At least I believe in what I ask.
That's what I'm still not sure about, hence the comment about how I'm not sure if you're just confused or a self-aware sophist!
That's again, very easy to say until the harm is done, after the fact, you'd wish you paid thousands for the possibility of preventing one sick consumer (oh wait, maybe you're like me, money upfront is more important).
When you say "you'd wish you paid," who are you referring to...the business owner? If I owned a business, I'd certainly do everything I can to instill trust in my customers (plus, when it comes down to it, I actually do care about people anyway). Money up front and quarterly profits are great I guess, but even in the purely selfish and practical sense, such an intense focus on the short-term can undermine your business in the long-term...whereas developing a reputation for trustworthiness, customer service, etc. can go a long way towards customer loyalty. One of my favorite examples here is in Randy Pausch's book,
The Last Lecture, where he talks about how Disney's generous return policy (back in the day) ultimately netted them $100,000 in further business from his family. That said, customer loyalty - and what consumers want in general - are much bigger factors in a free market where small competition isn't being suppressed by government policy...so I guess it's no surprise that quarterly reports are the name of the game in today's corporate-fascist market.
No, I understand, I DON'T UNDERSTAND THOUGH, why there is a big deal about how it's done, who does it, what it costs, doing it before or after. The question should be whether it's the moral thing to do, if it is, shouldn't we do it at all costs? If it's not, does it matter how legal it is?
This depends on what you're asking. I believe in
universal morality, but I do not believe in
absolute morality. Of course I propose that we should always do the moral thing (although sometimes there's some ambiguity involved, such as in a situation I've addressed in
this post.) Because you made a comment about "how much it costs," I'm not quite sure exactly what you're asking, so I'll cover more than I otherwise may have. First, I'll clarify with two points what I mean by "we should always do the moral thing," assuming natural rights stemming from rightful self-ownership (and by extension, ownership of property rightfully acquired). I know you don't believe in natural rights, but you still understand the terminology, so I'll use it to convey my viewpoint:
- We have a moral obligation to respect people's rights (rather than violate them), and we should be held accountable when we do violate them. By violating someone's rights, we're violating their self-ownership, and in short, we owe it back to them...with interest of some sort, in my opinion. I say "in my opinion," because I believe that universal morality exists, but I don't necessarily presume my guess of its parameters to be 100% correct. I do think I'm close, though. This is different from moral relativism though, which holds universal morality does not even exist whatsoever, and that there is no right or wrong...which is what you believe. Anyway, this leads into the idea of protecting people's rights, which is different from merely respecting them: Although good, caring people will make reasonable efforts to protect other people's rights as well as respect them (and to help them out in general), it takes violating someone else's rights before you owe it to them to forfeit any of your own rights or self-ownership. In other words, we can't rightly force a sovereign individual to protect or sacrifice for someone else, because that would violate their own self-ownership without them having violated anyone else's. Still, in terms of moral judgments, my conscience tells me there is still a such thing as morality above and beyond respecting people's rights. For instance, I'd say a person who gives to charity is a better person than one who mocks the poor, all other things being equal...but that's just my opinion, and I could be wrong. Based on our own consciences, we can make rough judgments about how good of people we are, but beyond respecting people's rights, it's damn-near-impossible to come up with any kind of objective, non-arbitrary rule about what kind of behavior is "adequately moral." For all we know, an anthropomorphic male God with a big dangling penis and a beard might own a very detailed morality judgment scale with a ten trillion page tome covering every possible situation, but since that's impossible to know - muchless agree upon - we're left with subjective rough estimates when it comes to morality beyond natural rights and what a good person "should" do in every situation.
- Respecting other people's rights doesn't mean, "Spend every penny you own micro-inspecting every piece of food you sell and live like Bubble Boy to prevent accidentally breathing on someone." It simply means, don't appreciably violate someone else's self-ownership. You're still causally responsible and generally liable if you directly cause appreciable harm to someone even on accident, but there's still a difference between liability and having done something morally reprehensible.
So, back to the point: In the moral sense, people should always refrain from committing immoral actions...but
policing morality and proactively micromanaging others to prevent them from committing aggression is another matter, because taking certain actions in the course of policing aggressive behavior are inherently aggressive by themselves. That's why it matters how it's done, who does it, and when they do it. To give an extreme example, it would be immoral and a violation of someone's rights for a little kid to steal someone's ice cream cone, but that doesn't mean it's acceptable for a police officer to shoot a suspicious-looking kid in the head first to prevent the crime from happening...after all, that in itself is a crime, and it's quite a serious one. The same principle applies to preemptive business regulation and big brother micromanagement by some self-appointed authority, with obvious differences in degree (of course, the authority might be "majority-appointed" or whatever else, but that still doesn't confer legitimacy).
Question for you is, do YOU understand that the price of freedom is people will get hurt? Do you understand that another person's life is not worth certain people's time worrying about? Do you understand just because I sound sarcastic, I am not? Do you understand that every system has a downside, and admitting it is not the end of the world?
First off, I should point out that your first question carries the false and unsubstantiated assumption that permitting freedom and eschewing authoritarianism would cause more people to get hurt. Frankly, people will always get hurt, regardless of whether they live in a free country or not. However, I do strongly believe - the morality of liberty aside - that in an entirely practical sense, libertarian policies would ultimately involve the least number of people getting hurt. I don't consider people getting hurt the price of freedom, because people getting hurt is simply the price of life.
Still, I do understand your question, and I will answer it more directly:
Hypothetically speaking, let's say you could undeniably prove that allowing people to be free would result in more people getting hurt than...than, well, some level of authoritarianism by some group of people who consider themselves "special"
rolleyes: ). Even then, I would still be a strong supporter of freedom, simply because I still believe in self-ownership of each person's life. Let's change the scenario, though: If you could undeniably prove that allowing people to be free would result in the end of the world, well...then I'd be more open to loosening my moral standards a bit further for pragmatic reasons.
I may be much more of a principled moral idealist than 99% of the population, and I'm fully committed to at least staying
close to my moral convictions...but I nevertheless fully recognize that I'm still not 100% consistent. I'm not fully convinced by the idea of anarcho-capitalism yet, and I still wonder if a minarchist government might be a necessary evil, even though I readily acknowledge it as an evil. In other words, it should be readily apparent that I'm willing to tolerate and turn a blind eye to some small level of immorality for a perceived practical benefit.
To answer your other questions:
"Do you understand that another person's life is not worth certain people's time worrying about?"
Well, it depends on what you're asking. On one hand, your life is your own, and I don't expect you to be losing sleep every night over starving children in Antarctica. As cold as it might sound to some, it's simply not your problem unless you want it to be. On the other hand, in the case of the peanut butter incident: Let's say you were the guy who knowingly sold contaminated peanut butter. In that case, you obviously didn't think other people's lives were "worth your time" to worry about, so you deliberately sold peanut butter you knew would harm people. Regardless of whether you felt their lives "worth your time" though, their lives were certainly worth THEIR time, and it wasn't your right to knowingly do something that was likely to take them away, etc. Do what you want with your life, but once you encroach upon someone else's equal liberty and self-ownership, that's when you
deserve to be taken to the shithouse (regardless of whether anyone has the "might" to bring you to justice, in the practical sense).
"Do you understand just because I sound sarcastic, I am not?"
I answered you seriously, right?
"Do you understand that every system has a downside, and admitting it is not the end of the world?"
I understand that no system will ever have a 100% perfect outcome for everyone involved, but that doesn't mean all systems are created equal with equally weighted upsides and downsides, either. It sounds like you're trying to get me to concede to some wishy-washy relativist notion that each system is just as valid (practically or morally) as the next, but I
totally disagree with that. On the contrary, I'm fully convinced that acknowledging self-ownership, permitting liberty, and rejecting arbitrary authority is objectively better - both morally and practically - than allowing arbitrary authority to rule over people's lives, whether we're talking about protectionism, socialism, Communism, fascism, or whatever else. Sure, we can never achieve a utopia, but the practical upsides to libertarianism seriously outweigh the practical downsides...which does not even remotely hold for more statist philosophies.
