moral musings
a few threads of moral thought / themes but i've been thinking about lately, or else, seem to be coming up a lot in media i've consumed lately:
(1) to what extent should we take responsibility for, or else be held responsible for, actions done under some kind of duress?
see: The Fifth Season, a novel which examines the injustice of trauma-people who are traumatized, are much more likely to enact that trauma on others, and are much more likely to be pressed into doing awful things-while the originator of the trauma (the oppressive society, the shitty dictator, whatever) never seems to be held accountable. surely that's the thing we should be going after?
alternatively, see: this random Twitter thread, which argues for a radical ideal of responsibility: you should take absolute ownership of everything you do, even when it was for survival, even when you were hurting at the time, it's always a thing that you, personally, did. one corollary of such an attitude: it renders you unimpeachable when holding others to account; not because you’ve never done anything wrong, but because you don’t deny it. people can always say "but i had a bad childhood" or whatever; if you say "that's not an excuse" and mean it, always, that’s a power move.
my rough instinct, looking at these two views, is probably along the lines of my snarky maxim that you should be "a liberal with respect to others and a conservative with respect to yourself." you should give other people a break because maybe it will help them. but you will be a better person, and feel like a more whole person, if you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. which can mean apologizing for shit even when you had no alternatives at the time. which can be owning shit that wasn't even really your fault-i mean, what is Jesus praised for, right, if not that.
the point not being guilt, i imagine, but ownership-i know i did this thing, therefore i can choose to not do that in the future; i have power over me. and so on.
see also "Moral Luck", the famous and excellent Nagel essay, which opened up a lot of these issues in modern philosophy. when i show this essay to other engineers, they always just bite the bullet immediately-"well of course justice doesn't mean anything, of course it's just a means of coercing people into what we doom socially-acceptable behavior, why does Nagel seem to think it's so important that justice actually be correlated with blame"-but, well, that doesn't feel quite right to me, though i've never been able to articulate why to my own satisfaction. (i have partially-satisfactory answers, but eh.)
(2) to what communities, distributed both temporally and physically, should we be held accountable?
by this i mean: if someone got away with a bad thing a long time ago, and we just find out about the bad deed now (a year later, a decade later, many decades later; centuries later), do they get to get away with it forever?
see: the whole Kavanaugh thing, which to some extent was about whether it makes sense to punish someone for something that was "kinda" "sorta" socially acceptable three decades ago. no one wants to be held responsible for shit they did three decades ago; that almost may as well be a different person. but what if they couldn't have gotten where they were today, without "getting away with" something in the past?
that's in the case of an individual; it’s also worth pondering this with respect to families (am i responsible for my father’s sins? need i attempt to make amends for them? ancient societies often seem to answer “yes” to that, but we probably wouldn’t), and with respect to nations (America is quite literally built on the soil of injustice; what can be done about that?).
see: The Color of Law, a book which argues clearly and vigorously for some sort of reparations for black Americans, due to federal housing policy hindering their ability to accumulate wealth during the "boom" years before, during, and after World War II. reading the book, you feel an urgency at its core: the author knows we must restore justice as fast as possible, or else it’s doomed to slip away forever (and in many cases it already has; for individual lifespans, often, justice delayed is justice denied.) another theme that i thought was important in the book: we-that is, all Americans-do not owe this only to Black Americans. we owe this to all of us. making America more just is a project we should all be committed to, and it will make all of us more whole in the end.
see: that one really sick AtlA episode, heh
i think the bit o’ media that brought this question to the forefront of my mind most clearly was a somewhat disturbing twitter thread. someone was arguing that someone's apology cannot possibly be genuine unless they "turn themselves in" for punishment, clearly implying: to the U.S. justice system. this person ran in the same kinds of crowds that talk freely about how deeply fucked up the US justice system-how disproportionate it is, how racist it is, how much it focuses on punishment versus rehabilitation, and so on. you cannot have it both ways. if the justice system is fucked, then you can't have it apply only when you think someone is particularly bad or unrepentant. you have to think more specifically-in what way do you want the person to be held to account? specific.
(semi-related sidebar: i don’t think i appreciated, until relatively recently, how powerful the “trial by a jury of your peers” thing is. more specifically: trial by a local, specific-to-your-community jury of your peers. it’s not just about keeping “the people” as a stopgap against “the government”-it’s about keeping “your” people, for some relatively sensible value of “your”, in control of what happens to you. as fallible as juries are, there’s something powerful in the theory that, well, maybe my community judges me less harshly than some rando federal judge from the other side of the country, and that’s okay because my community understands the prevailing social norms and culture in our part of the country. it’s a remnant of federalism, a stopgap against applying the rules too evenly or strongly everywhere.)
to some extent, both of these questions are things we pondered in my college philosophy class-the topic of the class was free will, but naturally that topic brings up a lot of considerations of blame/responsibility/etc-but it’s been a long time since i took that class, and i don’t think i thought about things in quite the same light back then.
(1) to what extent should we take responsibility for, or else be held responsible for, actions done under some kind of duress?
see: The Fifth Season, a novel which examines the injustice of trauma-people who are traumatized, are much more likely to enact that trauma on others, and are much more likely to be pressed into doing awful things-while the originator of the trauma (the oppressive society, the shitty dictator, whatever) never seems to be held accountable. surely that's the thing we should be going after?
alternatively, see: this random Twitter thread, which argues for a radical ideal of responsibility: you should take absolute ownership of everything you do, even when it was for survival, even when you were hurting at the time, it's always a thing that you, personally, did. one corollary of such an attitude: it renders you unimpeachable when holding others to account; not because you’ve never done anything wrong, but because you don’t deny it. people can always say "but i had a bad childhood" or whatever; if you say "that's not an excuse" and mean it, always, that’s a power move.
my rough instinct, looking at these two views, is probably along the lines of my snarky maxim that you should be "a liberal with respect to others and a conservative with respect to yourself." you should give other people a break because maybe it will help them. but you will be a better person, and feel like a more whole person, if you have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. which can mean apologizing for shit even when you had no alternatives at the time. which can be owning shit that wasn't even really your fault-i mean, what is Jesus praised for, right, if not that.
the point not being guilt, i imagine, but ownership-i know i did this thing, therefore i can choose to not do that in the future; i have power over me. and so on.
see also "Moral Luck", the famous and excellent Nagel essay, which opened up a lot of these issues in modern philosophy. when i show this essay to other engineers, they always just bite the bullet immediately-"well of course justice doesn't mean anything, of course it's just a means of coercing people into what we doom socially-acceptable behavior, why does Nagel seem to think it's so important that justice actually be correlated with blame"-but, well, that doesn't feel quite right to me, though i've never been able to articulate why to my own satisfaction. (i have partially-satisfactory answers, but eh.)
(2) to what communities, distributed both temporally and physically, should we be held accountable?
by this i mean: if someone got away with a bad thing a long time ago, and we just find out about the bad deed now (a year later, a decade later, many decades later; centuries later), do they get to get away with it forever?
see: the whole Kavanaugh thing, which to some extent was about whether it makes sense to punish someone for something that was "kinda" "sorta" socially acceptable three decades ago. no one wants to be held responsible for shit they did three decades ago; that almost may as well be a different person. but what if they couldn't have gotten where they were today, without "getting away with" something in the past?
that's in the case of an individual; it’s also worth pondering this with respect to families (am i responsible for my father’s sins? need i attempt to make amends for them? ancient societies often seem to answer “yes” to that, but we probably wouldn’t), and with respect to nations (America is quite literally built on the soil of injustice; what can be done about that?).
see: The Color of Law, a book which argues clearly and vigorously for some sort of reparations for black Americans, due to federal housing policy hindering their ability to accumulate wealth during the "boom" years before, during, and after World War II. reading the book, you feel an urgency at its core: the author knows we must restore justice as fast as possible, or else it’s doomed to slip away forever (and in many cases it already has; for individual lifespans, often, justice delayed is justice denied.) another theme that i thought was important in the book: we-that is, all Americans-do not owe this only to Black Americans. we owe this to all of us. making America more just is a project we should all be committed to, and it will make all of us more whole in the end.
see: that one really sick AtlA episode, heh
i think the bit o’ media that brought this question to the forefront of my mind most clearly was a somewhat disturbing twitter thread. someone was arguing that someone's apology cannot possibly be genuine unless they "turn themselves in" for punishment, clearly implying: to the U.S. justice system. this person ran in the same kinds of crowds that talk freely about how deeply fucked up the US justice system-how disproportionate it is, how racist it is, how much it focuses on punishment versus rehabilitation, and so on. you cannot have it both ways. if the justice system is fucked, then you can't have it apply only when you think someone is particularly bad or unrepentant. you have to think more specifically-in what way do you want the person to be held to account? specific.
(semi-related sidebar: i don’t think i appreciated, until relatively recently, how powerful the “trial by a jury of your peers” thing is. more specifically: trial by a local, specific-to-your-community jury of your peers. it’s not just about keeping “the people” as a stopgap against “the government”-it’s about keeping “your” people, for some relatively sensible value of “your”, in control of what happens to you. as fallible as juries are, there’s something powerful in the theory that, well, maybe my community judges me less harshly than some rando federal judge from the other side of the country, and that’s okay because my community understands the prevailing social norms and culture in our part of the country. it’s a remnant of federalism, a stopgap against applying the rules too evenly or strongly everywhere.)
to some extent, both of these questions are things we pondered in my college philosophy class-the topic of the class was free will, but naturally that topic brings up a lot of considerations of blame/responsibility/etc-but it’s been a long time since i took that class, and i don’t think i thought about things in quite the same light back then.