Bastille Day and Ethics

I’ve been sitting on one quote in my sizeable list of unfinished posts for quite a while now.

This one comes from an episode of Battlestar Galactica (big surprise, I know) – “Bastille Day,” the third episode of the first season, and establishes the conflict of legality and ethics which is so deliciously pervasive throughout the series:

I only committed you to obeying the law. […] I swore an oath. To defend the articles. The articles say there’s an election in seven months. Now, if you’re telling me we’re throwing out the law, then I am not a captain, you are not a commander, and you are not the President… and I don’t owe either of you a damned explanation for anything.

The character, Lee Adama, is doggedly reaffirming his support for what the law within the fictional world maintains – that the rules dictate behavior regardless of the situational context. However, if the rules are to be broken due to convenience or to create a more favorable outcome, then this would place all rules in question as to whether or not they are to be followed/adhered to.

I have touched on this familiar ground previously, but this does not diminish my firm stance which bears repetition: that a society’s laws are only as solid as the judiciary process which establishes and enforces those laws. Of course, this is yet another research pit into which any substantial investigation will undoubtedly lead to hours upon hours of the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, Hume, Kierkegaard… and while I have the time to write the atypical SECOND blog post in one day, I don’t have that kind of time to go into that level of granular detail…

Besides, your eyes would glass over. Mine do, all the time when I try to read philosophy.

Ah, yes… law and the social cooperation it requires to be viable.

As with anyone who has had experience with three-year-old kids, there comes a time when the there is a significant fork in the road of development: either give ground to the loud tantrums demanding immediate gratification or stand ground in the face of even louder tantrums which follow the denial of immediate gratification.  

Another fictional quote comes to mind, for some reason – this time from Chuck Palahniuk’s book (and movie, as well) Fight Club:

You morons. You were running around in ski masks trying to blow things up?! What did you think was going to happen?!

The reader can extrapolate freely which court case(s) or other contemporary event(s) are happening in the middle of November 2021; that is the amazing thing about writing on pressing news without being specific – if you are paying attention, the arguments are not too far from each other as their proponents would like you to believe.

However, the objective reality of today is as clear as it has been in the past and as it shall be in the future: be careful how actions and the law are viewed by all parties involved – perpetrator, victim, enforcement, judicial entities, and… most importantly, public opinion. What may seem like a valid decision or deviation may only serve to be yet another form of escalation and/or retribution against what others determine is an injustice. As the last few years have definitely shown, this cycle benefits very few and jeopardizes the very foundation of the system which affords the comfort of those very rights is may no longer be able to support.

In short (and as honestly profane as necessary):

Please. Calm the fuck down.

You may think you are right and the other person is an -ist or whatever, but take a long and careful look at what is going on around you and around the rest of us.

Are you helping?

Probably not… and you need to fix that with a quickness. Some of us will tell you we tried to tell you so… and some of us will probably not even bother… but things feel like they are getting to a very strange point in American history and the next year is only going to be worse if we all don’t stop and understand that, once the social contract of law has been broken, nothing which follows will not be beneficial to any cause, political party, or whatnot afterwards.

What comes first: ethics, or morality? Does the individual acquiescence shape the legal framework of a society/group, or do the social expectations determine what is ethically correct? Is there a difference?

I have answers, but in the meantime, I shall revisit Carmen Medina’s 2018 lecture “Survival Heuristics: My Favorite Techniques for Avoiding Intelligence Traps”:

When we use the phrase “something happened by chance,” what we’re actually saying is that we do not understand the causality chain that led to this event.  @ 9:52

Organizations that allow for a lot of different ideas have better outcomes even when the dissenters are wrong. @ 34:15

So even when the people who are expressing a different view are wrong, the organization still has better outcomes, and the reason is because allowing for free-flowing debate leads everyone to raise their game. @ 34:29

Hope is never lost; much like the Law of Conservation of Energy (which hope is, really), it can only be transferred or changed from one form to another…