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Comment by Fins | Hacker News Reader

You can't enforce ethical standards.

I thought dumb college kids were all leftie Bernie supporters; being a libertarian takes slightly more intelligence than a belief that somebody will come and regulate everything perfectly for you.

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Sure you can. Ask every lawyer or stockbroker that can no longer work in their field due to shady or illegal behavior.

illegal

It's legal standards that are being enforced, not ethical. Whether those standards coincide with ethical ones is completely another issue.

Ethical codes aren't legal standards for professional organizations. You can be disbarred for legal but unethical actions

Being a libertarian does not take much intelligence. It however seems to be correlated with a lot of arrogance and with overblown ego.

Kinda like being vegan, liberal, or conservative. Everyone is just being tribalistic and petty.

Yes. But libertarians are more likely to claim that being libertarian is proof of their higher intelligence. As parent did.

Not at all, but that’s definitely a cheap and easy shortcut to giving ourselves license to sink to the lowest common denominator. Don’t sell everyone short based on the actions and attitudes of the loudest.

That goes for blindly following any ideology.

The Bar in every state, the AMA, the APA, and many other bodies enforce ethical standards.

They enforce rules of that association. Which may or may not be based on ethical standards.

They call them ethical standards, and if you’re being reduced to a purely semantic argument, why not just pack it in?

That's a pretty important semantic distinction -- are you enforcing ethical standards (and I don't think anyone can force somebody to be a good person), or are you enforcing laws or rules?

If the same association, in the fifties, excluded black members, would you say that the standards they were enforcing at the time were ethical?

Are you making the argument that ethical progress is not possible?

Not really. I am arguing that what can be enforced, either by state or by an organization, are laws for the former and rules/bylaws/etc for the latter. Which may or may not be ethical.

Maybe I _am_ splitting it a bit too finely, but I just don't see ethical norms (which do change over time) as something being enforceable.

Unless you’re offering a similarly objectionable issue with current ethical standards, you’re playing word games instead of a real argument.

Which is obnoxious.

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