Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: ethics

I Suffered, Therefore So Must Others

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On November 16, 2020

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I want to expand on this idea, ably put my Amal El-Mohtar here:

This idea seems right: the first is better than the second.

But the actual correct stance is:

This bad thing never happened to me BUT I can imagine how horrible it would be, so I want to make sure it doesn’t happen to other people.

None of us, no matter how bad our lives are, have experienced all the horrible things that can happen. Conservatives are notorious for being terrible except about one thing, you dig and it’s “My child got esophagal cancer so now I champion that,” OR “Someone I care about was shot with an assault rifle so now I’m against that.”

Imaginative empathy allows us to imagine being a blood diamond slave in the Congo, or there during a school shooting, or suffering from grinding poverty even if we’ve had good lives. It allows us to be disgusted and horrified by people cleaning out sewers by hand (Indians euphemistically call this “manual scavenging”) or what it’s like to suffer from anti-black racism or caste oppression. We don’t need to have suffered something either to say, “Others should suck it up,” or “Others shouldn’t have to go through what I did.”

This isn’t a call to removing all risk and stress from life. Not all unpleasant events are bad. The general rule, now well-supported by various studies, is that short term stress is good, and chronic stress is bad.

When I went to school, we had exam hell week: one before Christmas, one at the end of the year. The final exam week usually determined 50 percent of our marks.

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This arrangement made for “good stress:” it was short-term and made you learn how to take high-impact tests. I’ve never feared a test since then: I assume I can pass any academic test, if given enough time to study, and my idea of enough time is a lot less than most people’s.

We don’t want to protect people from good stress — from short term challenges that teach them what they can do.

Chronic stress or traumatic stress, however, we do want to avoid. No one is improved by rape (prison administrators take note). No one is improved by being poor for years or even months on end. No one is improved by chronic hunger or fear.

The larger questions are why some people are unable to employ imaginative empathy: Why they must experience hell first-hand to realize “Oh! Hell is bad!” and why some can’t extrapolate this to “All hells are bad.”

Life is better with happy, healthy people. Heaven and Hell are both other people: if you’re surrounded by happy, loving people, odds are you’ll be happy. If you don’t start that way, you’ll almost certainly wind up that way. We shouldn’t want our fellow citizens to be subject to damaging long-term stress of traumatic events simply because we have to live with them.

The exception, alas, is that some people can’t learn that something is bad if it doesn’t happen to them. Their depraved indifference is a danger to everyone around them and a challenge to ethics. The people who need to be poor or spend time disabled or seriously sick are the people who think it’s no big deal. Some people, it seems, can only learn that “Hell is bad” if they or perhaps someone they love, spends time in Hell.

El-Mohtar’s tweet, of course, was about the possibility of Biden using an executive order to forgive $50k of student debt.

The good way to do it would be to get rid of the bankruptcy bill Biden pushed that made it impossible for student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, which would sort the situation out fast (it is NEVER a good idea to make it so that creditors do not have to worry about non payment. NEVER.)

But Biden probably won’t have control of Congress, and this is better than doing nothing, even if some people who have paid off student loans feel it is “unfair.” It was unfair they had usurious loans, but just because they suffered doesn’t mean others should.

The best solution, of course, would be to go back to 60s-style universities where tuition is either cheap or non-existent. The cost is a lot less than any of the repeated bailouts of rich people and could be made even lower by doing something about university admin bloat (that’s an entire other article I may write one day) and a more complete solution would be to do something about credential inflation: Most jobs don’t need a degree and the idea that they do today is absurd.

But what Biden can do is forgive $50K with an admin order and he should. It’s a good thing he can do, and if it doesn’t relieve the suffering of people in the past, well, hopefully you are, at least, the sort of person who doesn’t want others to suffer like you did.

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Morally Neutral Virtues

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On January 24, 2018

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Something is moral if it is good for people you know. Something is ethical if it is good for people you don’t know.

One of the most important concepts to understand for judging oneself and others is “morally/ethically neutral virtues.”

A virtue is something that makes a person a better person.

Better is not a synonym for good.

It is a virtue, in most cultures to be generous, to keep one’s word, to be kind, to work hard, or to be courageous.

Three of those five virtues are morally and ethically neutral.

A brave person who is doing evil (many Nazi war heroes to give the most socially acceptable example) is worse than a coward doing evil. A hard-working person doing evil is worse than a lazy person doing evil (usually). A person who keeps their oath (their word) to a tyrant, is worse than someone who doesn’t keep their word to a tyrant.

We admire people who are hard working, courageous, or honorable.

But people who are all of those things, or even one, in service to a bad cause, do more harm than those without them.

I find a great deal to admire in Genghis Khan, but he left a wasteland behind him. (And note that Khan was generally moral. He took very good care of almost everyone around him. He was not, however, ethical.)

Although Dick Cheney was not a brave man (he sought and received Vietnam deferments), even those who hate him will admit he worked like a dog. That is unfortunate. One of the things I liked best about George W. Bush is that he was lazy, which, because what he wanted to do was almost all evil, was a good thing. Left-wingers whining about him (or Trump) taking holidays were fools.

The virtues of our enemies are virtues.

Note also, very carefully, the distinction between ethics and morality. A person can be moral (look after his family, friends, and other people he knows) and deeply unethical. Joe Biden is a deeply moral man: He loves his family and friends and would do anything for them.

He is also a deeply unethical man, who has supported many monstrous policies which have hurt millions and millions of people. He’s, frankly, evil, if you don’t know him. But what a friend he would be.

However, he’s not your friend, and if you vote for him because of how wonderful he is to people he knows, you will get hurt badly, and be somewhat responsible for that hurt.

It is also possible to be ethical and immoral, as in leaders who treat people they know like shit and people they don’t know well. Huey Long fell mostly into this category. To the extent that JFK did good things (his legacy is mixed), he certainly was.

A wise peon, and most of us are peons, prefers as a leader someone who is immoral but ethical, because they know that they aren’t their leader’s friend, or family, or direct servitor.

And, generally speaking, an enemy who is lazy, stupid, and so on, is preferable to one who isn’t. The only broad exception is that honorable enemies are better than dishonorable ones, because you can cut deals with them, and it is enemies, above all, with whom you must be able to negotiate.

In the small world, of small people, there are many we admire for their virtues who have turned themselves into creatures of bad leaders. Take, for example, special forces, whom many worship. In many cases they have done truly amazing things to become special forces: worked brutally hard, put up with privation, been loyal, and disciplined.

But when you let other men (or, more rarely, women) turn you into a weapon or tool, you are responsible for how they wield you. If your loyalty, skill, and discipline make you a better weapon or tool for doing evil, then your virtues have been corrupted.

(Ivy League graduates as well as military men and women should think deeply on this. But so should those who consider themselves elites in the financial industry, for example.)

Virtue in the service of a bad cause or evil master is still virtue. It is still admirable. But it turns virtue to the service of evil.

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