#ethics tag

[chamerionwrites]

"The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims."

--Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

[moonmotherrr]

Listen, I understand completely when people have icky feelings about wearing fur - I will only wear fur from animals I KNOW did not live in a cage (industrially farmed mink, fox, rabbit, etc.) or die in a cage (fur trapping) but please for the love of the earth, don't wear faux fur. It's polyester and nylon. Very, very bad materials when it comes to eco-friendliness. If you don't want to wear fur, skip fur looks all together.

[chamerionwrites]

There's this popular category of life advice on here (I've seen two or three separate posts just recently) that basically boils down to "doing something good/kind/charitable for self-serving reasons (including 'wanting to feel good about oneself' or 'wanting to be admired') is functionally identical to doing it for purely selfless reasons." And while I do appreciate that they're largely intended to address a certain kind of fretful overscrupulosity (with which I sympathize!), and I obviously don't think it is selfish to derive happiness out of making others happy, I've gotta be the local killjoy and push back here because imo those posts overstate the case to kind of an alarming degree.

Sorry but it takes exactly one experience of watching horrified while some entitled donor acts as a human wrecking ball to an organization's stated purpose before you develop a healthy cynicism about charity, motive, and the human capacity to convince others (and frequently oneself!) that deeply destructive and self-serving actions are making the world a better place. Motive DOES matter and it's not because joy is inherently suspect, or because an act is only good if you personally suffer for it, or because you are being judged/deserve to be judged for every secret passing thought and emotion. It's because motive can and does have real material effect on outcomes.

So yes, agonizing over the perfect purity of one's motives as opposed to just doing the nice thing can definitely be taken way too far. On the other hand reasonable self-examination is absolutely a thoughtful, honest, necessary impulse and not a sign that you need to kill the joyless cultural puritan in your head or whatever [CITATION NEEDED].

[chamerionwrites]

For a guy who gets ghoulishly excited about the concept of state executions for people you dislike you sure talk a good game about prison abolition, internet blogger

[chamerionwrites]

My take on a lot of people with supposedly ''''''progressive'''''' politics is basically the same as my take on a lot of the fundamentalist christians I grew up around, namely: nice enough people on a day to day basis, maybe even strikingly kind and generous people (to certain specific folks under certain specific circumstances), absolutely cannot and will not trust 'em as far as I can throw 'em

[chamerionwrites]

Sometimes I see people say that your motives for doing a good thing don't matter, and while this is a nice idea...imo it's pretty directly untrue. Not in a thoughtcrimes way, but because motivations often have a very real material effect on outcomes.

I've been known to fall down thought spirals about how doing nice things for people is actually SELFISH because their happiness makes me happy, so I do sympathize with folks trying to refute that kind of overscrupulous fretting, but still. A lot of people have parents who care more about their social and/or self-image as a Good Parent than their child's actual needs. A lot of people have encountered doctors (or teachers or social workers or pastors or therapists or pick your caretaking profession) who like the idea of Helping People more than they actually like listening to them. A lot of us have been expected to perform gratitude for something that was unhelpful or even directly hurtful to us. It's true that wealthy people giving money to charity is often a calculated PR move or attempt to exert political power. It's also true that sometimes they just wanna feel good about themselves, and that the amount of time/effort/money wasted because some filthy fucking rich donor wanted their ego stroked more than they wanted actual effective action is probably incalculable.

It doesn't matter that your motives always be stringently pure and untainted by the slightest hint of self-interest. But it does matter what you'll pick when push comes to shove between doing good and feeling good, you know? It's one thing to let someone go ahead of you in line or whatever, but if Doing Good involves any sort of sustained effort-over-time - and so often it does - then yeah actually, ime the motives often have a way of coming through.

[chamerionwrites]

I'm not even sure which late night comedian it was, but sometime circa 2017 one of them clearly made a joke about how the reason that Donald Trump is such a tool (to put it mildly) is that daddy didn’t love him, because all of a sudden there was a weird rash of people who fancied themselves internet comedians repeating this joke (both about Donald Trump specifically, and as a general insult) like they thought they were being original.

And maybe this is me being humorless or whatever, but it's like nails on a chalkboard every single time I encounter any variation on it.

#1 Plenty of people who are mistreated as children grow up to be very kind human beings so tbh this feels pretty stigmatizing;

#2 You can’t retroactively deserve something? Even if they eventually grow up to be the worst people in the history of the world, children don't deserve to be abused??!?

#3 In fact what people “deserve” has nothing to do with it because ABUSE IS BAD ON PRINCIPLE;

#4 Genuinely, what the actual fuck is wrong with you that you think “[X person] was abused as a child and then grew up to abuse others” is a hilarious joke????????

#5 Incredibly frustrating that we keep having to have this conversation but:

That, except in this case instead of body shaming it’s just. People who have painful relationships with their families seeing your post and going oh. okay. I guess I’m a joke to you

[chamerionwrites]

Call me crazy but I think that if you feel comfortable going around loudly and proudly proclaiming that if someone belongs to [x class of people] you feel zero compassion about them being mistreated or abused, then you should maybe. Take a long hard look at whatever components of your personal ideology make you feel that's acceptable