It was pretty much what I tried to say. You can't build a galactic empire in New Eden without being cold and calculating. Recently there have been a lot of attempts to portray the Caldari as some sort of Druchii of EVE and I mistook your presentation as one of those.
Heh. No worries. I have a deep and long-standing love for world-building, and it's an itch I tend to indulge if I feel it needs to happen. I do tread the fine line on godmoding from time to time, but I try to make sure my conclusions are justified (and I also try to show my work, where practical).
Druchii ... those are from ... what was it, "Aeon?"
Ah-- no. The Caldari are just people, nothing so archetypal. The argument is that the Caldari are more of a cultural cross between the Russians and the Japanese, with a little Chinese and maybe some Finn thrown in for color and texture (though I'm still unclear on which bit is supposed to be Finnish). To a certain extent, they should be and are their -own- sort of culture, and it's hazardous to refer too heavily to other cultures. However, playing off and extrapolating from various known cultural traits can give us points of reference for understanding something relatively alien.
Tricky, but useful. You just have to be careful that the Caldari idea of a proper tea (and they do canonically drink it, formally even) (as a form of ordeal poisoning, even) doesn't start looking too much like a Japanese tea ceremony.
My own pet peeve in this area is suggestions that the Caldari are "space Nazis." They are not space Nazis. The Helghast (from the "Killzone" series) are space Nazis. Along this axis (no pun intended), the Caldari are, at most, space Serbs-- plenty of ethnic axes to grind, but no real insistence on "superiority," just a bunch of bad blood.
By re-reading your posts, I guess you were suggesting something like that the Caldari do not buy the Gallente propaganda, and vice versa, and I can't argue with that.
Hrrrm. I think I was suggesting more that the Gallente and Caldari each tend to believe
their own propaganda.
What words mean is the foundation of any argument - defining the terms and assumptions upon which the game is to be played. Our definitions and assumptions are, unfortunately, different.
Not unfortunately: inevitably.
A word is a symbol. What the symbol means is typically a matter of common agreement, either local or general. "Local" agreement can apply a different meaning that is shared only within a select group, such as an academic field. Different fields often use similar terminology differently; when such terminology has specialized significance, we call it "jargon."
It may be that the use of "ethics" to mean something different from "morals" started out as a form of jargon. Whether that jargon was medical or legal, or something else, I really don't know. It could make an entertaining little study project.
If this use of "ethics" was at one time jargon, however, it's crept out of specialized usage into other places, including popular culture. For example:
"Let me be straight about this. I have no morals, but I do have ethics. I can't tell you everything about the work I have accepted from Dr. Kabapu, so please understand." Excel Saga, Vol. 22, pg. 19 (2011).
(This, by the way, is a manga series I recommend highly. It's superb satire, and translated so damned masterfully that I'm willing to wheel out a manga translation as an example of correct contemporary usage. It's THAT GOOD.)
For example, I would argue that the distinction you are making between Eastern and Western philosophy is a false one - there is only philosophy. But the disagreement would, I suspect, be one of definitions.
Possibly. To a degree, all distinctions between fields of thought and study are artificial. That said, the distinction here seems significant to me.
Western moral philosophy has, as I understand and see it, chosen to make a game out of generating dubious and unnecessarily limited moral codes and knocking them down with far-fetched hypotheticals. These make for some excellent jokes and some great anecdotes about things like how to disprove the validity of certain sorts of utilitarianism, but ultimately the only way to win that game is not to play.
As far as I am aware, this field of thought has yet to face, much less cope with, its permanent inability to produce workable theories of rational morality, and is therefore worse than useless, a cultural albatross. Eastern schools of thought generally do not have this problem. That one is rooted, not to say bogged down, in an outdated, mechanistic view of our existence, and the other is not, seems like a useful distinction.
It may seem very arrogant of me to condemn an entire field of thought so freely, but I have enough supposed "expertise" (and the bar card to prove it) to have a strong idea what "expertise" is and what it is worth. To be an expert is to possess a deep, detailed understanding of certain concepts and theories-- that may nevertheless be nonsense at their root. Take for example the economists who insisted before the housing crash, and, in some disturbing cases, continue to insist, that human beings make economic decisions rationally.
To me, Western philosophy, grounded as it is in false assumptions about the nature of human morality and behavior, is a doomed field. IFF it is able to let go of the idea that morality can be reasonably subjected to a logical proof, I may be willing to give it another chance.
As it is, morality appears to fall more into the domain of animal instinct than than of rational thought. The biologists and the psychologists have the ball on this one, maybe with some help from a school of philosophy that never decided that human behavior had to be logical.
It would be as if we were playing separate games of football on nearby fields. We'd both be scoring goals but neither of us would know about it.
This is fixable. It just takes some work to get everybody on the same playing field.
Author
Topic: Let there be WAR! (Read 15843 times)