Having read and heard many so called ethical debates over the years it seems to me it could be put to bed once and for all. Essentially, in my view of course, ethics and NLP CANNOT coexist.

First off and bringing a bit of MM into the argument Ethical is a nominalisation, which is manly where I have the problem.

Ethics is a process, philosophical in nature and revolves around deciding what is right or wrong, good or evil etc.

We then seem to have moved ourselves from this into labelling the outcomae of this debate as ethical or not. We are then left in the ridiculous position as NLP’ers that Michael highlights so well of having to continuously say -

“I would say the answer is a firm and unambiguous 'it depends'. ”

Without elaborating here on each of the presuppositions, for these are the basis of my argument (and NLP hopefully), concepts like badness and evil cannot exist. They are simply behaviours driven by other peoples maps which we accept as true for them. I think there are probably 3 or 4 pre-supps that relate to this issue.

They may be things we would not do ourselves but that doesn’t make them wrong per se. Thus it is then a fairly straightforward step to realise that evil therefore cannot exist. It is but a judgement we make about the unacceptability of some form of extreme behaviour. Once again it becomes all to easy as a follow on to label the person as evil. A cop out basically because we no longer have to look for a root cause which saves a lot of trouble.

Interestingly if your belief system requires that evil must exist perhaps because it is based on some form of religion, how do you reconcile the pre-supps in that case. Not being religious it is not a difficulty I have to face thank God.

Of course we may judge them as unacceptable in our society and come to a joint agreement that they (the perpetrators not the behaviours) should be punished for carrying them out. But again it is this judging process that’s start to cause problems.

The problem of coming to these sort of conclusions is that you cannot always see that you have basically got your head up your own arse so any thoughts on this much appreciated as ever.

John

I do want to have Brooklyn christened but I am not sure which religion – David Beckham