Quadriplegic dies after losing Madoff money

Sure, and you should be locked up for not selling your shirt to pay for food for a child who will otherwise die of hunger somewhere.

The "private property" assumption is one that makes moral sense on account of our species' morality being based on the golden rule that "he who has the gold ("power" really) makes the rules" but it's not very logical. I believe there's a good case to be made that Madoff is no more culpable for this guy's death than is anyone else who had the ability to grant him care but chose not to.

Of course the truth of the matter is that all of morality is bunk and that we're left with nothing but the social contract of our choosing (and that it turns out to be a highly disorganized and self-contradictory contract).

you're a retard.

Madoff has ruined many people's lives, that in itself is a huge crime. Madoff has become a symbol of amorality and irresponsible selfish behavior run amok. Public outrage is a sign of good mental health.

Mnuez,

Morality is not bunk. Morality is actually a great clarifier, those who reject it are often guilty of immoral acts of selfishness or they display a lack of will to judge dishonorable behavior because they are innerly conflicted themselves.

Razib, that's a bit harsh but I guess I shouldn't dish it if I can't take it. Furthermore if I'm going to make a point for a whole different paradigm of thought I ought probably to express myself more clearly and proofread my comment. But, in the event that my point was sufficiently clear that you do believe that you understood what I meant to say, pray explain how I've demonstrated my retardation. I'm a fan of yours and if you seriously think that what I said has no merit then I'd like to hear why. Flipping the switch to kill the solitary guy on the tracks is really no different than "allowing" the train to continue on its course that accomplishes the same thing. Inaction that leads to the same outcome as action may seem to render one less culpable, but a damn fine case could be made that it does no such thing. Is that really so retarded?

Flipping the switch to kill the solitary guy on the tracks is really no different than "allowing" the train to continue on its course that accomplishes the same thing.

let's just say i'm skeptical about going back to first principles and applying "logic" to moral systems in this way in the generality as anything more than a waste of time. right, it is "no different," if you're a robot. as it is, even if a mother and son are consenting adults, most people would feel that the son putting his penis into the mother's vagina for the purposes of sexual arousal would be immoral (i'm being explicit to flesh out the intuition). many intellectual types do explain how this is "no different than...." and so forth (generally of libertarian persuasion).

thought experiments on this sort of boundary condition case of moral responsibility (bernie was engaging in fraud & living high on the hog) is like someone objecting to the idea sugar can be sweet and preferred because it is just a mental sensation which produces a subjective qualia. if you're a non-human looking on the outside, yes, it is entirely logical and reasonable, and yes, no moral system is without unproven priors. but if we're talking about humans, no, it's just kind of retarded to talk like this. many hyper-rational and somewhat aspergerish people of course like to engage in games of moral equivalence to show how contradictory human intuition is. since i share some of those proclivities i can see the point, but as i've gotten older i've had to accept that since most people are actually retarded and endowed with particular modal intuitions, i'm the retard and freak.

this case for intuition can be taken too far. but i think appealing to social contract theory is at the other end. like david hume i think it's just window dressing and totally removed from human reality. most people can barely figure out a car rental contract, as opposed to the social contract. but the main reason i said you're retarded is that you seem to take a step outside of the modal human and want to show how silly their presuppositions are. which is fine, but that's not a game that most humans play, so it's all irrelevant. most people know what bernie did is immoral like they know eating shit is disgusting. pointing out that putting shit into an autoclave would make it non-septic is not false, but it is irrelevant.

I believe there's a good case to be made that Madoff is no more culpable for this guy's death than is anyone else who had the ability to grant him care but chose not to.

and to be clear, yes, i am 100% sure you can make and airtight logical case for exactly this point. in the bizarro world where humans are pure reflective inference generation machines it might be a worthwhile endeavour. or perhaps among some alien race with an alternative hardwired set of cognitive priors. or at a convention of singulitarians or extropians. or on the harvard law review. but cleverness can be out of place in a retarded world where most people can grokk why what bernie did was wrong in a way that not giving food to people africa isn't wrong. there are other posts where explorations of deep logic and arational presuppositions are worthwhile (nor irrational, because it's only irrational when you presuppose some moral axioms which i don't think really hold). i don't think that this post is one of those. perhaps if society collapses and our communal obligations are all rewritten or erased, but we're not there yet.

Well, it looks like we agree on all of the facts but appear to be plagued by some miscommunication regarding when it's appropriate to get into the finer details of what makes up our morality and whether that's rational or even necessarily "intuitive" (cultures that lack the regular and overwhelming presence of the "private property" idea might not intuitively agree that withholding surpluses of life-saving food or medicine is not the equivalent of what we'd regard as "theft" of the same). I agree that most posts on most blogs deal with the world on a rather shallow level and in a flippant manner and are therefore not the proper places to present an alternate point of view that's so beyond the imagination of the blog's writer or readers. I thought that this post might be an acceptable place for just such a comment, albeit in miniaturized form, but I guess that what I meant as a yawning, sleepy, "yeah, but" came across as utterly seriously intended and uncompromising, which wasn't my intention.

In any case, thanks for the clarification and have a good evening.

mnuez

but I guess that what I meant as a yawning, sleepy, "yeah, but"

emoticons? :-)

Here's another one.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1143562/Suicide-British-soldier…