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Originally Posted by Brian Pfleuger
A good solution, in a world of omniscient people.
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Well, all ethics is drawn from the "metaphysical omniscient" realm. We're just stuck trying to figure out how we are going to apply it (or whether it's even real) in this physical realm.
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Originally Posted by Brian Pfleuger
At the members-only range where I shoot, the brass rule is that anyone who wants the brass can pick it up and that which does not get picked up goes to the recyclers.
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Reasonable and practical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Pfleuger
The whole thing is a weird sort of circular argument based on arbitrary priorities that shift from one person to the next. It's not a matter of ethics. There's Right, there's Wrong and there's Opinion. This one is opinion. Don't assign "Right" and "Wrong" to arbitrary opinion.
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I certainly agree that getting into too much hair splitting is nuts. Frankly, as the very first responder to the original post, my opinion was that there's nothing immoral about simply selling it for scrap.
My last response was merely a commentary on the observations of the poster just prior to me, not a moral castigation on the evils of "robbing the community at large." I can leave that propaganda exercise to the Stalinist in the government.
And you are right; the whole thing can quickly degrade into a circular quagmire that becomes meaningless if you step back two paces. After all, once the brass is collected and brought home, it's private property. The owner can bury it in the back yard hoping it will sprout if he wants. None of us have any right to say a word about it so long as his actions aren't crossing the boundary of interfering with my rights or your rights or someone else's rights. (And I'm not willing to assert that collecting range brass steps on my rights if that brass didn't come out of my ejector.)
But the question was asked. Several answers given. And I pointed out a parallel to a historic precedence that forms a piece of the underpinning of common law that is our shared heritage. Nothing more and nothing less.