| bdbdbd said: @r505Matt: Actually i tried to provide a practical example. Zumba, aerobics or gym 1-2 times a week is what lots of people do when trying to keep in shape, while you easilly play Wii Fit 4-5 times a week, because you don't have to leave home. In terms of time investment, with aerobics you'd need to factor in the time it takes to travel, change clothes back and forth. If you spend 20-30 minutes on top of each 45 minutes class, the efficiency per unit of time invested drops drastically. In the real world there are variables. Ethics isn't "what should be done", but "what is done". For example, you don't buy products made with child labour, except when Nike shoes are on sale. Which one speaks more about your ethics, your words or your actions. It's always easy to say "should", when the "should" have really nothing to do with you. In a todays western society it's easy to have lots of "shoulds" when you don't have to fight for your survival. If a society with lots of "shoulds" comes crashing down and people face real problems, it's a moment where the ethics are really measured. Or think about the burka bans we are likely to see in Belgium and France. The people who shout out loud for equivality, oppose the said bans for peoples right to wear them. When the question is the rights of these people to not to wear it "we want everyone to be equal - except...". |
We're just talking about 2 different things. I was talking about how much time you actually spend exercising, and making the comparison based on that. Otherwise, comparisons get too complicated to make general statements. I put the single variable to time spent exercising to determine whether Wii Fit or some aerobics class would be more efficient. If you want to talk about other variables beyond that, that's cool, but you can't just ignore the simple fact that in terms of time spent exercising, Wii Fit may not be the best choice.
Maybe the gym is 5 minutes up the road, and one can argue that you'll spend time changing anyways. Maybe there are other benefits such as friends, not to mention the studies showing that everyone exercises harder and get more out of said exercise when there are others going through the same thing as you. Maybe you go shopping after an aerobics class (not that I think that's the best idea) and it's right up the street. Maybe you stop at a gym on the way home from work, and do your class then, thus completely negating the negative effect of travel time. Maybe your work itself has some sort of aerobics class.
The only way to feasibly compare things like this is to remove as many variables as possible. When you put in other variables, it becomes far more complex. Yes, real life situations don't work out that simply, which is why it's important to have some sort of baseline to go off of. This is the basis of scientific research. Remove as many variables as possible to test a hypothesis on a single variable. After that hypothesis becomes a scientific theory (this is often misunderstood, a scientific theory is a hypothesis that has been proven correct, or at least never proven wrong, many times, don't confuse this with the normal definition of a theory this is just a concept or an idea) then you can move on to another variable using that theory as a constant, or at least no longer as a variable. Granted, things are so complex that scientific theories are fairly rare (there are some like Einstein's Theory of Relativity), and most of the ones that have survived the test of time have turned into scientific laws (Newton's Laws, Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, etc.).
You have a very flawed idea of ethics. The school I went to (Rutgers) is regarded as having the 2nd best philosophy department in the world (source: http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/overall.asp) so I'm sorry if I'll trust my teachers over what you're saying here about ethics.
And you're talking about the application of said ethics and the way it relates to actions people take, and their intentions, and whether or not those intentions matter. The rest of us are talking about the metaphysical nature of ethics.
Edit:@CGI-Quality,
Yeah, it's pretty much spot on, but it's fun to talk about =)
