# Ethics Principia: Colloquial Democracy



## Abishai100 (Sep 13, 2018)

Can we use norm-vignettes to address societal intellect?


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Imagine that two fictional terrorism-symbolic comic book avatars, contentious towards each other (one a hero, the other a villain) are debating about the formatting of ethics in a hypothetical world in which ethics is challenged by the complications of civilization, capitalism, and urbanization (or ambition). Let's say these two avatars are DC Comics' Batman (a masked vigilante who defends democratic values) and his nemesis Mad Hatter (a logic-trickster who is more or less an anarchist and terrorist). Imagine further that Batman and Mad Hatter want to evaluate all kinds of ethics-related subjects/issues as they relate to imaginations about morality claustrophobia, say, in a world in which ambition has confounded temperance in various ways.


 

BATMAN: Capitalism creates forms of piracy.
HATTER: A pirate is one who espouses mischief.
BATMAN: Mischief can be reprimanded but never eliminated.
HATTER: That's because mischief is a natural 'reality.'
BATMAN: What about avarice/greed?
HATTER: Capitalism and urbanization certainly cater to avarice.
BATMAN: Imagine our hypothetical 'ethics-confounded' world 'plagued' by vice.
HATTER: We'd have to seriously meditate on ethics.
BATMAN: Precisely; we must find contours for democratic exchange.
HATTER: Yes, democratic commerce prevents competition-gauged warfare.
BATMAN: To make commercial alliances, contracts have to be reliable.
HATTER: The quality of contracts depends on the ethics of the negotiators.
BATMAN: If capitalism is a 'bargain' then what about race-car driving?
HATTER: We might invent 'games' to reflect our interest in consensual competition.
BATMAN: When people cheat at games, regulators have to detect turbulence.
HATTER: Policing Wall Street, for example, requires strong focus on norms.
BATMAN: Imagine therefore a shoe-making factory built by an exchange-listed company.
HATTER: Such a factory would capture a social interest in production and satisfaction.
BATMAN: We'd have to measure satisfaction against the ethics of labor-sternness.

 

So, from this mock-exchange, we see that our fictional governance-meditating offbeat comic book avatars, Batman and Mad Hatter, are considering the contouring of labor and social consciousness in terms of the ethics of general expediency-imagination. We see from such an exchange, which really serves as a 'thought model' of sorts, that we can evaluate civilization-ethics (as they apply to modernism-relevant formatting --- capitalism, commerce, democracy) in terms of overall 'managerial aesthetics.' The challenge would be to use such evaluations to better understand civilization IQ.

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