Day 158

Sometimes we fancy ourselves hipocrites, becase we're willing to act morally in some situations but not others, even when the respectve situations are nearly identical. We're happy to help our friends, or loved ones, or even a stranger if that stranger is right in front of us, but we couldn't care less about the ubiquitous starving Africans.

I don't think this makes anybody a moral criminal. It is difficult, if not impossible to muster empathy when knows absolutely nothing about those individuals for whom he empathizes, let alone a group of indviduals characterized as such. Isn't the notion of empathizing with a group of people self-contradictory? It is no wonder we don't care all too much.

So let's call people what they really are. I don't hesitate to admire somebody when he or she stands up for a family member or friends over a stranger. It's how we stay cohesive as families, friends, an communities. The "world community," I suspect, will always work morally much the same way it works economically and politically: as a set of power relationships in which there are winners and losers. The entitlements are always arbitrary.

Comments

Anonymous said…
You might say that the point is not that a person stands up for a loved one "over a [hypothetical] stranger", but that he or she actually loves someone enough to stand up for them in the first place! So much the better if he or she can learn to extend that attitude, piecemeal, to a massive unknown population that deserve no less, but who are incidentally deprived the opportunity to receive it.

However, I have to repudiate the generalization inherent in your last sentence. Arbitrary power relations will only persist as long as the people who benefit unfairly under them are determined to remain ignorant of the consequences. Your depressing fatalism here seems somewhat out of character. I thought you also reject the notion, as I do, that the 'international community' must be reduced to a matter of economic/political mechanisms which are beyond anyone's individual influence.
2:19 AM
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