(11-17-2018, 10:06 AM)B2hibry Wrote:

(11-17-2018, 12:00 AM)mikesez Wrote: Even if you don't believe in it, you should realize that ethics is not a team sport.
You guys already do plenty of speaking out when the left leaning people do unethical stuff.
Then you want everyone to shut up and forget that they ever knew anything about ethics when the right does unethical stuff.  
In other forums, the reverse is true.  And in those forums, I make it my job to remind the leftists when their people have been unethical.  But there are no leftists on this forum.  No one here cheers for Democrats, so I don't have to bring that stuff up.

Geez, now your the self appointed savior of the left and sworn ethics police? Aside from that absurdity, let me be you for a second...”You’re wrong”, in that ethics is absolutely a team sport in America and modern societies. “Norms” are the very foundation of our system. Anyone who has had the most basic of classes in Consequential and Non-Consequential Ethics may be aware of why this is. I know there are folks who would love for Americans to be “ruled” by a singular morality no matter how twisted, but that isn’t who we are. The whole issue with debating politics today is the attempting to group into one box. Team comes into play when we need to decide the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (Utilitarianism liked or not) It can be debated to no end which group may get left out in decision making but there is no stopping it without undoing everything that makes up a functional society.

I think you're confusing politics with ethics.

Ethics is not a team sport. Consequentialism is a form of ethics, true. But if you're going to use consequentialism to justify what your side does, the other side gets to use it to justify what they do.

What you are describing is politics, which is a team sport. Ethics and politics overlap, of course. Sometimes you have to use ethics to evaluate a political claim, and sometimes you have to consider politics in evaluating an ethical claim, but mostly the two fields stand on their own. Ethics speaks to individual people and individual actions and politics speaking to institutions group behavior and whole systems of government and economics.

I'm not saying you're ever going to find a politician who is 100% ethical nor am I saying that my opinion of what is and is not ethical is somehow final.

But I am saying that ethics is one of the tools we have to preserve freedom and limited government. Holding our politicians to ethical standards and using the same standard for politicians we love as we do for politicians we hate, is a means of preserving freedom, and I'm concerned that people are losing sight of it as they get more and more excited about the team sport aspects of politics.

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