Ethics

I have made my determination of this forum, a list for you to ponder. I will not be posting amongst the frogs any longer. First the men and women here are out to control human life, population, brain waves, weather, you name it. It takes evil in order to think the way some of the people think around here. Asking stupid questions, like they have no idea. like hiding information that they study for a living. like plotting murder for control over the population, programing all human minds, poisoning the food, the drink, and all life that remains on earth today. Is immoral issues of life, and they have ego so big that they feel it is ok to play god. …

My question to you all is this: Should we torture people deemed as terrorists in their home country, if we find that their actions could eventually have negative repercussions to the survival of our nation? We all know might know a terrorist or two. They could be our neighbor, but they're hard to spot and even more difficult to really pin down. So, my question has regards to the actions going on in parts of the world like Afghanistan, Iraq and such. Should we, the Army of our great nation, have the right to torture people in parts of the world to protect us? I know that there are many people who do not support this, but why not? If what these people are doing …

In physics, an electric field surrounds electrically charged particles and time-varying magnetic fields. The electric field depicts the force exerted on other electrically charged objects by the electrically charged particle the field is surrounding. The concept of an electric field was introduced by Michael Faraday. Michael Faraday was reviled and outcast by his 'peers' because he couldn't do the math they demanded of him. However, I can't think of the name of one of his peers, but I do remember Faraday. The story of his life should be compulsory reading to anyone in any advanced science course because it might help them remain open minded about the opinions of oth…

ELECTRIC ENERGY ADDICTION Risk of Epilogue: what should we do? Nowadays people are addicted to drugs, alchool and tobacco, but all of these kind of addiction are not so diffused as the electric energy addiction: the great majority (some 90%) thinks that the use of electricity makes life easier... isn't this approach like the junkies' one? Well, it is extremely similar, in fact the only difference between electricity and drugs is that the first is deemed legal and Governments improve on it, and the second are banned by the same Governments. This article doesn't ask Governments to consider Drugs as legal substances, nor to ban the use of electric energy, bu…

THE TWO FACES OF EDUCATION SYSTEM Civility and Theoretical Culture in the Schools It's very difficult to explain what the Education System "should" do because, in particular for a student, the information heard about school, its rules and news, are modified by political influences, and also (I think this is the main problem) these rules don't permit students to be what they are, to become what they want, to think about what should be better for themselves, to say what is important for them, to ask help without the risk of future impacts on the academic performance or, wider, on the thinking of the teachers. Surely, a school where students are free to expl…

Usually, when a couple has established a relationship, either would be socially judged for engaging in romantic activity outside the partnership. This is a culture of monogamy. Yet, because there is also a culture of civility, once a person finds a new partner and leaves the old relationship, the social expectation emerges that any infidelity that occurred in the old relationship should be forgotten, the old partner should accept the new partner in the life of the children, etc. In other words, extremist forms of retaliation such as those we hear about in Sharia law, etc. are condemned and all are expected to love and celebrate the new relationship, even if it resulted…

I just checked the banned and suspended list .. wowzo .. so many bad, bad people in susch a short space of time, makes me wonder if the moderators are honest, but then, I don't have to wonder about at least one of them. "Aristarchus in Exile has been banned for repeated failure to back up extraordinary claims, off-topic arguments, failure to answer direct questions, and finally a personal request to be banned." This is the second "a personal request to be banned" found in a short search of the banned list. I asked my good friend Aristarchus if he had asked for a ban, and he said "No." Check his posts. Can you find his request for banishment? Nay. Is the foru…

I think it is insane that in today's over populated world that there are people still trying to ban abortion. Abortion should be a woman's choice along with extensive education to prevent further unwanted pregnancies by using birth control. Abortion should not used as a birth control method and woman should be educated on the important of birth control and the emotional consequences that accompanies the decision of getting an abortion. For most woman it is one of the hardest decisions that they might have to make in their lifetime. There will always be a small percentage of women who think nothing of it by using abortion as a birth control method and if there was s…

Cloning. What if any should be the limits? We have begun to clone various animals and chimeras. As technology progresses, and it inevitably will, we will push the envelop of cloning to, I believe, it’s furthest reaches. We, I think, have not done much with human cloning but it is a possibility in the future. What, if any, should be the limits set for cloning technologies? We know that, over time, some countries will likely not have any limits on these technologies. I think that competitive forces will eventually force all countries to remove any limits. Stem cell research is a good example of these competitive forces. Obama reversed Bushes rest…

It's ethical to say goodbye to the people involved in this forum. I almost certainly will have been banned by the time you read this. I pointed out to the moderators where their personal ethics are not ethical, where their personal idea of what science is varies with true ideas of science, and of course, their pride causes them offense, and as they have the 'on' 'off' switch they really have little choice in their sense of ethics but to use the 'off.' Cheers.

When people think about what kids watch nowadays (e.g Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, Batman/Ironman, Naruto) one automatically thinks about violent cartoons... Pokemon for example encourages children to adopt the view point that mistreating animals is okay (e.g. cock fights, horse racing etc) What does everyone think?

Consensus becomes unethical to science when it become consensus. Consensus becomes a brick wall with no door. Consensus leads quickly to theories being publicized as fact (Big Bang for instance.) Consensus is a very sad state of affairs.

http://www.foxnews.mobi/quickpage.html?page=38321&content=58747955&pagenum=-1 This is really sad, seeing this kid without a father, being led down this road with untold ridiculous molding pressures influencing him. Absolutely ridiculous. I mean, really. In the absence of a bonafide male father figure, just how hard could it conceivably be to brainwash an impressionable little baby into believing just about anything, just add in some coochie coo, a bunch of trips to the salon, and, "Presto! You were really a girl! Happens all of the time! Now, we'll just get this surgery done and everything will be fine and dandy." This is so disgusting, I'm almost at a …

hello, my name is xianghang shen

What is the general opinion on display of human remains in musems? Originally these people were given a burial according to their religious and cultural beliefs and it would seem to me disrespectful to exhume and display them for the public. There's the argument of course that placing mummies for example in a museum instead of leaving them in their dusty, secluded desert homes is safer and saves them from destruction and theivery as "artefacts" but i still can't get past the fact that Egyptian mummies at the very least have obviously been dealt with ceremoniously (perhaps ice mummies and ones found in peat bogs could be argued differently; or is there evidence of this…

Why not be nude in public when it's warm? Why not raise our kids to be okay with it? Where there not nude societies with better sexual security than ours? (Native Americans, Ancient Greeks, etc.) Clothes are for being warm... And fancy, expensive clothes are just silly...

Anyone over the age of 20 knows that life can be horrible. The one thing we fear most -- death -- is what is most certain to happen, and everything we do in life is overshadowed by that awareness. From an early age on we start to experience a gradual slide into death as we decay before our own eyes in the process of aging; a dead 20-year-old who has been lying in the sun for three days looks better than a living 80-year-old, so the mask of death is something we have to wear even in life. Human existence is not only burdened by grief, frustration, injury, disease, and conflict, but also, our awareness augments the power of every evil by anticipating it, ruminating over …

This topic might be an interesting spin-off of the prostitution/pornography thread. What are the ethics of dating when you know that your partner doesn't fulfill all your expectations/wishes for someone you would want to declare your partner for life? E.g. say you have a certain hobby that you love, like fishing, and you find someone you really like but who hates fishing. What are the ethics of dating that person with the knowledge that if you ever meet anyone else with potential who also likes fishing, you would be happier with that person? Is it unethical to set someone up for rejection if you know there's a potential for future rejection in a relationship?

Let's say that we have a simple moral theory that goes like this: It is wrong to harm people. From there we can build a moral frame work. But my question is why do it be wrong to harm a person? The answer seems to be that it is wrong to harm a person because it harms the person! I would say that this is a problem for ethics. Or I might be misunderstanding something here. (This particular moral theory comes from Shelly Kagen.)

Facts In 1984-1985, there was a widespread famine mostly in Ethiopia, but also some in countries around it. A (contested) number of 1 million people died. Drought was the reason that food did not grow, but a war caused the available food to be extremely poorly distributed. Since then, the population in Somalia went from 6.4 million to 9.1 million. The population in Ethiopia went from 41 million to 82 million (it doubled!). The population of Eritrea went from 2.8 to 5.0 million. And the population of Kenya grew from 19.6 to 39.8 million people (also doubled). In short: in 26 years the region went from 70 million people to 136 million people. Right now, again, mi…

First off, hello to those who remember me from when I used to participate in the forum regularly. I was reading the book, Hitler's Scientists, by John Cornwell and another book was cited (can't remember the name of that one, sorry) that credited Heisenberg with the ethical feat of preventing Nuclear weapons from being developed by the Nazis first. This sounds as if Heisenberg was being lauded for obfuscation. Do you think this is a valid interpretation of the role Heisenberg played in the practical development of nuclear technologies?

Such a pity, but what a pity! This country, just rising from a middle ages crisis concept; is now considered fodder for the guns and bombs of terrorism. Why? They are not "America", so why pick on them? Don't those subversive dirt bags know that the U.S.A. is supposed to be the only one bearing the brunt of "all hostilities"? http://news.yahoo.com/india-terror-attack-kills-17-wounds-81-mumbai-161508702.html

I was wondering in regards to pornagrapy and prostitution, why is one ok and not the other? They are one in the same, you legalize one and damn the other.

Imagine you are a planner for a government agency with the mission of torturing someone but you are not allowed to arrest them or use illegal means to do so, but you have a practically unlimited budget. Could you pay people to avoid contact with them thus isolating them as much as possible from social contact? Would this be legal and/or ethical?

There has recently been renewed talk of torture being justified because it may have produced information which led to the killing of bin Laden. But is it technically necessary to extract information from resistant subject by such methods? Some have said that since people being tortured simply tell their tormentors anything they think the torturers want to hear, the information produced is always suspect. Also, the drug Scopolamine was used by the Germans during World War II as a preferred method of extracting information from those they were interrogating, since they found it easier to use and less unreliable in the results it yielded than torture. Another drug, Mi…