is incompetence immoral?

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large swaths of our gov't are immoral by the definitions proffered so far.

Well...

according to my idol...Joseph Stalin....it would be that.

In his armaments factories during WWII you could be shot for being a screw up (on charges of treason).

But kidding aside..."incompetence does not equal immorality" but the two things do overlap in some situations.

It all depends.

Just a passing thought I’m throwing out here...

Would it help to clarify the issue if we negated both terms of the question and asked:

Is competence moral?

depends on the motivation and the results, IOW if people are hurt, esp. the little people.

^ sort of what I was driving at: if you can’t define competence as necessarily being a moral quality, then by the same token you can’t define incompetence as necessarily an immoral quality.
The question itself is a categorical conflation.

Uhm.... No?
I mean... If A is part of B, it does nit follow that "not A" is part of "not B". A and "not A" may both be part of B.
Only if A *equals* B, then "not A" must be "not B".

So, if incompetence is part of the set of qualities that's immoral, it does not follow that competence must be part of the set of qualities that's moral.

If incompetence equals immorality, then that still doesn't mean that competence equals morality. It only equals "not immorality", a category that also contains "morally neutral".

Just sayin.

In my case, the question is more like: if you know you're incapable of not breaking windows, is it still okay if you offer your service as a paperboy?
And what if you don't know for certain, but there's a good chance you're incapable of not breaking windows?

Where's the line, and are you obliged to make sure you can be a paperboy who doesn't break windows? Do you need to check, or is it okay to take the money, break the windows, and run off?

Thank you for ending this asinine discussion. Conflation was apparent from the beginning. Or rather, a tacit externalization of personal/subjective values that results in an implicit conflation of the concepts that, due to the denied and projected dispositions, came to be perceived as synonymous with the phenomena in question.

The most interesting part of this thread were the arguments in which people conflated "incompetence" with morality. It gave an insight about the considerations they bring to bear when determining morality, the projections onto reality they engage in.



Incompetence is immoral to a narcissist. The narcissistic mentality is the substrate upon which an individual can characterize incompetence as immoral. Others would indicate different conceptual focal points for moral failure.

shlaifu: The concept you're reaching for is the "contrapositive" of the modus ponens. The modus tollens. Not A implies not B is a significantly different statement than A implies B or not B implies not A. What you cited was the inverse, which is a separate thing to prove and does not follow in a biconditional manner from the original statement.

If you don't know for sure that you're completely apt at engaging in logic is it immoral for you to proffer your pseudo-logical conclusions to others as if they were so?

I don't think it's sufficient by itself. And incompetence isn't necessarily immoral - again, by itself. There's a potential degree of overlap depending on circumstances, though - mostly whether a person knows (or could be reasonably expected to know) they are incompetent at something, and whether their being incompetent at a thing affects other people negatively (and to what degree and consistency).

If I'm incompetent at keeping my front yard tidy, for example, it might slightly annoy passers-by who like seeing tidy things. However, in general it's not going to severely affect the quality of life of the average person, and I wouldn't consider it immoral. If I'm an incompetent engineer, though, and I know it, and I still allow myself to be the person who designs some piece of infrastructure that lots of people depend on (such as a city water filtration system or the anti-earthquake regulations for building skyscrapers in an earthquake-prone region), I've potentially put thousands, even millions of people at severe risk of death, disease, or permanent crippling injury, and done it knowingly, when at any time I could have bowed out or passed the work on to someone competent. I'd consider that immoral.

ROFLMAO

Tell me when you find a reliable way to avail people of their unknown unknowns and to reliably get them to reintegrate their belief systems around them. I haven't found a way yet, if I did I'd've converted half the people here to a much broader and more inclusive understanding of things... including you.

Actually I’d like to proffer thanks @shlaifu; I must confess I found the application of semi-algebraic set theory to an area as slippery as moral evaluation a bit hard to interpret as relevant, but it did stimulate some self reflection and the internal construction of a form of Aristotelian square. Which if nothing else has helped me clarify my own thoughts on the issue to myself.

Nice and genuine thanks

So, I’m conceiving of two categories at play here which are fully independent and non-identical.
• The first across the top has three categories: Moral, Amoral, Immoral. I think it necessary to distinguish between intentional wrongdoing by the light of whatever system of evaluation is in use, and unintentional wrongdoing by light of the same.
• The second down the side also has three categories: Competent, Adequate and Incompetent.
For I must recognise that striving after a goal and fulfilling it in less-than practically perfect manner is distinct from failing to fulfil it.

This produces nine cross-categories, horizontal line by line:
• The act is Competent & Moral.
• The act is Competent & Amoral.
• The act is Competent & Immoral.
• The act is Adequate & Moral.
• The act is Adequate & Amoral.
• The act is Adequate & Immoral.
• The act is Incompetent & Moral.
• The act is Incompetent & Amoral.
• The act is Incompetent & Immoral.

I think it’s cross category 7 that is causing the issue, although it doesn’t really fit the OP’s original situation which seems to my mind to describe Adequate rather then Incompetent behaviour in the line of business.

So I proffer the obvious question from this:

What is the correct categorisation of striving with all you can, and yet failing completely?

Edited because I checked back and realised I’d been thinking faster then I can type, and had botched the grammar of the first paragraph as a result.

To chime back in with a redux of my first post, because I think it's relevant:

As certain segments of the work world become more Hunger Games-like you'll find feigned and selective incompetence being part of the game theory, ie. how people bog down and destroy people who they don't like.

There was a way of thinking for grade school and high school bullies - ie. that if meet someone whose honest and won't 'play ball' or placate the dominance hierarchy - you take that person deep out into astroturf and drown them.

It's the same thing.

Clearly this kind of game-theoretical incompetence isn't incompetence in the usual sense so much as it's a matter of playing, deliberately, inhumanly dirty.

It might be worth separating those two things - ie. real incompetence vs. the veneer of incompetence for the sake of smashing people you don't like or just genuinely don't give a flying _ about.

Yeah, as I mentioned, I think I'm dealing with these kind of guys.
The other day they asked me to add 4days worth if work on top of my contractually agreed upon commission. I sent them a written offer. They got really upset that I wanted to get paid for the thing I do for a living. - and they acted like I was being greedy.
I should mention: they really do need that bit of work done, I'd perfect to do it - but I'm also slowly drowning under the work I already have.
So I'm focusing on that, because if things go south, and chances very much are they will, I want to have fulfilled my contractual obligation. - but focusing this way is actually a bit detrimental to the project. They really need this additional planning work done for them.
Well, they need all the work done for them.

I couldn't say anything about belief systems. But if a person has been assessed as incompetent multiple times via multiple methods and multiple independent people/sources, that's probably a clue.

In my own case, it's why I like doing work where there's rigorous feedback, particularly automatically generated, and even more so where it allows assessment compared to peers. If I've been in the job for long enough that I should be up to speed, but I'm regularly scoring well below average, something somewhere needs addressing. If I'm regularly scoring better than most (or all) other people, I'm presumably doing something right (or the assessment system is broken, in which case why the hell is is being used). If it's really difficult to assess my own output, or the assessment is extremely subjective, it bugs me - it becomes one of the unknown unknowns, as you say, and I don't like that. I'll usually try and find something I can assess myself against, even if it's only my past performance.

And, yes, if I'm still doing badly at something after significant time, and it doesn't look like I'm getting better at it, then maybe that thing is just not for me. I might try coming at it from a different angle at a later date, or backing off and doing more training/research before attempting it again, but if I keep failing over and over... possibly I'm just not cut out for whatever it is, and I'd have better luck doing something else. And yeah, it'd probably hurt to admit it, but life's too short to keep banging my head against the same brick wall - even if I do eventually break through, it'll take more time than the result would be worth.

Of course, it's possible that it simply just looks like I'm f*****g something up over and over, because the person making the observation/judgment is assuming I have the same goal that they would have in my place. Whereas it's entirely possible I have a quite different goal, and the 'fuckups' are side aspects that I don't care to put any particular time or effort into. It can actually be quite amusing to see them struggle with the concept that I do not want the thing that they would want, and sometimes they themselves will never accept that this could be the case, and will continue to assume that I'm a f**kup, whereas in actuality I've achieved all I wanted out of a situation and simply don't care about those things which the observer personally deems critical.

It may be that the vast majority of people doing Thing A want to achieve objectives X or Y, but if I go into it because I consider it the easiest way for me personally to achieve objective Z, that doesn't automatically mean I'm after X or Y as well. Thus, failing to achieve X or Y isn't a problem from my perspective, as long as I achieve Z. There may also be other (cheaper, simpler) ways for people to achieve Z on its own, yes, but my own circumstances may have made those things harder to access for some reason, or perhaps I wanted to achieve Z but also have the chance to take a crack at Y if time or money permitted, or just to satisfy my own curiosity.

Likewise, I can't judge other people for their decisions, even if I think there are better ways or I think they're failing at what I think their goals are. Sure, maybe that's the case. But... maybe they have reasons or restrictions I don't know about. Or while I think we're in the same boat, we're actually not. Always hard to say unless you have all the facts to hand.

Incompetence is a subjective definition. Negligence is not.

For example if you were hiring a taxi driver who doesn't know the fastest routes they could be considered incompetent. If the optimal route between two areas can be completed in 1 hour, but a taxi driver takes a route that takes 3 hours most would consider them to be incompetent. But what about a taxi driver who takes a route that goes in 1 hour 1 minute? They're slower than the optimum, but almost everyone would agree they're good enough. How about 1 hour 20 minutes? 1 hour 40 minutes? Different people will have different thresholds at what they consider good enough.

When you call your bosses incompetent it is that your standards of "good enough" are higher than their standards of "good enough." The customer has their own standards of "good enough." The highest possible standard is perfect. If we were to suppose incompetence is immoral than perfect would be moral. I think it should be patently obvious that perfection does not morality make, which brings us back to the idea of "good enough." Ultimately in businesses "good enough" comes down to the customer satisfaction. If customers find the work acceptable than they will become repeat customers or refer others to the same business. If the customers find the work unacceptable than they will not frequent that business again and speak poorly of it to others. Thus there is an economic incentive for businesses to reach to customer's standards.

Negligence is another issue, and is absolutely immoral. It may be incompetent to have a taxi driver that delivers a 1 hour route in 3 hours, but it is negligent to have a taxi driver who is unlicensed.

one man's incompetence may well be another man's willful madness. some people insist on doing things not only the wrong way, but the most tasteless of ways as well. is that incompetent, or competent perversity?