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Tag: ethics

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    Perilous Adventure: use your rights

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    1–2 minutes

    For those craving perilous escapades, reflect on unexercised rights: Are you utilizing your freedom of speech or bearing arms?
    Society often conflates legality with morality, distinguishing between the civilized and the uncivilized based on superficial markers: a civilized individual shuns firearms and engages in courteous discourse, even while indulging in most of the seven deadly sins.

    This dichotomy invites a reevaluation of the divide between legal standards and moral principles, challenging where true civility lies—in the actions sanctioned by law or the integrity of our conduct.

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    Necessity of Fault

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    1–2 minutes

    What if everything considered human in us derives from our faults? Instead of privileging the pure or authentic, we can more consistently rely on balancing a multitude of negatives to create the positive self.

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    Paradox: moral transgression

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    1–2 minutes

    A confounding problem for progressive politics is the belief in transgression to move beyond traditional shackles.

    Transgression is anti-moral, in that morality is established by conservative mores, and yet the “equality” progressives seek is essentially moral, and must not be transgressed.

    As usual, at extremes, the deal struck to release us subverts its terms into it’s Achilles heal: to achieve morality we must transgress morality.

    That is, to escape hierarchical domination and become free, we atomize people and norms beyond the commonality that can gauge equality.

    (Inspired by Cristopher Lasch)

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    Moral Flip: Empathy as Chaos

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    1–2 minutes

    Empathy for those less fortunate leads to pleas for benevolent altruism: Universal basic, open borders, or reallocated police funding.

    Taken further, all structure and any limitation is oppression: empathetically, anyone should have whatever they want whenever they want it.

    This becomes anarchy or chaos unless by design the people are so dull that they only desire what they are told, or so enlightened they can self-regulate.

    Unfortunately, denuded of limits out of a desire for freedom, we become oppressed by our neighbors, collapsing standards, and bankrupt infrastructure. (oppressed by others and circumstances)

    This hyper-empathy mistakes Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty (freedom from restraint) and positive liberty (freedom to self-determine): the paradox of allowing self-determination is that it will infringe on the rights of others.

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    Moral Flip: Idealism leads to Evil

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    1–2 minutes

    High moral principles reduce room for compromise. In fact, compromise itself is often seen as suspect.

    Inverse to our lauded praise for "moral steadfastness" its rigidity and idealism lead to evil.

    This happens when the desirable ends provide justification for violent and oppressive means. Or, you want good so much that you become bad.

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    explanation vs justification

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    1–2 minutes

    “How could you?” is answered with “That’s no excuse!”

    People forget that an explanation is not an excuse; it is not a justification. Explaining the mechanics is not appealing to morality.

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    Might makes right

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    1–2 minutes

    As we know: rhymes aren’t right. (neither is alliteration)

    “Might make right” is an intentional slur against bullies, but proves poignantly enough the fragility of righteousness in the face of reality.

    To make right our reality, do we destroy might?
    If so, have we become mighty bullies swinging our glorious righteousness?

    Have we inverted it: Does weakness make warriors?

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    Use your worst traits to counter each other

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    1–2 minutes

    Our society coaches, in eco-cybernetic fashion, use your worst traits to counter each other.

    To harness your pride, greed, gluttony, vanity, lust, or sloth, empower another (more compelling) sin.

    Apparently, the way to counteract avarice is ambition, and vice versa: the politician will leave office only if he can make more money elsewhere, and the rich man will vacate the market and jump into politics because of his pride.

    Thus, selfish traits have been recast as steadfast (predictable) and mutually beneficial.

    While these counterbalancing forces appear stabilizing, they normalize rationalizing increasingly excessive appetites.

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    Sin as sublime

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    1–2 minutes

    Every deadly sin can become mystical at excessive levels.

    Transgressions at the extreme explode the individual: which is why they are a problem for community and society.

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    The new is an abomination, but we will accept it

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    1–2 minutes

    When something new is born into the world, it is an abomination: a mutation.

    It may serve some utility. Utility is what makes us accept it.

    In a simplified stance, new is “evil” in terms of disruption, but after an encounter, you cannot help but accept aspects of it as a new reality.

    From that point on, removing all traces of this foreign injection from your altered life is almost impossible.