Are All Net Causes Incomplete?
Today, a colleague of mine brought up an interesting question. He was considering a problem at work, and asked basically, 'if you could do better quality work, and it wouldn't make a clearly perceivable difference to your employer, would you still do a "good" job?'
This question seemed to me a matter of cause an effect. When we consider a moral or ethical question philosophically, we often find tallying up and weighing the implications of 'what will be the cause of this or that action' to be the best way to make a decision. It seems that all these causes can be reduced to 'net causes,' in the sense that in any course of actions one can imagine reducing causes to a still smaller group of interactions that tend to weigh towards a singular definition.
It seems apparent that all causes are like this, and that this would require an ever-present element of skepticism to any morally clear action such as this. In this sense the difference my colleague was speaking of would be a tertiary quality and incomplete or ill-defined by a set of net causes. Would you agree?
This question seemed to me a matter of cause an effect. When we consider a moral or ethical question philosophically, we often find tallying up and weighing the implications of 'what will be the cause of this or that action' to be the best way to make a decision. It seems that all these causes can be reduced to 'net causes,' in the sense that in any course of actions one can imagine reducing causes to a still smaller group of interactions that tend to weigh towards a singular definition.
It seems apparent that all causes are like this, and that this would require an ever-present element of skepticism to any morally clear action such as this. In this sense the difference my colleague was speaking of would be a tertiary quality and incomplete or ill-defined by a set of net causes. Would you agree?
Comments (4)
To do otherwise would be to drown all mystery in probabilities, the chances that something were to be beneficial to company trumping any alternate cause. The proposition gets around this by using the cause itself as a sum total of alternate causes like below:
EVENT GOOD WORK (cause)---> NO FINANCIAL IMPACT (effect)-----> OBSERVATION (effect)
changes to
EVENT GOOD WORK {INCREASING SKILLS, SETTING EXAMPLE TO OTHER EMPLOYEES, OTHER PEOPLE, etc}---> CLIENT SATISFIED, END USER EXPERIENCE IMPROVED, MORE LONG TERM BUSINESS, WORSE TIME MANAGEMENT, etc -----> OBSERVATION
Another equivalent would be
TEST EXPERIMENT COMPLETE (cause) ----> KILL TEST RAT POPULATION (effect) ----> NO PERCEIVED PROBLEM (effect)
changes to
TEST EXPERIMENT COMPLETE---> KILL TEST RATS {cause rats pain in death, reduce empathy towards animals and humans through some real factor, etc}---> TEST EXPERIMENTS LOSE GOAL OF GREATER GOOD DUE TO REDUCED OVERALL EMOTIONAL RESPONSE
When I am adding in these new details they too are based on the same physical phenomena that generated the cause that was a pure and acceptable reasoning. To express the cause in terms of their net effects, these internal forces were filtered out. These are the kinds of reasons that in the real world usually make people say "Are you serious? Give me a Break!" The question was, is it worthwhile to bother considering them?