User talk:Maunus/ethics/Editing Ethics

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I do not agree with your essay. In some ways your text actually falls far short of the antics I've seen - for example, you speak innocently of not releasing information in BLPs that is not publicly known, when in fact most of the BLP fundamentalist crusades focus on excluding information which is in the top five Google hits for the person in question. In others, as with racial bias, it is covered by WP:NPOV much more clearly. And then there are some, namely the "information which is likely to be used for harmful purposes", which are absolutely opposed to the idea of providing free information to the public. I dare say all information will be used for harmful purposes sooner or later, but there are countervailing benefits of public knowledge. To take a simple example, consider bomb-making. Back in the 1990s it was the great "moral" outrage of the era that people could download recipes from the internet. But in practice? Bombs seem to be rarer than ever. Anyone can make them now, but apparently, anyone can recognize them also. Or maybe it's just that once it's no longer Secret Knowledge but something anybody can look up in two seconds, it loses its rebel cachet. I don't know, but the lack of explosions is welcome, and to me, expected.

Recently I made a series of edits to Methamphetamine, for example, seeking to expand our coverage of the synthesis. This was not based on naivete about the damage this drug manages to do, nor on intellectual emotionlessness - rather, there are thousands of people burning themselves terribly doing a procedure that they look up on the internet and don't understand. If we can explain how the procedure leads to sudden and terrible fire, some of them might be saved. If we make people more knowledgeable about the existence of alternative procedures, some will abandon the easier/more dangerous method entirely. In the process, we might also damage the drug cartels' profits, because while they may hold a monopoly on the trade and extensive control of the police and politicians, they don't have a monopoly on knowledge. To me, these are all good things. In the end, I have faith that providing knowledge will always be a good thing in the end. Wnt (talk) 16:00, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I disagree very strongly with that opinion which I find to be naive and irresponsible - a cop out basically -and also factually incorrect. Free knowledge is not intrinsically good. Knowledge is only ever as good as the use to which it is put. What good can possibly come from publishing knowledge on how to genetically engineer a flu virus to become resistant t known medications and therefore lethal as some dutch scientists were recently doing. There is no way for that to hav a positive consequence. I am quite sure that people who have lost family members to IED's don't find your idea about bombs being rarer than ever to be correct. Or those who recently died in Oslo when Breivik used an homemade bomb based on internet recipes before going on a killing spree. The comments about overlap with policies is a feature of the essay not a bug - and i disagree that the NPOV policy for example is clearer - because that policy is not about ethics but about rules of conduct. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 04:08, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't support conducting the experiments to develop transmissible H5N1, which pose unacceptable risk; but I agree with many of the experts who believe that suppressing the results is not a good idea. Anybody can passage H5N1 in ferrets - indeed, the dictators who worry us the most could passage it in humans. For a low-tech, Third World country, it would be easier to passage virus from scratch than to use the published data to modify a virus by targeted mutation (e.g. because they'd tip their hand if they ordered the oligonucleotides required to make the change, and they might not have their own synthesizers). And the precedent that is being set by the suggested censorship is that the U.S. is a) developing a brand new lethal virus, b) producing H5N1 vaccines which might protect against those viruses, c) keeping it all secret. That is indistinguishable from a national program of offensive biological weapons development. China and Russia and probably even Iran will doubtless feel they have the right to do the same. And sooner or later one of those strains is going to escape from the lab and spread around the world, killing half of the population. Perhaps it is God's will, a judgment on a world that cannot use available technology to develop universal anti-flu vaccines, but seeks any excuse to develop private and secret power.

The homemade bomb made by Breivik killed only a few people - it was based on the same old recipe used by the Unabomber and distributed by the U.S. Army in surplus stores in the 1960s. For him it was really a distraction, one which consumed months of his time and could easily have gotten him caught.

The IEDs that kill people in Iraq are made with explosives they scavenge from the Americans' own dud bombs, or stockpiled in the Hussein era. They don't have to make them from scratch.

Any "ethics" which are in conflict with the ethic of allowing the people of the world their right to know what their masters know is not ethical at all. Wnt (talk) 06:23, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I sympathize with your interest in distritbuting important knowledge more equitatively in the world. But I don't think that is a tenable ethical position to put this over responsibility for personal harm. There are kinds of knowledge that noone should have, and you are basically arguing that since someone does have it now everyone should. I definitely can not have it on my conscience if I contribute to spreading harmful knowledge in any sense of "harm". Also I don't see who gains anything by having readyily available illustrations of sexual violence against women - (and in the porn clip against a named and identifiable woman). If you really meant that you are fighting to distribute important knowledge more justly rather than just disseminate puerile counter-culture you would be editing articles about medicines needed in the developing world, about how medical companies work to keep this knowledge away from those who are afflicted, about Monsanto and their quest to on life, about civil rights issues for minorities, etc. I don't see you doing much of that. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 13:45, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Ok, thinking again you do make one important point - the essay neds to consider conflicts between the possibility of harm and a possible greater good -e.g. informational equity. I will add a section on that.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:25, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

(ec)I've edited some articles on medical and biological topics, and crossed paths with deletionists on issues relevant to the Third World - for example, their efforts to keep out the photograph of a man beaten to death in Egypt whose death played a crucial role in their (semi) revolution, and their pooh-poohing of the information about 25 people killed in Kashmir by the Indian government as "not notable". Still, this is a systemic problem for Wikipedia. The deletionists rampage through content like locusts looking for things to destroy. It's not good enough to save, or more likely lose, one small fact of importance when you find it; it is necessary to fix Wikipedia, or at least, try to understand why it is so badly malfunctioning so that the next such project can be built on a firmer foundation.

Monsanto is, to me, an example of the futility of the intellectual property model as opposed to other means we could invent to reward inventors. But that article doesn't seem short on the major criticisms of the company that I can think of. And while I do indeed object to their ability to profit from contamination of neighboring crops with patent law, I cannot say it is a bad thing for people to be researching ways of feeding an ever-growing population, even if it involves potentially hazardous amounts of pesticides. We just need a viable economic system under which to live. Wnt (talk) 14:26, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I should also point out that the lack of censorship of Monsanto under WP:BLP is an omission, not a logical necessity. The doctrine of corporate personhood does prevail legally; you can be sued for libeling a corporation. There's absolutely no reason that the BLP fanatics don't attack that article and excise all the most notable and widely-documented allegations calling it a "WP:Attack page" and so on, except that they must still worry that people would rebel. But they purge more inclusionists from the site every day - sooner or later, it is inevitable that they will do so unless stopped. Wnt (talk) 14:34, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

What was the possible benefit for anyone by seeing the image of a named an identifiable person beaten to death? What would be the possible harm? Would a picture of him alive have served the same function while also being more respectful for his life and his family? You seem to devote a lot of energy to including controversial information and media and not as much to the possible consequences. "inclusionists" have a naive idea that information is intrinsically good and more information is always better than less. That is not ethics (since ethics is based on weighing moral and physical benefits against harm) - but simply an unreflective dogma. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:37, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Ethics might be a complex tapestry, but the rights surrounding intellectual freedom - freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, freedom of the press and association and religion and all that good stuff - these are the hem. When deciding what is ethical and what isn't, that's the place to begin. After all, without an open process of rational consideration, how can any other ethics be devised? Wnt (talk) 20:13, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion that is backwards: any question of rights must come from ethical considerations - not the other way round. Rights are not god given - they are based in ethics and there for th right to free speech does not trumph the requirements of apllying those rights in an ethically respnsible way. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 22:20, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I subscribe to the notion that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Quaint, but as fine an expression of the way things should be as has been managed. The notion of rights, which a person can exercise without fear in a wide and well-defined ambit, is vastly superior to a concept of ethics which, too often, depends on the circumstances, on who you are and what you are doing. It is better to have a simple and almost mathematical exposition of what is right than to have a sophist's thicket of assumptions, all more or less unexamined in any critical way, used to "justify" enforcing some arbitrary pattern of behavior. Wnt (talk) 02:20, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Im sorry but what you say lacks all logical coherence. You talk about God and the american constitution as providing the universal standard for judging behavior and then call ethical considerations "arbitrary". You don't even sem to understand that the american constitution establishes rights on the basis of a particular set of ethics (liberal ethics specifically). Rules with out ethics is simply autoritarian dogma - if you want that then fine - but those are not the principles that wikipedia is built on. We use ethial guidelines to guide individual decision making -not stone set rules and rights. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 04:45, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Seriously? You're calling the unambiguous rejection of censorship, as a principle rather than on a case-by-case basis, an "authoritarian dogma"? I think we're done here. Wnt (talk) 11:28, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Maunus, assuming nothing, and only as simply another possibility, I suggest you also consider WP:POINT. Naive inclusionism is only one way of looking at it. Hoverfish Talk 15:48, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Could you be more specific about how you mean that Don't Assume and WP:POINT applies here? I think I am being dense. What are the other ways of describing the viewpoint that information should be included without regard to the possible benefits or detriments of doing so?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:55, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I did not suggest we disregard possible benefits or detriments of our edits. What I am saying is that people who add questionable information may not necessarily be naive inclusionists, or that even if they are naive inclusionists, just behind them are others who will use this to come down on freedom of expression or wikipedia in specific. In other words I support your view that an editor should consider some basic ethical points, that freedom needs a responsible attitude. I do not say that such ethics should be imposed, as this would create a very dangerous system, only that should be seriously considered by editors. Hoverfish Talk 16:13, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree that ethics can not be imposed as rules or policies. For me ethics is a way of being aare and thinking critically about one's own actions. It is in the nature of ethics that there are conflicting positions that can be defended and weighed - so yes people who add material that is questionable for me may have made their own ethical deliberations and simply come to a different result. That is when the policy of consensus and discussion steps in. What I was arguing with WNT is that it doesn't seem to me that he has in fact made the full ethical consideration but is simply attracted to the idea of being able to disseminate material that "the establishment" may find offensive - that suggests to me a puerile rebelliousness that parades as political action. If WNT has a compelling ethical rational for why making video clips of sexual violence publically available should be a goal of wikipedia, then he has yet to present it.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:25, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Since I come from Athens Greece, and given the actual situation there, I could say lots and lots about rebelliousness parading as political action, especially since the international mass media care only to show the actions of some violent small groups and disregard completely the thousands and thousands of peaceful demonstrators and their demands. In this case however, a video of sexual violence made available through wikipedia, would be an action against wikipedia and nothing to do with freedom of expression. Hoverfish Talk 17:23, 16 February 2012 (UTC)