ethics

ISO: Legitimacy

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 9 Comments

A philosophy professor of mine recently summed up human nature this way:

Human beings are legitimacy seeking creatures.  We want to know what the right thing to do is, and we will move heaven and earth to persuade ourselves that whatever we’ve done is somehow justifiable.

This came up after a couple of hours of our class discussing the ethics of cannibalism at sea, so you can imagine we had struggled through some weighty life and death problems in a short time span.  Our heads were swimming with issues and questions, and when our prof dropped the concept above you could hear in the room’s silence each person’s recognition on some level of this reality.

It’s a fascinating idea.

We all have a need to articulate our decisions in an ethical framework, but the drama creeps — or barrels — in when our frameworks are different.  Slightly different, a little bit of drama.  Very different?  War.

That is how we are, and it is hard to deny or ignore once it gets into your mind.  I find myself thinking, “Should I do this?  Should I do that?”  and quite often it matters not one whit to anyone but me.  There can be nearly nonexistent consequences beyond myself, and yet somehow I go through the right/wrong process whether it be an enormous decision affecting others or simply a choice affecting me.

Ethical decision-making is incredibly complex if you take it seriously.  The world is full of black-and-white moralists who want us all to believe along with them that the world and people in it are simple things.  Just follow this law, or that rule, or what that spiritual authority is believed to have said, and everything will be fine.  What evidence there is to support this idea, especially in the context of occasionally conflicting laws/rules/texts is not clear to me, but that does not stop it from being incredibly popular.

To be quite frank I’ve dropped a lot of handwringing over the years compared to how I used to be.  I once heard someone say, “Guilt is a useless emotion” and I’ve never forgotten it.  It changed my life.  Agonizing over things I cannot undo is pointless.  But attempting to resolve the decisions I have made into an ethical framework that works for me is important and ongoing in my life.  Naturally this begs the question, what the heck kind of person retrofits his or her ethics to assuage a fevered conscience?

Apparently, every kind.

Image credit: Follow Steph

The Big Game – Suited Up at the 40

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

It takes a while to really get it.  At the proverbial mid-field point myself, I would say I am still trying to live the reality every day, but better late than never.  Here’s how it works:

We think we are born naked, but we’re not really.  We are wearing tiny, invisible, game day uniforms.  Little knee pads, wee helmets, grippy cleats, the whole ensemble.  Over time we start to notice not only are we suited up, we’re on the field.  So is everyone else.

We look around and start trying to identify our team members.  We talk strategy, and possible plays, and rest periods and practice times.  Sometimes we lose teammates, and that hurts.  Sometimes we find out we are playing a position at which we are terrible, but fortunately we have the choice to move around.  Good teammates will let us do that.  Sometimes we get traded, and sometimes we get suspended.  We are injured, sometimes severely.  We win games.  We lose games.  We go into overtime.

Slowly it dawns on us that these things are not happening to us.  We are engaged in most outcomes, and certainly always in our responses to the dynamics of the game.  It’s a relief, and it’s also a humbling and sobering moment of truth.

One of biggest learning  points in The Big Game is that the refs are not ethical arbiters.  Law is only law, and what is legal or technically aligned with the rules of the game most often only coincidentally aligns with what is right.  Learning to know the difference and to respect what that difference requires of us is a demand of the game with no clock running down. 

It is always on.

There is no postponement of The Big Game.  We are all playing it right now, and the sooner the adults involved in the West Virginia AAA State Football tournament debacle wake up to that reality and what we are teaching kids with this ridiculous behavior, the better.  It may be too late, because at the moment the field is littered with nothing but losers as far as the eye can see.

On an up note, one great thing about The Big Game is that there is often a thrilling emergence of an unexpected hero.  My hope is that hero turns out to be the kids themselves.  Time will tell.