Russia seems to have lost contact with its first lunar probe in half a century

"The management team is currently analyzing the situation."

See full article...

 

[llanitedave]

I have never said this before about the failure of any nation's scientific endeavors, but...

good.

Until Putin is dead and Russia can act like a responsible global citizen, I hope everything they try to do crashes and burns.

 

[llanitedave]

That seems very misleading. The moon is visible over Russia 12 hours per day, just like everywhere else in the world. Russia's lack of access to the US's Deep Space Network means they don't have 24 hour a day visibility, but I wouldn't call 12 hours a day "relatively few". Tilley's post was clear but the characterization of it in the article is misleading.

Given the longitudinal extent of Russia's territory, it should be closer to 18 hours a day. Their lack of tracking ability is no one else's fault but their own.

 

[llanitedave]

It seems obvious that luck (if luck even exists...there's no proof it does...reality may very well be a chain of totally random events) can't be manipulated - otherwise there would be how-to's on YouTube and everyone who watched them would be able to win the lottery, get the girl ánd live happily ever after, just to name some stuff.

You obviously don't watch enough You Tube.

 

[llanitedave]

Did you mean a penchant?

They're certainly not doing it with panache.

 

[llanitedave]

The trouble with this sentiment is that while the people in control of Russia may be evil, that doesn’t mean all of the Russian population are evil. There’s going to be a large number of people in Russia who simply want to live their lives, go to work, and come home to their families. Given the fascist state that Russia has become they have very little say in what goes on. Yes they need to realize that they need regime change in order to improve their lives, but don’t go around condemning everyone in that country for things they can’t control.

As an analogy, I despise what Kim Jon Un is doing in North Korea, but I pity the peasants who are suffering under his rule.

---

For the donwvoters, how many Russian children under the age, of say, 5 deserve your wrath?

I upvoted you because your sentiment is humane, and I wish that it were true. But I don't think it's as benign as you and I wish. Even in the United States, some 40% of the population appears to have fascist tendencies. I cannot hold those people blameless, because they cannot fall back on the "don't know any better" excuse. They are fascist because they want to be, because that's the moral character they have chosen, whether through family tradition or moral laziness matters little. In Russia, it's often said that the state controls the media and the Russian people simply lack access to factual information. The War in Ukraine has shown that to be false. There are plenty of opportunities to get at the truth, if the people want to know it. Turns out most of them don't. They blindly accept what the government tells them not because they are prevented from knowing the truth, but because they are too morally and intellectually lazy to want to know the truth. That would take more effort.

Laziness is human nature, of course, so do we refrain from holding people accountable for their choices if those choices are based on moral or intellectual laziness? No, those choices should and will come back to bite them. That should also be true for each of us, whatever the nationality. In the final analysis, Russians are just as responsible as Americans for the leadership they accept and the national decisions they acquiesce to. Their country was not taken from them by force, they sold it cheaply. Taking it back now is more difficult, but it's not impossible. If they accept it as it is, then they deserve the consequences of that choice.

No, Russian children do not deserve to suffer, but then again, nobody is bombing their schools, museums, hospitals, theaters and homes, nor is anyone threatening to do so. Ukranian children aren't so lucky.

 

[llanitedave]

I wish Roscosmos luck. I hope they eventually recover this craft. No doubt, their space scientists have worked hard on this one, and it would be nice if they could score some much needed win and success.

It is rather strange that many Arsians seem rather happy with the misfortunes of this spacecraft. Why is that ?

Is it because of Russia's terrible leadership? If so, may I remind folks that, right now, idiotic Trump, and crooked Joe Biden, are the two leading contestants for the White House! That's not exactly inspiring.

So unless one is completely blinded by nationalist and tribal sentiments, it should be obvious that America today is not exactly a shining beacon for honest and sensible leadership. It's politics is, at the very least, heading in a
toxic and unnerving direction.

And if it is because of Russian adventurism in Ukraine, may I remind folks that the US Government isnt much better in that respect. Even as we speak, the US & the French are, for example, quietly orchestrating a potentially devastating conflict in the Sahel, and notably in the Republic of Niger.

So, much as Putin sucks, I don't quite understand why we would feel particularly smug about the performance, or activities, of our own government. That smugness can only be sustained by a flamboyant level of ignorance and/or hypocrisy.

Hey Vlad, we're not as stupid as you think. If you read the comments enough to know that "many Arsians seem rather happy with the misfortunes of this spacecraft," then you should have read the numerous succinct and well-expressed reasons for that sentiment, and you wouldn't have to ask why.

Nor is there a need to make shit up to justify your own hypocrisy.

 

[llanitedave]

Personally, putin and roscosmos can lick my balls right around to the brown, and I think I speak for the majority of literate and intelligent westerners. Help those that are struggling so hard to DESTROY civilization???? Not effing likely. Wait till that lunatic in North Korea fires one of the ICBMs that putin gave him and drops a nuke on Seoul or Seattle. And that is not even considering the invasion of the Ukraine, that is polarizing the world into two armed camps, one of which wants to do putin's dream of destruction.

Yeah, I'll help them with their pathetic space program.

Personally, I wouldn't let Putin anywhere near my balls. I don't have that much respect for him.

 

[llanitedave]

In a hundred years nobody will talk anymore of fucking Putin.

Nobody will talk about the failed engineers of a failed moon launch either.

 

[llanitedave]

Who do you think mostly settled America?

Originally? Asians of Siberian descent.

 

[llanitedave]

Ignore politics. Really, it's hard to do because everything is rubbing politics into your brain, but ignore it. In the end you will realize anyway that it has been the least important thing in your life. You're just being used. Engineering is much more rewarding. Numbers don't lie. What you've learned this way will never be wrong. You'll be able to work with everyone who has worked with the same stuff. Facts are facts. Lies are lies.

If you were ignoring politics you would be ignoring this mission. Its sole purpose was political. And because it was a political action by a reprehensible regime, it's completely good and right to celebrate its failure.

 

[llanitedave]

Well, I guess Ars actually does exist in the cloud. The incoherent yelling at it makes more sense now.

Ummm, that was pretty Snarky, Robot.

 

[llanitedave]

You cannot outrun a bad diet.
You cannot out build a bad political environment.

Soviet Union had some of the best engineers, launched the most tonnage to orbit, had some of the most robust hardware in the world. Soviet Union still failed due to its politics.

Roman Engineering was legendary. Rome still fell due to its politics.

Nazi German Engineering was ahead of the Allies. Nazi Germany still fell due to its politics.

China has a rising amount of science and engineering graduates, they also have the unusual situation of having a body politic stuffed with engineering and science trained politicians.

The modern world understands climate change, that includes the fossil fuel companies understanding climate change too. However it isn't getting fixed because of the politics, that includes lobbying by the fossil fuel companies to not do anything.

We are in the messes we are, precisely because we don't have enough engineering and science trained people in politics. So staying in 'our lane' and pretending we shouldn't get involved is part of the problem that got us here and it is not how we get out of the issues we are facing.

Politics kills. Ignoring it is fatal. Politics is the transmission of democracy. Ignore politics, and democracy seizes up.

 

[llanitedave]

Be friendly and look at the suffering of others and understand them. In the end nothings else helps.

He says while defending the actions of a genocidal megalomaniac.

And yes, your ARE defending them by insisting the rest of us ignore them.

 

[llanitedave]

Yes, I literally did that. I was born in the very city in Germany that was one target for the nuclear bomb in Germany if it wouldn't have been Japan. I had a nuclear cross painted over me.

I still agree with this because of reasons, but you really need to accept that reasons are reasons. They don't care for your fucking nationality. And you will understand this at some point and the sooner the better.

Being born is not laying your life on the line. It's not like you had a choice in the matter.

 

[llanitedave]

Are people still going on about that tired old "knowledge makes you ethical and good, and ignorance = evil"? I would've thought World War II would've debunked that one. The most educated population in the entire world allowed themselves to fall in line and torch off the most destructive war in human history.

People who learn things and are smart just have better tools to help justify what they want to do and believe, to themselves and others.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Unfortunately, too many people take that too far the other way and equate ignorance with virtue.

 

[llanitedave]

Is there an absolute scale of morality? Isn't that an internal judgement only? Two moral codes could be different and yet each finds the other to be morally inferior. What's the objective test?

I've long reached the conclusion that morality is different from, and inferior to, ethics. Morality is based on cultural norms and expectation, and differs radically between societies. Ethics is based on fundamental humanity, the existence of empathy, the recognition that there is no objective and absolute measure of value that makes us different. You can be as immoral as it takes to enrage the local karens, while still behaving ethically in recognition and respect of your shared humanity with others. The king is not fundamentally different or superior to the peasant, and the king who recognizes that is more ethical than the king who doesn't.

 

[llanitedave]

Didn't know they sent grunts to Phobos before sending them to Donbas
/s

They weren't too successful with that attack either.

 

[llanitedave]

Yeah and then they sat around for 1000 years.

Well, they were here for something over 20,000 years, it would seem. And I'm not sure what you mean by "sitting around." From what I've been able to learn, they did an awful lot of walking.

 

[llanitedave]

Morality is different from ethics, yes. As to whether morality is inferior - that depends on your point of view.

Legal ethics, for example, often results in outcomes that many may consider immoral, such as guilty parties going free.

And similar for medical ethics - for example, if the parents of a sick child are Jehovah's Witness and the child desperately needs blood - medical ethics prevents a doctor from administering it, even if the child will die without it. Is that the moral thing to do?

Ethics is akin to law. Law is often based on "morals" - the prohibition against homicide, for example, but the law is not moral, and its application may result in immoral outcomes.

I admit that my use of the word "ethics" is rather idiosyncratic, and is not the same as legal or medical ethics as officially established. I've actually been casting around a bit for a word to differentiate fundamentally humane and benevolent behavior from "morals," which is anything but objective, even in the ways you used it in your post. I consider morality inferior because it is essentially local -- it's defined by the practices and customs of a particular society. The Aztecs had a moral system quite different than that of the Hindus, for example. When we say something is "immoral" we have to set that within a cultural context.

What I have identified as "ethics" (and if you have a better word I'd love to adopt it) is based on common humanity, which transcends local cultures. The Aztec practices of human sacrifice were good and moral in their own context, but that context was rooted in scientific ignorance, tribal authoritarian hierarchy, and religious superstition. A culture with a scientific understanding of climate, for example, cannot morally justify making human sacrifices to the rain god. So morality is necessarily relative. Since my view of ethics transcends local culture, being based on what is beneficial for humans regardless of their ephemeral and superficial social belief systems, it will subsume morality and transcend it.

The question becomes... can a moral sytem itself be evil? If you make a distinction between morality, and * whatever word you want to use that overlies it* then yes, a moral system can be evil. The Aztec system, the Nazi system, both considered themselves moral, but they could not be ethical under the structure I imagine.

But yeah, it's not the best word I could have chosen.

 

[llanitedave]

You are searching for a distinction without a difference. "Common morality" is just as based on cultural norms as anything else. There isn't any (and can not BE any) universal, objective morality, from a truly scientific or logical standpoint. It's all subjective, mostly taught from one generation to the next, and entirely based on preferences. "Survival of the fittest" isn't any more or less objectively correct than "live and let live". One is preferable to most, but that's subjective. Even the method of "ethics" that you're describing just seems to boil down to "least common denominator" morals. In other words, stuff that is common across cultures. But that's frequently just a matter of meeting up with other cultures and existing in the same world in the same time.

It's also largely based on external factors, like availability of resources. If there's a catastrophic, cataclysmic event that makes the world less livable, the majority of societies and cultures will turn inwards. New norms, new morals will be formed. And they will not be any more objectively correct, even if all of them line up perfectly. Same is true in the other way, perhaps, if we establish first contact with a new and (subjectively) more kind species.

The only way you can get to a truly "objective" morality is religion. This is not an advertisement for religion, or a claim that any are correct. Yet it's only in a world where ethics/morals are (literally or figuratively) set in stone that a moral can have been objectively established by an outside entity/presence.

And even then, you can disagree with that entity/presence as to whether their morals are moral. Slaughtering firstborns doesn't need to be moral, after all.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. For one thing, I'm not equating "ethics" with "common morality." They are not the same thing, and the distinction is absolutely different. Nor am I referring to, or trying to promote, an "objective" morality. The closest thing to objectivity, even in an ethics which transcend cultural morality, is the understanding that humans are to be treated humanely. A moral system does not have that requirement.

Yes, circumstances will always play into decisions, the trolley problem will always bedevil us, but those aren't really questions of morality, as far as society is concerned. Those are issues that are independent of the social system.

I didn't invent this, it's been out there for ages. Ironically, the concept is referenced by Jesus himself in the New Testament, in some of Christianity's most carefully ignored examples from their own literature. The tale of the Good Samaritan is one, where the people who walk past the injured victim in the street are the fine, upstanding moral law-keeping Jews, and the one who helps him is the looked down-upon immoral Samaritan. Jewish moral and secular law at the time forbade "work" on the Sabbath, and pundits of the time often discussed in fine detail the exact definition of "work" within the law. Jesus said that if someone's donkey falls in a ditch and gets stuck, the owner is going to do whatever it takes to pull it out, regardless of how "morality" defines the act.

More recent literature also gives us plenty of examples. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck has to struggle with the dilemma of whether he should do the good and moral thing by returning the escaped slave Jim to his owner, or assist Jim in his bid for freedom. Huck is convinced that helping Jim is immoral, and he'll go to hell for doing so, but eventually he decides to do the right thing rather than the moral thing.

To me, in simple terms, that's what ethics means: doing the right thing for other people, regardless of whether society considers it the moral thing.

 

[llanitedave]

Muffin, you are oh so ADORABLY stupid.

AirLibra may be stupid, but there's nothing adorable about him. When Putin's bunker finally burns, I hope he's one of those locked in there with him.

 

[llanitedave]

Ethics: will this action make me an asshole and possibly upset the balance of our society?

Morals: does god want me to do this or not?

Even that approach has its problems. For example, would it have been more ethical to avoid upsetting the balance of Nazi society, or to overturn it in favor of a human rights respecting free democracy?

 

[llanitedave]

The latter, of course!

Unless perhaps you were Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 'progressor' hero stuck on a "Nazi" (more like thinly‑veiled Soviet) planet in their Inhabited Island novel, where your overturning the regime makes it all even much worse (or does it?). Ah, the questions, questions...

Reminds me that as much as I enjoyed philosophy at the uni, I am glad I didn't choose it as my major! Debating with a philosophy‑major ex was enough of a headache for me (they were usually right and I conceded defeat) – can't even think of just what a quagmire some possible (highly unlikely) future intergalactic ethics might be ;-)

Don't even want to go there. Puzzling, but it seems much easier to debate the ethical ways to treat gorillas than it does humans from aggressively different moral philosophies.

 

[llanitedave]

Philosophers use the words "ethics" and "morality" in various overlapping senses. They often use them with the senses more or less reversed from what you say above.

It's common to argue whether something is or is not actually "immoral," which isn't just quibbling about various readings of some arbitrary societal rule book.

One sense of "ethics" (as often used to talk about "professional ethics") is an agreed-upon set of fairly specific principles applicable to certain people in certain role (e.g., for physicians, about informed consent, not hitting on their patients), hopefully grounded in more basic and not-wrong principles of morality.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:

the term “morality” can be used either

1. descriptively to refer to certain codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or accepted by an individual for her own behavior, or
2. normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people.

and IMO that's just scratching the surface.

Yeah, it's a semantic mess. What professions call "ethics" are really codes of specialty morality. I think the primary reason for that is that ethics in the purer sense is really more of a broad overview, and can't be so easily codified. It's discerning right or wrong in a human sense rather than a narrow professional sense. Hopefully they will usually overlap, but there's no guarantee of that.

 

[llanitedave]

The philosophers I've talked to tend use "moral" to talk about the more basic and general thing, and "ethics" when talking about more specific codes or systems of thought. It has always struck me as weird that the field is often known as "ethics," because that's not usually how philosophers actually talk about it.

I've heard it the other way (with "ethics" as the broader term) mostly from non-philosophers who (unlike philosophers) are allergic to the words "moral" and "immoral" because it makes them think of dipshit codes of biblical sexual morality, sex as sin, obedience to God's arbitrary dictates as the highest virtue, etc.

Philosophers, in my experience, use the words "moral" and "immoral" more freely and unironically, and generally aren't worried about what people do with their genitals or what prophets say a god wants; that kind of bluenose "morality" is usually not even on the radar. Given that context, the words "moral" and "immoral" tend to have much more force than "ethical" and "unethical," because they're more directly about what's actually right and wrong (and why) vs. what violates some specific rule in a legalistic code by crossing some arbitrary line drawn through a grey area. "Ethics" can mean the whole schmear, but often has a whiff of being about the semi-arbitrary details.

And that's the reason your usage is opposite of mine. I'm not a philosopher, and I grew up with the more "rustic" usage of the term, such as "she's dating a black man! How immoral!" or "If that guy was more moral and upstanding he'd cut his hair and dress decently!"

Yeah, it's a bluenose standard, but that standard is in much more common and widespread usage than the ones used by the academics. I never heard anybody say that being a loud drunk was unethical, only that it was immoral. So when I think of the distinction, I think of how it is more likely to be perceived by the nonprofessionals.

 

[llanitedave]

How well does NASA know the impact site? LRO could image it within a week or so if they knew where to point the camera. But NASA wasn't tracking it, it was most definitely not on course to an announced landing site, and I doubt the Russians are sharing their estimated location of the crash site.

I doubt if the Russians have any method of locating it anyway.

They could be miles off course!

"That's impossible, they're on instruments."

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ7cxAUeZZw

 

[llanitedave]

I understand the motivation, but there are problems with that.

Normal people understand moral vs. immoral as being strongly about what's right or wrong, often very right or very wrong. It's not clear to me that they have the same clear sense of ethical vs. unethical. I don't, myself, so I don't assume they do.

To me, being "unethical" can sounds like cutting some corners here and there, maybe in ways that don't matter too much. I would guess (but don't know) that a lot of other people react similarly. "Unethical" seems like weak tea.

I don't think we should give up the high ground of using the language of morality and immorality. IMO the problem is not that morality and immorality aren't what actually matters. The problem is that many people are mistaken about what is or isn't immoral. Butt sex isn't immoral. The powerful not giving the weak a fair shake IS immoral.

The problem with Falwell's "Moral Majority" wasn't that they were moral; it was that they weren't. They pretended to be moral, but were self-righteous hypocrites promoting a "morality" that was profoundly wrong.

We should take back the language of morality from the bluenoses, and not let it seem like we don't care about morality. Of course we do, enough not to let them own the concept or the word. It's not that we don't care about morality. We care enough to not accept bullshit standards of morality.

You might not agree it's worth fighting that fight, for those words, but I'm never going to agree that they own "morality" and I just have "ethics." That is not true, and it's not how the definitions actually go.

Often you can bypass that distinction, and just talk about right and wrong, but IMO you shouldn't get twisted in knots avoiding talking about being moral, and the last thing you should do is say anything that sounds like you're "not moral." You should usually say you disagree with THEIR "morality."

(This reminds me of weird knots some atheists twist themselves into to avoid using the word "believe" and especially the phrase "believe in." There's an unfortunate meme in atheist circles about saying you don't "believe" anything, you just "accept" some things "as true," as if there was a difference. Those atheists are lettiing religious people ruin a perfectly good and necessary word by association with religious belief.)

Good luck taking words back from the general popular usage. If it were up to me, "gay" would mean happy and carefree as it once did, and we wouldn't have to see millenials scratching their heads over the meanings of old texts. There are lot of words that have different meanings between their academic usage and the popular meaning, and there are some words (I had a couple on the tip of my tongue but they went the way those thoughts tend to do nowadays) that have different meanings in different technical specialties. We just cant choose to "take back" language, that would look low key emo and you'd be cheugy.

Anyway, the fact is that the word "morality" does indeed often mean strongly right or wrong in general usage, and that's what I've been trying to rebut by pointing out that "moral," as it is generally used, is a cultural, social and religious-based concept that changes constantly over time and place. The religious apologists who bemoan "moral relativity" fail to recognize that their morality, their powerful sense of right and wrong, is quite different than the moral sense of the writers of the book that they claim gives them eternal and unchanging guidance.

I'm not trying to take away anyone's morality, nor their terminology. I say let them keep it, and we can recognize it for what it is. The word and its meaning will eventually change anyway. To the extent that a moral system is also ethical in its application, I'm all in favor of it. To the extent that it's hurtful and hateful, it needs to be opposed and replaced.

The good news is that since cultures naturally change spontaneously and often rapidly, morality is also changeable. Ethics, being centered on humanity rather than a particular cultural time or place, is not so changeable. To the extent that educated and philosophically aware leaders can exert an influence over popular culture, they can work to shape the local morality into something that corresponds more closely to an ethical society. Post-war Europe is evidence that it can be done.

 

[llanitedave]

I guess I get your point now, even though I might still not totally agree with it from my PoV.

At the very least this tangent has been indeed interesting, even from the language perspective.

The gist of the very article we comment under was pretty clear, and there's only so much that could have been added on how much Russian space programme sucks big time, especially after the (predicted by page one) litho‑braking manoeuvre.

So I did quite enjoy this philosophy tangent, as much as I enjoyed posting crash memes in the first few pages of the comments. There is only so much you can say about a Luna‑25 litho‑brake after fifteen pages, so ethics was a welcome diversion.

I was hoping we could bring that side tangent full circle back to the moon failure, but it would have to step through a Russian/Ukranian minefield before it can return.

 

[llanitedave]

.As one military commentator observed - the Ukraine war is cash in the till for the arms manufacturers and they probably don't want it to end any time soon.

While the observation may be unfortunately true, it's a stretch to imply that the arms manufacturers are the perpetrators of this war. Vultures may depend on the hyenas, but vultures are not responsible for the hyenas' kills.

 

[llanitedave]

Less than it appears.

Morality is a human phenomenon, grounded in human nature, with a lot of cross-cultural near-constants that aren't just arbitrary or random.

The most important of those have to do with not doing harm, more generally behaving in pro-social ways (for some unit of society), being accountable for one's actions, etc.

And most people have understood morality to be essentially truth-based.

For example, even if you believe that there's a God who can infallibly tell you what's right and wrong, despite it going against all your human moral intuitions, you certainly think that that's only important because it's TRUE: that the God does actually exist, that he is actually morally authoritative in some unfathomable way, etc.

So for example, you might kill men who have gay sex because Leviticus tells you to.

But if you figure out that God of the Bible likely doesn't exist, or perhaps that he does but probably never said anything like that---that it was something benighted bronze-age goatherds believed, and nothing more---all the sudden it's not so important to kill gay men. Maybe it's a bad idea. Probably it's morally wrong. No longer the moral thing to do.

Morality isn't just an arbitrary set of rules. It's always grounded in BELIEFS, which can be true or false.

There may be no objective morality, in some technical sense, but there certainly are MORAL MISTAKES, where people think things are right or wrong because they hold false beliefs.

You can be morally mistaken because you are factually mistaken, and IMO that's the usual kind of moral error.

We may never agree on all the details of morality, but pretty much everyone understands some basic principles of morality. (Even psychopaths understand that it's about being pro-social and responsible, not self-serving without limit, although they don't personally care for it.)

Most of the "relativity" of morality is about different beliefs, not different moral principles

One of the big axes of disagreement on morality is about the relative importance of basic pro-social principles vs "purity" and "sacredness" for its own sake.

For example, some people think it's mostly important not to be an asshole. Other people think it's more important to be a virgin, or to not eat pork, than to not be an asshole.

But that too is generally grounded in a difference in belief. If you come to think that your God doesn't prefer beef to pork, because there's actually no spiritual "filth" in the pig flesh that you'll get on your immortal soul, you'll probably stop thinking that not eating pork is a big moral virtue. Likewise if you stop believing various nonsense about virginity and God's feelings about it, you'll probably stop thinking that being a virgin is something to brag about.

But you're likely to be left with something, at least an aversion to people who are assholes. That's something that tends NOT to go away once you get basic clues about facts related to morality, because it's grounded in human nature in a way beliefs about the "uncleanness" of pork are not.

I don't disagree with any of that for the most part, but just transferring the onus to belief really doesn't change anything. Belief is just as culturally and socially volatile as morality itself, and if a belief in witches leads to it being morally acceptable to burn old women at the stake, or if a belief in the wrath of Tlaloc makes it morally imperative to torture and kill children to appease him, then it's going to be impossible to argue that your moral system is in any way ethical. In fact, in order to meaningfully make a distinction between morals and ethics, it seems almost a necessity to have a scientific perspective of the world, that can be used to examine and test beliefs before those are attached to moral values. Because, as was pointed out earlier, ethics is more of a field of research than it is a rules-based formula. An ignorance-based morality cannot avoid being ethically inferior. The two words are simply not interchangable -- ethics requires a scientific mindset, and one that is focused on the humanity of behavior rather than upon an imaginary external force that must be placated.

 

[llanitedave]

When people say that morality is "subjective," they're often saying (or are perceived to be saying) that you can't make objective moral arguments, and can't persuade people with facts, because it's not about facts; it's about inarguable preferences, like chocolate vs. vanilla vs. strawberry ice cream.

If it IS largely about facts, that's tremendously important. It means there's a chance of coming to moral agreement by starting from common moral intuitions and working them through in light of the facts.

Many people don't understand that. They don't understand how moral arguments work, or how well they can work, except by appeals to scriptural authority or something like that. As you say, an ignorance-based morality cannot avoid being morally inferior. That is largely the point.

If belief in the wrath of Tlaloc is the linchpin of somebody's moral reasoning about why to kill children, that's important. It tells you it's important to question the idea that Tlaloc actually exists, wants you to do that, and will punish you if you don't, because that belief is derailing people's moral reasoning.

That's why (in our world) I think it's really important to cast doubt on things like the scriptural authority of the book of Leviticus. It's important to say that the Bible is clearly NOT inerrant, and that Leviticus is barbaric and immoral.

Many theologically liberal (but not necessarily politically liberal) Christians believe that the Bible has benighted bronze-age stuff in it that's just horribly morally wrong, Levitical prescriptions providing several stellar examples, but they very rarely say so in public. That is not part of our public moral discourse.

That lets a lot of people believe that the Bible IS inerrant, and that most Christians know it is.

When I was a kid, I used to think the Bible was inerrant, and that all of the adults in my family knew it, or surely they'd have said something. Turns out most of them DIDN'T believe that, but they didn't tell ME, so I took the Bible way too seriously for quite some time, and it freaked me out.

Many adults are in the same situation their entire lives. They think it's common knowledge that everything in the Bible is true, modulo some difficulties of interpretation due to ancient language and metaphors, and that the Bible is the ultimate moral authority. They've never heard a smart, informed person tell them otherwise.

They can easily believe that stuff, because less orthodox Christians don't have the guts and honesty to call them out and tell them that Leviticus is stupidly wrong and morally abhorrent, and that anyone taking it seriously is morally impaired. They've never been forced to face the Euthyphro dilemma head-on, even though that argument is a thousands-of-year-old philosophical classic.

Moral progress is possible, and often depends on getting people to stop believing stupid shit and learn a little basic philosophy. That's an important fact.

I think we're converging. Note that I never said morality was unnecessary, or that ethics were somehow a replacement for it. A moral system is vital for any society of interdependent, cooperative individuals. I do believe, however, that for any society which claims to reject superstition, that values an educated and self-aware population, and that aspires to be self-governing, its moral system must be informed by an ethical philosophy that is inquisitive, recognizes its inherent (and persistent) immaturity, and strives to improve itself through ceaseless learning.

 

[llanitedave]

The Japanese gave up on those bonsai attacks after the first few years of the war. In the later years, they usually dug lots of deep, interconnected tunnels and made the US troops dig them out. The still rarely surrendered, but that approach was much more effective than mass suicide charges.

They did do one on Okinawa in the spring of 1945. It was pretty horrific from all reports.

 

[llanitedave]

Was there ever a point at which they were effective?

Against the U.S. Marines? Not to my knowledge. When they tried it at Guadalcanal in 1942 they were cut to ribbons.