💾 Archived View for splint.rs › righteous_indignation.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:06:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Formally studying Ethics can make it hard to take ethical demands seriously. I've said I don't know where I stand on callouts for unethical behaviour, but I definitely know where I stand on telling other people they need to do callouts:
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?
The whole thing looks like a case of special pleading. Every time I hear 'you need to join my righteous cause!', I want to ask:
The point isn't hypocrisy, but rather special pleading. It betrays a mindset where someone thinks they have Ethicsᵀᴹ, and need to instruct the plebs how to have it. It immediately tells people you're better than them, and you've decided to educate them.
And this isn't necessarily insane - when I read that Peta were an awful company, I listened, because that would be important to me (more research told me this was mostly hot-air, but it was worth my time looking this up). But someone who can clearly work on their own behaviour, and hasn't formally studied ethics, deciding their contribution to the greater good is instructing other people to act or stand with them in judgement, betrays a deep naïveté.
I'd like to live in a world where ethical statements have all the weight of Science, where we can say 'this is wrong', with the same backing as 'the planet is spherical', but no society has reached that level of general agreement, or even some basic epistemological process.