a Code Ge-Oss review and my response

[Setzer]

And here are her most recent replies.

Here is some of my work history:

http://hubpages.com/hub/-How-Advertisin ... eb-and-Off

I worked soldering boards, in the workshop, lifting crates, and doing any manner of physical labor as well as serving as in-house counsel for my father's company building flight simulators.

After that failed, I ran my law practice out of my home. I had no employees, and I did all the work by myself, including word processing and answering the phone.

I have never held a full time job in the United States, despite living here much of my life.

I have a Ph.D. in linguistics, and currently do ape language research independently. I have a ten acre hobby farm, and we are raising chickens and harvesting our own fruit.

BTW, subsistence farming doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It does not mean that you have no surplus. It does not mean that you don't save the harvest of a good year against an eventual bad year. What it does mean is that you are not dependent on selling your crop in the marketplace.

Best,

--Aya Katz

Yes, English is my second language, but I speak it quite well. I was born Israeli, and I acquired English by total immersion in first grade. My speech is indistinguishable from that of a native speaker, but I often have misunderstandings with people, because we have different cultural frames of reference and a different set of values.

Okay, so you damn the Japanese people for betraying their own values, as you understand them. Somewhere in their code of morals -- the explicit one, the one written down -- it said to treat people humanely. In reality they did not.

Do you think that a written code of ethics is what determines how people behave? Don't they have to actually believe in that code? Isn't it possible that they've acquired a different code and are living by it? Most of the people I know, of any culture, say they believe in one thing and do something else. If you dig deeper and try to find out why that is, you will find a different code of ethics, the one they really live by!


I've heard people say that they love Islam, but hate Moslems. Why? Because Islam is a religion of peace. But Moslems are war-like. Never mind the overgeneralization about all Moslems being the same. (They're not.) But does it make sense for an outsider to a religion to tell insiders what they should do to be true believers?

I wrote a hub about this:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Religion-and-Faith

I do find it extremely funny when neo-Nazis deny that the holocaust ever happened. If you're going to be a neo-Nazi, you ought to have the courage of your convictions, right? But the fact of the matter is that there is extreme social pressure on people today not to say what they truly believe, and even Nazis give in to that. If there are current day Japanese who deny the atrocities committed by Japan in WWII, they must be motivated by the same kind of need to appease prevailing morality. However, not all Japanese deny what happened.

Even here in America, there are the things people say they believe, and the things they truly believe. For instance, the police are not supposed to plant evidence or torture people to obtain confessions. If you ask any police officer, he will tell you that he agrees. But sometimes, they do these things because they are convinced that someone is guilty, and they have no way to prove it. A cop who does plant evidence (which I believe is always the wrong thing to do) often thinks of himself as very virtuous, because he dares to break the law to bring down a guilty party. While I condemn this action, I recognize that it is not always motivated by moral cowardice. Sometimes it takes extreme courage for them to do the wrong thing.


An old woman friend of mine from Texas supported torture of suspected terrorists when it was happening under the Bush administration. When I suggested that this goes against everything we as Americans believe in, she told me not to be so naive. Did I think that during WWII we didn't interrogate captives using such methods? After all, these are the bad guys, and we can't afford to have lily white hands. She believed the interrogators were sacrificing their "virtue" for a higher cause.


My whole point here is: the bad guys don't always know that they are the bad guys. Sometimes they think that it takes courage to break the rules.


Best,

I think I'll let things end here. When she mentioned her Israeli heritage, I was tempted to say that since Hitler believed the extermination of Jews was a good thing, we can't claim the Holocaust is wrong without unfairly imposing our own value system. It seem this lady is such a moral relativist she doesn't dare call anything right or wrong.

[Samuel]

Do you think that a written code of ethics is what determines how people behave? Don't they have to actually believe in that code? Isn't it possible that they've acquired a different code and are living by it? Most of the people I know, of any culture, say they believe in one thing and do something else. If you dig deeper and try to find out why that is, you will find a different code of ethics, the one they really live by!

We call that hypocricy. Setzer is showing that the explicit code was "obey the Emperor", but the one they lived by was "get power for oneself". Notice, some people actually do manage to follow the ethical codes they claim to uphold. We generally call those people good and those who are hypocritical and actually seek power evil.

But does it make sense for an outsider to a religion to tell insiders what they should do to be true believers?

Yes. Muslims claim that they submit to the will of Allah, embodied by the Koran. If their actions contradict the Koran, you can point that out. In fact, any belief system that lists its tenets can have outsiders point out to its adherents when they are screwing up and not following their beliefs.

While I condemn this action, I recognize that it is not always motivated by moral cowardice. Sometimes it takes extreme courage for them to do the wrong thing.

Unless they get the wrong guy. Because police aren't any less fallible than the rest of us. Amazing that these rules are in place for a reason, isn' it?

An old woman friend of mine from Texas supported torture of suspected terrorists when it was happening under the Bush administration. When I suggested that this goes against everything we as Americans believe in, she told me not to be so naive. Did I think that during WWII we didn't interrogate captives using such methods? After all, these are the bad guys, and we can't afford to have lily white hands. She believed the interrogators were sacrificing their "virtue" for a higher cause.

Than she is a moron and evil. We executed people during the 2nd world war for using such methods. We did not torture POWs during the conflict- at least not as a policy. Heck, we didn't even do pro-democracy indoctrination until after the war was over.

As for sacrificing their "virtue"... that is acting like evil is something physical, which is stupid. The real problem is that you are inflicting pain and suffering on other human beings, some (or most depending on how competant you are) that did nothing wrong. And needless suffering is the very definition of evil. Of course it is justified on the ground it gets information... because religious fanatics are completely unfamiliar with concepts like lying, need to know information, cell structure and the like. Of course there is the problem of it not working, but there is an even more obvious one- it means that when they torture our troops, it isn't wrong. After all, they are doing so for the same reason we are which means it is a perfectly acceptable tactic to use. As you can imagine this is an extremely bloody road to start down, and it generally goes towards sociopathic levels of brutality.