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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: spiral3 who wrote (70790)	6/4/2008 10:43:33 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542957

Automatically. Really ? I'm saying it's the path to effective results. Of course, the course is not always successfully completed. But trying to get there without a solid methodology is not remotely reliable. If your point is that ethics are not a guarantee of outcomes in the conventional sense, I take it, but this does not contradict their ultimate importance as the first step towards skillful action. I see ethics informing the objectives and constraints. And I see ethics keeping the analysts honest. But having a rigorous, objective methodology is the key. The mind becomes very agitated without an ethical foundation. Sorry, but I find it hard to believe that you need ethics to focus. Focus takes clarity and discipline, IMO. Imagine if those guys deciding on the worlds 10 biggest problems didn't have a common ethical basis. I can imagine it just fine. They need in common a commitment to collaborate in meeting the objective and enough maturity to play nicely in groups. And they need a good facilitator. <gg> Engaging in that sort of operations assumes that the parties may have very differing perspectives, perhaps differing ethical bases. You want a mix of people. Otherwise you'd save yourself the overhead and just make up the list yourself. As for "deciding on the worlds 10 biggest problems," that's not quite what they did. They came up with a list of the most cost effective actions that could be taken to mitigate the problems. They had methodology, objective methodology. They used cost/benefit analysis as at least part of their analytical methodology and a consensus building methodology for operating jointly, to come up with the list. Do you think you could put a bunch of people who shared an ethical base in a room but had no methodology and they would come up with something like that? They'd still be sitting there holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Which I suppose is better than sitting there yapping randomly at each other, but no closer to product.