Post-Ethics - Beyond or superseding the importance of ethics; ertaining to an era or situation when doing the ethical thing is no longer significant, relevant, or expected.

Breadbassket

Breadbassket

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In a post-ethical world, a zero sum game view of politics or the world is the norm, one side wins absolutely in a situation and the other absolutely loses. Everything is all or nothing and there is no in between. When battle lines are drawn by one side then eventually the other there can be a lot of people saying the other side is bad while ignoring the issues of their own camp intentionally. To acknowledge the problems one side has while being apart of that side can be seen as giving their opposition a victory and can result in being ostracized.

Once an environment of post-ethical conduct has developed it becomes a race to the bottom to see who will resort to going to the next level in order to achieve a victory. "My views are always correct, your views are always wrong" type rhetoric becomes commonplace. Political tribalism is the norm in this situation. Showing you or saying you support a particular cause for social points is something that happens often. Zealot like attitudes over certain things emerge and "the ends justify the means" mindsets appear more. "Us Vs Them" narratives used to maintain unity within certain factions rule the day. Truth becomes a casualty in a situation that resembles a social war in all but name. Political tension is ubiquitous in an era of post-ethics. Radicalization on the side someone likes is ignored while on the other side it is brought up constantly. People will hesitate to date others who don't have the same views or stances they do.

The only way this can be defused is by compromising with your political rivals on issues which would maybe do something but also be suicide since it would upset supporters of a particular thing or by one side totally crushing the other.

Is this new or is it just a phenomenon that appears to happen in deep ideological social divides throughout history? Is it what makes civil wars happen? The cause isn't entirely clear but maybe it has to do education, media and echo-chambers. Who benefits from making a post-ethical climate and who doesn't?
 
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I'd need a more specific definition of what is post ethics. The things mentioned in the article are common bugman thinking and ignoring your own side's shit, and even in the current world there is a strict sense of ethical lines that no one will let you cross unpunished.

The most I can think of in context of "post ethics" is some scifi setting where the traditional set of ethics is rewritten due to advancement in technology. Like the game Cruelty Squad where murder is a non issue since reviving a person is extremely easy.
 
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Post Ethics? Like how?

Ethics will exist one form or another.
 
OP I recommend you read the book Propaganda by Jacque Ellul. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_Men's_Attitudes
It's pretty interesting even if it doesn't apply to our current situation in all cases, but with some creativity you can extrapolate it into our lives. For example, one of the points in the book is that propaganda is only effective if it is maintained as a constant barrage on the subject. He writes that rural folk are harder to propagandize because they don't spend time in the city read pamphlets and getting the propaganda information repeated to them every single day. Now consider how much information people today are able to receive with smart phones, computers, televisions, advertisements, etc.

Ideological nonsense and agitation propaganda is dependent on constant stimulation of the subject and constant reinforcement of the commanded behavior.

Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind may also interest you. He lays out the scientific evidence for people's decision making and judgements about right and wrong. I think he convincingly shows that judgments on ethics or morals are made intuitively by the unconscious and then rationalized afterward. I think this is easy to see once it has been explained. It's also consistent with observable human behavior and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Reason and rationality are simply tools. Instinct, involuntary behavior such as physiological processes (from your heart beat all the way to flight or fight response dumping adrenaline in your body), unconscious decision making, "gut reactions" are all the foundations of survival and reproduction. Every animal and plant has unconscious behavior and physiological processes without rationality and reason. Only humans bother trying to rationalize or explain anything. It is a very underdeveloped faculty compared to every other facet of the human animal and human experience. Much of Nietzsche's work follows a similar track.

tl;dr: ethics, morals, and human behavior are generally unconscious and then people just make up a reason afterward by whatever means is convenient at the time. Reason and rationality CAN be used by certain people to modify their own behavior but this takes a back seat to instinct and unconscious decision making.

I would say we're not in a post-ethical society because there has never really been an ethical society. there have only been societies that supported certain behaviors and suppressed others and the "ethics" or "morals" were just made up afterward to satisfy the vanity and desire to fit in of the people subject to it.
 
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Breadbassket said:
Is this new or is it just a phenomenon that appears to happen in deep ideological social divides throughout history?
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Not new, obviously deeply divided societies, civil strife, etc., has existed for as long as humans have existed. Think about all the religious wars where people killed each other over whatever difference in religious beliefs--the same dynamics were almost certainly at play in those conflicts.

Is it what makes civil wars happen?
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It's part of them no doubt.

The cause isn't entirely clear but maybe it has to do education, media and echo-chambers. Who benefits from making a post-ethical climate and who doesn't?
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My first guess would be to say that it occurs when one group is able to somehow gain at the expense of another via engaging in this type of conflict. In the context of modern America, the beneficiaries have been leftists, and the losers everyone else.

David Brown said:
I would say we're not in a post-ethical society because there has never really been an ethical society. there have only been societies that supported certain behaviors and suppressed others and the "ethics" or "morals" were just made up afterward to satisfy the vanity and desire to fit in of the people subject to it.
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There is definitely some degree of explanatory power to this but I'm not sure if you can completely write off ethics and say that humans are basically the same as animals with no capability for any true moral behavior. There are some developments in human society that are difficult to explain under such a framework. For example, why don't men simply keep women as sex slaves/breeding vessels? Why bother treating them as equals, or even as anything other than subservient sex objects? Men certainly could put women in this position, if they all wanted to badly enough, and in history something like this has been closer to the norm than it is today. If we disallow moral/ethical developments as any kind of consideration, why has the treatment of women changed so much over time?
 
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Breadbassket said:
The only way this can be defused is by compromising with your political rivals on issues which would maybe do something but also be suicide since it would upset supporters of a particular thing or by one side totally crushing the other.
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Nah, these things run in cycles.

I was personally pretty stoked to see this package of 150 items pass in a bipartisan select committee:

 
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