Chilling out to some Norah Jones and pondering life, renewal, and second chances on the eve of Easter. This is the first in a string of 3 or 4 reasonably personal posts. I'll be back with the usual gossip, rants and minutiae in a few:
There are three ways that I know to approach what is right: rejecting it outright, trying to be right, and trying to do right.
Since the first encompasses a totally different moral perspective, I'll focus on the distinction between the latter two.
I like to think of myself as a person of principle--which leads to a strong tension between being right and doing right. But as one faces an increasingly complex world with issues of which one is increasingly unaware, one's ability to be right diminishes significantly. One's ability to do right never does. Being right can ultimately be self-serving, self-gratifying and self-ish. Doing right is usually quite the opposite. But doing right doesn't always mean following the rules, and this is where the key discussion arises: at what point does one draw the line, even if one is doing right? Where is principle more powerful than outcome?
Utilitarian vs. Retributive
I guess for me, the line gets drawn at precedent. Am I creating an indefensible precedent with this action--one that I will forever need to abide by (and can't)? Am I really trying to do right or am I just taking action for the sake of action? At core, I fall more towards the retributive side--I want to do the right thing, I want to stick to a moral code, I want to believe in something (more on faith and love in one of the forthcoming personal postings). But I'm too much of a human to ignore attenuating and mitigating factors. Does this make me a dreaded "flip-flopper"? I don't think so, in fact, devotion to weighing each situation on its own merits, to me at least, is a desirable trait. The debate here can lead to all sorts of discussions on legal theory, punishment and crime. Discussions that involve things like whether its justifiable to kill (or allow to die by inaction) 50 innocent people to save 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 or 51.
But I want to focus on the little decisions we make everyday--e.g. that woman over there is crying: on principal, I don't approach strangers in the street, but I should ask this woman if she's ok or maybe I should just ignore her based on the principle that I would be invading her privacy and violating urban codes of conduct by approaching her.
When we think of things like "the greatest good" and "justice" we tend to attach grandiose notions to them that involve matters of life and death, universal principle and global consequence. And yet, what a difference we could all make if we saw these enormous choices we face in our daily lives and forsook the rules when they were not bettering the world and attuning our rules to life, and not the vacuum within which we generally generate them. What I'm getting at is that in all the grandiose decisions we debate and discuss and believe and hesitate and judge and sympathize and reject and agree and take a million and one stances. How often though do we pull over and help the person who's got a flat? Or put a quarter in the meter when we see a traffic officer approaching and a forgetful mother juggling two kids running into a grocery store to do her shopping? Or even see those as decisions? Principle actually tells us not to help out--the system will take care of them. They'll learn their lessons or help themselves. In short, a reflection of the severe individualism American society foists upon us--do the right thing for yourself and let everyone else worry about themselves. Just like you should make your money and step over anyone who asks for help.
So while in the extreme situations we often see a retributive approach as ridiculous, in so much of our daily life we've grown accustomed to accepting it without question. Intellectual exercises are great, but the power is in the application. Obviously, there's the question of how do these macro concepts scale--but as I see it, they scale very well, as long as you can identify matters that fall within the precedents you've created. And learning to identify them, well, I often find I've passed them by before I recognize them. 3 haunting words: "I should have..." accompany those moments. But there was a time when I didn't even recognize them. Having passed beyond wanting to be right, now I need to go from wanting to do right, to actually doing it.
Life is a helluva journey--just when you think you've gotten somewhere, you've only reached the point from which you can actually start.
There are three ways that I know to approach what is right: rejecting it outright, trying to be right, and trying to do right.
Since the first encompasses a totally different moral perspective, I'll focus on the distinction between the latter two.
I like to think of myself as a person of principle--which leads to a strong tension between being right and doing right. But as one faces an increasingly complex world with issues of which one is increasingly unaware, one's ability to be right diminishes significantly. One's ability to do right never does. Being right can ultimately be self-serving, self-gratifying and self-ish. Doing right is usually quite the opposite. But doing right doesn't always mean following the rules, and this is where the key discussion arises: at what point does one draw the line, even if one is doing right? Where is principle more powerful than outcome?
Utilitarian vs. Retributive
I guess for me, the line gets drawn at precedent. Am I creating an indefensible precedent with this action--one that I will forever need to abide by (and can't)? Am I really trying to do right or am I just taking action for the sake of action? At core, I fall more towards the retributive side--I want to do the right thing, I want to stick to a moral code, I want to believe in something (more on faith and love in one of the forthcoming personal postings). But I'm too much of a human to ignore attenuating and mitigating factors. Does this make me a dreaded "flip-flopper"? I don't think so, in fact, devotion to weighing each situation on its own merits, to me at least, is a desirable trait. The debate here can lead to all sorts of discussions on legal theory, punishment and crime. Discussions that involve things like whether its justifiable to kill (or allow to die by inaction) 50 innocent people to save 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 or 51.
But I want to focus on the little decisions we make everyday--e.g. that woman over there is crying: on principal, I don't approach strangers in the street, but I should ask this woman if she's ok or maybe I should just ignore her based on the principle that I would be invading her privacy and violating urban codes of conduct by approaching her.
When we think of things like "the greatest good" and "justice" we tend to attach grandiose notions to them that involve matters of life and death, universal principle and global consequence. And yet, what a difference we could all make if we saw these enormous choices we face in our daily lives and forsook the rules when they were not bettering the world and attuning our rules to life, and not the vacuum within which we generally generate them. What I'm getting at is that in all the grandiose decisions we debate and discuss and believe and hesitate and judge and sympathize and reject and agree and take a million and one stances. How often though do we pull over and help the person who's got a flat? Or put a quarter in the meter when we see a traffic officer approaching and a forgetful mother juggling two kids running into a grocery store to do her shopping? Or even see those as decisions? Principle actually tells us not to help out--the system will take care of them. They'll learn their lessons or help themselves. In short, a reflection of the severe individualism American society foists upon us--do the right thing for yourself and let everyone else worry about themselves. Just like you should make your money and step over anyone who asks for help.
So while in the extreme situations we often see a retributive approach as ridiculous, in so much of our daily life we've grown accustomed to accepting it without question. Intellectual exercises are great, but the power is in the application. Obviously, there's the question of how do these macro concepts scale--but as I see it, they scale very well, as long as you can identify matters that fall within the precedents you've created. And learning to identify them, well, I often find I've passed them by before I recognize them. 3 haunting words: "I should have..." accompany those moments. But there was a time when I didn't even recognize them. Having passed beyond wanting to be right, now I need to go from wanting to do right, to actually doing it.
Life is a helluva journey--just when you think you've gotten somewhere, you've only reached the point from which you can actually start.
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