TWO
PROPOSED CORE VALUES FOR A COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE LOOKING TO MOVE BEYOND
MODERN CAPITALISM AS A WAY OF LIFE
"MORALITY"
Morality
– the question of what it means to be a good person – is a
*social* issue – it's about how you treat other people, how you
consider the effects of your actions on others. Proposed value: good
citizens and decent people strive to live by the following principle:
do unto others as you would have them do unto you (or whoever you
care most about in the world). In other words, a person acts morally
when she treats others with the same respect and consideration with
which she would want her loved ones to be treated. This 'golden rule' demonstrates
that morality ("the way a person should act") is about
relations with other people; it's *social*. Morality is not a code
laying down specific "don't dos" and "do dos" in
order to be a good person. If someone personally or as part of a
voluntary group wants to ALSO live by some code of ethics with strict
rules of what you can and cannot do, that's their business and they
are free to do so as long as it does not interfere with anyone else.
As a community, we have the right to expect people to act morally,
i.e., in accord with the golden rule, but good citizens and decent
people do not try to impose their particular ethical code on anybody
else who does not choose to live that way.
"EQUALITY"
Proposed
value: at birth, every human being is equally deserving of respect
and equally deserving of a society where she or he can live a good
life. This radical (at the roots) human equality plus the golden rule
means a good society should not allow power to form in ways that
would enable any one person or class of people to lord it over any
other – from the perspective of society and power, all people are
equal and should be treated equally. That doesn't mean that everyone
is equally smart or talented or whatever, just that society should
not provide ways to use those smarts or talents to gain power over
others.
(Of
course, some people do not value equality and they should not be
forced to live in communities of people who do. We should use this
value as a crucial distinction determining general groups of
like-minded people. [People who don't agree that equality is an
important value to build into our communities must want to use smarts
and talents to gain power over others. The not-explicitly-elitist
arguments against equality as a social value mostly seem to come down
to economistic propaganda about "innovation" and "growth"
that just puts a pretty face on the materialism and greed at the core
of the totalizing capitalist consumer society we are currently
laboring through. But in any event those who don't value equality
should be free and encouraged to have their separate communities of
people who don't value equality].)
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