Preferences vs Ethics

[unspeakablehorror]

Since I suspect the selection of people I could potentially get along with is rather small, I don't hold with the idea that everyone I dislike is inherently a bad person.  Some of them are, I believe, but even those people are capable of doing good things (though they may not exercise that capability).  My point is that I sometimes think that people divide the world up into 'good people who deserve good things' and 'bad people who deserve only death' according to...what people they personally like and could stand to be around.  And even without the rather disconcerting binary this creates (there are only good people and bad people, never in-between people), this elevates one's personal preferences and conflates it with morality and ethics. 

I don't think that everyone I dislike is a bad person.  I don't even dislike everyone that I avoid.  I know that my ability to get along with people is contingent on a large number of factors, but not all of those are ethical or moral factors.  And that's okay.  It's okay to just not like someone.  There are also people I dislike for doing bad things, but I will say that I definitely do not consider all of those people morally equivalent in their misdeeds! 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of the time I get an 'us vs them' and 'you're either with us or against us' vibe from a lot of discussions regarding politics or ethics.  I feel like there's a lot of conflation and intertwining of judging people according to personal preferences and judging them according to ethical principles, which doesn't seem right to me.

Comments

with the spectre of such things as damnation...

[rugessnome]

It isn't necessarily helpful, but I have to wonder what the different interplays of that naive and violent heuristic are with uh... the peculiar circumstance of abused children who grew up believing they were bad, bad, bad (ahem... me) finally coming round to trust their judgement on the idea that the abusive adults who perhaps claimed to be good weren't (or at least their actions weren't)...

(I mean, that's emphatically not what happened with my worldview; I'd reserve the latter category for a very few who are(/were) extremely despicable or pretty-bad-but-also-quite-old and as for the rest... I'm inclined towards the Lemony Snicket quote about people being chef's salads of nobility and villainy, or Solzhenitsyn putting the boundary between good and evil running through each human heart)

but yeah, I struggle with the perception (perhaps somewhat imagined, but evidenced nonetheless), that believing even slightly differently than certain people will cause them to reject me...

Re: with the spectre of such things as damnation...

[rugessnome]

and! having posted that comment, upon rereading it my brain is just pinging about my [not necessarily canon-compliant] ideas about Palpatine's transition from ~civilian to Sith, and I think i) Cosinga held to some variety of in-group vs. out-group ("good" vs bad) morality and ii) the transition into Damask's grasp coincided with the formation of a worldview that basically traditional morality is nonsense and there are no truly good people, only the struggle for power...

...my hc is that Sidious thinks everyone is ...depraved ^(projection + let's have fun manifesting personal issues in characters we id with!) but Plagueis is more "that's an antiquated system of no relevance"

(--also I need to stop reading secondhand stuff about Nietzsche to either go straight to the primary source albeit in translation as I don't trust my German quite that far, or stop meddling in it, but how people seem to be parsing this... accursed master morality... smh)

Re: with the spectre of such things as damnation...

[unspeakablehorror]

Ah, well, I'm always interested in thinking about these Sith! I think that Palpatine was taught early on that power was important from Cosinga, who seemed to place a lot of importance on political power and on the proximity of his bloodline to that power.

I think Cosinga's idea of good and evil were very tied to his political beliefs, which were tied to his beliefs in the specialness of his bloodline. So the in-groups and out-groups involved were politicians. Hence Palpatine choosing to rebel by opposing his father's politics.

I think Sidious on some level had absorbed the values of Cosinga on what was good and evil, and as a result subsequently decided he wanted nothing to do with anything good. I do think "that's an antiquated system of no relevance" is very much in line with the kind of thought process Plagueis would have!

I've heard a bit about Nietzsche second-hand but I do agree that the best way to understand what someone believes is to read from the source, which I have not, original language or no.

Re: with the spectre of such things as damnation...

[unspeakablehorror]

I think there's a lot of things that can cause people to take a very absolutist view on things. I think one of my own social issues is related in that I can have very strong reactions to disagreements, and that I tend to always feel I am right (even if intellectually I know I'm only sometimes right). That's something I've had to try to figure out how to deal with in a healthy way that respects both myself and other people. Because it's inevitable that I will disagree with people about things sometimes.

And yeah, I can see how someone who's always being told they're wrong all their life might decide the answer is to assume they are always right. Which I think is understandable because who wants to always be second-guessing themselves, especially when that's been exploited for selfish purposes in the past. So I think sometimes people assume that any sort of self-reflection is unhealthy, which I think is very much the wrong conclusion.

I'd agree that most people are a combination of good and bad traits, so I think rejecting people whenever they predictably have bad traits just ends up becoming an exercise in misanthropy. There most certainly has to be some standards for our own well-being and safety and that of others, but I think that there's a problem when those standards far exceed what can realistically be expected of others. I think that can be hard for people to judge when they've been isolated from most others for a long time, though, as I was due to my intense social anxiety. That's why I think its important for me not to judge people based purely on my feelings, which are subjective and can be transitory.

I have to say that I worry about the same thing! While I am perhaps weirdly self-confident for someone who's had so much trouble with social anxiety, I really, really dislike rejection. And in my particular situation, it's easy for me to imagine that if I expressed my thoughts and feelings more often, most people would choose to reject me. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I often disagree with or at the least, question a lot of things, and I don't think most people want that level of conflict in their lives. In any event, it would cause too much confrontation for me to contemplate voicing every doubt or disagreement that I have, but I also suspect that I perhaps supress my doubts too often. I also have difficulty expressing admiration for others, though. Really I think I need to work on my interpersonal skills in general. That's something that's important to me because my friendships are important to me.