h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting viewpoint. I was introduced not so long ago to the distinction between morals and ethics. A moral is an absolute, for instance: child abuse is wrong. An ethic is a guiding principle that is up for grabs: torture is wrong, but if it were te only way to get at the location of a terrorist's atom bomb, then we'd sanction its use. Perhaps, as views progress from the individual to society as a whole, morals tend to evolve into ethics, mainly because a discourse can then take place?

To me 'moral statements' and 'ethical statements' are synonymous; any distinction is academic, that is to say, of no practical significance. Following Wittgenstein A1024156 who regarded them (both) as belonging outside rational discourse.

And yet would he have said "Everyone is entitled to their own ethics"? He certainly opposed (angrily) the ethics of Bertrand Russell.

Didn't Russell advocate the nuking of the USSR from a purely utilitarian viewpoint? Then he went and started campaigning against the bomb?

Interesting character.

This whole gun-lobby vs. anti-gun-lobby makes me think of Yeats:
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

I read a biography (vol 1) of Russell by Ray Monk who had done a wonderful bio of Wittgenstein. I found it depressing: the only biography I had come across where the writer had no feeling of fondness for his subject, even after rummaging through all his intimate laundry. Russell felt himself like someone under a curse; he couldn't enjoy fellow-feeling until his own son was born, then he thawed a little.

I would be surprised to hear he advocated nuking the USSR, since he was militantly pacifist (you might say) since the First World War. He went to prison rather than shut up about it -- imagine! Son of a Lord, sent to prison! What larks!

Both Russell and Wittgenstein were among those intellectuals in the thirties who dearly wished the Soviet experiment would work, but while Wittgenstein failed to get a visa to visit Russia, Russell did go there and was instantly and horribly disillusioned.

He went to live in China for a while and should have died from a fever that put him above fatal temperatures, but (presumably having made a pact with the devil) he survived to outlive his pupil Wittgenstein by several decades.

Was he a Good Thing? I don't know. Was Mother Theresa a Good Thing?

He pissed W off so comprehensively that he offered to join a pro-war movement, if one could be found.

[Yes -- that Yeats quote exactly expresses "great disparity of zeal".]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell -- good wiki article on Russell. In which I learn that it was 1920 when he went to the USSR.