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And what is ethical exactly? Objectively? And this is something that you get to decide?

Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.




It's something that everybody gets to decide for themselves. And then judge others accordingly.


Ethics are inherently subjective, which is why their only actual usefulness is as a shorthand/proxy for "unlikelihood to generate bad press".


How come others have to have "objective" morals, but for you "seems to me" is perfectly fine? Of course it's subjective, that doesn't take away from it at all, since any opinion that it being subjective is a problem is subjective as well.

> Maximizing profits seems pretty ethical to me.

Up to extracting gold teeth from people murdered in concentration camps, or is there a limit for you?

> [Q: Isn't there a certain calculus that someone who is sitting in the shoes of a Condoleezza Rice can make, that they're responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there's an upside of going into Iraq which is we get one of the greatest material possessions in world's history, and there're downsides which are: we upset the international community, and maybe there's more terrorism. Couldn't you envision a calculus where they say, sure, that's the reason, and it's a good reason, let's do it. What's the flaw in the calculus?]

> Oh, I think that's exactly their calculus. But then we ought to just be honest and say, "Look, we're a bunch of Nazis." So fine, let's just drop all the discussion, we save a lot of trees, we can throw out the newspapers and most of the scholarly literature, and just come out, state it straight, and tell the truth: we'll do whatever we want because we think we're gonna gain by it. And incidently, it's not American citizens who'll gain. They don't gain by this. It's narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication...

-- Noam Chomsky, Talk titled "Why Iraq?" at Harvard University, November 4, 2002




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