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Creidiki
Creidiki's picture
Virtue and ethics

Another well written and thought out podcast from Iain, kudos. He touched subjects that I have been trying to organize into coherent post/article, but have been unable to. So I'm going to ramble a little bit and hope that the feedback will give me the push needed.

First, lets consider two castes, european knight and japanese samurai. They develped separately but are both remarkably similar solutions to the same problem:

How to train, equip and maintain mounted fighter?

Solution: select a hereditary group of people, train them from early childhood and have a dedicated set of farmers and craftsmen to supply them.

Heydays of european knights continued until the high middle ages until longbows made them obsolete, Samurai class continued to dominate battle fields in japan until Meiji restoration, but Togukawa shogunate effectively removed the need for large stanging armies. In both cases there were an entire caste of people trained mainly fight but no wars you could send them to.

Awkward.

It seems that while the knight and samurai were busy fulfilling their original function their main virtue was loyalty and obedience. Chivalric code and Bushido (and their virtues) make their entrance only after that function is made obsolete.

Cynic might view code just as a form of social control.

Hmm, what am I trying to say here? I'm not exactly sure, maybe that warrior virtue and ethics don't exist as a separate set, but ethics and virtue in martial arts is just a representation of ethics and virtue in society as a whole?

ky0han
ky0han's picture

Hi,

for me the following quote sums it up.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility!

smiley

Regards Holger

Iain Abernethy
Iain Abernethy's picture

Creidiki wrote:

maybe that warrior virtue and ethics don't exist as a separate set, but ethics and virtue in martial arts is just a representation of ethics and virtue in society as a whole?

Thanks for the kind words about the podcast!

I think that warrior ethics are in keeping with the ethics of the society of which they are part, but they are not the same ethics as other members of the group.

As a modem day example, doctors have an ethical code that requires them to do no harm. Soldiers obviously can't share that same ethical code because they are required to harm in order to protect other members of the society of which they are part from harm. However, both doctors and soldiers have an ethical code aimed at securing the greater good and the wider objectives of society.

When any given group divorces their aims and ethical code from the common good, the days of that group are numbered. When the nobles of old switched from being protectors to oppressors we can see what happened. They were overthrown (physically and politically) and a new order put in place. In my part of the world this resulted in the Magna Carta, English Civil War, etc.

Ethics are very complex and beyond me, but I do feel ethics come from what is perceived as the common good, but the ethnics will be specific to the role the group or individual has to fulfil. If any subset abandons the notion of the common good, it generally leads to the demise of that subset.

All the best,

Iain