#morality**

[liberty1776]

Differing moral values.

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[creature-wizard]

Again, speaking as someone with scrupulosity OCD and anxiety, this whole entire mentality of "if I vote for a presidential candidate, then I, personally am responsible for each and every bad thing they do" is essentially a form of catastrophic, polarized thinking. It's a super unhealthy way of thinking that leaves you unable to meaningfully navigate through life a lot of the time. And while you might feel morally clean, it's actually an incredibly dysfunctional way to live because you just won't take action when it could really matter, or the actions you do take don't actually have a substantial chance of changing things.

Like refusing to vote, or voting third-party even though you know the odds of a third party candidate making it are pretty much nil (or because you've convinced yourself it could totally work if Everyone Just - even though we all know there is no point in history when Everyone Just), that's dysfunctional behavior. There's no getting around it. It's dysfunctional behavior.

[eelhound]

"The idea of reforming Omelas is a pleasant idea, to be sure, but it is one that Le Guin herself specifically tells us is not an option. No reform of Omelas is possible — at least, not without destroying Omelas itself:

If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

'Those are the terms', indeed. Le Guin’s original story is careful to cast the underlying evil of Omelas as un-addressable — not, as some have suggested, to 'cheat' or create a false dilemma, but as an intentionally insurmountable challenge to the reader. The premise of Omelas feels unfair because it is meant to be unfair. Instead of racing to find a clever solution ('Free the child! Replace it with a robot! Have everyone suffer a little bit instead of one person all at once!'), the reader is forced to consider how they might cope with moral injustice that is so foundational to their very way of life that it cannot be undone. Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are — at this very moment! — already in exactly this situation. At what cost does our happiness come? And, even more significantly, at whose expense? And what, in fact, can be done? Can anything?

This is the essential and agonizing question that Le Guin poses, and we avoid it at our peril. It’s easy, but thoroughly besides the point, to say — as the narrator of 'The Ones Who Don’t Walk Away' does — that you would simply keep the nice things about Omelas, and work to address the bad. You might as well say that you would solve the trolley problem by putting rockets on the trolley and having it jump over the people tied to the tracks. Le Guin’s challenge is one that can only be resolved by introspection, because the challenge is one levied against the discomforting awareness of our own complicity; to 'reject the premise' is to reject this (all too real) discomfort in favor of empty wish fulfillment. A happy fairytale about the nobility of our imagined efforts against a hypothetical evil profits no one but ourselves (and I would argue that in the long run it robs us as well).

But in addition to being morally evasive, treating Omelas as a puzzle to be solved (or as a piece of straightforward didactic moralism) also flattens the depth of the original story. We are not really meant to understand Le Guin’s 'walking away' as a literal abandonment of a problem, nor as a self-satisfied 'Sounds bad, but I’m outta here', the way Vivier’s response piece or others of its ilk do; rather, it is framed as a rejection of complacency. This is why those who leave are shown not as triumphant heroes, but as harried and desperate fools; hopeless, troubled souls setting forth on a journey that may well be doomed from the start — because isn’t that the fate of most people who set out to fight the injustices they see, and that they cannot help but see once they have been made aware of it? The story is a metaphor, not a math problem, and 'walking away' might just as easily encompass any form of sincere and fully committed struggle against injustice: a lonely, often thankless journey, yet one which is no less essential for its difficulty."

- Kurt Schiller, from "Omelas, Je T'aime." Blood Knife, 8 July 2022.

[neuroticboyfriend]

relapse is not a moral failure. substance use and addiction are not a moral failure. mental illness is not a moral failure. disability is not a moral failure. you have a health condition. you are struggling. recovery is not mean to be perfect, and if you're not in recovery, surviving is good too. i'm glad you're here, and i hope life treats you better soon. please know this is not your fault. you do not need to feel guilty over your own health.

[st-just]

"I made gentle fun of [John] Woolman for his guilt about reading books and going sledding with his childhood friends. But all of his childhood friends grew up to own or trade slaves. Of course he’s skeptical of nice food and nice clothes, sleighs and ice skates. His friends, good people, people he loved, liked these seemingly innocent pleasures—and so to pay for them, they bought people who were violently kidnapped away from their families and carried to a foreign land, forced them to work from dawn to dusk, underfed them and dressed them in rags, sold their children away from them, tortured them, and supported laws that ensured that all this would continue forever. From Woolman’s point of view, to oppose slavery, you have to hate torturing innocent people more than you like ice skating. It turns out this is very hard and people mostly don’t."

-Ozy Brennan, On John Woolman

[rhymeswithchronic]

Okay listen so we’ve all heard about how ParkCiv is a really good analogy for late stage capitalism that has been simplified into an easy to understand in an easily digestible format for younger audiences to learn and understand, but CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE INTENSE MORAL QUESTION THAT PVPCIV PRESENTS?

What is the value of a human life? Is the suffering of one person acceptable if it means a life of peace for the rest of the world?

Evbo originally tried to get out of his first 1v1 by claiming that he has a wife and kids, which implies these family units DO exist in some way.

While the people we see that are eager for “The Chosen One” to appear so they can gain everlasting life are all fighters, not everyone who lives in this world is on their own. There are likely mothers, fathers, children, natural leaders, amazing people that are clinging onto life by only a few swings of the sword. It’s not just violent fighters, it’s likely normal people trying to simply get by day to day life.

Is it selfish of them to want to be there for their families, friends, etc.? To fear death? Is it selfish of Evbo to try to escape his fate of being essentially a pig for the slaughter forever?

Is world peace worth the suffering of a single person?

If one person has to suffer for an eternity to bring peace to his civilization, someone with no friends, no family, no ties to the world, is that okay?

Is it okay to torture someone in any circumstance?

I don’t have any clue whether this kind of thought was intentional, but this is SUCH a vivid and interesting moral dilemma. It’s the trolly problem made physical. Of course everyone wants to say that it’s never okay to facilitate the suffering of another individual, but in a world where your continued death spreads life and allows families and friends to remain together for the entire natural lives, would you even be able to continue saying that? Or would you be willing to accept that this is the price, and an innocent person has to pay it.

Would you partake? Observe? Fight back?

It’s SO FASCINATING and I am IN LOVE

And it’s once again presented in such a simple and easily understandable format that it is available for everyone to consider.

GOD my brain has melted into a gooey puddle on the floor please send help

[philosophybits]

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

[quantummechanics]

Saturn has 83 moons. 63 moons are confirmed and named, and another 20 moons are awaiting confirmation of discovery and official naming.

This is their dynamic visualization while they travel with Saturn through space

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[incognitopolls]

Choose from one of my reductive nuance-free options or else

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[creature-wizard]

If you are so terrified of being Bad and Unredeemable that you can't make a decision that actually has a good chance of making things better and/or stopping things from becoming severely worse when there is some amount of moral ambiguity attached to said decision, that is a problem. A serious problem. What you have isn't "morality." It's anxiety/trauma so severe that it is actually preventing you from being a fully autonomous person.

Choosing inaction or the action that looks morally pure but actually has a nil chance of changing the outcome might make you feel like a good person, but it doesn't actually make you one. That's just not how it works. I won't say it makes you a bad person, but it does mean that your ability to behave autonomously and make meaningful choices is severely hindered.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

I distro a lot.

[mrkmciver]

MORALITY