I've always been fascinated by the interplay of morality and ethics, as anyone whose been with us a while could probably attest to. Its not really just those two things, but they provide an easy shortcut for what I tend to think of as Personal Good and Social Good, and demonstrate the tension between the two pretty fucking effectively.
Personal Good is your moral code, but its also your personal philosophy on life. How you choose to live and the reasons you make those choices. Social Good, to me, is a simultaneously simpler and more nuanced topic. As far as I'm concerned the purpose of society is to ensure the greatest joy possible to its constituents, there was once a time when it was a survival mechanism, but adherence to that model is a relic of a shitty tribal impulse that we deeply need to get the fuck over. Notice, "greatest joy possible to its constituents." Not as many as possible. All. The entire reason we band together in groups is to benefit as a fucking group. With that in mind I tend to consider things in terms of freedom to pursue joy. At which point I come quite quickly to the old Lockean maxim (though I hate to lean on a dead man's words), "Your right to swing your fist ends at the next man's face" (in some book, presumably by John Locke).
In terms of the Social Good, that is pretty much absolute to me. To phrase it another way, your right to act as you please is inversely proportional to the amount of harm it causes. Not some esoteric, "moral fiber" bullshit. Harm. Non-consensual, unnecessary physical or psychological damage to other living things. Non-consensual, meaning any party is either unwilling or unable to freely and intentionally participate. Unnecessary, meaning not required for the continuation of one's own existence; harvesting to eat (meat or vegetation, provided the entire process is humane), harming in reasonable self-defense, and doing harm to protect another are all either allowable or encouraged depending.
Now, obviously this is a hierarchy, but its a subjective one. For me the Social Good tends to win out, you've got to reign in your darker impulses (impulses that tend to get justified by the Personal Good) or you make the world a worse place for everybody. There's no reason for that, a little more effort and a little forethought opens up a lot of possibilities for beneficial cooperation. I get that that isn't how everyone looks at it, many people put Personal Good first, either because its an easier starting point and they don't examine the issue much, or because they make the decision that their own way is the superior way. Most of the time this isn't really a problem honestly. People are by and large vanilla enough that their way doesn't have enough of an impact generally to be terribly concerned about in the long run. Either because their thing is close enough to the Social Good that it doesn't matter or because they never get up the gumption to bother doing anything anti-social.
However, some people are poison, they don't just put themselves first, they seek to fuck others over. And that is where the question becomes interesting. These people are unequivocally cunts, the little tiny pieces of shit that get lodged in a cultures colon and rot it slowly to a suppurating cancer, and their stupid shit saw us through some of the nastiest periods in history. Asshole behavior makes society worse as a whole, but selfishness dramatically increases the rate of survival in adverse environments. So it gets passed down, held on to. Not by everybody, but by enough to demonstrate success and spread, like successful strategies do.
I find that whole interaction to be deeply intellectually engaging. Seeing the wheels of society turn on conflicting and complex cogs of community and cock-knockery, as heartbreaking as it is to watch swathes of the population slowly try to shit the world to death, its almost hypnotizing. But just because a behavior is successful, doesn't mean its worthy, and just because a thing is hypnotizing doesn't mean you should sit back and watch it happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment