?s about atheism but were afraid to ask

02/22/2011 05:45:39 PM · #476

Awww, SP, you should really take a crack at it. It's an interesting dilemma.

Don't lawyers naturally want to make judgements about things? :) I'll tell you what. If you give me your answer and let me have three posts to "cross-examine" as it were, I'll give you my answer and you can have three posts to "cross-examine" me. So, answer the dilemma with the "System of The Puppy" (if you aren't a libertarian then don't feel compelled to utilize it).

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

02/22/2011 05:46:12 PM · #477

Originally posted by Melethia:

Great answer, SP!

Jason, you just have to ask the question. The system of Deb is inherently unstable and unpredictable.

Check. (makes notes and backs away slowly)

Apple iPhone 5

02/22/2011 06:09:55 PM · #478

The problem I'm seeing here is that us Atheists need to get organised!

To start with, I would suggest a round of introductions; "My name is xxxx, and I'm an Atheist.", so we're clear about that from the start. Then we have to work on our doctrine; our non-beliefs (basically, a list of things we don't believe in, a non-credo), mission statement, and moral framework.

We'll also need some sort of logo or symbol to help identify us to others.

And finally... how about we meet up once a week, say, at weekends? Just to go through this stuff to make sure we're still in agreement on it.

02/22/2011 06:15:21 PM · #479

JH, just for you I designed a logo that doesn't exist ---->

02/22/2011 06:24:08 PM · #480

And then in 1500 years people will be going around saying "I'm Atheist (reformed)" or "I'm First Atheist" or "I'm Southern Atheist". :)

Message edited by author 2011-02-22 18:24:21.

Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

02/22/2011 06:39:15 PM · #481

In 1500 years they won't have to. If humans survive that long, the term will have long since died out for the same reason we don't have a term for people who don't believe in dragons.

Kelli

Canon EOS-D60

02/22/2011 06:58:18 PM · #482

Now dragons, I believe in!

Canon FD 70-210mm f/4.0 MF

02/22/2011 07:04:56 PM · #483

...but only ones that talk.

shutterpuppy

Sony Alpha a7

02/22/2011 07:29:10 PM · #484

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

Awww, SP, you should really take a crack at it. It's an interesting dilemma. . . . I'll tell you what. If you give me your answer and let me have three posts to "cross-examine" as it were, I'll give you my answer and you can have three posts to "cross-examine" me. So, answer the dilemma with the "System of The Puppy" (if you aren't a libertarian then don't feel compelled to utilize it).

<> In the interests of "moving the discussion along":

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

Jazmin is a young, severe asthmatic who is allergic to cats. She owns four cats at home. Her FeNO, a marker of allergic lung inflammation is very high at 105. Jazmin's asthma is frequently out of control and she utilizes lots of medication, makes frequent trips to the ER and is admitted to the hospital many times a year. Jazmin has state insurance funded by tax dollars.

I actually really don't find it that interesting. For me there are no significant moral implications in the hypothetical. You say "young," but I am assuming Jazmin is of legal age. Also, I will assume she is of normal mental capacity and of sound mind, as there is nothing in your hypothetical to indicate that the woman is somehow mentally impaired or incapable of balancing the costs/benefits of keeping the cats.

Therefore, my analysis would go something like this: Woman likes cats. Cats make woman sick. Owning cats is legal. Owning the cats causes no direct harm to others. Woman likes cats enough to deal with the cats making her sick. Woman can keep the cats.

As for the economic aspect of it, unless you believe that taxes and/or public health services are immoral in and of themselves, it is a practical question of efficiencies. I think the "extra" costs associated with Jazmin's action are too attenuated from the limited "harm" caused to the health care/tax system as to be worth attempting to regulate. The minor imbalance in benefits that she receives from the health system as a result of her needing additional medical care, is probably outweighed by the benefit of keeping her as healthy as possible (and thus some sort of contributing member, either tax-wise or other-, to society as a whole).

In other words, I don't see any rational basis for state/government/societal action to prevent Jazmin (or others like her) from owning the cats. Personal action by concerned individuals could be different.

For example, if I was a family member and thought that the cats had the potential to severely adversely affect her health, I would likely advocate for her to give up the cats, perhaps even offering to take one or two of the beasts or try and find homes for them that would allow visits by Jazmin, which would hopefully give her some of the benefit of the cats, but prevent the majority of the personal costs. But, in the end, if she insisted upon being a cat owner with severe asthma, she gets to make that choice in the System of Puppy.

There you go. Happy now?

Message edited by author 2011-02-22 19:31:43.

Matthew

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

Peleng 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye MC In M42 Mount

02/22/2011 07:36:36 PM · #485

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

I answered this already:

A libertarian system of morality might state that "all things are permissible as long as they do not harm another". The system might become more complex than than, but this would be the founding "truth". This system has come up in conversations on varied topics such as drugs, sexuality, religious beliefs, or other things of such nature. Since it gets brought up, I thought it would be interesting to explore it in the context of a less polarizing, but still complex scenario. Is the system robust? Are people who adhere to it comfortable with applying it in an unbiased manner regardless of the conclusions, or do they pick and choose to apply it when it suits their preconceived notions?

I want to understand the framework so when it comes up in other conversations I can tell whether people are being faithful to their framework or whether they are employing other frameworks or are just giving the answer they want. It doesn't work too well to stop the "Should people be able to shoot up heroin in their own home?" conversation and say, wait, time out, what do you think about this? There's a lady with a cat on public insurance...

I must admit I'm not sure why the conversation is so difficult on this.

I don't think that anyone has a single complete moral system that they can apply consistently and coherently in all situations. Real life is far too complex to be reduced to a single statement or series of statements of principle. Take the golden rule ("do unto others...") - no-one suggests that a masochist should be entitled to hurt others because they would themselves like to be hurt. The rule needs clarification, explanation, and exclusions to make sense.

Something I said before (but which was dismissed) considered morality in the context of the law. The law provides a very sophisticated practical application of morality. For example, common law systems (inc. the UK and US) have as one pillar the concept of "equity" - which is essentially the application of morality in a secular context.

The principles (including moral principles) to be applied in adjudication and law-making have been studied for centuries (the field is called jurisprudence). What is clear is that there is no single moral philosophy that is or can be applied - and theories as to how law making is or should be applied vary considerably.

DrAchoo's question is not unreasonable - except in the scale of its reduction given the weight of thinking that exists on the subject.

Message edited by author 2011-02-22 19:37:28.

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

02/22/2011 08:02:47 PM · #486

Originally posted by shutterpuppy:

<> There you go. Happy now?

Your honor. I'd like to treat the witness as hostile. ;P

Your dealing with the "harm" in this situation seems to be similar to Deb's. It isn't directly tangible like a bloody nose so it is less worrisome. Yet, the harm does exist. In the balanced world of the Oregon Health Care System, if she gets care, someone else doesn't. I have other patients with eczema (below the line and not covered). I can think of two girls with significant eczema around their eyes. We can attempt to control it with topical steroids which the families can afford at the risk of cataracts (steroids and eyes don't mix well), or I can try a non-steroidal eczema cream like Elidel which costs more than $100 for a month. It is tangibly real that Jazmin's cat ownership costs the state money that they can't turn around and spend on my other two patients. Most of the time we don't think about such harms because we treat healthcare dollars as a bottomless pit. No matter how much you take out there is always more for others.

Do you think Kant's Moral imperative speaks to the situation at all when judging the morality of her action? If suddenly we had 100,000 cat allergic asthmatics utilizing resources and now the cost was huge, would this shed a different moral light upon it? I'm less interested in the practicality of "what should we do about this?" or "how should we regulate this?" (it seems that's often the direction people want to go), but whether it is "right" or "wrong" or "acceptable" or "not acceptable" for Jazmin to own her cat?

So you can touch on Kant if you want, but mainly I want to know why less tangential harm seems to be of less of a concern? I hesitate to even call it indirect, because it will clearly affect someone else.

Message edited by author 2011-02-22 20:04:58.

Apple iPhone 5

02/22/2011 08:12:54 PM · #487

I don't get it. Why would you even think about pussyfooting around that woman? (har har) - Just tell her to get rid of the cats, give them away, whatever.

If she's stupid enough not to see the harm they're causing her, then someone else needs to take control and sort her out. If she insists that her cats are more important than her health, then she should be referred to a psychiatrist.

To continue wasting money on treating her while she goes home to an environment that's worsening her condition is ludicrous.

Melethia

Canon EOS-80D

02/22/2011 08:32:50 PM · #488

EVERYTHING affects something else. Butterfly flaps its wings.... yadda yadda.. So yes, there has to be a line somewhere. In the state of Oregon, apparently that line is eczema. Again I would contend that health care costs are not a moral dilemma, but a pragmatic and economic one. Given a perfect world (with sickness, albeit) everyone would get all the health care they need, in which case your asthmatic is not effecting the coverage of your eczema girls.

I think people dislike arguing/discussing with you because of the odd and somewhat illogical (Spock would be dismayed!) turns that you take. And the badgering. :-) But I will admit the ping pong with Shannon can be amusing....

02/22/2011 08:41:04 PM · #489

Originally posted by Melethia:

I think people dislike arguing/discussing with you because of the odd and somewhat illogical (Spock would be dismayed!) turns that you take.

Well, this is the only way we can start to understand each other. Talking. To me the turns seem logical and the answers I get seem illogical, but that is probably a product of us having different frameworks.

02/22/2011 08:53:18 PM · #490

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

To me the turns seem logical and the answers I get seem illogical, but that is probably a product of us having different frameworks.

It's a product of you using fallacies to the point that it's hardly worth the bother to point them out any more. Spock would have a hard time resisting the human urge to pound the floor in hysterical guffaws. ;-P

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 USM

02/22/2011 09:30:24 PM · #491

Originally posted by scalvert:

Originally posted by DrAchoo:
To me the turns seem logical and the answers I get seem illogical, but that is probably a product of us having different frameworks.

It's a product of you using fallacies to the point that it's hardly worth the bother to point them out any more. Spock would have a hard time resisting the human urge to pound the floor in hysterical guffaws. ;-P

And Deb wonders why I'm provoked to badger people. Sheesh.

RayEthier

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

02/22/2011 10:02:27 PM · #492

Originally posted by Melethia:

Who pays is not a moral issue. It is a pragmatic one. If Jasmine paid her own health care costs no one would care if she was being self destructive.

Actually that is not quite true. Payment of the costs associated with the service is one thing, but the constant drain on the resources avaiable to provide that service is something completely different.

There are no victimless scenarios... eventually someone has to pay.

Ray

shutterpuppy

Sony Alpha a7

Canon FD 70-210mm f/4.0 MF

02/23/2011 11:32:00 AM · #493

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

Originally posted by shutterpuppy:
<> There you go. Happy now?

Your honor. I'd like to treat the witness as hostile. ;P

Denied. Lack of foundation.

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

Your dealing with the "harm" in this situation seems to be similar to Deb's. It isn't directly tangible like a bloody nose so it is less worrisome. Yet, the harm does exist. In the balanced world of the Oregon Health Care System, if she gets care, someone else doesn't. . . . It is tangibly real that Jazmin's cat ownership costs the state money that they can't turn around and spend on my other two patients. Most of the time we don't think about such harms because we treat healthcare dollars as a bottomless pit. No matter how much you take out there is always more for others.

. . . mainly I want to know why less tangential harm seems to be of less of a concern? I hesitate to even call it indirect, because it will clearly affect someone else.

You really can't draw the kind of straight-line effect you seem to want to in this type of situation. Sure, you can say that any "unnecessary" medical treatment takes money out of the system that can't then be used for other "more deserving" patients, but who makes the decision as to what is necessary and what is not?

The "dilemma" in your hypothetical stems from the fact that health care resources are finite (if not fixed, since adjustments can be made in the system to expand or contract the resource pool, or to change the distribution of the resources within the pool). The problem with ascribing some moral negative (rather than practical concerns of distribution) to any particular person's use of the resource pool is that under that configuration any particular person's use of medical resources comes at the likely expense of some other person's "more deserving" use - the more people who treat their asthma means there is less money for diabetes treatment; more diabetes treatment means less money for vaccines; more vaccines means less money for prenatal care; more prenatal care means less money for breast cancer treatments; more breast cancer treatments means less money for stroke treatments; etc.; etc.; etc.

In regard to why tangential harms are less of a concern, direct harms are more morally important because they impact the autonomy of the harmed. Less tangential harm is of less concern morally because there is not a direct impact on personal autonomy and because it can be very difficult to impossible to accurately map the lines of cause and effect involved.

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

Do you think Kant's Moral imperative speaks to the situation at all when judging the morality of her action? If suddenly we had 100,000 cat allergic asthmatics utilizing resources and now the cost was huge, would this shed a different moral light upon it?

I'm a big fan of Kant, but I'm not sure he resolves this because Kant's moral imperative is asked from the point of view of the person engaging in the conduct. The key to Kant's imperative is that "immoral" actions, if universalized, actually work to undermine the desired outcome of the person engaging in the questionable conduct. Thus, the liar cannot wish that all will lie because it would undermine his own desire to be believed. The cheater cannot wish that all will cheat because that would undermine his own desire to gain advantage.

Thus, under Kant, the question is for Jazmin as to whether her love of cats, even to the detriment of her personal health, should be universalized. She could very well wish that all people would place the welfare of cats above their own, since doing so would not impact her own desire to own the cats. Indeed, it might advance her desire that as many cats as possible be given good homes.

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

If suddenly we had 100,000 cat allergic asthmatics utilizing resources and now the cost was huge, would this shed a different moral light upon it?

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

I'm less interested in the practicality of "what should we do about this?" or "how should we regulate this?" (it seems that's often the direction people want to go), but whether it is "right" or "wrong" or "acceptable" or "not acceptable" for Jazmin to own her cat?

You say you aren't interested in the practicality of the situation, but this adjustment in your hypothetical is completely concerned with the practical question of resource distribution and how the conduct effects the viability of the health care system.

I think the analogy to the 100,000 cat allergic asthmatics is smoking. Smoking has direct, negative health consequences on the smoker - used as directed, smoking eventually kills the user. The collective decision by particular individuals to smoke imposes very large, incidental (but not, generally, direct) costs on society in both money, productivity and loss of life. Yet, while some would probably say smoking is immoral, we don't treat the mere decision to smoke as a moral choice, we treat it as a practical problem. We don't make smoking illegal, instead smoking is taxed so that (at least in theory) the tax revenue generated by the users offsets the incidental costs to society made by their choice.

The smoking analogy also illustrates how society differentiates between direct and incidental/tangential harms. Smoking is taxed (again, at least in theory) to offset the tangential (but very real) costs incurred by society of the individual's decision to smoke. There are practical costs, but it is not normally seen as a immoral choice to smoke. However, where the individual's decision can be seen to directly harm others, smoking is directly restrained and you begin to see society-wide moral condemnation of the decision to smoke. For example, most people have a moral reaction against seeing pregnant mothers smoking, and public smoking bans are premised on the idea (correct or not) that second-hand smoke has a direct, negative health effect on non-smokers.

Bringing it back to Jazmin. Again, the heart of the "dilemma" really is not Jazmin's decision to keep cats, even though it impacts her health, it's the health system's method of distributing the available resources. This is a practical question. There are practical modifications that can be put into place to compensate if conduct like Jazmin's is really a problem - certain limits on the number of asthma treatments covered in any particular period; co-pays which transfer some of the costs of individual visits to the patient and thus discourage "unnecessary" treatments; rewards for patients with manageable illnesses (asthma, diabetes, etc.) for keeping their conditions under control without medical intervention; etc.

People are gravitating to the practical, rather than the moral, because it is a practical dilemma, not a moral dilemma.

Message edited by author 2011-02-23 11:41:43.

02/23/2011 12:06:49 PM · #494

Thanks for the well thought out response. I found it interesting. In a conversation with someone else I mentioned that I find one common theme among moral systems held by atheists to be a generally smaller sphere of influence. In other words, the number of actions which are viewed in a moral light is smaller. This insight might be valuable for everybody to understand because it can lead to the erroneous view that atheists are amoral. For about the zillionth time Jonathan Haidt's insights seem quite revealing. I'll get back to that after I give you my answer. (fair's fair)

I would view Jazmin's cat ownership to be immoral, but perhaps for quite different arguments than have been proposed. In the System of Jason (perhaps a rough proxy for the Christian system), one is not at simply liberty to perform self-destructive acts. While we do have some claim to our own autonomy, we do not have a complete claim. We are "owned", as it were, by God. So just as a homeowner could ostensibly burn his own house down (leaving aside lots of practical or legal reasons why this might not be the case), he could not do it if he still owed a mortgage on it to the bank. Someone else has a claim to the house as well. (that's just a rough analogy, but you get what I'm saying). Paul summarizes this very nicely in I Corinthians: "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies."

In this light the fact that she is on public insurance becomes extraneous.

I should also mention that this principle is not sacrosanct. If someone pushes his friend out of the way of the oncoming bus and is killed himself, we view this as an act of heroism, not immorality. However, in general, the benefit must be large and this caveat does not seem to apply in Jazmin's case.

Back to Jonathan Haidt and his five foundations of morality. You may be able to put this squarely in his foundation of "purity/sanctity" and that foundation is less commonly held by liberals (which is an extremely rough proxy for atheists). He describes it as "some ways of living and acting are higher, more noble, and less carnal than others." I am not implying that systems without this foundation are wrong (although I would ultimately view that as being true), but rather I just bring it up to potentially explain the different answers. It also gets back to what I described as a "smaller sphere of influence". Most activity has some bearing on this foundation and so, to me, most activity has some bearing on moral questions. But if you don't hold this foundation as important, your number of moral actions shrinks.

Hope that wasn't too incoherent. Your witness... :)

EDIT: typos.

Message edited by author 2011-02-23 12:08:26.

02/23/2011 12:09:11 PM · #495

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

In a conversation with someone else I mentioned that I find one common theme among moral systems held by atheists...

la la la I'm not liiiistening....

02/23/2011 12:14:08 PM · #496

Originally posted by DrAchoo:

In...the Christian system...one is not at simply liberty to perform self-destructive acts...We are "owned", as it were, by God...Paul summarizes this very nicely in I Corinthians...

So my instincts were correct. Your point in bringing up this scenario was to proselytize.

02/23/2011 12:31:11 PM · #497

(Pulls out new Android app called "Louignore")

02/23/2011 12:42:51 PM · #498

You do that. At the same time, here in this thread all about us fun-loving atheists and our crazy morality systems, try to imagine the yawning chasm of apathy that opens up when we learn what tiresome bible personality thinks about all this. Why on earth would you think it matters, if you were not teaching your lessons? But I digress. This thread is, and always has been, about you.