Reverse image search yielded a bunch of tumblr blogs and nothing else so I don’t know the artist unfortunately. If anyone does I’ll add it to the post
Judge Dredd scowl intensifies
That’s right, OP, the law doesn’t define ethical behavior – this community’s rules do. Thank you for trying to find the artist; five ethics points have been credited to your account, which can be spent to pay down your sin points at any participating location.
How many points does it take to escape this hell?
Your current amount +1. Always out of reach
Can I have some ethics points? I did some sinning that I’d like to pay down before I do some more sinning.
I’m so tired of hearing that blinding headlights are perfectly fine because they’re legal and the car came like that
okay, Jared, but you’re still an asshole for having them and blinding me at the four way stop so I almost ran over somebody in the crosswalk because they were absolutely invisible due to the glare from your lowbeams even though they just walked right in front of you.
While true, please don’t drive if you can’t see. Better to wait a few seconds than kill or maim someone.
you can’t go down the road stopping every time you’re blinded when it’s every fourth car that’s shining laser beams into your eyes. that would be a different kind of dangerous.
in my example, it was actually the driver ahead of me that couldn’t see the pedestrian and nearly hit them; I was barely able to discern them as they crossed in front of the asshole headlights, because I’m very aware of this exact situation. but I certainly don’t blame them for not seeing the pedestrian - they were basically completely invisible, including during the approach on the sidewalk, again because of the stock lowbeam LED headlights shining into our faces. I’ve seen people nearly get into frontals as well because the oncoming car was turning, but nobody could see it because of the headlight glare. personally, yes, I generally don’t go if I’m not sure it’s clear, which is why I watch during intersection approaches so carefully, so that I know what might be hidden behind headlights. but the ugly truth is that sometimes you have to keep driving when you’re blinded, because the alternative is more dangerous. (that does not apply at a four-way stop)
The law: KYS
Them: Oh, well, the law is the law suicides
The law’s fine print: (KYS as in Keep Yourself Safe)
When I was in college, I had an ethics class where the class was presented with a conundrum, and here’s the gist of it:
A man was hired to write something. He was instructed that he had to make sure to put a copyright notice into the work. (This was the time when if you didn’t specifically put in a copyright, then it was automatically public domain.) For whatever reason, the man did all of the work, but did not add the copyright statement. Then, he quits the job, takes all of the work home with him and sells it. Were his actions ethical?
An overwhelming majority of the people in my class argued that his actions were ethical, to be paid to make a product and then take the product home with you and sell it yourself. So, at the time, I thought either that was some sort of psychology class experiment that I didn’t know I was part of, or people are far more unethical than I ever imagined.
Obviously, the main argument for their side was that it wasn’t wrong to take public domain material because it’s not illegal.
I realized the truth much later. The average person, even the average college student, doesn’t really think about things very much. They have never in their lives tried to think about whether something is ethical, and have spent their entire existence guided by emotions like a dog or something. So, asking them to think through a problem with only one step is about the maximum they’re capable of. So, because they are basically incapable of thinking, when given an ethical problem that is even slightly complicated, they can just default to “it’s legal,” and then they don’t have to think.
I’d argue that trying to find and exploit loopholes in ethics is in itself unethical. “Do not <verb>” is not an invitation to find creative ways to <verb> without “technically” <verb>ing.
Welcome to the lesson taught by the entire Old Testament.
So yeah, I would say something else was happening in that story. The students had an intuitive or innate sense of what was ethical here and couldn’t articulate it against the well-honed apologia created to support an unethical system.
Intellectual property is a crime against humanity. It takes a universal innate quality of sensing thinking beings and then wraps it in violence saying that we will literally use the force of violence if we have to in order to punish you acting on natural process that are prosocial and help humanity.
The only reason intellectual property needs to exist in the first place is because we proactively starve the masses and then set up a system where they can only survive is they make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.
The students in the class intuitively understood that a human being doing work and then benefitting from that work is far more ethical than a human being doing work and then being forced by law to never ever benefit from that work again simply because that person was starving and agreeing to that abusive contract was the only way they could get their next meal.
That’s a good point (last paragraph) and something you see often in moral debates. It’s probably why people are always so eager to ask extra questions about hypotheticals.
“It’s legal” is a great example of ‘Thought-stoppers’. Little phrases that people use so that they do not have to do the mental work of thinking of the larger systemic issue. “They will think of something” is a great one when it comes to climate blow back and technological issues.
But all thought stoppers are like ignorance, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. So when people tend to go to reductionist thinking on complex issues, you tend to get a form of conformity that can be manipulated. Not consistently but enough to cause large power structures. Alas, for every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.
FYI it’s dire, just to set it straight.
Thank you for that. One of those that I always get wrong!
Damn, I would have argued it is ethical because corporations shouldn’t exist and workers “stealing” from them is actually just an appropriation of what was already rightfully theirs.
The problem doesn’t mention that it’s a corporation. He could be stealing from a one person shop.
How the fuck is being paid to do something for someone and stealing it ethical, that’s some god damn fucking mental gymnastics
There’s not even a corporation in the question!
Who said anything about stealing it? The person who paid still received the writing. They just didn’t get a copyright too.
The person has committed fraud, they have agreed to specific contract terms, been paid for them, never intending to fulfil them
Oh I don’t believe capitalism is ethical. I think capitalist employment is a coercive relationship based on the threat of starvation and homelessness. I don’t believe in private property and therefore view commodities as belonging to those who produce them.
Imagine you are in precarious circumstances. You aren’t sure if you will have food or housing in the next month. Guy comes up to you, says he’ll pay you to design and produce x commodity for the exact hourly wage you need to get meet your immediate material needs. You produce x commodity and manage to live a little longer. He copyrights x commodity and sells it for immense profit. Zero labor on his part. Is this ethical or is it exploitation?
Property is theft
So in your system you can never do any paid work for someone else?
Bad take
How is that a bad take? They literally said yes
Yes, I’m glad you’re getting it.
Yeah I got to say the more and more I think about it, the more I think it is ethical. Because if you want to use his work in perpetuity you should hire him for the amount of time you use it. Or work out some kind of long-term profit sharing. If it’s for a one-time use of their skills you shouldn’t get to own the copyright of it. So yeah I’m going to say completely ethical.
I argue that we should abolish copyright. However to be a bit more pragmatic, if we were to keep copyright, it should be for 10 years from publication. You can apply to have it extended another 10 years but with a fee attached to approve it per work. This means people can still have some control of the work for a decade after completion and if it is still worth while, they can get another decade. But after that, it is public domain.
I’d be curious to see how much money content makes every year after creation. Surely they make the vast vast majority of their money in the first few years. Surely you shouldn’t need 150+ years or whatever for a profit.
Exactly. I once saw a discussion with some authors and this came up. Some one proposed that copyright should be 10 years, and one of the authors said “Oh no, we cannot do that, that is way too long. 5 years tops!” Most sales are in the first 2 years and that is if you are lucky.
My proposal of 10 years plus a single extension is for those that get luck in having a semi-ever green back log.
I put my money were my mouth is. In a few years I will directly be inheriting the rights to a large volume of print works that apparently makes a few thousand dollars a year, the day I get those right I am just going to public domain the lot of them. Let the works be free, I didn’t make it, I didn’t earn it and information wants to be free.
It could just be the circles I run in, but lately I see the opposite problem prevailing. People just decide that if a law doesn’t suit their “ethics” or whimsy in the moment, they can go ahead and ignore it.
Silly stuff like “I dont want to spend 90 seconds finding a parking spot and walking into/put of the store, so I’ll just leave my car right in front of the store entrance. Who cares about traffic patterns or emergency services or blacking access ramps for mobility impaired people?”
Or more serious things. Some friends of mine recently bought a vacant lot near me intending to build a house, and a workshop for their business. It’s on a hillside so they would need to spend ~$3k to have a contractor grade the property. But they needed to handle the permitting themselves… Which needs an engineer to verify their changes won’t destabilize the land and endanger their neighbors. Analyze the drainage to ensure their changes won’t cause flooding. Environmental impact survey to check for endangered and protected species on tbe property. Comes out to $7k. All of a sudden my extreme left-wing, progressive friends sound just like my conservative Uncle at Thanksgiving, ranting about how the big government won’t let them do anything. Meanwhile, since I live nearby I have been feeling a lot more comfortable knowing that my neighbors are required to go through these processes before doing any projects that could impact me. We have been getting more extreme weather lately and I had a landslide on my own property a few years ago.
They also wanted to build a separate workshop building for their business. It is just the two of them now, but they hope to grow and have employees, and want to have some seperstion between the work space and their living space. Which means extra parking, and the workshop needs stuff like a bathroom and break room. And the business needs regular truckloads of pallets of chemicals that they use. And they also use resin 3D printers which need to ventilate toxic fumes outside. This property is zoned for residential and entirely surrounded by single-family homes. Their plan was to just build and hope they were too small to get noticed by the city.
Would they be able to do all of these things without causing disaster? Probably. In my own uneducated opinion, I think they were probabky correct that there are nk endangered species present, that their plans would result in thr land being more stable rather than less, that drainage would not be concerned, and that there business woukd be small and quiet enough that the neighbors would not notice or care.
But none of that is the point. Everyone who does this stuff always thinks its fine. Disasters like that are things that happen to OTHER people, not me! A LOT of regulations are written in blood, but people want to ignore them because they are inconvenient or a hassle or they just don’t want to consider the impact to anyone else. Often laws are there to remind us of the ethical considerations we would otherwise overlook.
Rugged individualism and its consequences. In a society where people’s lives revolve around their community this would not be an issue.
I recently started going to a course related to law at university. Its aimed at people not studying law, and the first thing it started with was clarifying that law is not morality.
This was quite interesting to me, since the course’s topic (laws about digitalization) has nothing to do with morality. So law != morality is obviously something the courses organisers thought to be a very important thing about law.
So I think the professionals are well aware of it, and anyone using law as a morality is either deliberately choosing it to ignore problems they’d have in a proper moral system, or not well educated on law.
Yeah, although I think that laws should always equal to moral, everytime, assuming that there are objectively good things.
If the nation is truly democratic, then yes, though a caveat is that sometimes new edge cases appear that force the laws to change.
You’d be a moron to think you’re more competent and more ethical than the collective will of the people.
Looks like we don’t need the Bill of Rights, or any other rights laid out in the law, then. It just interferes with pure democracy. Let’s go change the Constitution, boys! Those “rights” are interfering with our very ethical need to enslave people.
Ah yeah like that one time when the people they all voted to take away their own rights, yeah, we all remember that. /s
The closest thing to what you’re talking about was the rise of Nazi Germany, which, and this is true, was a fascism resulting of a flawed democracy.
American slaves came from outside America. Places like Africa. Africans don’t get to vote in America.
First of all, the USA is not a perfect ideal democracy. It’s actually really low on the index.
“Africans don’t get to vote in America.”
Fucking Tankies must hear the wildest propaganda and really believe it. Are you from North Korea, mate?
Reported you for blatant racism.
If you abuse the reporting feature one more time, you’re out of here.
Calling you a tankie is not racism. If you don’t know what racism is: look. it. up.
I thought when I explained the problem, you’d remove the racist comment the next time you logged on, and probably give FiniteBanjo some penalty similar to the one I was threatened with.
I considered reporting it again with more details so that maybe another mod would remove it, but since I was threatened about that, I’m reluctant to do so.
I reported it because that comment goes against the rules of the entire platform, and even if my report was initially misunderstood, I don’t think we should leave racist comments up.
Just to recap the racism, I said that Africans couldn’t vote in America and that’s why democracy wouldn’t keep them from being enslaved, and FiniteBanjo responded with a picture of the Obamas, saying that they were Africans voting in America. There’s no way that they thought the subject was African Americans. It was African slaves. And they posted a picture of a person who was repeatedly falsely accused of being born in Africa. It’s blatant racism.
