Is it ethical to spend money for personal entertainment?

Post Reply New Topic

That has never been the question in this thread. You are not asked to chose between spending money on entertainment and "just handing out money". Your handing out can be as targeted as you like. If your ethics entail a duty to help others when you can do that at comparatively little cost to yourself, and if your resources are limited, then your duty to help also includes a duty to be as efficient as you can.


And that teaching, or providing the means by which he can take care for of himself, often needs money. That way of helping would be far more efficient than just handing out money.

How do your ethical principles value spending $X on entertainment versus spending $X on helping a man to take care of himself?


The same is true if someone else spends that money instead of you. If you help people to support themselves, their purchases help support others, so your money will have a greater effect than if those same people starve or barely subsist on handouts.


Who has talked of compulsion? What compulsion is there in anything here except for whatever you feel your ethical principles compel you to do? We are not talking about taxing you and redistributing the money. The question is what you think the ethical choice is.

The original question already presupposes that you own the resources you spend. Taxes don't come into it. What do your ethical principles have to say about a situation where you can offer a very large benefit to someone else at comparatively little cost to you?

Here is another thought experiment. You see someone being stabbed. You rush over to help, but the victim dies. When the police arrive, they find you with blood on your hands and your fingerprints on the knife. You're an aspie, someone strange, and they are only too glad to keep the case simple and don't look for any other suspect. I have witnessed the scene, but no one has noticed me. Do I have a duty to help you by coming forward as a witness? The interview will cost me some time that I could spend on entertaining myself. Or I may lose some earnings if I have to come in during my working hours. If I don't pay that cost you face a long prison term or even the death penalty. What is the ethical choice for me? Would you say I have every right to walk away?

Actually, I would. I might say it wasn't ethical to do so, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that you're obligated to come forward. I'm also not under the illusion that there are not costs involved with freedoms and liberties, so I have a fairly pragmatic view of such things.

Well, I am not sure that destroying the entertainment industry would make for a strong enough case that this is wrong. I mean, the people who need charity most really are people who are off the economic grid anyway, and thus don't really benefit a lot from the entertainment industry. Even if we promoted moderation, it still would seem as if it would be strained rather heavily towards giving away given that the benefits of not dying usually exceed that provided by most entertainment, as happiness levels have not risen anywhere close to the same rate as income, but presumably each person benefits from a year of living.

That being said, I am cynical towards Kantian ethics. In response to the criticism of giving everything you own to charity, I would put forward a few ideas:
1) Having more moral desires is more moral, that is to say that a human being's end should be to treat themselves as a means to an end for morality. Otherwise, we have to say that supererogatory acts exist, and I tend to be skeptical of that.
2) All of Gromit's points seem rather valid in terms of how I would intuitively think about things.

Kant's philosophy is mostly bogus. You are better off following Hume than Kant.

ruveyn

Ethically, I see no difference, but then again, I'm not wealthy enough to say I'm pouring money down the drain that could help others. To buy myself a new pickup truck is one thing. To buy myself a luxury yacht because I'm filthy rich would be a different matter. The latter reflects a level of resource I simply don't have, and I've always held that if I came into an insane amount of money, most of it would be funneled into trusts for worthy needs. I simply don't need that much money to be "happy."

I do not see it as evil to want to spend what you worked hard to earn on yourself.



Well, I see compulsion because the idea of feeling guilty or hypocritical for spending money on yourself and not others is a form of coercion.

In Christian principle, charity is a big deal, but the Bible is clear that God wants man to give out of a cheerful heart...not because it's some cold demand from above. Even when the Holy Spirit struck a husband and wife dead in the book of Acts, the truth is that they were stuck down for LYING about their giving, and not because they chose to keep half of what they got when they sold property for the new church. The money was theirs to do with as they saw fit, but they wanted the acclaim for giving ALL of it when they really had kept half of it for themselves.

There is a lot of "guilt" flung about to pressure people into giving to charities, and that is a form of coercion in my view.

I'm very sorry, but I can't escape the impression that you're mostly bogus yourself, sir. Simply pontificating that philosopher X is better than philosopher Y is nowhere near the true spirit of philosophy, and almost always seems to be the hallmark of an inferior mind. I can see merit in the work of all great philosophers, including Hume and Kant, even though I agree more with some than I do with others. To dismiss Kant's noble edifice of thought as mere bogus is not only an insult to the intellects of all sincere students of Kant, it's also petty and immature.

I definitely agree that not-dying is normally more of a benefit than merely being entertained. But I don't think things are quite as black-and-white as you're suggesting. As a minor point: not all the money donated to charity is able to directly prevent someone from dying; that would be a far too idealistic point of view. More important though is the question of quality-of-life. Is it really preferable to stay alive just barely at the subsistence level without the joys of music and other arts to lighten the sometimes unbearable dullness of existence. Most immigrants from really poor countries I know really love music and dancing themselves, and I do not doubt that some of the more artistically-minded of them would rather be dead than to have no money at all to spend on the beautiful things in life.

1) Why shouldn't there be supererogatory acts? Giving a present to my neighbor on her birthday (even though I don't know her well) is a morally positive act (in that it gives her joy), but it could hardly be considered a moral duty.

2) While I wouldn't say that moral intuitions don't count for anything (they are indeed rather important in cases where decisions have to be made rapidly), I'm rather skeptical whether they're really useful guiding instruments in complicated matters such as this one.

Worthy of life topic

I would jump in, after I called for assistance, and surveyed the area for dangers to me.

I have assisted before, using these guidelines. Maybe I am selfish but I feel good about helping.

A rationally selfish motive. Go for it!

ruveyn

Not all money has to be able to directly prevent somebody from dying, but when you give money to a charity, it is distributed to the various needs of the organization, which can include things such as aid, but also things that are needed to maintain the organization. Frankly, when thinking about giving, the effective good the resources will do is likely very important, and the effective good of a lot of the resources shifted will actually be dramatic improvement in the quality of life of other people.


Most things aren't that expensive. Music is cheap and mass produced. Just having an internet connection provides access to all of the entertainment needed. A television is cheap. Books are cheap as well, especially ordered off of Amazon.


Well, for one, from what I hear, Kant himself rejected the idea regarding moral value only found in duty.

Even further though, a definition for "good" could be "that which ought to be done", or "the right thing". If there is no reason why one ought to do something/it isn't really more correct to do it, then how can it really be good? No motivational force, and a choice as valid as other choices. If there is reason to do something, then one ought to do it, and thus it should be done.

If we reject supererogation, we must also accept that there are greater goods than moral good, and that it is morally permissible to sacrifice what is good for that which is not morally good. This seems questionable to me given that if goodness relates to any duty, then good cannot be traded off, and if good can be traded off for non-morally good things, then what is the line between supererogation and normal morality? If such a line can't effectively be drawn, then we have problems of making all good things supererogatory and thus destroying goodness.


Umm..... so you want to work on a problem outside of the set of intuitions you have about it? I tend to be more of an intuitionist in the sense that I regard all of our philosophical beliefs to be the result of one intuition or another, and that philosophy is a trade-off of intuitions. As such, I can't make sense of your point. What are you suggesting? Reason itself can't get us far enough because reason cannot create its own premises out of thin air.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 28 Apr 2010, 1:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

No, Hume was mathematically proven to be better than Kant 4 years ago. The proof was clever, innovative, highly distrusted, but now the profession is coming to accept what happened.

Yes, but that's basically communism applied internationally. Or am I seeing this in a wrong way?


Exactly. But the question at hand is: 'Is it ethical to spend money on entertainment?" I think it's perfectly ethical to spend money on entertainment, precisely because most of it is inexpensive, and thus buying a DVD or a book now and then doesn't impair one's ability to give to charity in any serious way. What I protest to is some people's fanatical insistence that all one's free income should go to charity and none of it to entertainment. For this would, in all fairness, also have to apply (though perhaps not to the same extent) to those receiving charity themselves, as soon as they're just a bit above subsistence level. At worst, this would result in everyone living exactly at subsistence level - not a very desirable situation I think. At best, it would result in a massive redistribution of wealth, with everyone receiving roughly the same amount of wealth. This is too close to communism for my comfort, but you may disagree according to your "moral taste". (I don't mean taste to be derogatory, I think everyone has an innate sense of taste when it comes to morality.)


I don't get you here. In my definition a supererogatory act is an act which is morally good, yet cannot be considered an absolute duty. It is an act, so to say, beyond the call of duty. I'm a bit puzzled as to why some people have difficulties accepting the existence of such acts. To me, it's sort of intuitively obvious that they do exist. Look, Mother Theresa did more morally good acts than I ever will do (probably), but that doesn't mean that I have neglected my duties as a morally good person. We can't all be expected to be saints, I think.



You're right about our principles being more or less grounded in intuition. Pure reason cannot establish that one system of ethics is better than another, just like pure reason cannot decide that Euclidean geometry is in some way superior to Hyperbolic geometry. But once we have our principles, I consider it very much in the true spirit of philosophy to deduce all the duties which may follow from these principles by means of pure reason. Yes, it is intuitively obvious that Pythagoras' theorem is true, but I'd rather see Euclid's beautiful proof than to trust my own, falible, geometric intuitions. By the same token, I think the categorical imperative, once agreed upon, is a beautiful means of deducing morally good actions without having to resort to "women's magazine ethics", i.e., a bunch of "obvious" moral intuitions gift-wrapped as lifestyle advice.

The concept of the apodictic synthetic a priori is incoherent. This is the major premise of The Critique of Pure Reaons. Given that the synthetic a priori is bogus Kant's Critique of Pure Reason comes crashing to the ground.

On other grounds Kant was unsound. He asserted that geometry was true as a syntehtic a priori. In Kant's day there geometry meant geometry as Euclid formulated it. We now have many geometries (non-Euclidean) that are as consistent as Euclid's geometry and are contrary to Euclid.

In addition Kant asserted that physics as Newton formulated it was true as a synthetic a priori. But we now know Newtonian physics is false. It has been falsified empirically.

In short Kant is bogus.

ruveyn

Now we're talking!

While I agree that Kant was rather misguided (or just plain unlucky) in his choice of examples of a priori synthetic knowledge, I don't see how this invalidates the concept itself. (And that's when I don't even consider the issue whether non-Euclidean geometries and Relativity truly refute Kant's conceptions of space and time.) Besides, your assertion of the falsehood of Newtonian physics is very crude at best. It is incomplete in some fundamental respects, but that doesn't make it false.

Your examples only show that most modern philosophy needs science to guide it now and then, as in Comte's assertion (in the 1840s or 50s I believe) that the internal constitution of stars is an example of unattainable knowledge of the natural world - but then astronomical spectrography came along, etc. Still it's quite possible that Comte was right in asserting that knowledge of certain facts about the natural world may be ultimately unattainable.

Newton's laws of gravitation incorrectly predicts the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. This is a matter of empirical fact. Newton's law of gravitation is WRONG.

Furthermore Newtonian momentum is not conserved, relativistic momentum is.

Furthermore space is not flat-Euclidean as Newton supposed but is curved.

Furthermore time is not absolute as Newton supposed. The dilation of time and contraction of distance has been verified empirically.

Lets see you set a record for how many wrong things you can say.

ruveyn