YUP

So, there is a friend of a friend of mine (She's an ex-girlffiend of a friend of mine.), whom I've known for many, many years, that suddenly came upon some sort of revelation (figuratively). This person, in all the years I've known her has always thought ethics, both as a notion in iteslf and as a subdiscipline of axiologogy in the discipline of philosophy, is utter bullshit and a waste of time. She has always maintained a compete ethical apathy, with inclinations toward claiming that there is no such thing as ethics in the first place. (By that I think she means there are no moral properties in the universe.)

Now, I and two of my close friends, have been arguing with her for at least 9 years now (about as long as I've been academically studying philosophy) about this issue. Now, she hasn't spoken to my other two friends in at least 4 years now, but I suddenly had the opportunity to speak with her. She then proceeded to sit down with me and, after almost a decade of adamantly telling me that studying ethics was stupid and bullshit, then, as if we had never had any discussions about this ever in our lives, begins to explain to me what ethics is and how it is such an important feature of what it means to be human, and to be a rational thinker. She then started asking me if I had ever heard of certain theories and their proponents (the stuff she asked about was super basic and when she told me what ethics is, she gave a very general and overly simplified account). We were only tertiary friends, she was just a friend's girlfriend, and I tolerated her but would never hang with her as my own friend.

BECAUSE I HAVEN'T BEEN STUDYING PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS FOR 10 YEARS NOW! BECAUSE FOR YEARS I WASN'T PREACHING TO HER EVERYTHING SHE JUST 'INFORMED' ME OF! BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ETHICS!

The thing that really galls me about this is the arrogence and smugness to which this person addressed me. she was telling me--as if contrary to what I may have been thinking all these years--that ethics was important and that it consisted of X,Y,and Z, and that X, Y, and Z were important. The only thing that would have made this worse to hear is if she had invoked God as the basis for everything. (she wouldn't do that though, she's an atheist). Hello, I've been studying philosophy for 10 years and ethics is one of my specialties! Hello, everything you just said is stuff I've been telling you for a decade! It's not like she sat down with me to tell me that after all these years of talking to me (and my two buddies) that she finally came to see our position as valuable. No, rather, I was approached as if I had never heard of ethics before and she was going to tell me things I definately needed to learn. Wow! While I'm glad she finally saw the light regarding her poor thinking in the past, I am utterly annoyed and offended at the flippant assumption that I somehow had no idea what she was saying and that I had not ever said a thing like what she was saying. I mean, it's as if she walked up to one of her professors and said, "We need to talk. Let me tell you about such and such because you clearly can't get such and such right on your own." It's like saying to your mechanic, "Hey, I just read a book about the engine, and let me tell you how important it is to keep it maintained, oh, and by the way, let me tell you what it is to be a mechanic." The guy would laugh in your face, and rightfully so. But the worst of it, I think, is that she never once acknowledged her error in all those years (since she has a completely contradictory view compared to what she had been espousing). Lame, lame, lame.

Here is something else that is really annoying me right now. I'm reading a Yahoo! news blurb on Career Dos and Don'ts. It's just a news article about the year's strides and misshaps that have occured among celebrities and high profile people. So, you know, they mention Mel Gibson's racism, Michael Richard's racism (but no mention, predictably, of the Black Professor who, two weeks ago, gave a speech at Howard University and their law school, in which he said, to resounding applause, "white people should be exterminated."), but also Katie Couric's leap to anchor at CBS News, and so on. Each little entry is accompained by some statement about the person and events in question such that the statement takes the form of advice for 'us'--the regular people--in the form of a moral principle.

One of the 'don'ts' they mentioned is former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling, who was sentenced in October to 24 years in prison after being convicted on 19 counts of defrauding investors. Now remember, these are things you should Do and Don't do. The 'Moral' of this Enron story is the following principle that you should apply to your own life: DON'T: Compromise your ethical judgment. This incredibly insightful wisdom was elaborated with the following comment by Debra Davenport, a master professional mentor, licensed career counselor, and employment agent:

"If you're lacking in the ethics department, you have no place doing business -- with anyone (Italics not mine).

Whoa! I'm so happy to see that when it comes to extolling great ethical advice to Americans, the media, once again, turns to the business world for insight and motivation. I said the business world, because the business world spends their time sorting through all the historical and contemporary ethical views and debates. (Because you can build dreams.) Now, what most annoys me about both Davenport's inane remark and the insistence that business people are ethics experts (you know, those people who made a science out of buying something cheap and then selling it for more than it's worth) over and above those people who really are experts in ethics, is that the so-called moral principle, "DON'T: Compromise your ethical judgment, has pretty much nothing to do with ethics. First, without a context to place this norm in, it lacks any definate sense of application. Without a context it can apply to both nothing and everything. A a norm it can be followed by the best of us and the worst us, as well as everyone in between. If Tony Soprano doesn't compromise his ethical jusgment, he'll never become a good person because his ethical judgment results in him performing acts of adultry and murder. To say that one should not compromise one's ethical judment means little because it refers to everyone's ethical judgments--good or bad. Presumably, it is one's ethical judgment that results in one's ethical choices. So, for all we know, the executives of Enron were perfectly following their ethical judgments--they were not compromising their ethical judgments--because it was a part of their ethical judgment in the first place to perform fraudulant acts. They may have even judged correctly that fraud is wrong, and yet still chose to do it anyway. Just because you recognize something as wrong ethically, does not mean it is a part of your ethical judgment to not do it anyway. For instance, the Satanic Church founded by Anton Lavey, whose headquarters are the Black House in San Francisco, recognize all sorts of wrong doings but insist that their followers perform them just for that very reason. It is a part of their ethical judgment that they perform acts that they deem immoral and wrong. So I have no reason to think the Enron executives compromised anything unless I know their ethical judgments are such that they think they ought not to defraud anybody. The so-called moral story of the Enron scandel surely, then, is not that one ought not to compromise their ethical judgments, since such a notion is meaningless apart from a given ethical context. Secondly, Even if we stipulated, for the sake of the argument, that they did compromise their ethical judgments with a context like: We ought not to defraud people, the 'principle' is one that bears on ethics only indirectly. For the principle, in conjunction with Davenport's vague remark, implies that you should not compromise your ethical judgments for the reason that you might get caught if you do. This just means that one shouldn't compromise their ethical judgments because it results in instrumental infelicities, not moral infelicities. In other words, ethical judgments have pragmatic value (not moral value) and one should not compromise them because what results are infelicitous states of affiars (e.g., being arrested, going to jail, losing money, being negatively stigmatized, etc.) Ethical judgment, then, has become nothing more than a tool for gaining certain desirable consequences, rather than the means to follow intrinsic values; there is no indication that one ought not to compromise their ethical judgments for the reason that it is immoral to do so. Thank you business world, I feel so enlightened. (I said "feel" not "think" because ethics is about feelings [Hume] not thoughts. Easy.)

A similar principle was given for Meredith Vieira's choice to leave 60 minutes to take care of her family instead of going for the fast track toward promotion. But this choice did not derail her carer since she is now co-anchor on the Today Show. The principle for this one is: Do: Stick To Your Values. Suddenly now we have a distinction between judgments and values. Anyway, I'm not going into this, but it is equally as vacuous as the above principle. It's pathetic.