From Philosophy Club: Ethical Revolutions

[Greg H.]

And this one came up in another thread, discussing the situation in Kiev:

- When is a revolution ethically correct? When do you have the ethical right to overthrow your government?

At the risk of stealing CP's thunder, I thought I would open this topic up, since it is so current on the world stage.

From my perspective, a revolution becomes ethical when a government begins to exploit its citizens - it's the definition of exploit that's the problem, really.

 

If I had to define an ethical revolution concisely, it would be a revolt against an unethical government, based on the premise that what is legal is not always what is ethical. But this forces us to then define an unethical government.

 

I would define such a government as having to meet four criteria:

1. It fails to adequately protect its citizens from both foreign and domestic threats,

2. It fails to adequately defend the rights of the citizen or abridges those rights unnecessarily,

3. It exists solely or apparently solely to exploit its citizens, and

4. It provides no system to balance the power of the government versus the power of the people.

 

A succinct way of putting it might be that an unethical government is one that exists in spite of the will of the governed, not because of it.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Greg H.

[imatfaal]

As this is in philosophy rather than in politics or ethics...

 

At the risk of stealing CP's thunder, I thought I would open this topic up, since it is so current on the world stage.

From my perspective, a revolution becomes ethical when a government begins to exploit its citizens - it's the definition of exploit that's the problem, really.

 

No the problem is how you define what political route you wish to follow given a certain ethical foundation. Ethical does not mean correct nor morally acceptable nor right thinking - well actually to be honest it shouldn't mean these things but it has come in slack modern parlance to mean those things; but from its roots ethical means how one lives one's life, the moral character (positive or negative, savoury or unsavoury) which one's actions promote, or the underlying motives which dominate the decisions that one makes.

 

It is denuding the word ethics and the classical notion of ethos of any value to rigidly connect one socio-political viewpoint to being ethical and the inverse to be in-ethical. To be ethical is to espouse a moral, political, social viewpoint and when called upon to make a decision to follow that perspective; there are a myriad of viewpoints and to complicate matters there are a multitude of opinions stating where judgments should be made - but to reduce this complexity to a single binary decision that one option is definitely ethical and the alternative is unethical is a mistake