Saturday, January 19, 2013

Finding Like-Minded People p.1

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].)

No comments:

Post a Comment