Morality

This is the 100th post on this blog, and to celebrate I would like input from whatever number of people read it.

I have a question.

How do you resolve arguments between competing moral systems without a prior moral system to evaluate them by?

So, in the development of a personal ethical system, there can be a choice between a utilitarian ethic and a deontological rights based ethic. Each of them uses different arguments to determine why someone should follow a particular moral schema. But, neither of them can make a determinate claim to being ethical without presupposing some other grounds to evaluate on. For instance, if utilitarianism is good because it treats all people as equal, this supposes that equal treatment has intrinsic moral worth. This claim may be justified by the argument that formal equality prevents large scale violence, but then we're moving in circles.

What grounds you at your fundamental humanity that allows you to construct moral claims or schema?

Duncan

Poetry and Physical Fitness

I do not believe in an authoritative interpretation of literature, or an authoritative ideal of health. Today, two events link these. The first came in my Comparative Literature course when the instructor spoke of an interpretation of a poem given by a student as being less right than another. His intention was benign, of course, but he spoke of interpreting literature in very narrow terms: being linked to a logical reasoning process. The second event was a friend to whom I gave the advice to exercise more. I did not mean this as an admonishment of his physical state as much as an attempt to realize a greater intensity of joy in feeling and knowing your body for it’s material character.

An ethics of joy links these two things in my mind. The ‘right’ interpretation for a poem should concern the reader’s (which reader? All readers, whoever happens to read at the right time in the right place) feelings of joy, and how the poem has raised or dampened those feelings. If one forking of meaning’s indeterminate paths gives you insight to a feature of living you did not know or appreciate before, then there should be no barrier to calling that meaning the truth. In my experience, the best interpretation of literature is the one that drives me towards new ideas concerning human experience and relationships (between humans, and non-humans). The more I feel changed by a poem, the better I find it, and if one interpretation leaves it politically innocuous, then I chose to believe my own instead.

In relation to exercise, the right shape for you relates to how happy you are with living day to day. Your body mediates perception fo the world in basic ways. Eyesight and other senses explain only one part of this. In the sense that humanity cannot be divorced from it’s myriad bodies, appreciation of the body plays a crucial role in defining our sense of self awareness and joy. Experimenting with bodies experiments with the very stuff of life and the meaning thereof.

Duncan

Democracy and Terror

The most troubling thing I find about counter-terror measures is their undemocratic administration. Rules devised in the middle of the night by a group of very limited diversity immediately become dogma for a vast number of people – travelers (moving under threat of police action/response if they refuse to follow), police, airlines, etc.

I think that making democratic accountability the primary concern in responding to terrorism has several important impacts-

First, it creates an accountable process that ensures that the “Homeland Security” process doesn’t become a (bigger) propoganda machine. If forced to fully disclose for the sake of a vote the evidence involved in administering law enforcement guidelines, information must be pretty good, to avoid embarrassment and to justify to a less partisan group the need for action.

Second, it re-orients to type of response the government must take to deal with terrorist threats. The need for a democratic process removes the option of quick fix/immediate action law enforcement solutions to accommodate deliberation. By excluding this option, efforts would instead be taken to adjust foreign policy decisions preemptively to deter terrorism by removing incentives to attack in the first place. The convenience of the option to administer undemocratic but quick solutions creates a culture that don’t account for the root causes, as slow moving cultural shifts cannot keep pace with immediate threats.

Duncan

Ignorance and Power

What happens when specific elements of consumer culture are made explicit? By this I mean, the act of decontextualization that comes with speaking about specific items in consumer culture and the supposed significance they bring in terms of their material components: “you are investing X amount of money and time to buy an electronic item that you believe will bring you self/social satisfaction.” The best examples I can come up with deal with the material/emotional relationships that people have with physical objects in their lives: for instance, coming home after work or school and staring silently at a box that flickers and speaks at you. This material connection inverts the power relationship the person assumes they have with the object. In the explicit version of events, the physical objects obtain a power over the user that the user hopes doesn’t exist. A basic element of consumer culture is satisfaction through choice. The American dream and car culture speaks to the autonomy of individuals in determining their fate. Talking about the material features of consumer culture subjugates the consumer to their material objects rather than the inverse. This is linked to a previous post I made about mass consumption. I had trouble identifying why it is pictures of mass consumption (or waste) terrify me. In these picture, the viewer identifies with the items in the picture as individuals but with their perceived role again undermined: they act as part of a mass of people compelled by greater forces crowding out individual autonomy. This description of mass culture partially explains the compulsion towards trendiness and being ‘ahead of the curve’ – an attempt to recover and individual’s power in mass culture.
Explicitness also initiates a reconsideration process for the people involved. Speaking out about consumer objects presumes that the people being spoken to don’t understand the reality of their relationship to technology. By speaking of it in a decontextualized space, they perhaps begin to question what they do or don’t know about their relationship to technology. This forms a significant line of questioning in the mind of someone using the technology for supposedly their own purpose.


Duncan