Comment by Red_Leaves_Flyy
5 years ago
Principles? Morals? Ethics?
The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another. It's easy to forget that these exist and that everyone must always be on guard, defending the world against ones own baser instincts and defending oneself against humanity at larges baser instincts. As we collectively forget, or consciously ignore, our duty to one another we mortgage humanities future with collective suffering today. Eventually the bill on these ills come due, one way or another the sociological debt is always repaid.
Indeed. That's why I'm worried when I see interpersonal relations being replaced by market rules. Markets have no morals, principles and ethics by default, and generally consider these factors to be inefficiencies.
>Markets have no morals, principles and ethics by default
That's not exactly true. "Markets" are made of people, and the morals principles and ethics of each participant imbue any given market with certain characteristics. The market doesn't reflect the exact morals of one particular actor, but it is nevertheless a product of them. Think matrix multiplication.
For examples look at Roman civilization, Jewish civilization, the meeting of the two. Or look at the Wire.
I agree that "morals principles and ethics of each participant imbue any given market with certain characteristics". I was highlighting that these are incidental, not structural in the market. And my main point is: these characteristics are not stable. More than that, these characteristics are actively being diminished, ground down by the market - and that is a structural aspect.
This happens through competitive pressure. If, as a market player, do something slightly shady to get an edge, I'll get ahead and my competitors will either have to do the same, or risk losing. When enough market players go along, the slightly shady things becomes a baseline, "standard business practice", and morality on the market is that much eroded. Then someone else starts getting ahead on being even more shady, and the process repeats.
(Ironically, we often call this chipping away at ethics/morality "innovation".)
> The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another
nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law - which mostly works.
Why do you think in a country where the law enforcement failed (such as a failed state) breaks down in to chaos so easily? Where's the "Principles, Morals, Ethics" then?
> nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law
You’ll be happy to know (I hope) that plenty of us (perhaps even the majority!) don’t have any intention to murder and rape, and it’s neither law nor religion which compels us to be minimally decent towards others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AwebTX3rk3E
As far as I know, landlords are not known for possessing any of the qualities you list. Indeed, what is special and unusual about this situation might not be the bakery itself, but the landlord of that particular bakery. There might be thousands of such potential bakeries all over, but for the fact that the profits are extracted by the landlords, and this might be the normal state of things. We would have no way to tell.
> As far as I know, landlords are not known for possessing any of the qualities you list.
Landlords are people and subject to the same qualities and defects as other humans.
Perhaps they are “not know” for the positive because people make a kerfuffle when things go badly, not when they go well.
Here’s a positive story of a landlord having a major positive impact on hundreds of tenants: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-...