Open question: What do you think a normal person’s moral responsibilities are and why?

Some angles you can (but don’t have to) consider:

To themselves, family, friends and strangers?

Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)

What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)

Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)

  • ddrcronoOPMEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    I like the point about people being too tired - as much as that might have felt like a side point I think there may be something there - one thing I noticed in Japan is that when I did something nice that was not culturally required people would not only be really happy but actually surprised.

    Japan is not only overworked to death, but also very strict on manners and social rules, so you’re often required to pretend to be nice to someone and to follow your duty to others to the point that people start to lose the concept of doing nice things spontaneously.

    As the vice grips tighten around the working and middle class, I think what you’re describing has also been happening in the West not only since Corona but gradually over the last several decades. People concerned primarily with survival have less room to be kind. (That said, it means more when they are).

      • ddrcronoOPMEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        The way I’d put this in technical terms is “What percentage of your disposable income is going towards helping others?” $50 for someone making minimum wage is probably more than $1 million coming from a billionaire.

          • ddrcronoOPMEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            Right, so I think you could push it even further than what I said. Maybe something more qualitative like “What are you willing to give up to help others?”

            That said you can also go too far the other way and say that a very rich person who does or doesn’t give away things hadn’t really giving up much, but we certainly would want to say a rich person giving away 90% of their disposable income is still doing something good. (And practically speaking it’s going to have almost as good of an outcome if they gave to the point of diminishing their well-being).

            Your angle here is actually getting really close to Peter Singer’s Famine, Affluence and Morality. (Personally I stop a little short of where he’s at, but I think your position more closely resembles his).