Hi everyone,

I'm sure this seems like a sophomoric drill to many of you, but none the less, it seems like nothing really can speak more to who a person is, than how they define what is ethical. I love this discussion about determining the roots of ethics and even if it's possible to say what ethical even means? Of course I am hoping some of you have heard some great ethical quandaries and paradoxes and even personal ethical dilemmas. How do we as a person, citizen, countryman, and human, decide what is and what is not ethical and how we live with those contradictions.

Elizabeth

The unfortunate thing is there is no single answer for what is ethical. If there were a single answer there would be no conflict, no war, no politics. We would just do that one thing, and everything would function much better than it does now.

I worry when someone tries to define ethics. What is right? What is wrong? These things change depending on who is talking, what point of view they have.

Ethics need to be defined by what is best for the sample size of people you have chosen. What is ethical for an individual, might not be ethical for a large group of people. What is ethical for a group of people living in the North, might not be ethical for a group of people living in the south.

The people in Northern Canada have a long history of hunting and fishing. They live in what would be considered "Wild Country". For them, it is ethical to have unrestricted access to firearms. If you don't know when a bear is going to come wandering through your front yard, you might agree. It would also be ethical for those people to teach their children how to handle those guns from an early age. Perhaps it would even be ethical for that child to own a firearm of their own.

If you live in a more Southern city like Montreal, then having unrestricted access to firearms is unethical. Instead, you want to make sure, only responsible adults, who've taken the proper training courses have access. You'd want to have restrictions in place that say whenever you transport those guns, they must be unloaded and locked up. When they are stored, they must be unloaded and locked up. Firearm registration makes sense and is ethical, when the only time a gun is used is in violence and crimes. You might live your whole life in an area where the only wild animal you see is in a zoo.

If someone came along tomorrow and said, "We've decided we're going to surgically remove your balls." I might see it as a good thing, and go along with them willingly. If someone told my neighbor the same thing, I expect he would have a very different opinion on whether he keeps his balls or not.

Ethics should be defined as trying to do the least amount of harm to the least amount of people, while leaving flexibility for people themselves to define "harm".

A surgeon takes an oath to "do no harm", yet isn't surgery (cutting into the body) a form of harm. However, if the surgeon does not inflict the smaller harm of cutting into the body, a larger harm, of the patient dying might occur. He has to weigh the ethics. Which is the greater harm of his options, and do the one that causes the least harm.

If that surgeon meets a patient that is religiously opposed to surgery, then for that patient, the greatest harm might come from the surgery itself. It might be more ethical to allow the patient to die, then to violate his wishes.

To be ethical is to do the least amount of harm to the least amount of people, in accordance to the effected people's, or person's, definition of harm.

The problem ethicists have with ethics is when two people disagree on what is right.

One person wants to build a dam to make power for his factory, and employ hundreds of people. Another person opposes the dam, claiming the hundreds of farmers in the valley below will be flooded out, and lose their livelihoods. The factory is going to produce an object that will add value to the world. The loss of the farmland and habitats in the valley would damage the ecosystem, harming the world. Who is right?

This is where compromise was created. One has to evaluate the people who will be effected. You have to evaluate long term over short term. You try to look into the future to guess what might happen, and balance it with knowledge of the past, and what has happened. Compromise is a dirty word, because someone will always get hurt. No one can know all the outcomes, and something will always fall through the cracks.

Ethics is about opinion. Opinions are like a**holes, everybody has their own. The biggest problems in the world come when someone decides for someone else what is "right". No one thing is right for all people.

Ethics should be a fluid thing, adapting to each situation, and knowing that there will always be harm from any decision. All ethics can do is try to minimize that harm for the both the greatest amount of people, and the least among us.

Thanks for starting the thread Elizabeth. This a subject that has no end.

I have nothing to say at the moment but will when a light goes on in my head.

Elizabeth you submit one of the best and most intelligent post on this forum!

Love your attitude to life.

Challenge Authority? Let me see if I can accomplish that...

Whosoever does not well-tolerate messy, way-too-long, conflict-describing, gobbledygook writing may, or may not, usefully overlook this posting.

While determining what is, and/or is not, ethical may be sophomoric, I find it so at the level of the ultimately central enigma of yet-to-be-achieved human social and personal development.

I am unaware of any more significant or important human question, and I have strong doubts that any more significant and important question faced by humanity may ever be possible.

I am having notable difficulty in finding words that make clear sense to me in writing this, perhaps because this question is one which is sufficiently unresolved that the language needed to convey its resolution in clear and simple ways does not yet exist.

I live and work in accord with what I find to be a basis principle of pragmatic ethics:

If it is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly. If it is worth doing, and it can be done well, that is good.{/b}

Perchance, what follows is being done poorly? That is not for me to decide. Perchance, what follows is not worth doing? That, also, is not for me to decide. For me to decide one or both of those questions would be an ethical violation of my conscience.

As best I yet understand, there having been no clear, testable and in-principle-refutable, demonstration of the unambiguous boundaries of ethics, at least until now, as the limit of what is actually ethical, it may be useful to surmise that the boundary definition problem of ethics is a problem of sufficient complexity as to have thus far eluded both description and definition of intrinsically unshakeable accuracy.

I became a eunuch in 1986, doing so in an effort to prevent (if I end up dying from something other than cancer) or delay my developing terminal cancer at a relatively young age (as had happened to my dad and other close relatives, and as was, unbeknownst to me, happening to my brother at the time of my orchiectomy), and I it seems to me that my getting a bilateral orchiectomy and a total colectomy with ileorectal anastomosis, both in 1986, may have been decisive in my not now having already died from terminal cancer.

However, there is no way for me to test whether those surgeries will end up having lengthened or shortened my total earthly life span, for the simple reason that I do not get to actually live both pathways (surgeries intended by me to prevent/defer cancer accomplished or not accomplished), such as to be able to accurately compare and contrast my life on both pathways.

To get my orchiectomy in 1986, I guess that I violated a towering heap of cultural admonitions (folkways) and prohibitions (mores (pronounced somewhat like more-rays; two syllables)).

My wife being much-educated and yet found to be unfamiliar with the sociology term, "mores," I have loosely defined it here for the possible benefit of folks who never delved much into sociology.

Was my decision to acquire a bilateral orchiectomy as I did an ethical or unethical decision?

To me, folkways are social traditions which are, within a given culture or sub-culture, taken as "givens," and not readily subject to effective challenge. To me, mores are social traditions which are, within a given culture or sub-culture, taken as so essential to the structure of the culture as to warrant severe sanctions for observed violations.

In accord with the mores of the time (the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Standards of Care), it seems to me that my orchiectomy was a blatant violation of societally approved ethical conduct. At what level of professional expertise, if any, did my bioengineering education surpass, as a determinant of ethical conduct, the standards of the medical profession, with respect to my seeking effective cancer-risk-minimizing medical care and treatment?

I suppose I might make a dualistic and false analogy in which violations of folkways are comparable to the level of misdemeanors, while violations of mores are of the level of felonies.

From the time I first came upon the Eunuch Archive via the Internet (as I recall now, more than 7 years ago), I was beset with a moral and ethical dilemma, one centered on how I could ethically and morally participate in the work of the Eunuch Archive as a member. Why the dilemma?

In my introductory postings, I indicated that I am a licensed professional. Having attended the 2011 MoM, the Archive Administrators (is "Archive Dictators" more accurate?) have been, methinks, made decently aware of my professional status. Into the future, for a time now indeterminate, I will only use "janekane" as my Archive name on the forum boards and on anything else available to guests. In private messages or directly person-to-person email messages not accessible to Archive guests, I have no difficulty with being personally and professionally identifiable. Long before I became an Archive member, I had put forth on the Internet my doctoral dissertation and many other items related to my research.

I am licensed in the State of Wisconsin as a Registered Professional Engineer. My license contains the non-negotiable requirement that I work as a professional engineer in accord with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers. To be able to reasonably comply with said Code of Ethics in my work as an engineer, I, long ago, deemed it essential that I actually understand said Code of Ethics in pragmatic, practical, and practicable ways. As one means of attaining said understanding, I set out to reduce said Code of Ethics to its ultimate basis in the simplest way I could imagine seeking and finding.

My understanding of the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, as concisely and simply stated as I have yet found feasible, is:

An Engineer shall hold paramount the public safety, shall work only in areas of professional competence, and shall do so without deception.

The manner in which I experience my life as an autistic person disallows my living a divided life (divided in the sense of R. D. Laing, "The Divided Self," (originally published by Tavistock Publications in 1959; I have in hand the Penguin Books edition copyright 1969) and my being unable to live a divided life disallows my separating my work as a professional engineer from any other aspect of my life.

My B.S. and Ph.D. degrees are in bioengineering. Biomedical engineering is a proper subset of bioengineering.

My ongoing research work in bioengineering is focused on a biophysical approach to the structure (form and function) of human society, using the methodology of reverse-engineering to ferret out the foundational basis principles (perhaps mainly of pre-historic origin?) and to accurately fathom the interface between those foundational basis principles and their accurately recognizable substrate.

At about this level of exposition, I find the words I am able to write begin to turn into nondescript mush.

As a professional engineer, I have a hunch that I ought to be able to state, quite clearly, what I believe engineering is.

Here goes:

Engineering is the solving of practical problems, efficiently, economically, and effectively, using scientific principles.

As a professional engineer working as a bioengineer, I have a hunch that I ought to be able to state, quite clearly, what I believe bioengineering is.

Here goes:

Bioengineering is engineering applied to the phenomenon of life (aka. "biology").

As a professional engineer applying engineering ot the phenomenon of life, I have a hunch that I ought to be able to state, quite clearly, what I believe the phenomenon of life is.

Here goes:

The phenomenon of life is comprised of the totality of that which is deemed to be alive and its substrate.

As a bioengineer doing professional engineering, I have a hunch that I ought to be able to state, quite clearly, what I believe "the totality of that which is deemed to be alive and its substrate" is.

Here goes:

The totality of (the totality of that which is deemed to be alive) and (the totality of all of its substrate of that which is deemed to be alive) is the totality of existence itself.

Methinks existence includes (surely as a proper subset?) the existence of non-existence; elsewise, of what is existence possibly made?

Alas, I find my work requires of me that I function professionally in the manner of an existentialist philosopher of science; how else would I be able to discern relevant scientific principles appropriate to my work in bioengineering, in compliance with, and in conformity to, the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers?

That Code of Ethics may be found on the Internet at:

http://www.nspe.org/Ethics/CodeofEthics/index.html

I did the work of my bioengineering doctorate in accord with the best understanding of said Code of Ethics that I could grasp. The field work study for the doctorate was done using human subjects. Having diligently studied human subject research deemed ethical and deemed unethical, I designed and developed my research methodology so as to preclude any and every sort of human subject research ethical violation I had heard of and could imagine. In accord with the requirement of avoiding deception, I could not possibly do any sort of "laboratory experiment" (one in which all but the one dependent variable and the one independent variable were controlled by the experimental protocol and its situational setting) because such laboratory experiments are invariably deceptive with respect to people's lives outside laboratory experiments. Instead of using a control group and placebo technique, I controlled only one variable, how I talked with the person who was the experimental subject, and let everything else run free; and I used each person as the person's own longitudinal control, by talking with a person prior to the experimental language process and talking with the person after the experimental language process, and comparing what the person believed prior to the experimental language process and after it. I also explained how and why I was doing prior to doing it, doing so without using any form of deception that I could recognize.

What was the research, what was its focus, its methodology, and its result(s)? I set out to unriddle the ethical nature of human choices, from the perspective of biophysics (which, to me, necessarily includes relativity and quantum mechanics), doing so with the mindset of the "hard sciences," and using the "null-hypothesis - alternate-hypothesis approach, such that the null and alternate hypotheses are of pure dichotomy, so that invalidating the null hypothesis necessarily validates the alternate hypothesis.

The null hypothesis? "Someone can truthfully describe a mistake actually made and also truthfully describe an achievable process through which the mistake actually made could actually have been avoided."

The alternate hypothesis? "No actually made mistake which actually could (or should?) have been avoided can truthfully be described."

The experimental result? "No one has yet truthfully described to me even one actually-made mistake which could have actually been avoided through any actually achievable process."

The experimental conclusion? "No mistake ever made either could or should have been avoided, and this is true regardless of the nature of the mistake made or its consequences."

In the field work experiments I did, which were of participant-observer naturalistic form, every person received the best "treatment" I could provide; no one was given anything resembling a placebo.

The effect of my research protocol and methodology was the research-risk-prevention office being unable to fault my work and being unable to ask the university Institutional Review Board to evaluate my work; I had designed and done the work in such full conformity with federal guidelines for human subject research as to totally preclude any possible Institutional Review Board involvement. Thus, to properly earn the doctorate, I needed only properly satisfy the five members of my thesis committee, and no one else, as to the scientific, scholarly, and originality merits of the work.

In "Biomedical Ethics: Opposing Viewpoints," Greenhaven Press, San Diego, CA, 1994, on page 56, is a comment titled "Placebo Ethics" in which it is observed that one may "justifiably conclude" that the use of a placebo double-blind approaches in seriously life-threatening circumstances is unethical. It may be worthy of note that I had determined, by 1984, that my not getting a proper orchiectomy prior to cancer development would, based on family history, likely be fatal for me, and that waiting to find out if fatal cancer developed in the absence of sufficient preventive surgeries would be ethically reprehensible.

I have asked, by now, about 3000 people about mistakes, and about 98 percent of those I have asked have initially told me that they have made numerous mistakes which they could and should have avoided making. For the dissertation field work, I asked very nearly 400 people, also with essentially the same 98 percent avowing having made mistakes they could and should have avoided making and close to 2 percent telling me that they had never made any mistake that they could have avoided making, and further that believing that they should have done what they could not have done is not less than absurd.

Funny thing. About 2 percent of the people I have asked about mistakes appear to harbor an understanding of mistakes which profoundly departs from the majority view. For people who believe in frequentist statistical approaches, and who also believe in that 95 percent divider between valid and invalid data, my finding of 2 percent who do not believe in mistakes made which could have been avoided are statistically insignificant outliers, data to be thrown away because it does not conform to notions of validity based on measures of central tendency.

As an ethical question, what percentage of "men" voluntarily choose to become eunuchs? My guess, nowhere close to 2 percent, at least in the absence of life-threatening prostate cancer.

If it is eventually substantiated that no mistake ever made could have been avoided, that may be of the nature of a scientific revolution in the science of jurisprudence. It is one thing to punish a person for an infraction which the person could actually have avoided through some achievable process, and it is quite another thing to punish a person for an infraction which the person absolutely could not have avoided.

Consider the following, from Black's Law Dictionary, Ninth Edition, Thomson Reuters, 2009, as found on page 250:

" 'Proximate cause' — in itself an unfortunate term — is merely the limitation which the courts have placed upon the actor's responsibility for the consequences of the actor’s conduct. In a philosophical sense, the consequences of an act go forward to eternity, and the causes of an event go back to the dawn of human events, and beyond. But any attempt to impose responsibility on such a basis would result in infinite liability for all wrongful acts, and would 'set society on edge and fill the courts with endless litigation.' [North v. Johnson, 58 Minn. 242, 59 N.W. 1012 (1894).] As a practical matter, legal responsibility must be limited to those causes which are so closely connected with the result and of such significance that the law is justified in imposing liability. Some boundary must be set to liability for the consequences of any act, upon some social idea of justice or policy." W. Page Keeton, et. al., Prosser and Keeton on Torts § 41, at 264, (5th ed. 1984).

Also, consider the following, op. cit, as found on page 977:

“Legal fiction is the mask progress must wear to pass the faithful but blear-eyed watchers of our ancient legal treasurers. But though legal fictions are useful in thus mitigating or absorbing the shock of innovation, they work havoc in the form of intellectual confusion.” - Morris R. Cohen, Law and the Social Order 126 (1933).

Not only do legal fictions work havoc in the form of intellectual (or cognitive) confusion; I consistently observe that legal fictions wreak utter havoc in terms of affective and procedural learning confusion.

Ethical issues arise, as best I can yet discern, within the inextricable conflict ensconced within fictions being deemed, by incompletely informed consensus, to be not fictions.

In the absence of so much as a single instance of a mistake/choice/decision/action that actually happened having been avoidable through any actually demonstrable achievable process, the simple truth may be, as I have always observed, that whatever happens, as it happens, actually is inescapably necessary and sufficient.

What is ethical? In the absence of a truthfully described mistake/choice/decision/action that actually happened which could have actually been avoided, what is ethical is only of, and about, cultural fictions, including cultural fictions deemed by culture to be legal fictions. So I find. Refutation is welcome.

My best guess for now is that, as cultural fictions are identified and replaced by objectively testable and if-false-refutable understandings, ethical concerns will tend to identically vanish.

Please note that I am writing these words without using deception, under my Eunuch Archive nom-de-plume, janekane, in accord with Eunuch Archive ethical standards as I am able to understand them.

Ethics and ethical are inseparable from your religious beliefs. And whether you belong to an organized religion

or not you have "beliefs".

What a simple, but terrific idea for a thread.

I believe that this will become one of the great ones on here.

That said, I am not going to contribute to it much just now (lol) - hopefully when I can find (or MAKE) the time. Also if I try to think too much about it my brain (which really seems quite mushy at the moment!) may explode

Just a quick something though; I saw on a bit of a skim the mention of life paths, and so with ethics we are talking about right and wrong. In some cases we don't know what was/is right or wrong as far as our life direction or decisions goes, as we don't necessarily get to live both (well we only ever get one life, though sometimes we live portions of it in vastly different ways). Also, what is right for one person may be wrong for another, which is very appropriate on the subject of castration. This could go off into all sorts of areas of discussion (which makes it such a grand thread question). For example often we have to be selfish to me happy, so making those decisions might be our right decisions, but they may be in one way or another, unethical. So there may be a difference between right and ethical?

...

Cainanite (imported) wrote: Thu Sep 29, 2011 11:10 pm Ethics should be defined as trying to do the least amount of harm to the least amount of people, while leaving flexibility for people themselves to define "harm".

...

Hi Cainanite,

Thanks for responding to the thread. I selected that quote from you as at least one of your definitions of what exactly "ethics" are. It stands out because I could easily cite several examples where doing the least amount of harm could or would be unethical. For instance, what if your job was as an executioner? Would it be ethical to keep shocking the subject of the electric chair with the minimum amount of harm until he was dead?

The problem becomes defining harm. Your example leaves it up to "the people", but who exactly are these people and how do they decide what is and is not harmful for someone else? Also, many times what is ethical has nothing to do with harming another person. If the bank makes a mistake and puts $35k in my bank account that it created from no where, just like a new loan. So even though I have the money, it didn't really cost anyone anything, because just like when a bank loans me money, the principle does not actually exist and as it's paid back, it is simply written off the books. So? if no one knows, and it doesn't really cost anyone anything? Is it ethical to keep the money?

I decided it wasn't. But it's strictly an arbitrary decision based more on fear of the unknown than any actual damage to a person or persons. I like your thinking, but I do not accept that definition of ethics.

Elizabeth

...

janekane (imported) wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2011 11:47 am I am unaware of any more significant or important human question, and I have strong doubts that any more significant and important question faced by humanity may ever be possible.

I am having notable difficulty in finding words that make clear sense to me in writing this, perhaps because this question is one which is sufficiently unresolved that the language needed to convey its resolution in clear and simple ways does not yet exist.

...

The experimental result? "No one has yet truthfully described to me even one actually-made mistake which could have actually been avoided through any actually achievable process."

The experimental conclusion? "No mistake ever made either could or should have been avoided, and this is true regardless of the nature of the mistake made or its consequences."

...

Ethical issues arise, as best I can yet discern, within the inextricable conflict ensconced within fictions being deemed, by incompletely informed consensus, to be not fictions.

In the absence of so much as a single instance of a mistake/choice/decision/action that actually happened having been avoidable through any actually demonstrable achievable process, the simple truth may be, as I have always observed, that whatever happens, as it happens, actually is inescapably necessary and sufficient.

What is ethical? In the absence of a truthfully described mistake/choice/decision/action that actually happened which could have actually been avoided, what is ethical is only of, and about, cultural fictions, including cultural fictions deemed by culture to be legal fictions. So I find. Refutation is welcome.

My best guess for now is that, as cultural fictions are identified and replaced by objectively testable and if-false-refutable understandings, ethical concerns will tend to identically vanish.

Please note that I am writing these words without using deception, under my Eunuch Archive nom-de-plume, janekane, in accord with Eunuch Archive ethical standards as I am able to understand them.

Hi JaneKane,

Thank you for such a careful and well thought out post. So far we are really going where I hoped this thread would go. This is great stuff. I agree with your statements about the importance of ethics to mankind and how we finally or perhaps never, agree on a set of human ethics.

I have to admit, you have really sucked me into this discussion with the tidbits of your research that you have unveiled in this thread. I had to really read your premise carefully to make sure I was understanding precisely what it is that you were conveying to us. It would seem the premise requires only mistakes that are actually made are unavoidable. To me this falls right in line with the premise that every decision anyone has ever made was the only decision they could have made. That us humans operate on a level of making the best decision we can at the time. No matter how unreasonable an action may seem to an observer, the decision maker always had a motive that they felt benefited themselves. I probably agree with both statements, but I have not had sufficient time to evaluate them yet.

However, let me tell you a little story. Before Elizabeth made herself known to the world, I lived a life as a man. At first and apprentice electrician, then a journeyman electrician, then a foreman electrician, then as an Electrical Superintendent, and finally as a Master Electrician, which in Wyoming is a professional license. It meant that besides being able to do any type of installation, I could also design and submit drawings to "Plancheck", something only Master Electricians and Professional Engineers are allowed to do in Wyoming.

When I became a Master Electrician and started running electrical contractors business, accidents became a major concern to me. In construction as well as other industries, workman's compensation insurance as well as liability rates, are set with respect to the number of reportable accidents. Now, I took over a company that had in excess of 30 reportable accidents(anything above what would be considered first aid and/or requiring the injured person to miss any work) on average, the previous five years. We then went 2 and a half years without a reportable. This was not just a coincidence. I instituted strict safety protocols, invested in safety training, made sure to provide the correct tools and the correct safety gear. I changed the focus of each job from "let's get it done as fast as we can" to "let's do this safely, as fast as we can". The focus was shifted from, how do we save money, to working safe saves us more money than any other thing we could do. And indeed workman's comp rates dropped from 11% of payroll to 5.5% of payroll in two years, saving my company over $300k in premiums in just two years. It also lowered liability rates, which increased our cash flow, which increased the amount we could borrow, as well as the rate we paid. I then bought them out and took over the company, incorporated and ran if for 6 more years before illness and the economy forced me to quit. The six years I owned and ran the company we had no reportable accidents.

Did the actions we took prevent accidents? The numbers imply it did. Quantum Mechanics said it did not. Can we ever know? Of course we can not. Perhaps I just had a very lucky string of jobs where no unavoidable accidents happened? But my career record indicates, as well as what I have taught and what I have been taught about safety, that accidents can be prevented, but? The stickler, we can't prevent accidents which have already happened. Only those accidents that we prevented were prevented, thereby making those accidents not exist. How does one prove they made something not exist?

Again, I also like your thinking. Very thought provoking post. I am still reserving my opinions about ethics, although as the discussion continues I am sure my views will become more and more clear. Thanks for participating.

Elizabeth

Sweetpickle (imported) wrote: Fri Sep 30, 2011 4:57 pm Ethics and ethical are inseparable from your religious beliefs. And whether you belong to an organized religion

or not you have "beliefs".

Hi Sweetpickle,

Wow, I really disagree with what you are saying. There is this notion, particularly among those who have religious beliefs, that morals and ethics come from religion. While I agree that they can and do come from religion, I don't believe there is a need for them to come from there. In fact when we look back at the remains of early humans there is a point about 30,000 years ago where humans start burying their dead with items of ritual significance or that they will need in their next life. The very beginnings of religion in humans. However, look back 200,000 years and find Neanderthals with such sever injuries, that they survived, that they must have had help from their fellow humans just to survive. Helping the unfit survive is not exactly Darwinian. It's compassion and compassion must have ethics. So I surmise that ethics preceded religion, meaning that religious beliefs can not be fundamental to ethics. Also as a person that does not have religious beliefs and continues to believe in the falsifiability of science, I have no strict adherence to base my ethics on.

Elizabeth

loveableleopardy (imported) wrote: Sat Oct 01, 2011 1:43 am What a simple, but terrific idea for a thread.

I believe that this will become one of the great ones on here.

That said, I am not going to contribute to it much just now (lol) - hopefully when I can find (or MAKE) the time. Also if I try to think too much about it my brain (which really seems quite mushy at the moment!) may explode

Just a quick something though; I saw on a bit of a skim the mention of life paths, and so with ethics we are talking about right and wrong. In some cases we don't know what was/is right or wrong as far as our life direction or decisions goes, as we don't necessarily get to live both (well we only ever get one life, though sometimes we live portions of it in vastly different ways). Also, what is right for one person may be wrong for another, which is very appropriate on the subject of castration. This could go off into all sorts of areas of discussion (which makes it such a grand thread question). For example often we have to be selfish to me happy, so making those decisions might be our right decisions, but they may be in one way or another, unethical. So there may be a difference between right and ethical?

Hi Greg,

It is not always as easy as just, what is right or wrong. Sometimes it's what is more right or what is more wrong. Lines of ethics seem to blur with respect to who benefits and/or who does not benefit or who is harmed. If I give everyone in the room, except you, a nice cold drink, are you harmed? Is it ethical, unethical or just rude or not rude? Well, if the room is 30 degrees below freezing and everyone is naked, you might think you were the only one I liked. Anyways, I look forward to your posts on this thread.

Elizabeth