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Tag: ethics

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    The Coward’s Bargain

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    1–2 minutes

    Cowardice, often condemned, is a form of survival—an adaptation to overwhelming threat.

    Humans participate in and placate power, psychologically deceiving themselves to endure, which causes an internal fracture. This duality—holding truth while manufacturing delusion—enables (makes space for) contradictory action: submission masquerading as strength, and strength pretending to be pacifism. (The coward as saint or martyr when there is no option, and the bully tyrant doing it all for peace.)

    In the fracture, the moral self is split, not erased, leaving it capable of duality.

    What appears as weakness is often the cost of coherence in chaos. Judgment of falling back (stepping down) overlooks the complexity of self-preservation. To understand cowardice is to recognize it as a psychological negotiation, perhaps not a failure of character but a recalibration of it under existential duress. 

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    The Dual Burden of Goodness

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    1–2 minutes

    To be good is to live between idealism and romanticism—believing in universal values while cherishing their personal embodiment. Yet, reality offers little affirmation.

    The world seldom rewards virtue, and goodness feels like a stubborn delusion in a landscape of indifference.

    Still, we persist, reshaping people and institutions toward our imagined order: we call this progress. We seek loyalty, justice, and integrity, though we often meet opportunism and betrayal. This striving is not naïveté—it is defiance.

    To be "good" is to love a brutal reality that resists goodness, and still choose to believe in its possibility.

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    Language when losing

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    1–2 minutes

    When you are losing, change your terminology: retreat becomes a tactical withdrawal or negotiated resolution, rejection or firing is merely exploring new opportunities, collapse is restructuring, and downgrading is optimization.

    This morale maintenance is more than applying a silver lining; it is a rejection of reality reframed so we never have to learn from failure. More than this, to maintain values, we must believe the surrogate terminology as wisdom and set up irrationality as necessary faith.

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    values without value

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    1–2 minutes

    Justice is an abstract concept linked to fairness and who is in the right. This involves a value-laden story. But keep in mind that values are also abstract: what is right or fair, and for whom? While some values can signify “this-ness” or haecceity (a virtue of uniqueness), most reference utility (use) or moral virtue (good) as the motivation behind broader abstractions such as justice or freedom.

    The problem is not that abstract, taken-for-granted, common-sense values undergird legalized abstractions because the pattern can be recognized, and debate can ensue. Instead, the gradual creeping inward of values shapes the individual.

    The internal self, the consciousness we access from which all meaning must be given, begins with these abstract values, allowing us to respond to situations. And yet, living up to multiple abstract values is an unrealistic burden.

    As values come to us, they are ripe with contradictions:

    Isiah Berlin says the notion that all good things, freedom, order, knowledge, and justice are compatible is “perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs entertained by profound and influential thinkers.”

    Beyond their incompatibility is their semantic drift, deviating from their origin. And yet, we must remember that shared values are the means to unite a group or society to solve a problem. The warning is to begin not from abstractions but from objects: solve for reality (real issues) instead of referencing ever-expanding, slippery abstract principles.

    However, on a more Machiavellian note, if you can hold peace and cooperation in your mind while destroying and betraying, you can become ultimately powerful through an innovative contradiction: values without value.

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    Objectivity as pretense to morality

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    1–2 minutes

    A well-crafted article presents research, fact after fact, in a compelling order—only to end in moralization, transforming it into a fable.

    Sometimes, I invert every value judgment, reaching opposite conclusions from the same facts. The ease of this reversal exposes a deeper issue: we accept logical structures (formulaic chains) without applying counter-logic.

    We crave belief, not reason, using facts as rhetorical tools rather than as paths to truth. The facts seldom dictate the conclusions; they merely serve as a pretext for moralization.

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    Nice vs Good

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    1–2 minutes

    To be nice is not to be good, to be good is to stand for what is good.

    Being nice is polite, wanting to be being liked, and sacrificing the good to get along, despite knowing better.

    Sure, you can be nice and kind up to a point or be politically astute up to a point, but a whole person (an authentic, emotionally secure, resilient individual) will cease polite agreement and take a stand for what is good.

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    Utopia as morality

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    1–2 minutes

    History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral. Indeed even actively conserving the status quo is immoral; governance is only moral in so far as it affects change, thus moving us ever forwards, towards utopia

    N.S. Lyons

    Progress is moral; caution is backsliding.

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    hypocrisy: gangster

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    1–2 minutes

    Hypocrisy is not merely professing one thing and doing another; it requires belief in the very stability of what one undermines. This paradox assumes a conscious recognition of virtue, selectively ignored but offset by actions that reassert a fractured self-image.

    Consider the archetype of the Mafia Don—a criminal bound by convictions to family, faith, or loyalty. He avoids divorce yet indulges in infidelity, preserving marriage as a symbol of high ethical permanence. Similarly, the mob sustains the pretense of tribal sanctity while exploiting or killing its members. Loyalty is theatrically upheld to avert anarchy, reinforced by calculated gestures of generosity.

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    positional morality

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    1–2 minutes

    Whether or not your position is right or wrong, forcing it on others is objectionable, if not objectively morally wrong (according to Peter Singer).

    This is how positive moral sentiment moves into a tyrannical position of fascist coercion by dictating “the good” as necessary.

    The role of the authoritarian (parent/politician/priest) is to say, “You are acting against your own best interests, and I will not let you damage yourself or this family.”

    Yet, from which stance is this “harm” prevented by the leader: common sense (popular consensus) or expertise (technical mastery)? Nebulous, unconscious ego compensation (blindly subjective desires, such as daddy issues, libidinal pathology, sadomasochism, or transference)? Or is it legal (judicial)? Technical expertise and judicial knowledge are drawn from academic and regulatory bodies, so they seem more impartial, but they can also be emotively distorted to serve subjective, relative ends.

    Never being coercive or authoritarian is not to find yourself in the right: you are still wrong but in a less visible way. Denying holding a position for fear of coercion smuggles in a more slippery sin: avoiding responsibility is also not of “the good” or “the right.”

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    Distancing sanctimony

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    1–2 minutes

    Freddie deBoer discusses the moral sanctimony of claiming to be on the side of the poor, disenfranchised, and mentally ill by asking for money for them.

    Consider money and social status as a feel-good distancing mechanism: write the check or post online rather than physically, personally engage with (or take responsibility for) those suffering.

    The reality is difficult but not complex: ill people do not make rational, normative decisions, but declaring their lifestyle as a choice or unique expression of their autonomy is another clever avoidance of responsibility/reality wrapped in the rhetoric of individualist freedom.

    By requesting funds without participatory understanding layered with evermore attenuated disclaimers about autonomy and agency, we are left to surround problems with resources: we encircle difficulties with money and abstract empathy, like walling off an invader or parasite, yelling our care over the barrier we created.