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I mentioned to my dad that my wife and I were boycotting a company due to evil / corruption, and he said, “If you’re going to boycott everything that is evil or

I mentioned to my dad that my wife and I were boycotting a company due to evil / corruption, and he said, “If you’re going to boycott everything that is evil or corrupt, you’ll be very busy. You’d better start with me.” There are degrees of evil and lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but for the most part, if you’re doing anything in this world, you’re going to be interacting with evil in some capacity. I’m writing this on my Foxconn iPhone as I’m making ethically sourced coffee— but is the coffee really ethically sourced? It produced a lot of carbon being shipped to me and being roasted. I’m about to go write some software that I know is being used to teach things that I consider reprehensible and evil. I’ve personally chosen to focus on one or two changes where I can make a difference, and for the most part, I’m letting the rest go.

Rayhem 4y ago
This is very similar to the position I've adopted, and I'd like to add on some of the thinking I've done about what I've come to call "weaponized mindfulness." In the balance of "good" and "evil", a lot of people will loudly proclaim e.g. how they drive a smaller car that isn't as wasteful as big American SUVs as if that's virtuous because less waste = good. In my accounting of the world, I totally agree and try my best to support things that waste less! But, inevitably, there's a thorny question left of why the small car is OK and the big car is Bad -- the line is totally arbitrary, both of them uphold a pretty wasteful driving system, and anybody can move the goalposts pretty much wherever they want. Relative to a private jet, the SUV isn't wasteful at all. Relative to a moped, the small hatchback is incredibly wasteful. So, assuming that people are well-intentioned and aren't purely virtue signaling for social capital, what's the measure of a "virtue" like this? Most people try to hand wave it as "the smaller car does approximately X less damage to 'the environment'", but that's all but completely unmeasurable. How do you quantify damage to the environment? How do you weight that against needing to get the kids to school? I'm not convinced there's any meaningful way to do it since it's a global measure for a local action. It seems to me that absent any universal morality, then, a better measure of a virtue is against itself: what an individual is willing to give up to uphold their virtue. "I drive the smaller car into the ground over 20 years, forgoing the luxuries of heated seats in newer models" or "I don't shop on Amazon, preferring instead to take extra time to acquire items locally" sort of a thing. It's still far from a reliable, quantifiable measure, and any of these things can be weaponized in any number of directions against unfavorable people or ideas, but I think it at least scopes the idea of "more and less moral" a little better/more locally.
plastiquebeech 4y ago
That sort of nihilistic attitude is anesthetizing, though. If we shrug and mutter that everything is evil to some degree, we'll stop trying to address large problems on a societal scale. In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."
moloch-hai 4y ago
Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs right through the center of every person's heart.

Rayhem 4y ago

This is very similar to the position I've adopted, and I'd like to add on some of the thinking I've done about what I've come to call "weaponized mindfulness." In the balance of "good" and "evil", a lot of people will loudly proclaim e.g. how they drive a smaller car that isn't as wasteful as big American SUVs as if that's virtuous because less waste = good. In my accounting of the world, I totally agree and try my best to support things that waste less! But, inevitably, there's a thorny question left of why the small car is OK and the big car is Bad -- the line is totally arbitrary, both of them uphold a pretty wasteful driving system, and anybody can move the goalposts pretty much wherever they want. Relative to a private jet, the SUV isn't wasteful at all. Relative to a moped, the small hatchback is incredibly wasteful. So, assuming that people are well-intentioned and aren't purely virtue signaling for social capital, what's the measure of a "virtue" like this? Most people try to hand wave it as "the smaller car does approximately X less damage to 'the environment'", but that's all but completely unmeasurable. How do you quantify damage to the environment? How do you weight that against needing to get the kids to school? I'm not convinced there's any meaningful way to do it since it's a global measure for a local action. It seems to me that absent any universal morality, then, a better measure of a virtue is against itself: what an individual is willing to give up to uphold their virtue. "I drive the smaller car into the ground over 20 years, forgoing the luxuries of heated seats in newer models" or "I don't shop on Amazon, preferring instead to take extra time to acquire items locally" sort of a thing. It's still far from a reliable, quantifiable measure, and any of these things can be weaponized in any number of directions against unfavorable people or ideas, but I think it at least scopes the idea of "more and less moral" a little better/more locally.

plastiquebeech 4y ago

That sort of nihilistic attitude is anesthetizing, though. If we shrug and mutter that everything is evil to some degree, we'll stop trying to address large problems on a societal scale. In the words of John Oliver's character in Community, "the average person has a much harder time saying 'booyah' to moral relativism."

moloch-hai 4y ago

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the line between good and evil runs right through the center of every person's heart.