In cases like this, I find ethics grounded in utilitarianism to be despicably manipulative positions. You are not treating people as rational agents, but pandering to their lack of virtue so as to recruit them as pawns in your game. If that’s how you’re going to play, why not manufacture evidence in support of your position if you’re Really Sure your assessment is accurate? A clear line of division between “pandering: acceptable” & “evidence manufacture: unacceptable” is nothing but a temporary, culturally contingent consensus caring nothing for reason or consistency. To predict the future, see the direction in which the trend is headed.
No, I would scrupulously adhere to a position of utmost sincerity. Screw the easily offended customers. If this causes my downfall, so be it. That outcome is acceptable because personally, if my failure is caused by honesty and goodwill rather than incompetence, I would question if such a world is worth saving to begin with. I mean, if that is what this enlightened society is like and wants to be like, then I can rather easily imagine our species eventually ending up as the aggressors in one of those alien invasion movies like Independence Day. I keep wondering why, if they evolved in a symbiotic ecosystem analogous to ours, one morally committed individual among their number didn’t wipe out their own race and rid the galaxy of this aimless, proliferating evil. It’d be better still to let them be smothered peacefully under their own absence of self-reflection and practice of rewarding corruption, without going out of your way to help them artificially reach a position of preeminence from which to bully others.
In cases like this, I find ethics grounded in utilitarianism to be despicably manipulative positions. You are not treating people as rational agents, but pandering to their lack of virtue so as to recruit them as pawns in your game. If that’s how you’re going to play, why not manufacture evidence in support of your position if you’re Really Sure your assessment is accurate? A clear line of division between “pandering: acceptable” & “evidence manufacture: unacceptable” is nothing but a temporary, culturally contingent consensus caring nothing for reason or consistency. To predict the future, see the direction in which the trend is headed.
No, I would scrupulously adhere to a position of utmost sincerity. Screw the easily offended customers. If this causes my downfall, so be it. That outcome is acceptable because personally, if my failure is caused by honesty and goodwill rather than incompetence, I would question if such a world is worth saving to begin with. I mean, if that is what this enlightened society is like and wants to be like, then I can rather easily imagine our species eventually ending up as the aggressors in one of those alien invasion movies like Independence Day. I keep wondering why, if they evolved in a symbiotic ecosystem analogous to ours, one morally committed individual among their number didn’t wipe out their own race and rid the galaxy of this aimless, proliferating evil. It’d be better still to let them be smothered peacefully under their own absence of self-reflection and practice of rewarding corruption, without going out of your way to help them artificially reach a position of preeminence from which to bully others.