[MD] Morality and Prudence

[Michael R. Brown]

hi, david buchanan -

> A place to channel EVOLUTIONARY stuff?

Yes. Feel free to say something substantive.

> we are talking about a serious form of mental illness

In its extremes, but there are few pure instance. Beware of cartoon 
extremes.

> Correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems that your aim is to soften and 
> undermine the ugly implications of this line from Wiki.

You're wrong. No need to soften it. If humans didn't have aggressive and 
dominant instincts, none of us would be here. I'm quite comfortable with 
those realities. Do you think Phaedrus would have gotten all he did done if 
he were just a nice guy? Even the Z-narrator's hardness with Chris brings 
things to a head.

> If ruthless predators who are incapable of feeling guilt or remorse can 
> just blend right into a corporate environment

Again, comes the caricatures. Most higher-level businesspeople I've known 
have fairly good empathic capacities. You also ignore that politics is a 
very fertile ground for acting like one cares. What does that tell you about 
statism?

> political ideologies that equate freedom with unregulated corporations?

That's largely a piece of imagination on your part. And no corporation is 
"unregulated" - every heard of supply/demand? Competitors? Need for 
customers? Yelp? Word of mouth? It takes the State to exempt business from 
regulation, as with Enron.

> not just a coincidence that free-market advocates also tend to oppose 
> welfare programs and government aid or anything that smells like the New 
> Deal.

Yes, we care about what actually happens to human beings in the long run and 
therefore don't like things that crash the economy or inhibit innovation and 
job creation. FDR's New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years - (said 
Depression was partly triggered by Republican idiots going for high 
tariffs - back in those days, pre-FDR, the Dems were the free traders and 
low taxers and state's rightsers).

> it's not exactly crazy to criticize such positions for their lack of 
> empathy.

Making up positions and turning the opponent into a hideous monster isn't 
exactly crazy, but it's largely useless.

> I think a lot of liberals object to conservatism because it lacks empathy.

Ideological positions don’t have empathy. People do. But the idea that it's 
liberal vs conservative is incorrect. Conservatives score about equally to 
liberals on empathy but have other moral axes that are also high. The 
libertarian (or classical liberal) option is the most fertile direction to 
go in: maximal freedom in all realms.

> It seems to guard the interests of the economy in general

Oh, not that! Far better to have a collapsing economy.

> at the expense of human suffering for the little guy.

The free market is not a zero-sum game, and began to lead to the greatest 
increase in human well-being within a few generations of its being 
unleashed. Statism has been around a great deal longer and has oceans of 
blood and millions of starved corpses to its name.

> "War is good for the economy."

You mean the War-recovery that is attributed to FDR? That which liberal icon 
Paul Krugman maintains? Businesspeople historically have been anti-war, and 
came under a lot of heat from miltarists (and expansionist socialists of the 
19th c., as in Italy) for it.

> That's a pretty psychopathic thing to say, no?

"Psychopathic" is the devil-term of yore. Here's psychopathic: 
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills - the murder record of governments. 
Corporations are nothing compared to governments - and note that those are 
statist, collectivist governments at the top of the death numbers: 
http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM - they hated business, the market, 
capitalism, individualism, and the U.S.


MRB
http://www.fuguewriter.com