Reverse image search yielded a bunch of tumblr blogs and nothing else so I don’t know the artist unfortunately. If anyone does I’ll add it to the post
Reverse image search yielded a bunch of tumblr blogs and nothing else so I don’t know the artist unfortunately. If anyone does I’ll add it to the post
When I was in college, I had an ethics class where the class was presented with a conundrum, and here’s the gist of it:
An overwhelming majority of the people in my class argued that his actions were ethical, to be paid to make a product and then take the product home with you and sell it yourself. So, at the time, I thought either that was some sort of psychology class experiment that I didn’t know I was part of, or people are far more unethical than I ever imagined.
Obviously, the main argument for their side was that it wasn’t wrong to take public domain material because it’s not illegal.
I realized the truth much later. The average person, even the average college student, doesn’t really think about things very much. They have never in their lives tried to think about whether something is ethical, and have spent their entire existence guided by emotions like a dog or something. So, asking them to think through a problem with only one step is about the maximum they’re capable of. So, because they are basically incapable of thinking, when given an ethical problem that is even slightly complicated, they can just default to “it’s legal,” and then they don’t have to think.
Most people don’t think about morality beyond societal expectations, rather than what’s ethical according to more universal principles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
So yeah, I would say something else was happening in that story. The students had an intuitive or innate sense of what was ethical here and couldn’t articulate it against the well-honed apologia created to support an unethical system.
Intellectual property is a crime against humanity. It takes a universal innate quality of sensing thinking beings and then wraps it in violence saying that we will literally use the force of violence if we have to in order to punish you acting on natural process that are prosocial and help humanity.
The only reason intellectual property needs to exist in the first place is because we proactively starve the masses and then set up a system where they can only survive is they make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.
The students in the class intuitively understood that a human being doing work and then benefitting from that work is far more ethical than a human being doing work and then being forced by law to never ever benefit from that work again simply because that person was starving and agreeing to that abusive contract was the only way they could get their next meal.
I’d argue that trying to find and exploit loopholes in ethics is in itself unethical. “Do not <verb>” is not an invitation to find creative ways to <verb> without “technically” <verb>ing.
Welcome to the lesson taught by the entire Old Testament.
“It’s legal” is a great example of ‘Thought-stoppers’. Little phrases that people use so that they do not have to do the mental work of thinking of the larger systemic issue. “They will think of something” is a great one when it comes to climate blow back and technological issues.
But all thought stoppers are like ignorance, ignorance is bliss but the consequences are dyer. So when people tend to go to reductionist thinking on complex issues, you tend to get a form of conformity that can be manipulated. Not consistently but enough to cause large power structures. Alas, for every complex issue there is a solution that is simple, easy and wrong.
There’s a phrase I thought up, which might be a thought stopper or reverse stopper depending on your perspective.
“If it’s popular, it’s not illegal.”
Imagine you’re a cop sitting across from Rosa Parks the day she refuses to give up her seat. Do you arrest her?
Legality should be informed by ethics, and generally they only larger systemic result I care about is “If it’s right, and the law is far from my morality, I’ll trust that the law will catch up to my breach.”
The small danger to acknowledge is when a popular act is driven by hatred or bigotry, rather than actual societal outcomes. There’s no one simple way to address that, but dialog and visibility helps.
FYI it’s dire, just to set it straight.
Also called a thought-terminating cliché. I don’t really know how to confront these because they’re spoken by people who have already given up on the clearly arduous task of thinking about something for longer than the duration of a short-form video
I do genuinely think that short from content has done far more damage to society than even the more pessimistic people give it. It is the final form of ‘The medium is the message’, the medium is saying that everything should be brief and surface level at best.
Don’t get me wrong there is a skill to brevity, especially in writing. Some books could be a fifth the length and they would only benefit form that. But short form video ain’t it this. Peoples attention spans are simply gone, I do not know if they can ever be brought back.
Damn, I would have argued it is ethical because corporations shouldn’t exist and workers “stealing” from them is actually just an appropriation of what was already rightfully theirs.
Yeah I got to say the more and more I think about it, the more I think it is ethical. Because if you want to use his work in perpetuity you should hire him for the amount of time you use it. Or work out some kind of long-term profit sharing. If it’s for a one-time use of their skills you shouldn’t get to own the copyright of it. So yeah I’m going to say completely ethical.
I argue that we should abolish copyright. However to be a bit more pragmatic, if we were to keep copyright, it should be for 10 years from publication. You can apply to have it extended another 10 years but with a fee attached to approve it per work. This means people can still have some control of the work for a decade after completion and if it is still worth while, they can get another decade. But after that, it is public domain.
The problem doesn’t mention that it’s a corporation. He could be stealing from a one person shop.
How the fuck is being paid to do something for someone and stealing it ethical, that’s some god damn fucking mental gymnastics
There’s not even a corporation in the question!
Who said anything about stealing it? The person who paid still received the writing. They just didn’t get a copyright too.
Oh I don’t believe capitalism is ethical. I think capitalist employment is a coercive relationship based on the threat of starvation and homelessness. I don’t believe in private property and therefore view commodities as belonging to those who produce them.
Imagine you are in precarious circumstances. You aren’t sure if you will have food or housing in the next month. Guy comes up to you, says he’ll pay you to design and produce x commodity for the exact hourly wage you need to get meet your immediate material needs. You produce x commodity and manage to live a little longer. He copyrights x commodity and sells it for immense profit. Zero labor on his part. Is this ethical or is it exploitation?
Property is theft
So in your system you can never do any paid work for someone else?
Bad take
Yes, I’m glad you’re getting it.