Blame Culture 47

[ScottyUK]

zdas04 rightly suggested that this belonged in a separate thread to where it was initially posted.

"I personally don't like some of the culture developing in the UK where everything is someone else's fault. No-one accepts responsibility for their own actions any more, however stupid those actions are. It is leading to increasingly restrictive legislation and in some instances corporate and state 'nannying', and an ever-growing level of paperwork designed to keep the ambulance-chaser lawyers at bay. How is it in the rest of the world?"

So - is it just the UK afflicted with this blame culture? Is it right? Or should Darwin's Theory of Evolution be allowed to take effect and reduce the number of stupid people in the world?



----------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes,
I'm getting a great education!

 

[SolderingGunslinger]

I have kept a firm on retainer since I attained majority.

They are:

Dewey Cheatham and How, Pinchaum Fleceham and Fleah Attorneys at Law.

:-D

 

[CRG]

Come on guys; don’t blame the “blame culture” on the ethics of lawyers. Lawyers are every bit as ethical as politicians. The person who votes or hires either one of the rascals is just as culpable when it comes to ethics.

 

[debodine]

Ivymike:

As always, you stretch me. In our mutual search to define the "blame culture", we have dug down to the bottom line: morality.

If we are the product of biological processes only, and upon my death the living cells that make up "me" simply cease to exist (no heaven or no hell, as the Christian religion would define it), what motivation exists to influence any action I might deign to choose?

For example, if we are evolutionary accidents only, then please define these terms I found in your post. Please do so without any reference to morality or right and wrong. Remember, we are just combinations of living cells chosen by biology to exist for a period of time and destined for annihilation. And please note that regardless of whatever definition you assign, since there is no overarching morality I hereby reject all your definitions without consideration and substitute my own. Prove me wrong for doing so, if we are biologically existant only. I also reject your definition of proof, as my reasoning power (assigned to me by evolution) tells me that without a moral basis for our interaction, I need not even consider what you want but should make all my decisions solely upon my own wants and needs.

If I reject your definitions, and you can likewise reject mine, who defines these terms for us?

"successfully"

"responsibility"

"rewarded"

"mutually beneficial"

"ostracized"

"punished"

"unacceptable"

"injustices"

"behave properly"

My contention is that one foundation of our blame culture is a reasonable application of the the theory of evolution. Since evolutionay beings are without a moral system unless they artificially impose one, and are without an eternity to motivate adherence to any moral system, corporately agreed upon or not, then no such thing as right or wrong or responsibility or blame exists. In our culture it has devolved to "whoever has the better lawyer wins".

Best regards,

debodine

 

[debodine]

P.S.

I am already in violation of my own moral code as I had previously promised to stop my posting in this forum. In keeping with the topic of this forum, I blame...anyone else but me!

Of course the moderator of this forum can choose to impose their own moral code and delete me for not keeping my word.

If evolutionary accidents can experience forgiveness, please forgive me Mr. moderator?

)

debodine

 

[smwpe]

Wow. It is wonderful to see this discussion among the high IQs. For a minute I thought I was listening to a Liberal Arts forum.

For those of you in private consulting, if you are really concerned about the legal liability, then bring an attorney into your firm and make her/him a board member.

You will be suprised how things smooth out.

All the best to you all. It is a tough road out there, and it always has been.

 

[IRstuff]

Sorry, but this mostly hogwash. Do you really think that serfs and peasants 500 yrs ago accepted responsibility for their sorry state of life? Of course, not.

They blamed the lords and kings and anyone else they could think of, including the Church. That's why Confucianism was developed, to convince that peasants that they got a crappy deal and they just had to suck it up.

The only reason they had to suck it up was that there was no other recourse, other than armed rebellion, hence Communism.

Now, after millenia of abuse, the common people have other champions that rob the rich and give to the poor, e.g., the lawyers; carrying on the traditions of Robin Hood.

TTFN

 

[UcfSE]

If you are only behaving yourself because you don't want to go to hell then you are doing the right thing for the wrong (selfish) reason. Religion does not imply morality. There are plenty of child-molesting priests on the news to demonstrate that. There's also history: how many people have been killed in the name of the church and "morality"?

You should be a good person because it is right. I define what is right, because I am me and have the freedom of choice and the intelligence to do so. If I choose to look for input from a holy book I choose to do so without interpretting that to mean I have found the only source of right. Obviously, that's only my opinion and my 2 cents.

 

[debodine]

UcfSE:

I am grateful you have helped to prove my point. You expect me to "be a good person because it is right". You therefore imply there is a right and a wrong. Voila, you have morality. Morality is simply a system for defining right and wrong, and as you correctly stated, history has shown that moral systems can be devastating to mankind...just as history has also shown they can be beneficial.

And if morality exists, then we must be more than just biological accidents, because biological processes do not have morality. And if we are not just biological accidents, then we must have responsibilities to each other, imposed by an intelligent designer, as the opposite of accident is intentional. And if we do, then one of those responsibilities is to accept that our actions have consequences and not to blame others for things we do.

See, I keep trying to keep us all on the "Blame Culture" topic because if we stray then this forum could be shut down!

Thanks to all for making me think. I hope I have done the same for you. Logical reasoning is the backbone of engineering, and when added to creativity, has resulted in marvelous gains for mankind. If we have sharpened each other a bit in our thinking processes, then we have accomplished one of the goals of this website.

)

debodine

 

[GregLocock]

I hope your logical abilities are more finely honed at work.

You have taken UcfSE's tautology and used it to prove your desired outcome.

Don't do this with structures.



Cheers

Greg Locock

Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[debodine]

Greg:

I certainly hope my logical abilities are better at work too! You rightly determined that I was having some fun with the assertions made by UcfSE. One of the very experienced engineers I work with likes to say, "Our job is to create a way to get from Point A to Point B...but first you have to start at the correct Point A!"

Thank you for making me consult a dictionary to look up "tautology", as I had never learned the definition (though I recognized that form of logic from prior experience), and I certainly profited from the effort.

P.S. I am better at starting from the correct "Point A" on aircraft. )

 

[HgTX]

Morality is not the same thing as religion. Belief in a higher power is not necessary in order to have a sense of right and wrong (regardless of the origin of that sense of right and wrong). By claiming it is, you claim that anyone who is not religious has no morals, no sense of right and wrong, no sense of propriety, no sense of social values. I suppose you have no idea how incredibly insulting that is to those who are not religious and yet are not sociopaths.

It is my experience that decent behavior and belief in a higher power are not particularly correlated. It is completely possible to believe in a higher power and be a nasty sonofabitch, or even a psychopathic killer. It is completely possible to be an atheist and be a considerate and constructive contributor to society.

You can hold whatever theories you like about *why* we have developed social structure, morals, ethics, etc.--but to claim that religious beliefs are necessary for one to have what might be called "strong moral fibre" is patently false. And it is indeed what you are claiming, since it's the contrapositive of your statement that diminishing belief in particular tenets of religious dogma are responsible for what seems to be seen as an overall decline of character among our fellow first-worlders.

There have *always* been plenty of evils in society, on both institutional and individual levels, even back in the days when much of the world was theocracy. Yearning for the "good old days" (or imagining that all would be right with the world if only we would all bow down before a vengeful higher power) is naive.

The reason that people keep leaping up to argue with you is not because they want to persecute you for your religion, but because you are INSULTING. You keep implying that religious belief is a necessary part of moral strength. It is not, and to claim otherwise is to claim that everyone who is not religious has no sense of right and wrong. If you are a Christian, you should be particularly aware that YOU are not the one to make judgement about whether other people who you have never met have a sense of right and wrong, or live their lives in a moral and ethical manner.

Stop it.

Hg

Eng-Tips guidelines: faq731-376

 

[IRstuff]

A pack of wolves know right from wrong.

Overall, they're basically existentialists.

TTFN

 

[ewh]

Elephants and apes have been known to mourn their dead. How can this be so if they have no religion?

 

[debodine]

Excellent points, HgTX. I find most of your statements easy to agree with from experience of my own.

By the way, it was not my intent to insult you or anyone else by the sharing of my ideas. Nor am I insulted by you sharing your ideas, so I will not request you to stop. To claim offense is the modern way to shut off ideas that are unpalatable.

My original point was to address the forum topic of the blame culture and to share my belief that the spread of the theory of evolution (specifically macroevolution) was one of the reasons for the blame culture. However, in doing so, all of us appear to have steered WAY off the original topic, and a share of the blame for that is mine.

Good red meat for me to chew on though, HgTX. I will ponder and work my way through your points, but I will keep my conclusions to myself as you requested to avoid further offense.

)

debodine

 

[vonbad]

Always a hot topic when religion and politics are brought into conversation.

Although, I enjoy bashing lawyers as much as anyone else. I will have to admit like any other profession there are good ones and bad ones; every profession has this problem.

Earlier post mentioned 'loser pays'. Well, this is not entirely accruate the plaintiff pays, not the lawyer. IMO lawyers filing ridiculous lawsuits will only stop when they too are held accountable. For them it's largely a win situation immaterial of the verdict.

However, as mentioned earlier this may have drawbacks as some cases will not be accepted as it would be too expensive (time consuming) on a shaky case.

 

[jstickley]

Here's the questions that this thread leads me to consider that I find most interesting and personally enlightening:
-- Why do humans seem to have an innate sense of right and wrong at all?
-- Why does that sense of right and wrong seem to be so very similar amongst both the religious and irreligious?
-- Why do we often feel guilt for behavior contrary to that sense of right and wrong?

Anyway, maybe I'm just a bumbling, small-minded fool who can't grasp the wonder of human biology and the evolutionary processes from which we result, but the simple fact that we can feel, understand, and debate such abstract concepts as morality at all leads me to believe that there's more to humanity than simple chemical and biological processes, and fuels my faith in a higher power (the Master Engineer, if you will). If that makes me a poor engineer... so be it.

 

[epoisses]

Impressive how this thread develops...

I could add another intriguing question:
- why do elephants have trumps?

Probably (it's still a theory) because having a larger nose came in handy, so the large-nosed lived longer and had more time to make large-nosed elephant babies. The small-nosed eventually disappeared. Maybe proto-elephant women were even attracted more to large-nosed proto-elephants than small-nosed. The large nose escalated in a couple million years and became a trump. The theory also says that this is just a bio-genetico-statistical phenomenon, there's no master plan behind it.

A similar theory is that our brain with all its funny features (right and wrong, guilt, but also sense of direction and maybe even sense of humour) came in handy as well a couple million years ago so it developed further into what it is right now.

The next 64k$ question is whether people with no sense of right and wrong will all become extinct within the next coupe million years, will be all be sweet ET-like creatures?

 

[epoisses]

(Note that this would be the evolutionist equivalent of heaven, all's well that ends well, the bad guys will be punished eventually...)

 

[UcfSE]

I had to look up "tautology" also lol.

I think HgTX hit it right on.

 

[SacreBleu]

Once again, I gave up arguing about religion (including evolution/creationism) or politics to anyone at work, including Eng-Tips.
However, I stand by my contention:
"Lawyers aren't all that bad...it is the 98% of tha bad ones that are giving the remaining 2% (good ones) a bad name"