Day 177

As though to offer a sense of balance from my dream two nights ago, last night was all about myself having to take care of my baby sister all on my own. It was strange in the dream, she was a baby even more fragile than real-world babies; the slightest breeze could be dangerous, so I had to do all these overly protective things just to keep her alive and well.

In a sense, it was like a confrontation with death in a totally different way. Unlike the previous dream, my own demise was nothing short of fully irrelevent. I had no concern whatsoever for it.

It is what I believe to be one of the biggest flaws in much of modern moral theory; a lack of selflessness. For the sake of logical consistency, a moral theory cannot prescribe selflessness to anybody, for that would either set people into diffrent categories of responsibility than others, or it would render everyone selfless (note multiple definitions here in usage), and defeat the point of valuing others altogether. So morality is instead said to be about balancing self-interests, or maximizing self-interest, or aggregating self-interests, or someting similar.
Watch politics on tv in America. They interview 'regular Americans' on the street... "Yea, but what is Obama going to do for ME?"

Is that all? Is that how we vote today?

Over the last few years I've very slowly developed in my mind the belief that selfishness is in large part what is making people so unhappy in a rich, opportunity-laden nation like ours. If you spend your life focusing on you, yourself, your needs and interests and desires and everything else, you'll end up isolated from others, kind as you may try to be to them. I'll work on this more at another date.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The thoughts expressed in this post mirror similar thoughts that were continually running through my mind during a good portion of our Moral Philosophy course with Macleod. Sometimes I'd let them drive me to a sense of futility, despair, resignation, irony or humour, depending on how the rest of my day was going (I'm aware how arbitrary that sounds).

Your diagnosis of the proscription of selflessness from the realm of analytical moral theory altogether, "for the sake of logical consistency", could not me more on target.

What you might find interesting, is that the philosopher John Caputo, whose paper I was supposed to present in our final class - the one I backed out on, to my regret and shame - actually tried to tackle this dilemma head on.

Caputo took a phenomenological, post-modern approach to the issue, concentrating on the place and function of moral theory, relative to our individual, existential experience. Moral theory has its place, but is always written with the benefit of collective hindsight. Meanwhile, human beings often prove to be theoretically hamstrung when fate corners them into situations that offer them unprecedented possibilities of spiritual risk - situations that ask of us, on an individual level, to redefine what it means to be a human being. These kinds of situations might be precipitated by emergent technology, whose consequences we are not yet prepared for. Or they can arise from our encounter with the "other", the stranger, with whom we lack a repertoire of expectation and response. Caputo desires to unravel, or at least draw more attention to this central paradox, wherein selfless love is the force behind our moral experience and yet cannot be accounted for in theory.

I will leave the rest for later.
3:24 AM
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