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A Paradox of Morality
Sep. 27th, 2019 02:36 pmThere is to me an apparent paradox involving the relationship between morality regarding individual relationships and morality regarding larger-scale politics.
I think one's ethics will always be somewhat removed from practicality if it's all abstract and large-scale and there's no sense of concrete personal ethics to go along with it. I also feel that that kind of ethics even has the danger of being unable to grasp the larger scale ethics that is its focus because that is, in the end, for the benefit of countless individuals. So to actually benefit other individuals, we need to know not only if they are being treated fairly (as large-scale ethics seems to me to be primarily about whether ethical precepts are applied consistently), but also if our understanding of ethics allows us to treat others well as individuals in the first place. And I think it's hard to do that without understanding, from a practical perspective, how to interact with others in a healthy and mutually beneficial way. And so I think that people who have more friends and are more sophisticated socially than I am may understand some of these issues in a more concrete way than I do.
However, I also think that personal relationships can pose enormous conflicts of interest when trying to act on larger-scale ethics. I think this is why people like Greta Thunberg, who has talked about her difficulties socializing due to Aspergers, may be more motivated to act on their politics than the average person. Also, I've read that Greta's parents were initially not very supportive of her activism and if she had been more worried about her behavior upsetting their feelings than she was, she may never have done anything substantive at all. I think when people are less concerned about doing the socially correct thing on a personal level, it becomes easier to do the socially correct thing on a larger scale.
This is just something I think about a lot because of the importance I place on social issues and because of my lifelong difficulties with socializing. I put a lot of effort into trying to improve my socialization skills both out of necessity and because my dedication to ethics means I want to have the skills to treat others in an ethical way. It can be easy to become inwardly focused at worst, or at best, out of touch, if one does not maintain any personal connections to others. But I have also seen how, especially for someone as conflict averse as myself, such connections can be a serious impediment to acting on ethical impulses. There's a lot more I could say about this but I'll leave it at that for now.
I think one's ethics will always be somewhat removed from practicality if it's all abstract and large-scale and there's no sense of concrete personal ethics to go along with it. I also feel that that kind of ethics even has the danger of being unable to grasp the larger scale ethics that is its focus because that is, in the end, for the benefit of countless individuals. So to actually benefit other individuals, we need to know not only if they are being treated fairly (as large-scale ethics seems to me to be primarily about whether ethical precepts are applied consistently), but also if our understanding of ethics allows us to treat others well as individuals in the first place. And I think it's hard to do that without understanding, from a practical perspective, how to interact with others in a healthy and mutually beneficial way. And so I think that people who have more friends and are more sophisticated socially than I am may understand some of these issues in a more concrete way than I do.
However, I also think that personal relationships can pose enormous conflicts of interest when trying to act on larger-scale ethics. I think this is why people like Greta Thunberg, who has talked about her difficulties socializing due to Aspergers, may be more motivated to act on their politics than the average person. Also, I've read that Greta's parents were initially not very supportive of her activism and if she had been more worried about her behavior upsetting their feelings than she was, she may never have done anything substantive at all. I think when people are less concerned about doing the socially correct thing on a personal level, it becomes easier to do the socially correct thing on a larger scale.
This is just something I think about a lot because of the importance I place on social issues and because of my lifelong difficulties with socializing. I put a lot of effort into trying to improve my socialization skills both out of necessity and because my dedication to ethics means I want to have the skills to treat others in an ethical way. It can be easy to become inwardly focused at worst, or at best, out of touch, if one does not maintain any personal connections to others. But I have also seen how, especially for someone as conflict averse as myself, such connections can be a serious impediment to acting on ethical impulses. There's a lot more I could say about this but I'll leave it at that for now.
