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Thursday, June 21, 2012

On A Ethical Scale Of 1 To 5...

 Mark Zuckerberg, Billionaire Genius and Demi-God


..., 1 being the lowest, meaning "bad" or almost no "good" at all, and 5 meaning the highest possible amount of "good", where would you rank such-and-such?

Is "good" an absolute, or does it exist in a range of values, somethings being "better" than others?

It seems to me that Fundamentalist philosophies and religions tend to view things as absolutes, whereas the non-Fundamentalist forms do not, and thus require a good deal more work and thought and study to come to a moral conclusion.
It reminds me of Isaac Singer's Rabbi of Goray, who was relatively lenient on the issue of divorce on the appeal of women, versus the Rabbi of Lublin, who was very strict: as a result, women from all over the East journeyed to Goray to see the Rabbi, who did not see divorce in absolute terms, but in terms which were modified by differing circumstances, differing life-histories.

So today in MarketWatch, David Weidner writes:

So long, suckers — I’m leaving Wall Street 
Commentary: Some lessons from 15 years observing the industry,

and ends with:
... remember: Greed is good, but good is better.
and that sums it up, so now I must wonder whether mankind again is a bunch of savages dancing  (or yelling out buy-sell orders)  in front of heartless and mindless idols of graven images, or whether there is a progress - a spiritual progress! - available to us of "better" and "better".

All things can become "better". There is no absolute Science, Economics, nor Morality. Just as we may descend, so we may ascend.

There is in these times a feeling that mankind is inherently evil.
I cannot believe such a proposition, even when it is modified by the doctrine of Original Sin.
We exist in a range of values, and we have free will to choose where we shall go. The accumulation of woes and sorrows we are struggling through now are the fruits of our choosing Greed and not something Better! (And I shall think about this when I ponder Mark Zuckerberg's sale of his stock at the obviously over-priced opening IPO price, and the eventual decline of 10%, which amounts to a billionaire stealing money from schlubs...  it really "zucks!"... even though if we were to ask him on a scale of 1 to 5 how would he rate himself as a positive benefactor to humanity, he would probably say that he's a "big old Fi-i-ive!")
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