• Business Ethics and Coronavirus
    If you start quarreling like a libertarian that they cannot give you such an order WRONG ANSWER!ssu

    That's quite the claim! Simply to play devil's advocate here, what basis can you decise that it's wrong? isn't it a violation of a person's liberty to give the state the ability to make them do something against their will when they have done nothing wrong?
  • Forum Etiquette
    Thank you for the responses! It's nice to have some of these questions validated!
  • Business Ethics and Coronavirus
    I don't think we can say the employer makes people come to work, as if pointing a gun at their head. They certainly risk losing their employment if they do not show up.NOS4A2

    If you don't mind me asking, what are the points of contention? I thought I laid my case out fairly well, and if you object I really would like to hear why.
    Partly since reason dictates for my reasoning to be incorrect there must be an issue of form or one of my premises isn't true.
  • Business Ethics and Coronavirus


    Interesting take, though if there is a risk doesn't an employer need to consider the ramifications of the thing he is risking as well? Just because things do not follow with necessity doesn't mean that people aren't supposed to consider them. Someone might not necessarily be mad if I drink their soda, but they might. So I don't. By analogy, the business can say that their employees aren't necessarily going to get sick because of what the company tells them to do, but they still might. And if that is the case, to ignore the risk that the company is putting them at would be an ethical failing, wouldn't it?
  • Business Ethics and Coronavirus
    Well to answer your questions I think we need to make some assumptions. Of course these would be reflective of my viewpoint, but to make any headway in the discussion we need some more footing.
    1. The rules put in place are not ethically authoritative. Since the government may or may not be just then disobeying it cannot be unjust as a rule.
    2. The basis for defining whether something is ethical or not would be in reference to any risk incurred by the employees. We could decide on using some sort of deontological system, but legislative decisions seem to be more consequentialist, plus consequentialist arguments seem to make more sense to the masses and thus using said system in our discussion will make our discussion the most informative and discernible. I will bring up some deontological points later if requested, but for now I'll just stick with a consequential view.
    3. The business must have either considered or neglected to considered whether to act a certain way is moral. Since it is comprised of human beings who are at least potentially rational this is really a given but I feel it should be mentioned, since anything not capable of ethical consideration can't be held to a moral standard.
    4. Like many people in this situation we don't know how great the risk is of contraction, all we know is that no one currently working shows symptoms of being ill/infected.
    5. Employees can't leave without incurring some significant personal risk. Since it is hard to get employment at least in the current environment, becoming unemployed would mean a loss of income and a threat to someone's livelihood since they would not be able to meet personal expenses. It could be argued that this is not realistic since people could "tighten their belts" so to speak, but having to move out of wherever one currently lives would incur a yet higher risk of transmission so we shall regard losing one's current living situation as a non-option.

    Since we don't know that everyone in the facility is healthy, we can't rightfully assume that there is no risk, so to make employees work in high-transmission conditions would be to force them to incur some risk, which would make it unethical. This fact derives from the arbitrariness of having to work on-location, since the initial discussion assumes that the job could be done at home. The risk here is different from any other risk assumption expected of employees since in professions of high risk employers must try to offset the risks of the job not only with pay, but also with safety measures. Since the risk here is strictly human contact, that itself is forcing employees to assume a risk which for assumption 5 they are not able to avoid.

    Of course, the objection could be made that since are rational beings they should make the decision of whether to work for a company making them assume such risks at all, but this consideration becomes moot on consideration of assumption 5.

    Just as a note:
    If you want to say "It saves lives, or has a better chance to save lives", that's a good value, and has nothing to do with ethics, does it now.god must be atheist

    To say that it is good is to make an ethical judgement and thereby to do ethics. The very act of deciding if something is good or bad is an ethical judgement.

    Further, to say that there is no ethical knowledge as you are asserting implicitly by saying that all ethics is merely opinion is in itself an ethical assertion. If you say there is no ethical knowledge and that assertion is ethical knowledge then that statement is self contradictory and it must be false.
  • Bring Aristotle Back
    So you want a revival to lend some 'appeal to authority' weight behind 'stuff you reckon' against those pesky scientists with their 'falsifiable theories' and their 'evidence'. Damn those scientists, how dare they undermine what we very strongly reckon is the case!Isaac

    I have to admit this is a far from charitable reading, but it does make some decent points in the latter
    half. If you wish to use scientific language we could say Aristotle's observations of a few civilizations are case studies. And if you are going to criticize him, I think to do it fairly you would need to cite where he makes his mistakes. He doesn't say his political theory describes what is going on, he says it is how it should be. I would love to argue the point with you (I think that's what most of us are here for) but I think polemics should be left somewhere else.

    But it has gone too far! The scientists make the things Aristotle was incredibly talented at, like ethics, epistemology, logic, his understanding of universals and especially his knowledge of how politics works that we really need today, worthless because of the damage he did to science.Michael Lee

    I agree with you on the ethics count. One problem I think that most people make when it comes to the scientific mind is applying the scientific method to everything. The only way that science could create a unified theory of morality is if it had some way to objectively measure morality. As such, ethics seems to be thoroughly and eternally fixed in the ballpark of philosophy.

    As my own aside,
    virtue ethics I think are the most common sense ethics around. I mean by common sense in that it seems the system that describes how people actually do decide if someone is good or bad. Disagreements? Objections?
  • true happiness
    If there is no falsely happy, would not all happiness be true happiness? What qualifies as truly happy? If we are to say that person who is truly happy has no difficulty in their life, then I would be inclined to say no, but there is an alternative.
    Aristotle defines a happiness-like state, eudemonia, as a state of flourishing. We don't have to be feeling the emotion of happiness constantly, just acting according to reason for the sake of virtue.
    If you have your own definition in mind, I'd love to hear it!