5 posts tagged “ethics”

View other items tagged “ethics:” Photos, Audio, Videos, Books or Links. View “ethics” on Vox.

Sweet, so sweet, so slow

I've been in the mood for Jean Paul Sartre recently. 

"Existentialism is nothing less than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this sense, existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing."


I find I'm happier when I acknowledge the anguish that accompanies honest ("authentic") living. It's a strange paradox of existential neurosis. Wish that didn't have so many syllables. 

More soon.

1 comment Tags: ethics

The status quo

Funny that it's always the TED talks that get me fired up enough to blog. Here, "fired up" means positively inspired, which is a nice contrast. In the past few days I've been very frustrated with the global status quo. I won't deny my frustration with the world is positively linked to trouble with my research... but that doesn't mean these nagging concerns are baseless! (Throw me a bone! It's fun!)

There's a post on MetaFilter asking a darn good question: What can I do to lead a more environmentally conscious lifestyle? There are a lot of answers, which is reassuring. Most of them strike me as off the point, which is depressing. The good responses: do donate money to good causes, focus on your CO2 footprint, and try to develop a sense of priorities. Bad: farmers markets, water bottles.

This small site appears a repository for one kind of complaint from me, so I needn't bother making it in full again--but why am I in Michigan? Will my education here offset my crazy CO2 usage? Will all this fretting about our rate of adaptation result in mitigation that genuinely improves people's lives? I want to believe that material standards of living make a difference. Maybe they don't. Maybe we're all better off reproducing freely, even if some future generation suffers enormously. I just don't know how to measure happiness and suffering. I don't begin to understand my own happiness and suffering.

Aesthetics are tricky. My brief Christian education makes me wary of them. But I love good lines. I love color. I stayed up until 4:30 a.m. on Monday night looking at beautiful furniture online. I love, love, love nice spaces and interesting patterns. I will spend more money on pretty sheets than plain ones. This money could've gone to people who need medicine/vitamins/education/etc. Enormous guilt. I don't know how to balance these competing desires.

The people speak very fairly about aesthetics are Virginia Postrel, and, just now on TED, Stefan Sagmeister. Keats doesn't cut it.

Are there any psychologists who are making progress here? I remember the subjective well-being and per capita GDP plot I saw in The Atlantic--that was reassuring (positive correlation, if you couldn't guess). But at what prevalence of malaria infections can I spend more time on interior design? Zero, I'd say. And yet I really, really like pretty things. Fortunately, global dynamics can be lovely to study too.

Now James Howard Kunstler on suburbia. I love the internet. Woof.

Post a comment Tags: ethics, aesthetics

Speaking of scale

From an article by Andrew Revkin in today's New York Times:

"This is a mega-ethical challenge," said Jerry D. Mahlman, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has studied global warming for more than three decades. "In space, its the size of a planet, and in time, it has scales far broader than what we go-go Homo sapiens are accustomed to dealing with."

Hell, yeah. The article otherwise (ironically, given it is on "moderate" scientists in the climate debate) imposes false contrasts between scientists who are quite alarmed and fear catastrophe and those who... want to do something pragmatic? (??) I don't quite see the point, but at least it's another article on climate change!

1 comment Tags: ethics, nytimes, climate change

It's like coming out... morally

Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
Marc Hauser

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.


3 comments Tags: books, ethics, my embarrassing development

The way we eat and watch football

My dad kindly ordered "The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter" for me off my Amazon wish list a few months ago. It took me about two months to read it, though it's just under 300 pp. and very well-written. There's no revelatory research, but it's impressive (and long overdue) in its scope--the review considers ethical implications for animal welfare, the environment, and human health and culture. I was particularly happy to read (finally!) a critique of the "buy local" invocation, which makes little sense to me, especially considering the enormous impact a few dollars can have on the well-being of farmers in developing countries. I was surprised that often the environmental impact, in terms of CO2 produced, is much lower for food shipped halfway around the world (by sea or freight rather than air) than items grown locally in greenhouses. I have an urge to give this book to most everyone I know, but they seem to fall into two camps: either they have already reached >90% of the conclusions summarized here and adjusted their habits accordingly (though the book is useful reinforcement), or they don't seem the least bit interested. I have no idea how to touch the latter. I'm reminded of a relative of mine who, when I asked her if she had seen "An Inconvenient Truth," replied, "Why should I go see that?!"


I wish I knew what genetic or environmental factors determine the bounds of our compassion. Perhaps the difference is more in our propensity to strive for internal consistency in belief. Perhaps some of us are working from different assumptions--we just don't understand the state of fisheries, climate change, and the unnecessary suffering of so many humans and other animals on the planet, and (most likely) we especially don't understand how our day-to-day decisions effect [sic] the world. But what drives some people to investigate and others to toss their hands in the air, declaring the problem too vague, complex, irrelevant (e.g., if God takes care of it all) or simply uninteresting?

We have a frustrating tendency to group our concerns for various causes into a gross category of "benevolence" and rarely to try to determine which among these causes most deserve our attention. Iraq, animal rights, sex offenders, climate change, the neighborhood soup kitchen, civil liberties, socially responsible investing, public health--the same halo floats over each. We rarely delve (at least publicly) into the necessary moral calculus to weight these problems. The problem is even harder, of course--we then need appropriate models for effecting change, acknowledging that certain interventions, such as literacy, potentially solve several problems at once and are prerequisites for others. I wish there were more objective discussion about what our priorities should be--this is an inherently philosophical question that depends on one's degree of utilitarianism--and then the corresponding challenges in public policy.

Finally, I need to vent about popular sports: playing sports is great, admiring technical ability is great, but it bothers me to no end that our beliefs, time, and energy can be sold so easily by the desire to belong to a group. It is the most abritrary, superficial connection I can imagine.

 


Post a comment Tags: food, books, ethics