Ethical Dilemmas...
ClimberInOz
Posts: 216
I lost interest in this board for a while, but of late I have impressed sufficiently with the intelligent discussion and entertained enough by the non-intelligent discussion to get back into it. So here is a long standing ethical dilemma I was never able to solve in the fight club (drunken dinner-table debating), that I used to host:
The rights of culture:
Imagine that a new island is discovered and it is home to an indigenous population that has been living without any contact with the rest of the world for thousands of years. They are in all probability the last remaining peoples on the planet in this possition.
Question 1) Do we make contact?
Question 2) It is decided to not make contact but observe them in secret. We discover that they have some cruel practices toward a certain group in the population. For instance, they practice female genital mutilation. Do we intervene?
Question 3) As above, but this time we discover that one class of peoples in the population is completely subservient to a second class of peoples. They are essentially slaves. Do we intervene now?
Question 4) As above, but this time it is discovered that their religous beliefs dictate that any babies born on the full moon are sacraficed exactly one year later on their first birthday. Do we intervene now?
Basically I am interested in people's opinions on the rights of culture. In other words, does the fact that something is traditional or cultural affect our acceptance of what would otherwise be considered an unethical behaviour? I would love to hear people's answers and reasoning.
The rights of culture:
Imagine that a new island is discovered and it is home to an indigenous population that has been living without any contact with the rest of the world for thousands of years. They are in all probability the last remaining peoples on the planet in this possition.
Question 1) Do we make contact?
Question 2) It is decided to not make contact but observe them in secret. We discover that they have some cruel practices toward a certain group in the population. For instance, they practice female genital mutilation. Do we intervene?
Question 3) As above, but this time we discover that one class of peoples in the population is completely subservient to a second class of peoples. They are essentially slaves. Do we intervene now?
Question 4) As above, but this time it is discovered that their religous beliefs dictate that any babies born on the full moon are sacraficed exactly one year later on their first birthday. Do we intervene now?
Basically I am interested in people's opinions on the rights of culture. In other words, does the fact that something is traditional or cultural affect our acceptance of what would otherwise be considered an unethical behaviour? I would love to hear people's answers and reasoning.
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i work in a local market. i watch mr. red court mrs. blue with in a course of a day... i like mr. red and wish he and the misses would break up...his liaison with mrs. blue could be the icing on the cake...do i tell mrs. red or do i let it be?
i have to look at the environment in which i am at...i realize i am in my place of employ and that if i was not serving in the capacity i am, i wouldn't have knowledge of their affair...
what do i do? why i keep my mouth silenced of course realizing who and where i gathered the information.
i don't agree with mutilization of any kind whether being infllicted by the self or another; but this is becasue my experiences tell me so...if i live in a culture where this has happened for ages, and the people there deem it part of thier ritual; i think it's really not my affair to pass any interference...but that's just me...
i think that people's rituals are part of the web of god....(life) and even though humans are involved, natural selection.
http://www.mohicanpress.com/mo08019.html
a derivitive of nature.
nature is god
god is love
love is light
I know you are in Australia, but America was founded as a soverign Constitutional Republic.
So, sorry ladies, let them slice away those vaginas, and whip the slaves and kill babies.
Just for kicks,
lets also assume that even despite all their primitive appearances they really had some secret ballistic WMD that we were unaware of ...
we go over there and start kicking ass to save the vaginas and the slaves and babies ...
... and then we end up with an asswhooping of a suprise when a nuke touches down on American soil.
And all that suffering came at what cost?
We wanted to save another cultures vaginas, slaves and babies.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
I might draw the line at 4, but that depends on what you mean by intervening. Talking and persuading them would definitely be on the table. Perhaps they'll stop those practices in return for something from us?
Obviously I have some respect for cultural rights.
Peace
Dan
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
it they dont like it, kidnap the babies, take all the un-mutilated woman and bring em back, then bomb the fuck out of the high class people in charge of said hidden island.
"To question your government is not unpatriotic --
to not question your government is unpatriotic."
-- Sen. Chuck Hagel
BTW. Who knows... maybe someday we will kill each other and this population would be the only one of human being which would survive?
halszka123@op.pl
I'm not sure the question was directed at US foreign policy (though your point about intervention seems to be directly opposite to our current state of things).
I would say leave them alone. Obviously once we find them we aren't going to have a vote and then say ok stop watching. Our interest would be piqued to a point that we would at least keep tabs on them. To say our idea of civilized society is somehow superior, though dictating our current foreign and domestic debates, is ridiculous. Not only would this untouched society be an amazingly valuable source of education, it would represent another direction of mankind and thus should be untampered with so future generations could also map differences.
To the original poster: great topic. I'd be interested to hear about your drunken dinner parties/debates.
"Sometimes I think I'd be better off dead. No, wait, not me, you." -Deep Toughts, Jack Handy
invade
conquer
divide
set up some authoritarian gov't to control it
extract resources
take advantage of cheap labor etc
If it is in any way socialist or an alternative to capitalism it would be dealt with militarily, as even the idea of socialism is considered a threat to western ideology.
a derivitive of nature.
nature is god
god is love
love is light
Nuclear Dump Disrupts a Peaceful Taiwan Island
Steep volcanic slopes carpeted with tropical vegetation vault out of crystalline waters and magnificent coral reefs here, while a peaceful tribe of aborigines, largely insulated from the outside world until the early 1970's, tries to cling to ancient ways.
This island seems like a tropical paradise except for one problem: it is also home to one of the world's most troubled nuclear waste dumps. As many as 20,000 barrels of radioactive debris are cracking and coming apart because of chemical reactions inside, the site's director says. The barrels are in seaside concrete trenches on the most windswept tip of this typhoon- and earthquake-prone island, at the base of a 1,500-foot-high bluff prone to rockslides.
After President Chen Shui-bian recently said that Taiwan's government would be unable to keep a promise made 12 years ago to remove the dump by the end of this year, most of the island's 3,000 people, who belong to the Tao tribe, descended from Polynesian explorers, marched to the site. Some overran the dump and occupied it overnight.
Local leaders threaten that unless action is taken soon, they may resort to more drastic action.
''We will burn or dig out the waste and throw it into the ocean,'' said the Rev. Syamen Nga Rai, general secretary of the 25-member tribal committee that is negotiating with the government. ''It will be in the whole world, because the ocean moves.''
Chen Chien-nien, the government's minister for indigenous peoples, who make up 1.7 percent of Taiwan's population, said the Tao were right to be upset. ''If the residents were Chinese or Taiwanese in the beginning, they probably would not have built the dump there,'' he said.
But Mr. Chen, an aborigine himself from the Puyuma tribe who is not related to the president, said the Tao should trust President Chen's recent promises to find a new home for the dump. ''The Tao thought that once you say that, you have to do it immediately,'' he said. ''Even if you want to work on it, removing the dump site takes six or seven years.''
Taipei has set up two task forces in the last month, one to step up the search for a new home for the waste and the other to draft an economic development plan for Lan Yu, one of the poorest places in Taiwan.
The government's favorite choice, burying the waste under the seabed next to Wu Chiu Islet in the Taiwan Strait, still requires environmental studies. The plan is also likely to face objections from China, since the islet is just 16 miles from its coast.
The dump here has only a 10-person technical staff, none of them aborigines, and a dozen local security guards and janitors. There is a six-foot-high stone wall around the dump.
Wu Ruey-yau, the planning director at the government's Atomic Energy Council, said it would be difficult for anyone to break in and remove any radioactive waste. Each panel of the trenches' lids weighs 12 tons, and the only cranes on the island are at the site.
Under Japanese colonial rule through the end of World War II, this island was closed to outsiders and treated as a ''living laboratory'' for Japanese anthropologists to observe the Tao people. Tribal members wore loincloths made from the fiber of trees and led an unusually peaceful life in which land was communally held, warfare and weaponry were unknown and all decisions were made by panels of village elders. Flying fish were venerated as gifts of food from the spiritual world.
After World War II and the Chinese civil war, the island became a military outpost for Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, who had fled the mainland after their defeat by the Communists. Presbyterian missionaries visited and converted much of the population.
Taipei opened the island to visitors in 1969 and, in the name of progress, bulldozed most of the traditional, stone-walled homes over the objections of residents. The government built them three-story, concrete-block apartment buildings and banned the use of the Tao language.
Most of the Tao have lived in the apartments ever since, although some older residents still live in surviving stone-walled dwellings, fish from handmade canoes and wear loincloths. Their language is no longer banned, but nearly all school instruction is in Chinese.
Oil price shocks in the 1970's prompted the government to build three nuclear power plants on the main island of Taiwan.
Mr. Wu, of the Atomic Energy Council, said Lan Yu residents were not told that the construction project at the southeastern tip of their island, where two powerful sea currents meet and create the island's richest fishing ground, was actually a nuclear waste dump.
Construction of the dump was finished in 1982. Workers at nuclear reactors on the main island of Taiwan began mixing radioactive waste with concrete, sealing it in 55-gallon steel drums and shipping it here for storage in the 23 reinforced-concrete trenches. But until 1993, the drums were made of inexpensive steel that was not treated to prevent corrosion, and many of these barrels are now rusting, Mr. Wu said.
Incomplete records were kept of what was in the early drums. Only low-level waste is supposed to be inside, but it is not clear what kind. Workers will begin removing drums from the trenches later this year and drill holes in them in an effort to determine the contents.
Low-quality cement was mixed with the radioactive waste in many of the early barrels, and is now expanding and cracking the steel barrels, said Paul T.H. Huang, the director of the site. As a result, the government is preparing to grind up to a fifth of the 98,000 barrels here and remix them with fresh cement.
Up to 10,000 or so barrels have good cement but the barrels are corroded, Mr. Huang said. The government plans to pack these barrels in larger containers and pour fresh cement around them. As many as 30,000 drums need repainting to protect them from corrosion, while the remaining drums, nearly 40,000, are fine, Mr. Huang said.
All this work is scheduled to begin here as soon as next year and must be finished before the waste can be moved to another storage facility.
Michael Lin, the nuclear waste director at Taiwan Power, the state-owned electric utility that has operated the site since 1990, said no radiation had leaked from the site. One of the semiunderground trenches developed a crack a decade ago, allowing water to seep in, but the crack was soon fixed, he said.
Residents here are distrustful, saying there has been a spate of cancer cases lately and some fish have been deformed or have washed up dead on the beach. ''There's no way we can prove a link, but we are scared,'' said Syanan Gu Malin, a housewife with two young girls.
Facing thousands of miles of open ocean, Lan Yu is battered several times a year by some of the most powerful storms on earth. A typhoon in 1984 had gusts of up to 201 miles an hour, according to data from a somewhat sheltered weather station in the middle of the island.
The typhoons also dump up to a foot of rain a day, sending torrents down the bluff toward the site. The government has tried to divert the rain away from the dump with a 25-foot-wide drainage ditch, but this is filling with silt.
Three months before construction began here in 1978, the island was hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8. Boulders tumbled down the bluff onto the site. Several dozen protective concrete pillars now stand at the base of the bluff to stop falling rocks.
Until 1996, water contaminated by radioactive waste was distilled to remove as much of the contamination as possible and then dumped into the ocean in front of the site. Now the water is also stored.
Large trawlers from the main island of Taiwan have recently swept the sea here practically clean of fish, forcing the aborigines to look hard for food. At low tide on a recent afternoon, several aboriginal women walked across the jagged volcanic rocks below the nuclear waste dump's sea wall, occasionally stopping and using long metal spikes to pry crabs from their holes. ''I've been catching crabs here since I was a kid,'' said one of the women, who said she was in her early 50's. ''Before there were plenty of crabs and fish; now there are not so many.''
On #'s 2, 3 and 4, I have NO respect for "cultural rights". People don't get to say into where they are born. It is horrifying that people in this world have to live in such conditions. We know #2 and #3 are happening today. These are human beings just like us. These types of cultures are oppressive and violate some pretty basic human rights.
Yes, we intervene.
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"We've laid the groundwork. It's like planting the seeds. And next year, it's spring." - Nader
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Prepare for tending to your garden, America.
Looking back at what we (and by we I mean europeans) did to local cultures I really think the answer is not as clear as it may seem. How would you know your cultural references are better than theirs. Imagine the situation was the other way around :
these people would realize we let our own starve/freeze to death while we pass idly by, for the sake of owning always more we force ourselves and our kids to cut ourselves from nature and work indoors the whole day etc.
We shouldn't be too quick to judge and realize no culture is perfect. And particularly realize that by intervening you leave a cultural void which is extremly dangerous.
No culture is perfect, true. I vote for candidates and measures who/that help the people. Far too few people do the same.
But slavery, oppression and brutality are wrong, so I still say that I would want to intervene and have the practices stopped. I will not support such practices to help maintain a group's cultural identity.
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"We've laid the groundwork. It's like planting the seeds. And next year, it's spring." - Nader
***********************
Prepare for tending to your garden, America.
i like to use my vote as a form of seeding....
a derivitive of nature.
nature is god
god is love
love is light
haha, classic
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
but your scenario does pose an interesting situation - i can't imagine the repurcussions of intervention of the slightest would be ...
We never did resolve this one in fight club... Personally I think that culture and tradition count for little when a person's basic human rights are being infringed upon.
Cultural bias may affect our judgement on what we consider to be ethical behavior but I think that some behaviours exist that are simply unacceptable in our species.
I would hate to see the human species homegenised, but I also think that there is nothing wrong with a species attempting to progress toward true civilization. And if we are aiming for this as a species, then you cannot do it in a half-arsed way- it has to be a combined effort of the entire species.
That all being said, I also hate the idea of millitary intervention as anything other then the last resort in extreme cases. I think that education is where the greatest potential exists for directing a population toward civilization.
I am open to new perspectives though, so if you think I am wrong please tell me why.