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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dragonlordofpoondari" data-source="post: 3289016" data-attributes="member: 42088">It is easy to conflate law, duty, and good with principle. These are difficult concepts, and Kohlberg himself later retracted level 6 altogether. He found that no one consistently operated at level 6, instead they vascilated between 5 and 6. Plus, it was slippery to define.Yeah, I wasn't even going to try to draw the relationship between the two systems. They are both separate and flawed systems. Please feel free to ignore my comparisons. I only wanted to provoke discussion.EDIT: RE: Battlestar example ... Laura knows Baltar vascillates between levels 1 and 2. He's great for this reason. But Laura's reluctant decision to break the law by rigging the election came out of reasoning more sophisticated than the blind following of law. The decision was made was for the greater good, at level 5. Adama, however, pointed out a more sophisticated ethical position: Laura is a good person of principle and also the President. She knowingly choose to operate within the boundaries of law not only because she realizes that she shouldn't manipulate the system to get her own way; she is a person of high principle. She believes in the system and what it stands for (and what her position as President means) and prefers not to abide corruption. She would risk abandoning her principles and all the work she'd done to live a principled life up to that moment. It is a sort of selling out that would compromise her integrity as a highly principled character. What's more, she would have to live with that choice, and she would likely be changed by it forever. So in the end, even through her actions superficially appear lawful and maybe even good, it is because of higher cognition and ethical reasoning that brought her to that decision as opposed to blindly following laws or trying to manufacture good. She knows the consequences. Level 6 is sort of selfish and self-indulgent in this way. She chose not to sully her own advanced system of ethics than save the humans from Baltar. As you can probably tell, I'm too much of a pragmatist. The ends always justify my means according to my conceptions of good. Hence, I live at level 5. But sometimes I get this far off look in my eye, and I wish I could be more like Adama or Picard.EDIT: Zarek ... his character certainly undergoes an arc, but as you pointed out, there is a relativism at work here too. Most recently, it seems that living under cylon rule has attenuated his thirst for power. The enemy of my enemy is my bid for the Vice-Presidency. But the alignment system is over-simple for pidgeonholing because of moral relativism. Laws and conceptions of good/evil change from society to society, from person to person, and from situation to situation.</blockquote>

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