I've started reading Moral Minds by Marc Hauser (thanks, Dad!). I'm excited. It looks like a properly reasoned argument. I'm on p. 24 so far, and I'm happy he has already illustrated how our altruism/empathy is so constrained by what we can see, and the people whom we actually meet, rather than abiding ethical principles. We wouldn't hesitate to stop at the side of the road to help someone with a bloody leg, even if it involved expensive damage to our car's upholstery, but we toss UNESCO mailings into the recycling (or even the trash!) without much thought. (Again, we're faced with a uniquely large cooperation problem that selection has yet to act on.) The contrast is especially damning because the lives of many people far away can be saved cheaply. Drink a latte or treat someone for malaria. Something like that. It's funny to read these descriptions of Saddam maintaining the "clan" mentality as a ruler--we, too, think on damagingly small scales, both spatial and temporal.
I realize I'm pretty obsessed with ethics. My inconsistencies grate on me. I haven't settled on a consistent strategy. At what point do I value my ability to go to a movie, to fit in with the culture, not to wear the same clothes year after year--I want to participate in my community, I want to be happy, I want to be surrounded by beauty, I want to travel, but any particular purchase is ridiculously trivial. Do I have to renege on my culture to be ethical? Could I do that? Am I that adaptable? I doubt it.
I've been circling this topic for over a decade. There are few public forums for secular humanists. When I was young I was labeled "hyperethical." I tried really, really hard to find excuses not to care or worry; I can finally say they're bullshit, but I went half crazy when I was younger trying to believe the problem was only me. In college I should have taken a course with Peter Singer--his writing always brings relief, though he rarely develops his analysis far enough. I'm embarrassed that I feel a little like Cassandra too. In addition to my hypocrisy, a large part of my fear and anger arises from feeling alone in my concern. I know a handful of people who occasionally think along the same lines. I know more who blatantly don't feel any special obligation to others or who feel it uncritically within the bounds of some religion. This is a major source of pain.
I need a better moral calculus--no longer content to kill myself (I once thought I might do more good by doing so, since I had trouble valuing my own enjoyment of anything), I must instead figure out the necessary tradeoffs between my happiness... sometimes I wish I had a utile meter... as effected by my consumption of various things, and the happiness of other people. I'm thinking in particular of others' happiness effected through, first, reduced mortality, and then reduced morbidity, reproductive freedom, civil rights, and so on. By "other people," I mean people around today and also those in the future: short term gains with long term losses won't cut it. Environmentally, what's important is not that we maintain the planet in some state but that we allow ourselves enough time to adapt to changes. Small economic discounting is probably appropriate.
I also value the enjoyment of other sentient creatures: I would be happy if we could drop most forms of meat consumption.
My choices, and the choices of other people, cause such semiconscious distress and confusion from day to day that I need to tackle this problem more concertedly. In the past I've erred on the abstemious, miserable side (all the while having utopian dreams of living with like-minded people). It's time to try again. What's interesting is that the emotional dimension, the satisfaction that comes with seeing someone happy because of some very small sacrifice on your part, can be hard to summon. I fall into the "drop in the bucket" mentality. No matter--for many injustices, there are no threshold effects, and every little bit does count. But I need some way of prioritizing reproductive rights, climate change (effectively, future people's health and livelihoods), civil rights, spiritual happiness (damn religions), and so on--it's the most fantastic policy problem. I wonder what the literature on subjective well-being has to say on the matter. I remember reading in Lao PDR an Atlantic my parents had brought me, and there was a plot of SWB against per capita GDP. Quite linear, suppposedly dispeled "the myth of the happy farmer," and there were some interesting outliers--Latin America abnormally high, Eastern Europe low. I remember thinking, "Oh, my work is legit, and I don't have to keep searching for some secret well of happiness beneath the poverty." So I should focus on healthy development, combined with CO2 abatement, and try to get better resolved data on SBW by age and sex. And then there are the animals. And what of Scanlon's argument--how much of a utilitarian am I? Is it worse to have one person in extreme pain or 10 people in moderate pain? Ack.
My day-to-day happiness is too tied to assimilation. I like pretty things. I don't know how much I can give up while still being happy. I'm not sure if I'm even happy now!
I'm looking forward to chewing these ideas while reading this book. I remember when Talk of the Nation interviewed Paul Farmer (of Mountains Beyond Mountains and Zanmie la Santé fame), and I snuck in a question by email at the end: How did he know when to stop? How did he not become abstemious? He didn't really answer. He said he didn't wear a hair shirt, and that was about it. Now if he doesn't feel like he's sacrificing anything, why exactly do we consider him such a saint? Perhaps he was "born" that way? Ugh, I need to think more about this.
