ethical integration and clarity

Here's something hard I've been thinking about lately. If you have core ethical certainties and you want to do anything about them, you've got to manifest them in specific ways. But, how should you treat your specific course of action differently than you do the ethical core?

This will probably make more sense with an example. At a core ethical level, we've got the principle that (1) all human beings deserve respect as such. Then more specifically we extend the principle to the problem that (2) people are being exploited in sweat shops, and we ought to do something about that. Now in a further extension, many of those I know who raise awareness about the sweat shop issue would also say that (3) the exploitation is a problem of greed caused largely by the capitalist system and further that (4) you also should really buy things made of certified organic hemp fibers.

So what we've got here is a mixture of various ethical levels, and some complications arise when the layers aren't clearly distinguished. Namely, the mixture in this example can alienate people who also respect other humans and also might be willing to do something about sweatshops but who are not Marxists or hippies. It's not fair to imply that (1), (2), (3), and (4) always go together -- and that impression is a danger if they're all presented together without any distinctions. It's a problem to assume that an ethical principle is always bound to one's own methods of executing it.

Of course, it's also a problem if the ethical principle isn't executed at all. You have to have some elaboration or the beautiful abstract principle stays up in Plato's Ethereal Library of Congress for Ideal Forms and doesn't do anybody any good.

But what's more complicated is that the manifestation isn't arbitrary either. Marxists who respect human value establish a connection between human value and Marxist principles. Capitalists who respect human value also connect capitalism with human value. And I don't think the plurality of outcomes allows us to invalidate connections between ethics and method entirely. I might respect these people less if they didn't see a link between their socioeconomics and their convictions.

I guess the thing is that there's a lot of ethically neutral material (personal experience, available information, interpretive approaches, etc.) that intervenes between the principle and the specific course of action. So, while we need to involve ethical convictions in every specific choice, we also need to recognize that the convictions aren't acting in isolation. So perhaps if we recognize the inevitable entanglement of other material with attempts at doing what's right, we can do better at connecting with people who have similar convictions but different practices. Maybe? This is still hard.

gem of unintentional subversiveness

I'm looking for summer work, and I found a Craigslist job page which (in two places) advertised "hourly wage comiserate with experience." I presume these estimable employers meant to say "commensurate," but it's really better the way it is.

Chapel and Other Theophanies

Chapel is sometimes pretty inept. I'm all for making it as good as possible, but I also think that those of us who don't have much to do with the decisions there could do better at making chapel a worthwhile experience even when it's poorly done.

I'm beginning to see this as one of the fundamental challenges of Christianity: Receiving Jesus through whatever we encounter. Not that we rub out the initial reality of what we see and chalk Jesus in arbitrarily -- but that we look carefully, not denying the stupidity or sin or whatever else is there, for how Jesus is trying to reach us through what we see, and how he's present in the people with us.

Oh hey, I do have a blog.

So, I'm reading Ian McEwan's Atonement now. I'm not sure what I think of it just yet, but here's a really neat part near the beginning. This is where a thirteen-year-old aspiring authoress is digesting an existential epiphany.

"She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value."

This is one of the main reasons literature is worthwhile. As humans trying to interact meaningfully (and trying to obey a specific order to love our neighbors as ourselves), we have to try to think of other people as just as real as we are. And that's hard to do, because we have the senses and details of our own existence, but not anyone else's. And it's also hard because it means we have to deal with other people's needs as well as our own, and that's a lot of work. But literature helps with this, because we get to practice experiencing other people's existential realities. We get to go into what matters to another person and how her psyche deals with things when we read what she's written. And once we get used to doing that in reading, I think we can do a better job of it in real life too.

Doh.

So, I'm working on memorizing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." I just Googled a quote Eliot uses to see where it's taken from. Here's what I searched:

"on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be intent at the time of death"

And Google kindly provided me with this suggestion:

Did you mean: "on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be internet at the time of death" ?

Irony is a beautiful thing.