Society Ethics Philosophy
Society has many problems. They have existed from the past. Some problems would be the same as people made a very long time ago or different because of the high-tech society. As people make more gizmos, I can feel my values and concepts are gradually changing. Like what I feel, ethics as our basic mental boundary has been changing since we made machines. What society has been making causes people to be hard to hit mentally or psychologically. This result is caused by two things: development of materialism and the Internet. Because of these two most people naturally change their concepts and values.
Ethics is a major branch of philosophy, but it is not a simple part of study. It has influenced millions of years of our lives and it is going to do in the future. This important philosophy has changed into a very selfish way. Some say it is a logical conclusion of individualism and it is probably a good idea (McCormick, 2007, P.570). However this is only a theory, not a confirmed truth. I think changing ethics of people is not due to individualism but due to society. The entire social system does not make all the problems we now can see; at least it is the biggest part of our errors.
People desire to make convenient things such as levers, cultivation skills, or making houses. For these skills, people could stay in one region and keep living there until they were conquered. In this process people bought or sold their products made by hand. A village would be grow bigger and bigger. People would come around and settled down. People could not barter neighbor to neighbor, so they needed a place to barter their things. This was called the “Market”. The market was an important place because of the location. It was usually placed in an intersection where people went and came very often. Because of the location people could easily come there. Because the number of people and the market was growing, a new type of people appeared.
A merchant was a professional who traded and dealt with commodities that they did not produce. People who were engaged in the barter system concentrated on their own work and the merchant class substituted. Development of the merchant class required people to make a new system. Money was substituted for whatever they used as currency. The appearance of currency made many changes. The power then moved to money gradually. People who sold many products or made good-quality products earned lots of fortune. The demand for the product increased, and merchants had to sell more products than in the past. They realized that hand-made products had a certain limit to fit a demand, so they tried to make an apparatus that helped produce products.
The machine that made a product continuously invoked materialism. More products mean more fortune. Merchants who had a lot of capital controlled the majority part of society. They, for example, bought the nobility from a poor noble and applied the law for their trading advantages. Some nobles and merchants made an agreement to support each other. The noble had political power, but did not have much money to encourage their public pledge. Merchants had a lot of money, so the two classes added up their power to gain what they needed. As their power was growing, the quality of money also grew because the price of products was gradually increased by merchants. However, people who had capital were few, and the majority of people worked for a capitalist. This is called the “80 to 20 percent rule.” It indicates people who have something are only a few, but people who do not have are many. Not only money but something else that can create fortune controls people in this situation. This phenomenon enlarges the word “materialism”.
Materials that would be money are the power of human life and everything related to power. This philosophy is based on defending your belongings, whether it was a person or thing. It got broader, person to person, so people were controlled by money or temporarily pursued benefits that made them selfish. Many people conflicted their own values in this process. Their past values were not so harsh for their neighbor, but their present values were too harsh for their friends for protecting their own things whether it was money or not. This harshness finally met the ethics problem.
Most of the country has experienced the industrialization through two centuries passed. The big social wave brought us some disadvantages and advantages, and now we face another type of wave as big as industrialization. It is the ‘third wave': the information revolution (Toffler). The revolution is based on the Internet. It is the most powerful network in the entire world and well-connected to every corner of the world. It gives us the new world in a computer and we can live another life on the “net”. We can surf the net searching for sources or playing games. This world-wide network gradually grows up very fast and encroaches on our computer territory.
The Internet has appeared too fast, so a side effect also appeared very fast. For the Internet we can easily get sources or information that could not be easy to access before the net. Nevertheless, as we can see, copying or plagiarism is much easier. Social flow changes a little strangely. Plagiarism does not make feel people ashamed but instead they are proud of the ability for how they find information well and quickly. Surveys revealed wide-scale plagiarism in high schools and colleges, and the Internet has created new ethical challenges; allowing individuals to both spread suppressed truths and invented falsehoods. For example, in 1998 Stephen Glass, a writer for the New Republic, admitted that he falsified many of his stories, inventing quotations, people, and events (Dowd.1998.Vol 37). In 2003 Jayson Blair and several senior editors resigned from the New York Times after it was discovered that Blair had fictionalized news reports. It illuminates the important fact. The press, which gives clear news to the public, is infected with cheating. We can not have anything to believe in 100 %. These papers were not on the net, but most of big press have begun an Internet webpage service. The reader also exists on the net, so it can be a big problem. As these revolutions have come up over two centuries, human values also have been changed by changing social flows. Patrick McCormick (2003) said: “our cheating is the logical conclusion of individualism run amok. When we cheat, we act as if we were alone in the universe, as if the rules that oblige everyone else to play fair did not apply to us. When we cheat, we behave as if we were free to ignore the covenants that tether us to the rest of humanity”(p. 570). It has a persuasion, but it is not true, I believe.
Cheating is committed by people. Moreover, it is usually their will. Although it is purposed by one person, society has a responsibility. If there is another system that restrains currency, we could encounter another world whether it is better than today or not. In any case, cheating seems a virtue for success; people's values have been gradually changing. A survey of 2,100 students from 21 colleges found that 75 percent had cheated the previous year. In another survey, 41 percent admitted to plagiarizing Internet sources. We do not have a private space for the internet. We have a blog that shares our lives, but some try to know another's password and enter their blog as if it is theirs.
These two rapid revolutions make us to change. The changing society demand people to obey its law. If people do not have enough money or power, it seems to push us poor world. Although being poor is not bad for someone who embraces it, we do not make a living with only a small amount of money. As time goes by, society lusts for money or other people's things such as private secrets or powers. People who live in such dirty world accept the whole change and try to adapt it. Our mind is selfish and defensive, and we do not care about other people's privacy or the truth. What we care adjust in destroyed ethics. Real ethics is to help and live with each other, and revive the word ‘welfare and well-being'. What we now can do is an approach to ethical questions that is not to open the objections raised against the methods considered so far. What requirements would someone have to meet to make an ideal moral judgment? By its very nature ideal moral judgment is just that-an ideal. No one ever has or ever will completely meet all the requirements set forth in the ideal. But that does not make it irrational to strive to come as close as possible to fulfilling it. Even though we can not make the perfect judge by true ethics, we can try and try again (Moore, 2005, p. 44).The first step is harder than just walking. We act from such a small one, and it could make a big change that we cannot imagine now.
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