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Metaethics
Feb. 5th, 2019 03:37 pmI think one thing I find frustrating is the approach to ethics where everyone scrambles to prove that they are the most morally superior person, and so ethics becomes this cutthroat competition to disparage anyone who ever challenges us and prove that we've never done anything wrong, ever. Under this model, people have to constantly be looking to find ethical inferiority in others to feel better about themselves. Of course, anyone even marginally self-aware knows they've done things wrong, so these people spend all this time caught up thinking about how terrible their past mistakes are. Under this model of ethics, there's no way to correct your mistakes so you're just a bad person, forever, and everyone in the world is supposed to shun you. And so guilt doesn't accomplish anything, it just festers. The only people who benefit from such a system are the people who can use it to gain prestige through dishonest, underhanded means. It's a broken, empty form of ethics.
Another thing that bothers me is the idea that an apology is the answer to every wrong, and that every apology should earn a person automatic forgiveness. Sometimes more than an apology is needed, or a different kind of apology is needed, and in any event people should not expect that an apology purchases forgiveness. That doesn't mean that apologies are bad, just that they aren't a magical answer to every ill. We should teach people how to handle situations where their apology is not accepted, rather than teaching them that they are automatically owed forgiveness because of it.
I think a better approach is to teach people how to be fair to themselves, how to forgive themselves without demanding or expecting such forgiveness from others, and how to make genuine improvements in themselves. I think people are especially likely to cling to the forced forgiveness model in an environment of cut-throat ethics, but I think both of these are maladaptive and harmful.
Another thing that bothers me is the idea that an apology is the answer to every wrong, and that every apology should earn a person automatic forgiveness. Sometimes more than an apology is needed, or a different kind of apology is needed, and in any event people should not expect that an apology purchases forgiveness. That doesn't mean that apologies are bad, just that they aren't a magical answer to every ill. We should teach people how to handle situations where their apology is not accepted, rather than teaching them that they are automatically owed forgiveness because of it.
I think a better approach is to teach people how to be fair to themselves, how to forgive themselves without demanding or expecting such forgiveness from others, and how to make genuine improvements in themselves. I think people are especially likely to cling to the forced forgiveness model in an environment of cut-throat ethics, but I think both of these are maladaptive and harmful.