else again if I keep checking it out over and over so that no one will ever be able to read it (in that venue, at least).
Proportionality is a non-issue; that's why I didn't bring it up before. I'm talking about judging the morality of specific actions, which has nothing to do with any actions that they're taken in response to.
Again, I don't find anything immoral with holding a boycott; you and anyone else who feels so moved can choose not to engage with any private enterprise you feel like. That's different from actively trying to drive someone else out of business, or make them lose their job because they've done something you don't like.
That's not the issue - the issue is what actions they undertake, not what they right they say they're undertaking them in the name of.
Yes, which is a third tier issue, I believe, and not a second tier one.
I don't think that's necessary - at this point, you and I don't seem to be on the same page.
cadence said:
Sure! I love debating the issues like this.
Presuming that it's acknowledged that "do not suppress someone else's creative expression" is a negative duty (e.g. is tier one), then this gets back into the question of specificity in regards to what an action is.
If the sole reason for not distributing something is that they find it to be morally objectionable, then I believe that does violate that particular moral duty. However, in this case we've acknowledged that the action in question is a highly specific one, in that it's an act specifically done to suppress their creative expression - that's not necessarily the case with the follow-up questions you posted, in which case there can be other actions taken that would result in not being able to distribute something without it being an act of suppressing the creative expression therein.
To summarize, it's the difference between Kinko's not copying something for you because they think it's objectionable, and because the item in question is of large enough dimensions that they can't provide the service. In either case, the consequence is the same (they didn't print your thing), but the action in each case is different.
I recognize that this may sound like something of a very thin way of slicing the question, but that's the reason I called for specificity of action, above. The more information you have, the more easily you can judge an action for its moral dimension. (Of course, such information is often not present, leaving us in the uncomfortable position of having to evaluate for ourselves what the precise nature of an action is - did the guy at the restaurant give us bad service because he was tired from working a fourteen-hour shift? Or because he's prejudiced against you in some way? We're much more offended by the latter than the former, even though the results are the same - we can't know for sure what his motivations are, so we need to evaluate what his actions were - poor service or an act of prejudice - with insufficient information.)
The answers here depends on precisely what you think the violation of the negative duty would be (e.g. the aforementioned "do not suppress someone else's creative expression") and if you think that their prohibition is that action, or a different action that merely has the same consequences.
I want to reiterate that this framework is useful for judging the moral dimension of specific actions that are done. It doesn't work for analyzing something like a body of law.
The above system isn't, unto itself, concerned with the relative scale of "how" right or wrong something is. It's useful for finding something to be moral, immoral, or amoral, and doesn't ask how much.
That said, all instances of child-pornography are immoral, since they violate the negative duty of "do not hurt/exploit children," then I wouldn't call an action to report those to law enforcement immoral. I don't believe that "creative expression" includes directly harming others. The issue of selling products made from endangered species is less clear-cut in its moral dimension, since we don't hold that animals are fully-fledged members of the moral community the way other humans are - we do still acknowledge a moral dimension to their treatment, but not to the same degree (e.g. instance of animal ownership are not slavery, but animal abuse is still inflicting harm).
That depends on what negative duty (since this presumably involves doing something you think should not be done) you see this in violation of.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Apologies for the new post (I prefer to aggregate my replies to various posts into one, for easier reading) but EN World is being screwy at the moment.
Again, talking about rights is the wrong conversation to have (in my opinion). It's about the analysis of a particular action for its moral dimension, not the analysis of when a particular right does or does not apply. Whether or not you have the right to do something says nothing, unto itself, about whether or not that's the morally right thing to do.
dannyalcatraz said:
Again, talking about rights is the wrong conversation to have (in my opinion). It's about the analysis of a particular action for its moral dimension, not the analysis of when a particular right does or does not apply. Whether or not you have the right to do something says nothing, unto itself, about whether or not that's the morally right thing to do.
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