Moral* principles do more harm than good. We apply them self-servingly and selectively. They operate at the wrong level of abstraction, distracting us from the right level. I’m deeply committed to morality but I’ve never met a moral principle I could trust.
I can illustrate this best by example. Consider these two moral principles:
Don’t cling.
Show commitment.
What’s the difference between clinging and commitment? From what I can tell, they are indistinguishable except that clinging is bad and should never occur and commitment is good and should always occur.
Clinging and commitment both describe a preference for keeping something (a law, a policy, a belief, a system, a relationship, a habit etc.) the same rather than changing it. So far I’ve never found any way to objectively distinguish between an act of clinging and an act of commitment. I’m open to the possibility that I’m missing something so please challenge me: We’d need some litmus test by which observing a preference for keeping something the same, one could reliably sort out the bad (clinging) from the good (commitment).
A Buddhist friend suggested that the difference is that clinging is desperate and commitment isn’t. This proposed litmus test pivots on the intensity (desperateness) of desire for something to stay the same, where the more intense, the more clingy, and the more bad, and the less intense, the less clingy, and the more good.
Mind Readers Dictionary: The Podfast : Play in Popup
Mind Readers Dictionary : Play in Popup
“I need a workable solution to this problem and I need it now. It has got to be realistic but it also has to spell relief and spell it soon.”
It started out well. You and a friend were talking about a topic of interest to you both, sharing your opinions, listening and collaborating on thinking things through. But something went wrong; you don’t know exactly what. Now you’re arguing, the tension is thick and the stakes are high. He thinks you turned it into a power struggle over who’s right and–well, frankly you think he did.
Last week I wrote critiquing a vaguely-held but nonetheless influential counter-culture faith in win-win solutions solving everything. Today I want to talk about its equivalent in economics and hint at a parallel between new-age niceness and Tea Party libertarianism that will be the subject of a later article.
What changed my mind was the gun under my 15-year-old son’s bed. Loaded. Our son–who we raised on a commune where we believed that love was the way and that everyone could and would realize it if they were only educated in the dharma (spiritual teachings).