#ETHICS

[jade-lunar]

Do you have principles? Is this economy?

[savagechickens]

Remember.

[suliqyre]

There are moments when you must ignore the rules in order to do what is right. You must keep this in mind, lest you adopt the false belief that you are always constrained by the rules. If you believe this, you might do wrong by quietly following the rules instead of doing the right thing, which also happens to be forbidden.

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[shedoesntevengohier]

(Catholics don’t do divine command theory, right, that’s some evangelicals? Do Catholics do the ‘God would not tell you to do something wrong, that is just not a thing that would happen’? Or something else?)

Anyway, wow Vincent is perfect for the kind of story of,

God tells Vincent to do something which is wrong. (Yes literally God in this one, I’m not sure what kind of story like that this is but it is).

Vincent: I acknowledge Your ownership of every part of me and that You can do as You will with me. I love and honor and bow to You. And I’m not going to do that.

(God: 💙)

(This is a test of Abraham type of thing where him actually doing the wrong thing was never an outcome that was going to happen or supposed to, but seeing what he would do if told to was.)

[palatablepain]

back in the day, the only issues that affected you were ones you knew. silence was much more complicit back then

now, you know about issues that don't affect you.

Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.

[prokopetz]

I do enjoy how taking a milquetoast "everything is okay as long as it's not hurting anyone!" axiom as your ethical starting point inevitably leads to litigating the definition of harm like we're a bunch of Three Laws compliant robots. Like, it's absolutely not productive, but it appeals to me aesthetically.

[himmurf]

It's worth noting that Lae'zel could have combat related PTSD which can result in only feeling "normal" and "in control" in combat environments but dysfunction in non-combat environments.

If you want to know my thoughts on the disabilities of The Dark Urge, check out this reblog:

CW vilified fantasy disability. SPOILERS for The Dark Urge.

“gale is disabled with chronic pain” i say into the mic. the crowd boos and jeers.

“no she’s right” a voice calls from the back. i look up. it’s gale dekarios himself.

[philosophybits]

Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

François de La Rochefoucauld, Moral Reflections

[girlfishes]

One of the ways in which modern liberalism goes wrong in ethics is its singular focus on consent. Don’t get me wrong, consent is always necessary is any type of relation or exchange between individuals, but it isn’t sufficient.

This is why modern liberals will see nothing wrong with bdsm, pornography, surrogacy, or cosmetic surgery. “If both parties consent, then what’s the problem?�� they’ll say.

There needs to be ethical standards for how we treat other people, regardless of if individuals think they are worthy of being treated by those standards. This concept is already recognized in most legal systems. If I sign a form saying that you can kill me whenever you feel like it, you would still be culpable for murder if you followed through.

Women are the ones who lose out when this concept is not applied. We have been conditioned to believe that we are not worthy of being treated right, so we allow others to take advantage of us. Consent being by the only moral consideration people care about takes advantage of this fact.

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)

[incognitopolls]

Based on this post.

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[nando161mando]

[clandestinegardenias]

Okay fine. I teach an ethics course and I just keep seeing all of this discourse on whether or not to vote in the upcoming US presidential election and I just wanted to lay a few things out here.

People who are saying they will abstain from voting because they see voting for anyone as supporting/endorsing genocide are operating from a Rights Theory perspective.

Basically, Rights Theory posits that you should never take any action that could violate someone else’s rights. EVER. The balance of benefits and harms does not matter. There is NOTHING that can justify taking away the right to, for example, life.

And I think that’s where these anti-voting folks are predominantly coming from. They see voting as endorsing/enabling genocide, full stop, and therefore it is morally indefensible EVEN IF IT WILL RESULT IN LESS OVERALL HARM.

People who are arguing that you SHOULD vote, and vote for Biden specifically, are operating from a Utilitarian Theory perspective.

Utilitarianism is all about balancing benefits and harms, and essentially prioritizing overall harm reduction. They recognize the harm the system is creating, but are willing to participate in the system because through doing so they can ensure that various harms are minimized--certainly not eliminated, but reduced, and, importantly, made easier to eliminate eventually.

Through utilitarianism, we can actually make people's fundamental rights EASIER to defend! But a lot of people are so caught up in the idea of moral purity, and Rights Theory, that they're willing to let their inaction erode people's rights because at least they aren't actively participating in the system. (they are still passively participating, however, and we can argue about inaction being a form of action, but I digress)

Point being, VOTE. Because of Utilitarianism, but also because, if you believe in the inalienability of people's fundamental rights? Voting will make it much easier to protect those in the long term, and that's frankly more important than you getting to feel exempt from an exploitative system you are nonetheless inherently a part of and complicit in.

[gwydionmisha]

It's an ethics AND a safety issue. Trump is planning to stop crash/safety reporting Musk's cars.

A more graphic explanation of why we need to monitor this. (Shows crashed cars, but not the bodies). It's from that time Tesla did deadly beta testing that killed and injured a bunch of people.

Some of these are mostly focused on the national security implications of Musk, SpaceX, and Starlink, but the conflict of interest over things like Self driving cars matter too. It's a fundamental problem that Trump is basically letting Elon Musk make so many decisions for his own benefit.

[o-craven-canto]

Even in a purely, coldly utilitarian moral system, there are three questions to ask before accepting harmful or destructive Means because they ostensibly lead to a better End:

Do the Means lead to some other negative End, in addition to the intended one? The classical example of the naïve utilitarian doctor who kills a patient in order to harvest their organs and save five patients, in practice, if accepted, leads to general loss of trust in doctors and hospitals and therefore to much greater loss of life; hence, doctors should follow a hard rule of not killing patients to harvest their organs, even if this might save more lives in the shortest term.

Are the Means necessary in order to achieve the End? The negative utility of atrocious Means still ends up in the final account along with the supposed positive utility of the End (and without the penalty for uncertainty that the latter should arguably be given). The Means are as much part of the final state as the End.

Do the Means, in fact, lead to the End? Any consequentialist justification for an atrocity-for-the-greater-good automatically fails if the atrocity does not plausibly bring out the greater good, even before any other consideration is taken. It's all well and good to say that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but (ignoring for the moment that people are arguably owed more consideration than eggs) a large chunk of the 20th century was a sustained and furious festival of egg-crushing and egg-trampling that resulted in precisely zero omelettes.