"Ethicists say voting with your heart, without a care about the consequences, is actually immoral"

QUARTZ:   “The purpose of voting is not to express your fidelity to a worldview. It’s not to wave a flag or paint your face in team colors; it’s to produce outcomes,” says Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown University and author of The Ethics of Voting. “If they’re smart, they’ll vote for the candidate likely to best produce the outcome they want. That might very well be compromising, but if voting for a far-left or far-right candidate means that you’re just going to lose the election, then you’ve brought the world further away from justice rather than closer to it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, says it’s important for voters to balance their principles with the consequences of their actions. He suggests creating an equation to multiply how much one favors a candidate by that candidate’s chances of having a positive impact. (read the whole thing)

"Judge orders entire DOJ to remedial don't-lie-to-me class over WH executive amnesty case"

Washington Examiner:  A federal judge has ordered annual ethics classes for Justice Department attorneys as a punishment for being "intentionally deceptive" during litigation over President Obama's executive immigration orders.

"Such conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word 'Justice,'" U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen wrote in a withering order released Thursday.

Justice Department attorneys misled the court about when the Department of Homeland Security would begin implementing President Obama's executive order granting "deferred action" to illegal immigrants whose children are citizens. In doing so, they tricked the 26 states who filed a lawsuit into "foregoing a request for a temporary restraining order," according to the judge. (read more)

When Following The Law is Dangerous

"As it turns out, humans are kind of terrible at that. Which is a real problem for robot-cars."

One of the biggest obstacles currently facing researchers is the fact that driverless cars are engineered to always follow the law. So human drivers, who obviously don’t do the same, keep crashing into them when they’re “moving too slow” — AKA actually doing the speed limit.

As a result, according to a recent report from Bloomberg, driverless cars are now seeing a crash rate twice as high as cars with humans at the wheel. The report notes that they’re all “minor scrape-ups for now”, that they’re always the human-driver’s fault (usually human drivers hit the slower-moving computer-driven cars from behind), and that none of these accidents have caused any injuries.

But now researchers have to decide whether driverless cars should be taught how to break the law in small ways — like humans so often do — in order to make sure that they can safely do things like merge with high-speed highway traffic. Which gets into some murky ethical territory.

Mary the panhandler

Long story shortened: I had the little-old-lady shopping cart when entering the bottleshop by the backdoor, having used the little blue cart to haul an oversized load of trash directly to the dumpsters outside.

Lurch was on the telephone. I stocked up on cold beer, the kind I recently discovered that I like, and the usual 12-pack of Coke. I was just in time too because Lurch hung up the phone quite cross about a package being misdelivered. He must close shop now and hasten down there and rush back. We walked out the front door together onto Broadway.

Immediately we two were approached by a woman who appeared to be in waiting, and appeared to be native. Lurch addressed her directly. "We're closed for a moment. I must go down there and check something." The woman spoke sweetly, haltingly, timidly,
"Do you guys have fifty-seven cents? I only want a beer and I need fifty-seven cents." Now Lurch snapped, "No panhandling in front of the store" and sped down the street.

The woman turned away dejected. I started off in the direction of Lurch where I would tuck into my entrance before his return, then halted before taking a second step. I have a cart with two cold six-packs of premium beer that I like, my favorite types that I just now discovered since the story back then about the Belgium town that named a beer for American soldier Vince Sperancza of 101 Airborne, and designed ceramic mugs in the shape of army helmets to serve it. I tried a lot of beers with silly names and labels with fantastic individual character. Even Colorado beers have become quite interesting. Sold at premium beer prices everything I've tried so far, pretty much, is worth it. Beer seems inexpensive. Compared to everything else. Come on. I don't even drink most of it. I decided to keep some cold for emergencies, for unexpected things, and it worked. I offer beer to people all the time. And it is good tasting beer too, a topic of conversation. There I am out on a main street of town with a cart of bottles of beer, a very cross Lurch down the street, and a distressed woman short mere cents in immediate want.

"Hey, come 'ere."

Damn, she's agile.

"Wass'yur name?"

"Mary." 

"I'm Chip. You got a bottle opener?"

"What?"

"Do you have a bottle opener?"

"I can open one with a lighter."

Clever girl. I would like to see that. "Here. Mary, you are really going to like this beer." 

Back home, I haven't put the bottles away yet, every time I walk past and see the two untended six packs with an empty slot I think of Mary and her delightfully round face lighting up at having a beer passed to her like that following such a sharp rebuke from Lurch, the big meanie who is always so serious.

I must also recall the Denver architect, among the most impressively ironclad liberal and politically active persons that I know, declaiming moralistically and ethically about how he will not give cash to bums because they'll go immediately and spend it on liquor anyway. I told him that I sure get my share of free drinks, and much of that from people I don't know all that well. We were at such a gathering at the time, the host and hostess hired a bartender. He agreed when you travel in the right circles you do get a lot of free drinks, I respond poorly to that type of thinking and my impulse was argue about traveling in circles but the point was made and ever since then I've tried to broaden my circles or else increase them. I don't feel bad at all for contributing to the delinquency of a minority, in fact I feel good about it, besides, Jesus told me to stop being such a dick. 

Hey-sus, the guy on the building department crew.

I think that empty beer six-pack slot is funny. Lurch would not approve, and that makes it even more funny, in fact, I am leaving the beer out just so I can see the empty slot more. 

ESPN: "Where is the ethical line between advantage play and cheating?"

"[N]o one should feel extreme sympathy for losing gamblers. In all cases, they have no one to blame but themselves, as they could have walked away at any time. They are complicit in this transaction."

But casinos also have an obligation in this agreement. They get to create the game and set the rules -- all of the rules. They can refuse service to you. They can kick you out. They can change the rules of the game. They have all the power. What they don't ever say explicitly is that in their minds, part of this agreement is that you (the gambler) will lose.

So when someone figures out how to beat the game that they created, how can that be unethical? (read the whole thing)

"What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on?"

"In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle’s insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic—it’s credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they’ll fit into those categories."

The Six Things That Make Stories Go Viral Will Amaze, and Maybe Infuriate, You