Correct.

There is always that question — ssu

Nope. This is the easiest moral calculus anyone could be possibly faced with.

As my ideology links a positive outcome only to the extent humankind benefits — Hanover

Your ideology is dumb. Humankind doesn't exist independently of the ecologies that sustain it. The destruction of that ecology is responsible for the crisis we're in today.

there is - now - a legitimate question as to how long and how far we can and should go in closing down everything. — ChatteringMonkey

No, there isn't. Until the virus is under complete control, there is no question. It's that simple. Anything else is dissimulation and the effective murder of populations - primarily the poor, the old, and the already sick - in the interests of the rich. If you think differently you're either objectively wrong or OK with that.

The country (essentially our culture?) is the economy? — praxis

Yep. It's the fitting of a toy model of the economy onto the reality of social relations; anyone that doesn't fit the model can die; is not even acknowledged as having any true existence ('the country is the economy - and there's nothing left over... and even if there is, (which there isn't!) it can be safely ignored').

Worth noting that this will fail even by 'sound' economic standards. When your hospitals are overflowing and even .05% of your population dies, that's economic disaster. So worth calling it like it is: the concern for the the rich, nothing more. It's a lie both ways. Those who swallow it are willing dupes for the monied classes.

'This economy' is the one we have after all, meaning that insofar an economy serves a function in society, it seems to me that we should look at the effects actions will have on the one that is realized rather than hypothetical economies that we maybe could or could not have.

Something that is created is not illusory, nor does the fact that it is created automatically imply that anything is possible. Things are created in concert with the world, not in some boundless vacuum, there are limits to what you can do with it. But sure, we probably can create other possible configuration of the economy that are more fair, more sustainable, more etc... within those limitation. But that doesn't mean that the one we have should not be a consideration in deciding how to act. We put human lives in the balance with economy every day, otherwise all traffic should be banned immediately for example. Discussion about most policies would be literally impossible if human lives were a hard boundary that should never be crossed. — ChatteringMonkey

This is not a response to what I wrote. It's hard to see, in fact, what it is at all. Did I argue that we shouldn't 'take into consideration the economy we have' when 'deciding how to act'? Arguably this is the only thing I have done, insofar as everything I've written is nothing but a critique and 'consideration' of exactly the misery wrought by 'this economy', and which threatens to deepen given the the instincts of certain well-placed individuals in response to CV. So one is hard pressed to know what in the world you think you're responding to.

And one more thing, you are probably perfectly well aware that the the phrase 'literal deaths of millions in order to sustain the economy for the benefit of a few' is highly contentious and politicized. This is ideology, not philosophy... because it's not that simple. — ChatteringMonkey

The only ideology is that which remains blind to both history and ongoing ecological devastation wrought by capitalism, including the ecologies of human populations all over the earth (witness, incidentally, the flourishing of ecosystems and sky around the world in the wake of the shutdown of capitalist production). It takes a wilful ignorance or unquestioned indoctrination to think that statements of reality are 'contentious'. When your leaders have the open audacity and shamelessness to argue that gramps probably ought to be written-off and you call critics of this 'contentious' then your scale of what is and is not contentious is so far off median that you've lost the capacity to pronounce judgement on anything whatsoever.

Never forget that activists and politicians will capitalize on any tragedy for political gain. — Hanover

Tragedy - especially this tragedy - is already political. Anyone who says otherwise is being - political.

As far as moral questions go, the "general economic consequences" Vs "individual lifes" conflict is a lot more interesting, I think. — Echarmion

Yes and no. Even the framing of this question is open - or ought to be open - to radical revision: what is traditionally called 'the economy' is largely an abstraction that excludes large swathes of society as among the 'extra-economic', even as it relies on those areas for its very lifeblood. It's only when set against this abstraction does individual life become potentially set in conflict with this chimera. The issue is that the chimera is as real as it is illusory: it is real insofar as it is created, forged by power and political will, one happy to countenance the literal deaths of millions in order to sustain it for the benefit of a few.

If the trolly problem is an obvious liminal situation, a situation that exists only in the midst of tragedy and utter despair (and thus an ethical aberration), COVID's larger significance is its exposure of 'the economy' - the one in always potential 'conflict' with the individual - as equally aberrant and exceptional. An abberence so normalized that it takes the utter disruption of global life for people to even catch a glimpse of just how fucked up it is. It's less a question of 'the economy' vs individual lives as it is this economy vs. Individual lives.

Politicise this forever.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/comrade-britney-viral-britney-spears-calls-for-redistribution-of-wealth-amid-virus-quarantine

Comrade Britney. Actually re-listened to some greatest hits earlier today on the back of this. So good.

TDS Syndrome? - TDSS.

:up:

Yeah, a few places picked up on linking the trolley problem to the decisions having to be made by doctors in Italy. It got me thinking - and made explict an intuition I had - that the trolly problem, far from being a general model of ethics, is precisely a paradigm of ethics adopted in liminal situations, states of emergency and exception in which normal society has ceased to function. It's somewhat of a intellectual and philosophical travesty that it is taken for a litmus test of ethics in general.

Is it just me or has someone been "sleeping by the switch" — Teller

No one is sleeping by the switch. The switch has been deliberately ignored in the name of profit. You're a common man, which probably means it's OK if you - or at least your parents and grandparents - die.

Jodi Dean on the temporal aspects of the latest crisis of capitalism brought about by CV:

"We already know that the time of capital, of the self-valorization of value, is futural, anticipatory, always oriented to not now but later. This is what drives intensifications of production -- the speed up and automation, the push to get more out of workers to generate the more of whatever might lead to more profit in the future. The same with investment: forecasting what will happen is what generates bets now; they are always bets on a future.

Capitalist time is out of joint with the time of the virus. How? Tests for the virus look backward: did infection happen? What was the cause of the sickness one presents? It's why in the US in particular we are playing catch up. Capitalists didn't see profit in anticipating the epidemic -- "too many" ventilators and empty beds are but heaps of dead capital. We can only know where the virus was, make guesses about how it traveled.

The time of life with Covid 19 is asynchronous, fragmented, dissonant. The rhythms of our lives have been disrupted -- school, train, work, drinks, home or whatever familiar combinations gave our life its specific punctuation. Private time appears in its excesses: too much or too little, utterly alone or overbearingly together. At the same time, too much time becomes absorbed in screens. Every meeting, every communication -- work, entertainment, connection, boredom -- has the same interface whether we want it or not. Like the PBS show for tweens said in the seventies "c'mon and zoom-zoom-zooma-zoom."

Working from home makes work endless, a new elongation of the workday enabled not just by the technology but by the elimination of specific sites for work. It's not a snow day and the demands just keep coming.

Capitalist time is impatient. No rest (and they never learn this means no recovery). No time to live, or to try to save lives. No time to wait out the epidemic, protect the frontline medical workers, develop a vaccine and save some lives. For us there's no time to waste. For capitalists it's wasted time.

And with the tantrums and temper of a child incapable of waiting of accepting the imperative of constraint now for the sake of a future good, the president and his class -- he's not alone in this; Lloyd Blankfein has weighed in behalf of the banks --are saying "Time's up.""

Not me whose fantasizing instead of taking into account what those in power are actually contemplating. The only appeal to emotion is yours, government lover. No coincidence that your 'fellow travellers' are the elites and the powerful.

Says someone who is happy to let half a million people perish. Those lengths are real and being contemplated by those in power, with whom you sympathyze, always - so much for your fake railing against the state. No need for your imagined fantasies of gulag boogeymen. Death will be handed down by the boots you lick.

Although abolishing money is not a particularly bad idea.

And a 'force multiplier to thought' is meaningful??? — A Seagull

Obviously.

Philosophy forum appropriate:

Oh I forgot to mention, house every single homeless person so they do not pose a public health danger. And then keep this up, forever.

:death:

Yeah, the video where he says that is revolting. These parasites would have people die for their profits, and say that it's a worthy sacrifice.

They had to take him out of his rejuvenation tank just so he could do a video call. They're continuing to work on his failing circuits as we speak.

It's a dangerous lie that it is only corporations panicking about "bottom lines". Many of us are without work, and if this continues much longer, will be unable to pay bills and rent. — NOS4A2

So suspend rent and provide income relief. Hell, establish a UBI ASAP. Better yet, communalize the means of production everywhere, put businesses into the hands of workers, and nationalize every single company that asks for and gets a bailout. Abolish the private health system by yesterday, and ensure that everyone can afford to be treated. Suspend all medical debt. Hell, abolish all medical debt. Time for a debt jubilee. Worried about the economy being passed on to children? Abolish all student debt too. Appropriate the wealth of anyone worth more than a billion dollars; name a dog park after them so that they feel better. So many things that can be done. But you'd much prefer to murder half a million+ of your population.

There's nothing subjective about it. Or objective for that matter (a silly distinction of limited use, everywhere misapplied).

Heh, you're maybe more optimistic than me.

Did... did I need to add a /s there? Because there was a /s there.

Oh he's undoubtably doing that - but it's not just that. His analysis of 2008 are consistent with what he wrote in his books on the topic long before he become a founding member of Diem.

As far as numbers go, it seems like the those who'd ape the president's just-thinking-aloud about the keeping the US 'open for business' are, in practice, willing to forgo roughly 600,000 lives. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-23/economic-shutdown-is-estimated-to-save-600-000-american-lives

Because fuck old and sick people lol.

As someone put it elsewhere: anyone who thinks there is a giant government conspiracy ought to observe just how much they are writhing to end the shut-downs.

This is about corporate panic over bottom lines, not authoritarian government, and only idiots are consistently suckered into thinking the latter is where the stakes lie in this current debate - much to the delight of those same corporations.

lmao all these law and order types who don't know how law works.

I'll take inconsistency. It's better than barbarism.

0.

Of course you don't you spineless git.

Answer the fucking question.

Spell this out. If you're comparing misery to misery - parroting word-for-word a certain shitstain in chief - what is the threshold of deaths at which you'd be prepared to countenance reversing the 'reaction'? How many can or should die? You can round to the nearest ten thousandth if you like. A percentage of population will do too. Answer with a number or don't answer at all.

If you don't watch this and you still think you can discuss CV, you disqualify yourself from discussing CV. Basically on the continuity of the 2008 crisis with the current one, and how Trump may well stymie the last available mechanism for economic revival out of sheer ineptitude.

@fdrake

Except what you said was that 'nearly all dangerous epidemics and pandemics have come from China', which is and remains bullshit.

You could literally livestream the building of the hospitals in Wuhan. Which I did. It was incredible.