"He thinks morals are paintings on walls and scruples are money in Russia."

I've been reading the news for at least a year with an escalatingly frantic mental response of "what the fuck is wrong with you people?" to just about every item. I guess I have an answer.

A couple days ago I read an article on tech jackass Marc Andreessen and his claim to not engage in introspection. Now, tech jackasses can do what they want with their unexamined-and-not-worth-living lives, that's no skin off my back (until it is, I guess). But this bit from the article got me thinking:

When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It's a permission slip for zero accountability [emphasis mine].

That, to me, sounds exactly like folks who get their morality from authority: from a book, from a religion, from what other people tell them. There's no questioning and no impulse towards questioning, there's only "this is what I was told so it's right."

I've known for awhile that those are people whose empathy is severely lacking. That's an obvious correlation. It's a lot harder to keep believing that it's okay for awful things to be done to people if you don't really view them as people. I'd never thought to look for a causative link, though. It had literally never occurred to me that empathy is something that can be learned or activated, beyond 'teaching kids how to share and to get along.' Or that it can be actively discouraged in ways more subtle than 'those aren't real people.'

For much of this year I've been sporadically chewing over my own ethical/moral framework. I guess the above is sort of a lead-in to that, but I feel like it deserves its own separate post. Or posts.

towards a personal ethical framework, 1/n

So, this last few months I've been thinking about my own moral/ethical foundation. I can't claim any great insights, but at least I have a process that's a step or two beyond "what someone else told me to think."

1) I want some conscious moral/ethical guidelines to tell me what to do. That way I'm not acting on instinct and old programming, which ends with me doing or supporting things that it turns out I don't like very much.

2) The world is a complicated place requiring a great many judgement calls. I can't possibly lay down rules for every situation. Besides which: having inflexible rules may get me in less trouble than having no rules at all, but much of the trouble it gets me in will have been entirely avoidable.

3) Therefore, I need some simple principles that I can generally stick to, that can inform those judgement calls.

I've ended up at a handful of things that sound like truisms because they've been through the cultural wash so many times.

The big one is "choose to be kind when possible." This runs back to the golden rule, though I'm fond of Hillel's "that which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this is the whole of the Law, all else is commentary." I'm not as good at this as I'd like. I'm still prone to letting old fears and old damage override my better nature. I try to do better, and to be kind to myself when I can't.

Related to that is "none of us without all of us," which is even more often honoured in the breach but provides guidance nonetheless.

And there's "intent isn't magic." It's not that only actions matter, especially in interpersonal relationships, but actions for sure matter a heck of a lot more than words or intent. I come to this from "the purpose of a system is what it does," which is kind of the long way round. Then again I have a long-standing tendency to take systems and authorities at their word, so maybe that was the best way for me to get there. (I also like the related "a system is not defined by rules but by how they are enforced," but that's less personally actionable.)

I don't have an unanswerable argument for any of these. I'm okay with that too. I'm not trying to convince anyone else, just myself.

In the course of writing this I realised it's only part of the story. The next bit will, I guess, be about acting on those judgement calls.