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Grey World Morality

Page history last edited by Paul Hazelden 2 years, 7 months ago

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Morality in a Grey World

Introduction

There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of our vision: we want to avoid binary thinking, but we are seeking to make the world a better place, and the distinction between making things better and making them worse is the ultimate binary distinction.

 

We want to maintain three core principles here:

  • the world is rarely binary;
  • morality is real; and
  • you can make genuine ethical decisions in a grey world.

 

There is also a tension (which may be related) between shared morality and individual autonomy: we want to say as a group that certain things (such as uncontrolled global climate change) are wrong, and therefore we each have an individual responsibility to do something about it; we also want to say that each individual is free to make their own moral judgements and establish their own priorities.

 

How do we resolve this tension?  By discussing the issues and identifying the relevant facts, we seek to come to a common understanding of the issues and challenges we face, in the hope that we will come to a shared understanding that these things matter, and that we participate in a shared responsibility to do something about them.  But we are not going to tell you what to do, for several reasons.

  • Nobody has the capacity to respond to every situation which should be changed, so we each need to prioritize.
  • Different people will, quite validly, have different priorities.
  • Different people will have different capabilities.
  • Each situation to be changed requires different specialist knowledge and skills.
  • If every situation is going to be addressed, we need people and groups who are willing to to focus on each of the different situations.
  • In summary, it is good that different people focus on different situations, as long as we are supporting one another when we can, and are not pulling in opposite directions.

 

In concrete terms, I am not going to get involved in campaigning to save the whales: I have other priorities; but I am very glad that some people are involved with that campaign, and I will add my support to them when I can.  On the other hand, global climate change is happening because of the individual choices and corporate structures of the developed world, which we all (that is, everybody with an Internet connection) participate in, so each one of us has a responsibility to work out what we will do about it - I am contributing to this problem, so I cannot opt out (maybe by choosing to focus on saving the whales, or some other valid cause) and leave it to other people to solve this problem.

 

On a slight tangent, we are being advised to 'forget morality' by a professor of philosophy: https://aeon.co/essays/five-reasons-why-moral-philosophy-is-distracting-and-harmful - do people find this argument convincing?

 

And an Australian journalist argues for Nihilism: https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/nihilism-meaningless-life-activism 

 

 

 

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