User:Fasten/YHVH/Misplaced Concepts

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[edit] veterinarian

A veterinarian is "an academic ^[1] person with an animal friendly attitude visiting farmers and slaughterhouses". So far the concept isn't flawed. The flaw is that the reason for visiting is not to protect and care for the animals as an end but as a means to exploit and finally consume the animals.

^[1] academic probably translates to enlightened or "of high social status", with social status defined as personal ethics.

[edit] requiem

In a requiem the priest elaborates on the deceased's good deeds or positive traits. That translates to "When somebody is dead you want to keep track of his or her traits or deeds". Remembering the positive traits of somebody who is actually dead is a nice sentimental behaviour but serves no further purpose.¹ Also keeping track of actions guided by emotional motivation is less sensible than keeping track of the declared ethics of a person and putting that in relation to his or her actual deeds.

A track record of good deeds or adherance to high ethics could be an indicator for social status². One possible choice to accomplish this is to ask people to describe their personal ethics in a journal and also to describe changes to personal ethics over time.³

¹) The act of burying the dead in new furniture that is especially manufactured for that purpose is also not very sensible, by the way.

²) Thereby buying expensive products that carry trademarks could also be a limited indicator of social status, only the trademarks would have to be guarantees of fair trade, environmental safety and so on, not indicators for spending money for advertisement and unnecessary short product cycles.

³) An attempt to write an open source personal ethics review software can be found here. A piece of software is much more suitable to record and publish personal ethics (similar to a Blog) because of the general availability of the information.

[edit] tax advisor

A possible complement of a tax advisor could be an advisor who verifies and certifies redistribution of excess money or payment of a voluntary wealth_tax and who also gives advice on how to maintain ethics on a level above the law, not very slightly below the law (which is supposedly not uncommon ^[1]). A tax advisor would thereby become a tax advisor. A tax advisor also has insight into the expenses of an individual, which, with proper expense categorization and information on the companies that offered products or services would allow him or her to authenticate adherance to ethical consumption rules, even beyond what was spent with a (possible) ethical currency card.

^[1] Tax advisors know what degree of interpretation is possible and what the limits of interpretation are.

[edit] credit card

... they'd complained about working with everyone

except proper paid-up Guild members.

Pyramids-109

You can't trade with animals.

Animal Farm

The credit card (or charge card) satisfies the following conditions:

an accurate record of purchases is available.
it is non-anonymous, both sides of a deal are known to the operator.
the medium of exchange is only available for deals between members and participating organisations.
accounts pay little to no interest (more usually participants pay interest or a fee).
the operator mediates in case of dispute between members and participating traders.

As such it seems to be a mutation of a medium of exchange for a closed economy that adheres to its own ethical standards and refuses to engage in trade with parties that do not uphold the same ethics, only that the people who might have wished for it (or, maybe, claimed it to be impossible) are no longer around and the people who made it happen were primarily interested in earning more money with it, not in ethics. The near-absence of interest would match religious ethics that reject(ed) interest and the payment of a fee or interest would match the concept of demurrage ^[1], the devaluation of local currencies over time.

A record of all purchases could be used to determine an approximation of somebody's karma regarding social or environmental aspects of the products he or she purchased, assuming social or environmental aspects of the products were known and taken into account (in both meanings of the word). A card could make it impossible to buy certain things at all and track everything else with a karma record of the trader and the items purchased. A re-sale within the system would pass on all information, including warranty, reliably to the next owner.

Of course, this assumes that the community is voluntarily using such a system to uphold higher ethical goals. Even though its use would be voluntary and it could co-exist with national money or even use national money as the medium of exchange one of the ethical exclusion criteria could be the amount of ethics-free money owned or spent by a person, this way people with excess money could be excluded from participiation and might face actual or quasi ^[2] devaluation of their ethics-free medium of exchange. With a high adoption rate ethics-free money would become increasingly useless and, ultimately, obsolete.

The idea reappears (for example) as the party membership card of the SPD and Green Party or the REWE Card but there is still a misconception: Neither has clearly defined ethical goals attached. The green card is getting a little bit closer in that it's not just a party membership card but it doesn't create a closed economy with well defined ethical goals. An obvious ethical goal in a country with a high unemployment rate would be the "25 hours week". If you want to keep your job you need to share it and buy from companies that have the same "25 hours week" ethics and reject the "40 hours week" companies and people. The "25 hours week" ethics would simply deny everybody the right to work excessively (That's what a social democratic card could demand). Of course, this would require ethical requirements to apply to procurement / supply chains. To make this possible there would have to be disclosure agreements (NDAs are a complement) and public verification mechanisms. If such a card has a financial institute managing bank accounts for the issued cards the investment in mutual funds needs to be controlled by the same ethical restrictions: Only organizations whose ethics are acceptable can be considered for investment.

Such a tool for upholding ethical standards belongs into the hands of non-profit organizations, not banks or profit oriented financial institutes. The current situation is a complement of this.

The greatest challenge for ethical currency systems would probably be the time when one or several systems have grown sufficiently to be intesting to discount chains. To be prepared for lobbyism far reaching disclosure agreements and control mechanisms would be required and, of course, very precise ethical policies that allow enforcement by the operator of the currency or its community. A democratic consumer protection system within the community could allow to place a ban on products or companies that fail to meet the desired standards of the community. An internal taxation for imports could be required to finance the verification of labor and production standards of products that do not carry fair trade or other certifications required by the community.

Interview, part 7:

If you receive an advantage of any type that is founded on doing something you would not have done yourself, for ethical reasons, you have to reject that advantage, maybe even if the advantage is a present. That is what was the purpose of the jewish distinction of not taking interest from jews but taking interest from non-jews. It is, of course, turned around, as usual: "Don't apply your ethics of trade to people outside the community that upholds your ethics" is the complement of "Don't trade with people outside your community that do not uphold your ethics". Globalization has created the largest community that is possible and it can only follow the lowest common denominator of ethics ^[3] as long as you are unable to place ethical restrictions on yourself, as individual.

The abbreviation EC card (Eurocheque card) could be interpreted as a hint on an Ehical Consumer card. The different levels of some credit cards (silver, gold, platinum) could be useful as different levels of ethical demands and thus possessing a card with higher ethical goals could be an indicator for higher social status, if social status was redefined from "material goods" to "significantly good" (material -> significantly, goods -> good): Platinum is a more valuable noble metal than silver "because it maintains scarcity". (The Karstadt customer credit card I once had is another metaphor for this: A Scarcity Card. ^[4]).

The preferrable implementation would be, of course, in the form of small, regional cooperative non-profit banks with democratic control, extensive ethical policies and cooperative rules and, probably, a cooperative franchise holder or association, to act as a clearing house.

An existing implementation of an ethical consumer card is the Krankenversicherungskarte (health insurance card): There is a large number of controlling non-profit organizations which have high ethical standards and the customers can use the card to pay for products and services certified by the organization. These cards are, however, restricted to the medical sector and the controlling organizations are seldom choosen by their ethics but by membership fee or services offered.

Demurrage (to increase the speed of circulation of money) is most probably also a complement. An ethical currency that allows tracking of transactions would profit from enforced delays: An amount of money that has been transferred to an account would be required to remain in that account for 24 hours before it could be moved again; for international transfers this could be much longer. Some types of wire transfers have had the side effect of locking money for an extended period of time but the way it was implemented it looked like a bug, not a feature.

) ↑ That does not mean demurrage is a good idea, it may have unsolved problems in itself. For example, it may create an unnecessary desire to spend money before it loses value. Money with demurrage may be better suited for people who have the ethical understanding of not wanting money for random purposes but accept that excess money can be drained by a demurrage fee and there is no reason to circumvent this.
) ↑ quasi devaluation by all ethically restricted points of acceptance that would place limits on the acceptance of ethics-free money without questioning its value.
) ↑ either that of individuals or that of countries, when countries enforce a lowest common denominator by law.
) ↑ Scarcity as opposed to buying unnecessary products, products with an intentionally reduced lifetime, trend products or products that replace an already existing item that doesn't need replacement.

[edit] Some hints

MasterCard -> muster card -> prototype card
VISA -> wie {de} + sah' {de} -> "Here you see how you do it [... and now go and add the missing ethics]"
Diners Club -> DIN + er {de} + es + klappt -> "Standardize this, it works".
American express -> "A quick way to spread advanced ethics".
AdvoCard -> "A (credit) card that protects rights" (but not primarily yours but primarily that of employees and, possibly, animal rights)

[edit] Example

In the movie Dogma Bethany discusses with a colleague why the church can accept her church tax even though it was being paid by an abortion clinic.

[edit] See also

[edit] embrace & extend

The strategy to embrace and extend is often seen as unethical but there are also ethical strategies to embrace & extend, as for example the ethical currency; it could embrace an existing monetary economy and extend it by always requiring an ethical voucher with every single transaction. Without displacing the national currencies this could put them on a leash. A publicly verifiable standard would be that an entity's accounts are all publicly available ^[1] and denominated in an ethically extended currency.

^[1] Banks accounts are public writable (every company well-known to the bank can withdraw money and everybody can transfer money to an account), this may be a mutation of public readability (everybody can see the statements of account). While the former is logically motivated and efficient the later would be ethically motivated.