| The title of this chapter alludes to Peter Singer's 1979 book, Practical Ethics ((P. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979;) 1993.)) ((The title of this chapter, “Practical Ethics v.2.0,” was also chosen as both a version management implementation (an earlier version, “Practical Ethics,” was published in V&A Conservation Journal 56 (2008): 14-15) and as an echo of the content revision management tool employed by the wiki on which the text has been written.)). Singer's version of applied ethics (in his case, preferential ethics) has antecedents in Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, roughly defined as being that an action is good if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bentham conceives of an algorithmically based calculus for judging whether an action is good or not. However, the calculus can only work in a commensurable and closed system, that is, in a state of being self-defined and isolated from environmental influence (as in, for example, a dictionary, which is a closed system in that it defines each word in terms of other words, all of which can also be found in the same dictionary). Thus environmental influences, vis à vis incommensurability, present challenges to any ethical theory that contends that the right thing to do is the action that promotes the most overall good. Any disagreement about the commensurability of values, as, for example, in contemporary notions of "stakeholder consensus" or "interpretative community," means that any Bentham-like utilitarian calculus is not even theoretically possible. | The title of this chapter alludes to Peter Singer's 1979 book, Practical Ethics ((P. Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979;) 1993.)) ((The title of this chapter, “Practical Ethics v.2.0,” was also chosen as both a version management implementation (an earlier version, “Practical Ethics,” was published in V&A Conservation Journal 56 (2008): 14-15) and as an echo of the content revision management tool employed by the wiki on which the text has been written.)). Singer's version of applied ethics (in his case, preferential ethics) has antecedents in Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, roughly defined as being that an action is good if it creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bentham conceives of an algorithmically based calculus for judging whether an action is good or not. However, the calculus can only work in a commensurable and closed system, that is, in a state of being self-defined and isolated from environmental influence (as in, for example, a dictionary, which is a closed system in that it defines each word in terms of other words, all of which can also be found in the same dictionary). Thus environmental influences, vis à vis incommensurability, present challenges to any ethical theory that contends that the right thing to do is the action that promotes the most overall good. Any disagreement about the commensurability of values, as, for example, in contemporary notions of "stakeholder consensus" or "interpretative community," means that any Bentham-like utilitarian calculus is not even theoretically possible. |
| **La Lotta Continua** ((The group name of a late 1960's Turin-based Italian autonomist movement, and its eponymous newspaper, that sought to establish a way of living within a wider community but governed by its own system of rules.)) | **Lotta Continua** ((The group name of a late 1960's Turin-based Italian autonomist movement, and its eponymous newspaper, that sought to establish a way of living within a wider community but governed by its own system of rules.)) |
