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Establishing moral standards is just one of many ways to avoid regret. A society which doesn't have their moral rules obeyed by its members are likely to suffer by immoral actions that they do.
Perhaps someone who did immoral actions don't regret them. But someone else who still live afterwards may regret their failure to prevent those actions. In Whitman's case, the psychiatrists who diagnosed him may feel biggest regret.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 08/04/2021 16:40:05Perhaps someone who did immoral actions don't regret them. But someone else who still live afterwards may regret their failure to prevent those actions. In Whitman's case, the psychiatrists who diagnosed him may feel biggest regret. The Whitman case fell within the scope of a brilliant Texas judicial ruling:A "genetic predisposition to murder" is a valid defence. Public safety demands that anyone with a genetic predisposition to murder must be executed.
The Whitman case fell within the scope of a brilliant Texas judicial ruling:A "genetic predisposition to murder" is a valid defence. Public safety demands that anyone with a genetic predisposition to murder must be executed.
That's why we like having wars and battles.
We all have a genetic predisposition to murder. That's why we like having wars and battles.In a battle, the soldiers on one side, set out to murder the soldiers on the other side.And the more murders a soldier commits. the more the soldier is praised. And gets given medals for "Distinguished Conduct" or the "Congressional Medal of Honor" for doing the murders.This seems to raise certain questions about the universality of morality.I mean is it moral to commit murder on the battlefield, but not moral to do it in the street.
You're claiming that the extinction of humanity would be a mere biological incident of " no consequence".I don't think your claim is justified by the evidence available to us.So far, all investigations into the possibility of intelligent life in the Universe, have shown no evidence that it exists anywhere except on Earth.This is possibly because humans, on Earth, are the first intelligent species in the entire Universe.Someone has to be first! Why can't it be us?If it is, and we get extinguished, that may end intelligence in the Universe
Estimates by astronomers indicate that there could be more than 100 BILLION Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way that could be home to life. Think that’s a big number? According to astronomers, there are roughly 500 billion galaxies in the known universe, which means there are around 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (5×1022) habitable planets. That’s of course if there’s just ONE universe.
Myths. We tend to think they’re a thing of the past, fabrications that early humans needed to believe in because their understanding of the world was so meagre. But what if modern civilisation were itself based on a set of myths? This is the big question posed by Professor Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which has become one of the most talked about bestsellers of recent years. In this exclusive appearance for Intelligence Squared, Harari will argue that all political orders are based on useful fictions which have allowed groups of humans, from ancient Mesopotamia through to the Roman empire and modern capitalist societies, to cooperate in numbers far beyond the scope of any other species.To give an example, Hammurabi, the great ruler of ancient Babylon, and the US founding fathers both created well-functioning societies. Hammurabi’s was based on hierarchy, with the king at the top and the slaves at the bottom, while the Americans’ was based on freedom and equality between all citizens. Yet the idea of equality, Harari will claim, is as much a fiction as the idea that a king or rich nobleman is ‘better’ than a humble peasant. What made both of these societies work was the fact that within each of them everyone believed in the same set of imagined underlying principles. In a similar vein, money is a fiction that depends on the trust that we collectively put in it. The fact that it is a ‘myth’ has not impeded its usefulness. It has become the most universal and efficient system of mutual trust ever devised, allowing the development of global trade networks and sophisticated modern capitalism.
Hammurabi’s was based on hierarchy, with the king at the top and the slaves at the bottom, while the Americans’ was based on freedom and equality between all citizens
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 15/04/2021 15:03:47Hammurabi’s was based on hierarchy, with the king at the top and the slaves at the bottom, while the Americans’ was based on freedom and equality between all citizensNot a good starting point for an argument, I feel. The US economy was built on slavery and extermination, not equality. You'd think a professor of history would know this.
The iPhone used by a terrorist in the San Bernardino shooting was unlocked by a small Australian hacking firm in 2016, ending a momentous standoff between the U.S. government and the tech titan Apple.Azimuth Security, a publicity-shy company that says it sells its cyber wares only to democratic governments, secretly crafted the solution the FBI used to gain access to the device, according to several people familiar with the matter. The iPhone was used by one of two shooters whose December 2015 attack left more than a dozen people dead.The identity of the hacking firm has remained a closely guarded secret for five years. Even Apple didn’t know which vendor the FBI used, according to company spokesman Todd Wilder. But without realizing it, Apple’s attorneys came close last year to learning of Azimuth’s role — through a different court case, one that has nothing to do with unlocking a terrorist’s device.Five years ago, Apple and the FBI both cast the struggle over the iPhone as a moral battle. The FBI believed Apple should help it obtain information to investigate the terrorist attack. Apple believed that creating a back door into the phone would weaken security and could be used by malicious actors. The FBI sought a court order to compel Apple to help the government. Weeks later, the FBI backed down after it had found an outside group that had a solution to gain access to the phone.The tale of the unlocking of the terrorist’s iPhone, reconstructed through Washington Post interviews with several people close to the situation, shines a light on a hidden world of bug hunters and their often-fraught relationship with the creator of the devices whose flaws they uncover. Azimuth is a poster child for “white hat” hacking, experts say, which is good-guy cybersecurity research that aims to disclose flaws and disavows authoritarian governments.Two Azimuth hackers teamed up to break into the San Bernardino iPhone, according to the people familiar with the matter, who like others quoted in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Founder Mark Dowd, 41, is an Australian coder who runs marathons and who, one colleague said, “can pretty much look at a computer and break into it.” One of his researchers was David Wang, who first set hands on a keyboard at age 8, dropped out of Yale, and by 27 had won a prestigious Pwnie Award — an Oscar for hackers — for “jailbreaking” or removing the software restrictions of an iPhone.
In September 2015, Apple released its new operating system, iOS 9, which it billed as having enhanced security to “protect customer data.” The new iOS was running on the iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, a public health inspector for San Bernardino County.The FBI suspected the iPhone 5C might have valuable clues about why Farook and Tashfeen Malik opened fire on a holiday party at Farook’s office. Both Farook and Malik were killed in a shootout with police.Before the attack, Malik had posted a message on her Facebook page, pledging loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State. (Baghdadi died in a U.S. Special Forces raid in Syria in 2019.) The FBI had few leads on whether the couple had accomplices or whether it was directed by the Islamic State, which was directing similar attacks around the world at the time. The FBI thought the contents of Farook’s iPhone 5C might provide useful information, such as who he had been communicating with in the lead-up to the attack.But the phone, which belonged to Farook’s employer, was locked with Apple’s new security. In the past, the FBI could use software to quickly guess every possible combination of numbers for the four-digit passcode, a “brute force” effort that would normally take about 25 minutes. But the 5C included a feature that erased itself if the wrong password was entered more than 10 times.Months of effort to find a way to unlock the phone were unsuccessful. But Justice Department and FBI leaders, including Director James B. Comey, believed Apple could help and should be legally compelled to try. And Justice Department officials felt this case — in which a dead terrorist’s phone might have clues to prevent another attack — provided the most compelling grounds to date to win a favorable court precedent.In February 2016, the Justice Department obtained a court order directing Apple to write software to bypass the security feature. Apple said it would fight the order. Its argument: the government was seeking to force the company to break its own security, which could pose a threat to customer privacy.
During a deposition, Apple questioned Wang about the morality of selling exploits to governments, according to court records. A lawyer pressed him during the deposition on whether he was aware of any bugs that were not reported to Apple but were later found by malicious hackers.Apple “is trying to use a trick door to get [classified information] out of him,” Corellium attorney Justin Levine said, according to a transcript. Corellium declined to comment for this story.In its statement, Apple said the case “is about Corellium attempting to profit by selling access to Apple’s copyrighted works.”In its lawsuit, Apple argued that Corellium has “no plausible defense” for infringing on Apple’s copyright, in part because it “indiscriminately markets its iPhone replicas to any customer, including foreign governments and commercial enterprises.”Corellium has denied the allegation. It has countered that the lawsuit is an attempt to put it out of business following a failed effort by Apple in 2018 to purchase the company.“If Apple wants to make their phones more secure against these government-affiliated bug hunters, then they should make their phones more secure,” said Matthew D. Green, a computer scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who has led research that found holes in Apple’s encryption. “They shouldn’t be going after people in a courtroom.”
Something is called good or bad depend on its effect to the achievement of its terminal goal. We can't say if something is good or bad without defining its terminal goal first. This rule apply for moral rules too.
The article below says that life is abundant in the universe. We haven't made contact with extraterrestrial lives because of transportation and accommodation problems. If someday we eventually make first contact with them, it would be preferable to be on the side which has more advanced technology and philosophy.https://www.sci-nature.vip/2020/10/astronomers-admit-we-were-wrong100.html?m=1&s=03Astronomers Admit: We Were Wrong—100 Billion Habitable Earth-Like Planets In Our Galaxy Alone
What have philosophers ever contributed to the betterment of humanity?All they've done is write words without any experimental verification Instead relying on purely theoretical ideas.A prime example of this was the "philosopher" Aristotle, in Ancient Greece. He decided, for theoretical reasons, that all celestial bodies, such as planets, must revolve in perfect circles. Or in combinations of circles, called "epicycles".This false and completely unfounded philosophical theory set back the progress of astronomy for 1500 years.Until real scientists, such as Kepler, Galileo, and Isaac Newton arrived on the scene, and busted Aristotle's "theory" by supplying observational and mathematical evidence that it was carp..Aren't these scientists, the people we should admire and praise - not "philosophers"?
He was talking about US today, not some centuries back.