Do you take your friendships seriously? Do you care about your friends? People often care about their friends and do it for non-moral reasons. I’ve been thinking about how to live, have friends and so on and have an impartial perspective on beings. If you are impartial you are supposed to act as if you care about X of everyone equally where X is some value that your moral system promotes.
But I care about my friends and family much more than about other people. I could tell myself that I need them to stay productive so I can in the end be better of taking care of everyone but I feel awful about it. Is this a reason to drop impartiality?
Either I have to drop impartiality or drop moral tyranny.
As moral tyranny I mean something as there being only one moral value or rules that I am supposed to live with and maximize it. Under moral tyranny e.g. art is only supposed to be created for the X moral value.
If I drop moral tyranny I can keep neat moral systems and
but it would reduce how helpful is my moral system for making decisions.
This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:
Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.
Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.
Do you take your friendships seriously? Do you care about your friends? People often care about their friends and do it for non-moral reasons. I’ve been thinking about how to live, have friends and so on and have an impartial perspective on beings. If you are impartial you are supposed to act as if you care about X of everyone equally where X is some value that your moral system promotes.
But I care about my friends and family much more than about other people. I could tell myself that I need them to stay productive so I can in the end be better of taking care of everyone but I feel awful about it. Is this a reason to drop impartiality?
Either I have to drop impartiality or drop moral tyranny.
As moral tyranny I mean something as there being only one moral value or rules that I am supposed to live with and maximize it. Under moral tyranny e.g. art is only supposed to be created for the X moral value.
If I drop moral tyranny I can keep neat moral systems and
but it would reduce how helpful is my moral system for making decisions.
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