IdeasAndArguments

More scraps from the Philo B'fast table of early 2000:

3 March — Community:

Is it always wrong to use nuclear weapons? Can something like a technology be intrinsically or categorically wrong?
Are Communitarians wimps? (Is it bad to be a wimp?) What do Communitarians stand for? — moral suasion, perhaps, in between conservatives and liberals?
Are people good "by nature", or bad "by nature"?
If you could get away with something (e.g., the perfect crime), should you? Would you?
Should people be stopped from hurting themselves? How can one balance costs to individuals vs. costs to society?
Justice vs. Law — "good" vs. "good for something" ... Plato vs. Aristotle?
"Responsibility is doing the right thing when you're not being watched."

10 March — the Constitution:

"It's much easier to prevent something from happening than to cause it." — checks and balances, for example....
What's the importance of individuals to history? How much depends on having the right person in the right place at the right time? Were the Founding Fathers — Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, et al. — special, and if so, how?
Should we attempt to understand the original intent of the Framers, or should the Constitution be a living document, reinterpreted as times change?
Based on the rhetoric associated with flag-burning protests, "One would think that the sky was dark with the smoke from burning flags."

17 March — Organizations:

What's the distinction between a puzzle and a problem?
A big bureaucracy grown up around a noble charter is "Hypocrisy paying tribute to virtue."
See the recent business book Built to Last for comments on "big, hairy, audacious goals" and how important they are for forming an organizational culture that will endure.
An interesting parlor game: imagine you are staffing a Mars mission — whom would you pick for the crew to best embody the soul of your organization? (The bureaucratic committee-style answer: choose one from each group or branch. Duh!)
The best mission statement ever seen — by a tank commander, who at the close of every day would ask: "Am I better prepared, through fire and maneuver, to close with and destroy the enemy?"

24 March — Foreign Policy:

Privacy vs. Safety — what's the trade-off? By monitoring everyone moment-to-moment, one could virtually eliminate crime (or at least quickly identify and catch any criminals). Is it worth it?
See the January 2000 issue of Commentary magazine — twenty short, thoughtful essays about foreign policy
The Federal bureaucracy "reflects the Administration — which currently has a diffuse (at best!) coherence" in its foreign policy.
The obstacles to organizational reform "are not technological, they're sociological".
It looked crazy to the Europeans for the US to have a "morality-based foreign policy" in the 1970's and 1980's ... but that policy turned out to be right!
The key is "working in the white spaces" of the organization chart — between the boxes — to bring about improved collaboration, agility, and all the other important priorities.

31 March — Information & Ethics:

"We don't know what we don't know." A big organization has far more implicit, tacit knowledge than it can possibly bring to bear on a problem — unless ways can be found to get around bureaucratic barriers.
How can one manage huge amounts of data, maintain archives, be responsive to questions, find nuggets of critical new information, preserve privacy, keep audit trails, and control access appropriately?
"If you believe that you are an ethical person, but you support those who may not be, are you still ethical?
"Can you have a good organization made of bad people?"
Legal gamesmanship: label everything you do "attorney work product" to make it immune from evidence discovery proceedings by courts ... don't write things down ... encrypt and claim to have forgotten the key ...
Putting oneself in the other person's place is the great touchstone of ethics. But beware false symmetries! (Sometimes the other person's place isn't what you think it is.)

Thanks again to JB, AP, JJ, GdM, JC, BW, BD, et al. — for thoughts and encouragement.

Saturday, July 22, 2000 at 06:28:13 (EDT) = 2000-07-22