SCP by Series
Other SCP
Feed
Stories
Discovery
Random
Thanks to all the folks who looked this over in the forums and in chat! Too many of y'all to list, so feel free to list yourselves below, assuming this stays.
Also, since this is meant to fit into the Broken Masquerade canon, do I need to do anything to it/link it from there as well/special tags?
Link in the canon's hub with who wrote it (yourself, in this case). I don't think there is a Broken masquerade tag.
Liked it in the forum. Love what you've done with it. +1
Sent a PM to Mann and Silber, a couple of the founders, asking if they minded if I linked there. I will when/if I get permission.
E: Mann PM'd me and said that he thought it fits, so, I'll go ahead and link it.
Amazing, I love this article and I love this cannon.
+1
So, as near as I can tell, this boils down to "Your simplistic non-Foundation ethics are naive and harmful". This whole thing reads as terribly smug straw-manning. Downvoted accordingly.
Wasn't the intent.
The intent was: the Foundation makes choices largely deemed unethical, but not because their view of ethics is different, but because their view of scope is different. At most, the average person makes a choice that affects the handful of people nearest them, with leaders making choices for countries and so on. The Foundation has to look, literally, for what good benefits all people, or most people, of every country, and therefore the definition of ethics is difficult to ascertain. Essentially, until you walk a mile in another's shoes…
But to each their own. Thanks for the feedback at least.
I neutral-voted for largely the same reasons. The easy way out in terms of ethical debates regarding the Foundation is, basically, utilitarianism vs. deontology. And that's, like, boring. You can make it even easier and have the util be the "did what I had to do" guilty conscience hard men, and the deontology is the soft emotive/intuition-based ethical system. You don't really do the first but you definitely do the second.
I mean, I probably agree with the "message" of the story, which is that on large scales util is probably a better ethical model than deontology. But it doesn't really explore the deeper ethical implications of, like…everything that's going on. For once I want to see a story that doesn't operate on the deont/util axis. Go perpendicular to the axis. Fuck the axis, it's literally one-dimensional, and Voct's Ethics Committee Orientation and black white black white grey are okay but do we really have to keep exploring the line?
Agreed. This story isn't bad. I like the dialogue. But the flow of it was very predictable.
I think there are more interesting ethical conflicts to explore. In this context, for example, the "inquisitors" could challenge Foundation ethics by attacking the underlying axioms. There are plenty of entities that the Foundation contains by very "cruel" means which are the only way to keep it contained - but that could be destroyed much more "humanely".
I agree with your assessment, but liked it enough nonetheless to upvote.
if your reading this your gay
[ignore]
There are plenty of other ethical problems. Deontology and utilitarianism aren't even necessarily in conflict. More strictly speaking it's usually deontology and consequentialism that are in conflict, and utilitarianism happens to be the most common form of consequentialism. But there's plenty of other ethical perspectives and axes; virtue ethics is relatively rare right now but has been historically quite important; there's absolutism vs. non-absolutism, objectivism vs. subjectivism, motive-agnostic vs. motive-conscious ethics…
[ignore]
Opinion: I think there's a difference between the study/discussion of ethics and moral philosophy in theory space, that is the space of all theoretical discussion on ethics by moral philosophers etc., and applied ethics, or the application of ethics in actual practice by organizations and other bodies composed of multiple individuals with stated goals.
In theory it's difficult or impossible to say what ethical paradigm is best, but ethics as applied within organizations is usually grounded in the practical goals of the body. One may subscribe to Kantian ethics and believe the Montauk Procedure is morally reprehensible regardless of consequence, and thus the protagonist of this tale is espousing nonsense about how his utilitarian philosophy is superior to whatever paradigms other bodies or individuals may believe to be correct. However, the stated goal of the Foundation is the protection of all humanity from the paranormal - implicitly this means that this goal is held to be the ultimate virtue by the Foundation. Within this framework, the ethics committee works to ensure that procedures do not overstep the bounds of what is necessary - it is not an organization for discussing the merits of moral philosophical paradigms in theory space.
I feel like Feldon's tonal shift from meek and helpless to rebellious and condemning is a bit rapid, but all the same I enjoyed this story. Upvoted.
I just hope the New Ethics Committee discovered the limitations of their old ethical constraints before suspending Procedure 110-Montauk…
I love this canon, and I love this tale. It might not be the best one, but I do love the concept of people questioning the ethics of The Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_drug
except Larry isn't a drug, it's a two-person llama costume wearing galoshes.
They were using Larry for recreational purposes, to achieve an effect similar to that caused by dissociative drugs. It was psychic-dissociative recreation: recreation that involved having their psyches dissociate.
(account deleted)
