Comment by Udik
7 years ago
> why bother?
Because I'm a bit annoyed by what seems to me a growing push towards confusing the judgement of someone's work with their moral qualities. I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists, or arians; a literary masterpiece isn't diminished by the fact that its author was an anti-semite, or sadist; a great movie director remains a great director even if she did horrible things in her private life. Very little of our past science and philosophy and arts would still be standing if we were to apply these criteria, and I very strongly doubt we'd gain something better. Every single time "political" criteria have been used to judge the value of intellectual products, it's been the indicator of serious troubles, both for the society doing it and for the overall quality of the disciplines.
That is your personal choice, and is fine. But I think you can happily coexist with these other people:
- Those who care about influencing their culture and want to do what they can to change it.
- Those who are concerned with where their money goes and whether or not they think that that is the most effective use of their money.
Feel free to ignore the concerns of those groups and do what you want. But I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of is effective.
> I don't think that wading into a conversation you fundamentally don't want to be a part of...
I was replying to a comment that claimed that
"no real process in place for situations of misconduct in the office [..] would be like Google not having a process to investigate and resolve site outages - it would be unthinkable"
This to me is clearly a confusion between two completely different things: what Google produces, and what are Google's internal ethics. iPhones are not worse products because working with Steve Jobs was a nightmare. I value the distinction.
>I see it as fundamentally anti-intellectual, as it strives to bring extraneous criteria in the evaluation of what should stand and be judged on its own. A scientific theory or a work of art aren't less valuable because their authors or proponents are or aren't communists
The ethics of science does exactly this. A common question which has been asked for much of the 20th Century is: should we use scientific results that are the product of non-consensual human experimentation. an extreme but often used example experiments that were carried out by the Nazis at concentration camps. Outside of science consider the debate over the works of Wagner [0], Knut Hamson [1], or Heidegger [2]. Ethics matters when judging intellectual output. For
These are fundamental questions of ethics which have a long intellectual history of debate and discussion. You are welcome to hold your own opinions on them, but I don't think the way in which you are framing the debate is helpful, e.g. "a growing push", "confusing the judgement", "fundamentally anti-intellectual", etc... Ethical questions which have received this much thoughtful discussion and examination should be treated with respect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_controversies
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/books/28hams.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger_and_Nazism#Th...