These can be used to convince leaders to minimise harm!

Power, Wealth, Legacy, Personal Validation, Benefitting Family, Loyalty, Justice (especially against those who do wrong to those close to them), Strength, Control

Let's improve our leaders ethically!

Encourage them to have optimally caring perspective far beyond their country/business/group/self!

I’m a big fan of the show The Walking Dead, and the section of the show with the Saviors, who are very immoral and hurt innocent people, are some if the worst kinds of people. They will destroy innocent people just to keep their people alive and thriving, regardless of how unethical or just flat out immoral what they do is.

This brought a question to my mind. In a reality, like a zombie apocalypse for example, where the only way to survive is by hurting people to keep the ones you care about alive, is there even a minuscule amount of “okay” to that? Of course doing that without that kind of a reality is horrible and you should go to prison, but in that kind of a society, does being a horrible person to other people in order to keep your loved ones safe, does that decrease the immorality to it even a bit?

Is it better for you to just accept it’s the end of humanity and not do those immoral things, or does keeping your people alive justify it, regardless of how bad what you did is? If the only way you can keep the world from dying is doing the most deplorable thing, is there ***any*** justification whatsoever? Should you just let the population die?

A strictly consequence-based and evolutionary systems view of morality that I think some of you might appreciate.

What do you think guys?

I'm not much for long stories, so please ask any questions that are relevant and I will do.my.best to answer them.

My partner (Bran) loaned some money in a roundabout manner. An old friend(Tim)'s mother reached out to ask if Bran could loan her some.money to help Tim move, the mother agreed to pay back the money in 2 weeks. Bran made the loan. Tim's mom paid back 1/4 of the loan), then Bran had to start bugging her to get money. Over about 3 months she paid back about 3/4 of the total money, then she had a heart attack. The last payment was three months ago. Since this happened my hours have been cut and Bran has lost their job. We really need that last quarter of the loan to make ends meet. Is it unethical for Bran, us, to pursue the money?

People who cause harm often try to deflect by labeling healthy accountability as a grudge. They may do this to avoid the discomfort of changing their behavior or to force you to get over something that hasn't been properly addressed. True accountability is about recognizing what happened, owning the impact, and making meaningful adjustment, not doubling down on the harmful behaviors. Not one time in my life have I ever questioned the character of a person that didn't give me a reason to. I don't need closure. Your actions that didn't mach your voiced "care" for me gave me all the information I needed to make an informed decision. Actions speak louder. They always prove why words mean nothing. If they don't match. Trust is a no fly zone. Access is removed.

For background, I was in a same sex marriage with my wife for 10 years. We met and got married quickly be try young (22 and 25). Loved a lot about each other but clearly didn’t know exactly who we were as individuals. I tend to be fun/goofy but also more logical and rigid. My wife is super sociable and likes to be in the moment and go with the flow. A bit of a parent/child dynamic developed, I think in part fueled by my rigidity but also my need to be “the responsible one” in the marriage. She ultimately began feeling her opinions and desires in our life decisions didn’t matter and I felt she wasn’t being loving or courteous enough… frequently would be unreachable when out with friends, coming home hours later than planned with no updates, etc. At a certain point she said she wanted to try nonmonogamy which I wasn’t into. Said she didn’t know if she could continue the marriage if she was unable to explore this. Despite my fears I agreed to consider with the help of a counselor though my father got sick and passed which paused this. Her mother also passed during our marriage which was very hard on her. We became more and more unhappy with an avoidant/insecure dynamic. She was became very mean and treated me with a lot of contempt. Ultimately I caught her kissing someone else. We decided to try to work on it with a therapist and with me requesting a post nup as I was finishing my career training and about to make a large salary in several months. About a month later I discovered she had started an affair with the person the night before signing the post nup and she ultimately decided she didn’t want to be romantic partners with me anymore. I later found out she had made out with a coworker of mine a few years before and had a threesome with a straight couple we were friends with once and slept with just the female another time or two. I filed for divorce which made her very angry despite being in a relationship with her affair partner. She lost many of our friends related to their dislike of the infidelity, lack of accountability, and physical aggression she started to display towards me including significant property damage in our home. We went back and forth on an asset division agreement that felt pretty fair to me— split our bank accounts, the investment account my father left me when he passed (we had already spent her mom’s inheritance on various things), we each take our own 401k, and no alimony paid to her by me. I probably came out slightly on top as I got a house with about 30k more equity (but that would be much harder to sell) than the rental home she gets.

She is very bitter as she perceives I emotionally damaged her by valuing her opinions, listening to her, or truly loving the real her for so long. She also did a job she hated throughout my training as the deal had always been she could retire or really do whatever she wanted when I finished. She blames the loss of her social network on me as she feels I should have advocated for them to maintain friendships. She also feels I owe her for helping care for my father when he was ill. All in all she feels she was used/taken advantage of and that I owe her alimony and to pay off her student loans among other things to repay her. I view it more as we were building a life together that asked a lot more sacrifice from her on the front in but with the promise of a lot of freedom on the back end and she left right as her time to shine was happening. I also always kind of felt that if you were going to engage in such betrayal you just don’t get a bunch of the things you want in an agreement.

I love her very much and feel terrible about how unhappy she was for years even though I was unhappy and unfulfilled too. I think her cheating is unjustifiable but have accepted it and forgive. She is currently unemployed and I have just started receiving my new much nicer salary. I am considering helping her more than the asset division agreement specified by paying her insurance, student loan payment, and part of her rent so she is less stressed as she moves back to her home state and looks for a new job. Is this crazy? Should I have given her more in the first place? Do we think I am living in an alternate reality where I am supporting a betrayer because it’s like a Stockholm Syndrome type thing? Any advice is appreciated!

Intelligence makes you understand and realize more of what's going on around you. You either recognize and think about things in your day to day life and you either ignore the questions of "what ifs" and the constant realization of mortality, or you go and numb and want to do braindead,whether that be drugs or alcohol. The reason that people get an addiction to drugs us cause it feels good and if you've felt pain and anguish from the curse of intelligence then the blank and empty from drugs and alcohol feels better than if you werent intelligent. Drugs feel better because of the lower base line happiness. So that influx of happiness from the drugs feels better and you crave the drugs for the calm.

So, over the years I have held a few jobs and thus met copius amounts of people. Some have died \[that's life i get it\]. What has me in a bit of a tizzy, is when someone who is reasonably well like by most people dies and everyone is upset (understandably) and sings their praises. The problem is - objectively - these people weren't all that great to begin with, but because co-workers worked with them, all is forgiven? I'll give you two examples of people I've worked with and why \[i feel\] they were objectively not so great. You folks can tell me if I'm waaay off or not.

1st person, bit of an alcoholic. Was deputy fire chief \[volunteer\] for a semi rural community. It was at the point where this individual had the breathalizer/interlock device installed on thier vehicle for having been caught for multiple DUIs. Used their position/connections with polive to help get out of/lessen some of the DUI convictions. If it were anyone else, most of my - then - coworkers would be calling for that person's head.

2nd person, had a bit of \[an alleged\] cocaine problem. Was known to be a little bit openly racist, to the point where they were driving around a predominantly black neighbourhood shouting the 'N' word. Again, if it were anyone else, they would have been screaming from the rooftops as to how terrible this individual was (there's more, but this is the worst of it).

A few caveats, I recognize addiction \[drug/alcohol/etc\] is a disease and I am not condemning them for that; obviously thier families mourn them and I don't blame them for that. I am simply confudled as to why \[objectively\] these people were celebrated when if it were anyone else they didn't work with, they would probably be happy they were gone.

Thanks for listening.

For a good few months now I’ve been seeing some debates pop up online about the ethics of certain horror and/slasher premisses. I got interested about what you guys would think of it here.

There’s the big debate about the morality of finding entertainment in something gorey violent and the question of how that effects how a person reacts with the real world. I think it’s normal to have dark thoughts and it’s okay to explore them in a safe manner such as an art. But there is the question of when does it go too far? Or can it go too far? Is it possible for a fully fictional movie to get so dark, gross, and gorey that it deserves to be censored? Is someone immoral for watching those movies? At what point does a movie go from just a slasher or horror film to “torture porn”?

The other debate is about the sexualization of violence, mainly against women, and that’s the one I think is the most interesting. The main basis of this argument points out the fact that women are mainly the ones being killed or brutalized in films. The most brutal kills in movies are virtually almost always done to a woman or a teen girl. When men are killed on screen it happens within just a minute. When it comes to main characters it’s almost always a woman or a teen girl. The last girl standing is the main trope of the slasher genre. Many people excuse this by saying that audiences sympathize and care more about women than men on average, which I do see and agree with, but there’s also the fact that these women or girls are also very often half naked or actually naked when they’re killed. Some of these scenes are very obviously meant to be sexualized to an extent. I may be a hypocrite since I do enjoy many slashers with these types of scenes, but I do agree that it is a little odd that so much of the horror genre is just brutalizing sexualized women. Should the genre move away from this? Maybe the answer is making it equal by creating more female leads and longer male kill scenes (only half joking).

How do you guys feel on all of this?

Using the prisoners dilemma in game theory the "tit for tat" strategy wins greater over time. Are there instances in science where we can derive ethics for decision making? I'm looking for philosophers/papers/lectures/video discussing this theme. Staying away from theological discussions of objective morality and only including reasoned science based philosophical arguments.

I’m in the early stages of designing my own possible doll line and I’m creating my characters. I was considering doing a character for different regions; Asia, Africa, Pacific Islanders, Europeans, etc.

My dilemma comes up with later steps of design. I was intending, for example, my Asian character;
She could have different cultures represented with different looks. For example, one release could represent china, then another Taiwan (id like to avoid mixing cultures to avoid misrepresentation)

Would this be an ethical way to do this, or would this make the character ethically ambiguous in a negative way?

Any thoughts would really help.