Joe Krow said:
I see. Are you saying, then, that an individual is only constrained by his own whims?
Yes.
Why even talk about ethical standards then when, for you, there are none?
There are my own - I just don't claim any external justification for them. I have my convictions, and (by and large) I stand by them. I just realize that I can't make anyone else share them.
By extension your argument is that the ethics of the most vile repugnant human being are just as socially accepted as any one elses.
No. I've said nothing about "social acceptability". Being socially acceptable or otherwise is not the same as being moral/ethical. Picking my nose isn't immoral (by almost anyone's standards) it is nonetheless not socially acceptable (in most contexts).
The original argument wasn't about politeness / social acceptability. VD never argued he was being polite - just not immoral/unethical.
To have any meaning the standard must be set by the group not the individual.
Not true. My ethics/morals/convictions have meaning to me, my thoughts and my actions. They just don't have any meaning beyond that. A universal/group ethical code would have meaning/be useful
if it existed - but it doesn't. [if you want to call the collection of convictions which happen to be held by all members of a given group "group ethics" or "group morals", feel free, but that's hardly a particularly useful construct - it can be destroyed/created/expanded at a stroke when someone enters/leaves the room]
The group sets the standards, the individual decides whether to honor them.
Sure - and there can be rules, laws, conventions... in any group. These things are not morals/ethics. If they happen to agree with and encompass every member's morals, that's nothing more than a very unlikely coincidence - which will evaporate as soon as someone else walks into the room.
Society frowns on certain behavior because ethical standards are created collectively not individually.
These are conventions, not ethics/morals in the sense of this thread. Society frowns on all sorts of daft stuff - and frowns on different things over time. Not too long ago society would frown on a black person not sitting/standing in the "black" section of [area X]. That's only a convention - it doesn't make it immoral/unethical for a black person to have stood/sat in the "wrong" place. [if you think it does, you are using the word "ethics" in a different sense from that used in this thread]
Might these social standard have a baseline? A minimum?
For a start, that's meaningless: what does a "minimum" / "baseline" mean here? One set of people can have one "baseline" which contradicts another set's "baseline" (e.g. pro-choice vs pro-life; pro-truth-telling vs pro-confidence-keeping...). There are a load of fairly common conventions - many of which are contradictory.
Again, politeness/sociability is not the same as morality/ethics (as used in this thread).
Is that what NN was talking about?
If "that" was utter-bollocks-at-some-length, then yes.
Does he think VD breached the minimum standard of journalistic ethics?
He can think nonsense all he likes. The most absurd part of this has already been raised - if VD broke any codes of politeness/convention, it had nothing to do with journalism. A journalist is, if anything, expected and required to reveal uncomfortable truths. In this case, deadairis is - if anything - the story, not the source/whistle-blower....
The lines may is fuzzy so feel free to disagree with him.
In this case the fuzziness isn't the issue - it's that he's looking at the wrong line.
However, the standards are there and have nothing to do with how you feel about them.
Fuzzy standards of convention and social acceptability are there. Standards of ethics are not. Some horribly vague, blatantly contradictory collection of politically correct rubbish exists. Again, so what? Everyone is almost constantly acting in conflict with a part of this collection - since it's so full of nonsense and contradiction. [it's unethical to: be pro-life, be pro-choice, lie, break confidences, discriminate against group X by doing ???, discriminate against group Y by not doing ???, discriminate against stupid people, promote stupid people into jobs requiring intelligence...]