The following passages are taken from an article reprinted far and wide; this version is from MSNBC.
“Obviously stealing things like TV sets or beer or any items that aren’t crucial for survival, that’s a nonstarter,” said Mark Bernstein, a professor of applied ethics at Purdue University. “There would be no ethicist in the country that would think that’s proper behavior.”
But he quickly made an analogy: If the only pharmacy nearby were closed, and it had a drug your mother needed to stay alive, breaking into the pharmacy would be the right thing to do."
“If it’s truly for survival — and I emphasize that, really for your children or wife — I think you have an obligation to your family that is at least as strong as the respect you have to pay other property owners,” he said.
Study Question: obviously we all agree that the two pillars of culture are blood kinship and private property. Am I right in understanding that this means that if my friend, say Sasha, needed medication, it would be ethical to let him die rather than to bump and run for insulin?
By Thursday, National Guard, state and local police were deployed from search-and-rescue operations specifically to restore order to the city.
Jan Boxill, associate director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, draws a clear line: Looting on its face is wrong because it’s stealing.
Study Question: ignoring for the moment that the sentence "Looting on its face is wrong because it’s stealing" has no logical basis, despite its appeal to logic (or is that just common sense?), am i right to understand this sentence as asserting that the right to private property is actually without peer as the single highest value of ethics, and can never be contravened within an ethical structure?
But she said New Orleans appears to have regressed into what ethicists call the state of nature — an atmosphere without rules or infrastructure, where the needs are so great that anything goes.
“It isn’t that it justifies it,” she said, “but where there’s no laws that can help anybody, one way or the other, obviously people need what they need to survive.”
Study Question: does this indicate that there are no ethics or justifications in a "state of nature"? And by what definition is a circumstance where the stuff "people need" is still behind locks a "state of nature"? Wouldn't "looting" in fact be impossible in a state of nature (even in the Hobbesian sense) since private property is not in fact a natural state?
Meta-Question: are these solecisms proper to ethicists or to language?
Posted by jane at September 12, 2005 08:10 AM | TrackBack