Do No Harm—
what do you think about this as a guide to behavior…
Very idealistic, but not a bad one.
How far does one track the effects of one’s actions?
Are American taxpayers doing harm via support of Israeli military, the CIAs actions in Latin America, etc.?
If I buy a coke, can this be taken as doing harm if the Coca cola company is behaving badly in, say, Mexico?
Could be problemtaic if you wanted to kill someone or even just fuck them up a little.
Is my immune system allowed to kill bacteria?
Can I step on grass?
Does eating plants harm something?
What if helping someone harms someone else?
Can I plead ignorance?
How do you create a graduated scale of harmfulness? It will be needed when you have a choice between only harmful options.
Just being alive is harming somebody or somthing. Later on today I am going to my favorite restaurant where I am going to eat lamb. That lamb was slaughtered, cooked, and put on a plate because of my hunger in being alive.
As a consequence of millions of people being alive there are slaughter houses filled with animal live stock where millions are slaughtered everyday for our hunger so that we can keep on living.
It was slaughtered to satisfy my hunger.
Even the stalk of corn isn’t safe from the countless millions harvested every year. The vegetarian can eat their own heart out too for they are without innocence as well. 
Do no harm? Unlikely. Our entire existence is filled with harm.
Hi Turtle,
Do no harm – Boring!
Carpe Diem! Do some good!
You get to define it.
Ed
ok how about doctors and their hippo oath—
first do no harm…is that just for the docs…
No, it’s a good thing to do. But Moreno, Phyllo, etc. make important points.
Pretty much every medical intervention can do harm and a great many will do some harm - chemotherapy is a clear example or radiotherapy. Every surgeon harms by definition. I suppose they mean something like - don’t make the situation worse. But they do this also, if there is a chance that it might help, at least in many situations. So the doctor oath should really be don’t do any unnecessary harm. I am pretty sure this is the practiced intention. It’s a guideline that is easy to fool yourself around. Not that I can think of a better one.
Yeah turtle, it’s not about doing harm or not.
Harm is essential to life. It’s a cycle.
The question is what “type” of harm and “in what way” - and thus we enter “ETHICS”(!)
You just made all the Buddhists sad.
But, on the other hand, they can observe this emotion.
a paraphrased koan ive read (probably linked from this site)
“if there is no thought, is there still sin?”
There is no such thing as somebody existing doing no harm. There is no such thing as existence without harm. All you people here are life deniers. To exist, is to exist in a life of harm.
now lets get real-------we have not dealt with personal choice…do i kill someone or not…
do i steal or not…
Sometimes choice is an illusion where necessity and your own uncontrollable reactions do the choosing for you with yourself just stuck in between at both of their mercy.
you will be held responsible for your behavior…
you may be at an advantage to realize the results of your behavior…even in a suck-ass shit life…
No one is arguing that there are no situations where one can avoid harming someone. How many of the tough decisions you’ve had to make involving other people were similar to your examples above?
Much of the time the effects of our actions are mixed. And certaintly the medical examples I mentioned have to do with personal choices. As do the issues I raised in my first post in the thread where I raised the issue of effects of our actions only some people think about. I think if you tried to directly respond to some of our posts you would find that ‘do no harm’ is not a good enough guide and probably also a misleading one.
- Only if I"m caught.
- I’m not really concerned with any of that.
Also I was talking about feelings of rage where you have knee jerk reactions of wanting to hit somthing violent. Sometimes even after trying to restrain yourself you snap and start hitting somthing or somebody anyways.
It’s like restraint can only get you so far because there are limits to even restraining where if fails overtime too.
people have problems…
Is it ever OK to harm people with problems who cause other people problems?
If yes, then one should do harm on occasion.
If no, I can only assume you are against prisons, for the disarming of the police, for the elimination of armies…