This is not a blog

Friday, June 22, 2007

Dot's Bus-oriented Theory of Ethics 

More often than not, you run into this fundamental question that "Who is right here?". Some other times you ask yourself: "Is doing this justified?"

I had put this on draft earlier and now I'm trying to continue writing it. But what does that question mean anyway? Truth be told, it seems vague even to me now. But I remember what inspired me to write this post, so let's start from there...

Observation:

A) How many times has it happened to you that a friend of yours was mistreated by somebody?
B) How many times has it happened to you that a friend of yours has mistreated somebody?

A's are significantly more. I am not asking you to include the cases that you only hear about. Even if you just look at the cases that you are personally involved in, you see more A's than B's.

A) How often do you witness a relative or an acquaintance doing somebody a favor and not receiving the appreciation they expect?
B) How many times do you come across a relative or an acquaintance who receives a favor and doesn't return it?

I believe we all see more A's. But in both examples A and B are just the two sides of a same thing. Shouldn't there be some kind of a balance here? Where is this imbalance coming from then?

End of observation.

This whole thing is a not a big deal anyway and I have long had an explanation for this phenomenon. But what I've been more interested in recently is some other conclusions that follow from that explanation. Before I get into that, let me explain what I think is the reason for this imbalance.

Observation #2:

When I was in high school, I had to ride crowded buses everyday. Most of the time, all seats were taken and I had to stand in that narrow space between the seats. It's barely wide enough for one person and yet people are crammed in there and you are lucky if you find a spot on the bar above your head to hang from. The streets were pretty crowded too and the driver had to use brakes a lot. So from all these constant shakes to the bus, you occasionally bump into the seated person next to you. And I was very careful not to. But sometimes you are so busy holding a fixed position against all the pressure of that standing crowd that you don't notice that you are slightly bumping into the shoulder of that seated person. Sometimes when I did this, the seated guy gave me a look, like "you are a careless idiot for invading my space here" and I always thought how can't they see that there is no space here, and why are they so touchy about it.

Then some other day, I was on the bus and I was lucky enough to find a seat. During that rush hour and in that damn slow traffic, all I could do was to immerse myself in my thoughts, thinking through all sorts of stuff like it's a journey. You start from somewhere and you can't tell what you are going to end up thinking about. All you know is that when you get off that bus, it seems like you have been anywhere on this planet but on that very bus you were riding. And then just imagine what big of an annoyance can a standing passenger be if they lean onto your shoulder all the time and keep ripping your threads of thoughts and bring you down from those clouds into that noisy atmosphere.

You can see the point here, right? But the "real" point is that I wasn't seeing the point for quite a while! I mean, come on! I was always careful not to disturb the seated passengers, but these guys, the just didn't care. I would never bump into them repeatedly, but some of these guys they were like they didn't mind seating on my back! Believe it or not, it wasn't until one of those thought journeys on one of those buses that it was revealed to me that these are the two sides of the same thing. I was a standing passenger on some days and a seated passenger on some other days, but I never saw these two experiences related to each other. It might seem difficult to understand now that I have contrasted these two so clearly, but this simply was the case. These were two totally different and unrelated problems to me. The mind provoking fact is that this is what actually happens to us in many other different situations, yet we are totally unaware of it.

The explanation is simple. It's because of the different environments. When I was standing between rows of seats, that was my environment in there. The seated passenger was riding with me on the same bus, but they were in a totally different environment. In this case, the two environment are even physically separate. My environment was like chaos. Whenever the driver used the brakes, I had to stand against a lot of force from other passengers. But on the seats, things were much softer. It was calm and steady. For me, a slight contact with the seated passenger was barely noticeable, because it wasn't comparable to all that force from the standing guys. But for the seated guy, it must have been like a hard push, which is totally unnecessary. The conflict is exactly where these two different environments meet. You are in one environment and they are in another environment and yet you are "interacting". This is a really fine point if you see it like this.

And lo and behold. The real world is just one big bus with not only two, but as many parallel worlds and environments as the number of people alive! This is really true. The sole fact that you see two people next to each other, does in no way mean that they are in the same environment. We are all at the edges of our personal environments when we interact and conflict is always imminent. So this is what I have been preparing the grounds to talk about. But I guess this post got really long already, didn't it?

So let me just point out some of the conclusion that follow this "theory" and I hope I can write what I was really going to write in the next post.

First, the existence of these different environments is the reason for that imbalance I mentioned in the beginning of the post. The fact is that, someone can be mistreated, without somebody mistreating them.

Second, what happens to ethics if you look at things like this? I mean look at us humans. A lot of who we are is determined by our genes and our upbringing when we were kids. These are substantial parts of our personal environments. Can we really hold someone responsible for the damage they cause, when we know that they are acting in the context of their individual environments? I assure you that most of the time people genuinely believe that what they do is right.

Write to you later! By the way, if you read this, please leave a short comment so I can tell if anybody is waiting for a second post!