I think it was Mark Twain who said that in order for a man to be moral he needs to be well-fed first.
Seems like there’s plenty of entitled wealthy people in this thread. People who don’t understand what it’s like to be systemically pushed down into the mud; what it’s like when all of your choices are either bad or worse.
“But you can recycle…” Shut the fuck up dude, recycling doesn’t feed my fucking family. Recycling doesn’t replace the years spent in an education system that’s designed to make you a factory worker. Recycling doesn’t bring living-wage-paying jobs to my hometown.
When the bills are in the mail, the tax man is coming, the landlord’s raising the rent, and the bossman is driving a new car every year but can’t pay you enough to keep your bank account from overdrafting, sometimes you have to do “immoral” shit.
Sometimes you have to kill an animal with no hunting license, sometimes you have to find a place to stay warm for the night, sometimes you have to feed your kids when all you have is cardboard and that might mean stealing bread from the dollar store.
I remember the millionaire who wanted to prove that he could rebuild his wealth if he started from scratch again. He cheated a little bit because he used his friend apartment for free.
Fast forward, he gave up after a couple of months and understood what the rest of us knew for ages.
Wealthy people are delusional and no amount of reasoning will work with them.
warning satire
Are you sure your not just being lazy? Maybe it was the choices you made that landed you there. It’s not like there is a whole system in place to oppress a certain class of people.
I cannot believe that you’re being downvoted. This place disappoints me.
I was told I’m a politician in another thread so… yeah I don’t know man.
Looks like the consensus finally turned around somewhat
A preemptive warning of satire kinda breaks the entire thing and makes it fairly lame
See, I agree with you, but I’ve also been virtually beheaded because of stupid people who don’t understand what I believe to be very clear satire. So it’s lose-lose.
This is true and I am saying that as someone who is well off, the movie parasite talks about this great. Its easy to be a nice person when your rich
Well this is getting added to my playlist.
Dude looks like Tyler Cassidy’s nephew or something.
So you listed a bunch of things that make sense for illegal things you might have to do in order to acquire food but just because you are poor why can’t you recycle?
Poor people are excellent recyclers. Even in states that don’t offer bottle exchange they will collect for the aluminum/other alloys, alone.
And that makes logical sense to me that’s why I was surprised by the other commenter
That’s not the point.
The point is that doing little things like reducing reusing and recycling are not the end-all be-all solution to being broke. I’m saying that doing moral things doesn’t automatically give you a liveable life; it doesn’t magically make everything ok.
But especially reusing things should be a priority if you are broke right? Like that’s a way of saving money
WHERE DID I SAY IT WASN’T?
God damn, I am sick of you misinterpreting mother fuckers.
Why are you so mad? You are making a bunch of disjointed statements and I’m literally just tying to get you to connect the dots. If people are misinterpreting you have you considered you are not being clear?
My interpretation of this might be different, but I agree wholeheartedly with my interpretation.
Being morally just doesn’t just mean “not causing harm” directly. It means striving to not cause harm both directly and indirectly. As someone who lives in the USA, our entire society is built off of exploitation. The less expensive something is, the more heavy the exploitation likely is. The cheapest manufacturing is done in countries where labor is exploited or even enslaved, where the manufacturing process can pollute and poison the area with little consequence (to the manufacturer), and where the powerful can force deals on the government to let them extract valuable resources and pay a fraction of its value - depriving the locals and nation prosperity. Even when buying US food products, the food industry mostly relies on extremely poor conditions for the animals it keeps, taking advantage of farmers it buys from or employs, and may even employ migrant children for dangerous slaughterhouse labor.
Avoiding these kinds of practices throughout most supply chains is sometimes impossible and usually more expensive the more thoroughly you manage to avoid the practices. Even then someone has to check in and constantly verify that the practices are legitimately avoided and not just greenwashing or fraudulent.
It’s really quite depressing.
I understand where you’re coming from, because many societies are being structured in ways that make it feel like you are only hurting yourself by not being just and moral. It’s truly horrible when trying to live a life following “the good” puts you in the path of pain all the time, working jobs you don’t want to afford not to be put out on the street (and God forbid you want to have kids if you’re in a high cost of living area).
With all that being said: I’d fear becoming an evil person more than dying poor. I hope that we can work together to make a world that isn’t run by greedy, bad people.
Yes, being poor is bad.
No, it’s righteous.
This is what people tell themselves to cope better. There’s nothing good about not being able to afford stuff and juggling between buyin groceries and paying the bills.
I dunno, you really want to stick your head out for capitalism like that?
Wanting to live a non-shitty life is somehow bad? Dounds like someone who’s working for capitalists would say. “Shut up and eat your mac and cheese, it’s your destiny!”
No, i have to admit, I’m trying to gauge what people actually believe. I understand morality can’t be summed up into a set of infallible rules and it’s incredibly hard to teach everyone the ethical frameworks necessary to determine true moral justification for any given situation. The argument about personal liberty is just one that everyone has to reckon with and I’m curious if people still come to the same conclusions I always have.
Long sentence, zero substance. I’m trying and I can’t sum it up to see what you wanted to tell, in ahort, or how is it connected to previous conversation. I think more and more that you are a politician.
K
Righteousness doesn’t put food in my stomach, shoes on my feet, a roof over my head, or solve any of the other problems caused by poverty.
Honestly, rich people are pretty shitty themselves.
But not for lack of choice, that’s the point here.
I guess? But it’s also morally just to reuse disposables, repair instead of replace, conserve and reduce waste, and delay new purchases as long as possible. I’m doing environmental conservationism just by being poor!
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness. (Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms)
The rich will throw away their perfectly fine boots after a few years because they aren’t in style anymore.
The rich have that option.
This is the single greatest example I have seen highlighting the problem.
The poor cannot afford to have things that last, things that allow them to think of the future, and hence are stuck in a cycle of debt in the present to near future time periods.
However what I don’t understand is how the rich get so short sighted when they have both the motivation and resources to plan for long term outcomes. Doesn’t make sense.
Underpaying workers leads to worse productivity and apathy towards your superiors.
Does the world really have so few resources that the only way to keep number go up is to exploit the less fortunate? When will feudalism truly end?
It’s called capitalism, not feudalism
The rich man’s boots vs. The poor man’s boots. Terry died too damn young.
Wait till you realize morality is shitty fucked up crutch that doesn’t work at best and a tool to control people at… usual, not even the worst
Yes but so what?
Humans benefit from society. You can’t have society if people go around destroying that society. You make rules and enforce them to stop that destruction. Thats morality in a nutshell.
This has been going on so long that it’s hard wired into most of us. For the psychopaths that don’t have that hardwire, we have places to put them. I.e. prisons and boardrooms.
Oh, so many things I can say in response. I will try to make it brief, though
Yes but so what?
So, for example, tons of people think themselves into depression and suicide because of some bullshit morals they have come to value more than anything else. I would rather have merciless killers to deal with, but not this kind of suffering going on around
You can’t have society if people go around destroying that society
Oh, but we do. Show me a country with empty prisons (preferably without prison-as-punishment laws even)
Edit: as an example of society without morals, if I remember correctly Gautama has spent some time with his disciples just hanging around. For those who do not know, buddhism does not care about morals in the common sense, and yet whenever you get a master+disciples group, that is a certain kind of society, very much capable to function
You make rules and enforce them to stop that destruction. Thats morality in a nutshell.
Which is plain declaring “I have failed”. Failed in building a sustainable society. Failed in producing people capable of living in a sensible way. Failed to even restrict those who I failed to mold into something not that kind of destructive. I write “I” here, because in the end, if we look back in time, for every damn “moral code rule” that got spread, taught and enforced we will track that one idiot who enabled all this bullshit
This has been going on so long that it’s hard wired into most of us.
True. And because it got wired that deep we have enormous amount of suffering, because life cares not about “right” or “wrong”
For the psychopaths that don’t have that hardwire, we have places to put them. I.e. prisons and boardrooms.
Surprise: it is possible to live without any moral conditioning and still not fall into destructive behaviour. And also, we continue to revere people who have done things far from “morally right way”. (Jesus, Krishna, Gautama to name a few most recognizable names). Today every single one of them would have ended up in a prison or mental hospital, which also speaks something about what morality actually is
You’re conflating morals with religion.
No, I toss both in the same garbage bin, while separating from what is usually referred as spiritual process. But if that is all you’ve got to say, let’s leave it at this point
Is this an anarchist perspective? Just trying to see what your broader view might be.
No, I don’t expect there to be any ready label for this. In a nutshell:
- humans are as much part of life on this planet as everything else. the “killing is wrong” kind of maxims is just plain bullshit, just go watch how other forms of life take care of their sustenance
- moral dilemmas show by their existence that pretty much any widespread “morally right” way to behave has its limits, yet those limits are somehow “omitted” from most sources that are supposed to teach people what is good and what is bad
also, “good” and “bad” do not actually exist: you can vaporise whole Earth and rest of the universe won’t even notice
- still there is a vivid difference between a kind soul attending to a garden a feeding stray cats and dogs who happen to come by and an idiot torturing kittens in front of their mother just for fun, even seeing these situations produces very different experiences. Substitute humans here with animals and appropriate behaviour, the difference will still stand. So there is some kind of “this is in line with how all life longs to be”, “that is not how mature and balanced living creatures operate”, but I have no clue even what level to look at to find that difference
TLDR: So morality doesn’t exist, killing is ok, the way we teach morality to people is too simple, only physical reality matters, and actually there is a morality it’s kind of going along with a good nature balance and it’s sorta nuanced? Gotta feel it in your gut ya know? Anyway I haven’t researched any philosophy or study of ethics.
That is a word salad I could support, as dbtng already said:)
Ok, but seriously, I studied only a bit of philosophy and no ethics, and the question of discerning between objective reality and subjective observer can keep us occupied for many lifetimes, so no use in trying do dive deeper
If you’re willing to write it off, then I’d say you’re saying your position is equally dismissed. So cool, it’s great to say we can ignore you and dismiss your edgelord take, something I fully intend to do.
Lol. You got nothing of what I said, but I’m ok with it
Sounds like you have issues expressing yourself then
I appreciate you giving me your candid opinion. I find some of it fascinating, from the perspective that you’re not just subscribing to some brand of nihilism or whatever.
I do agree with some of it, from a lay persons perspective. I’m no philosopher and I’m certain someone might be much more qualified to tell you all about the origins of your belief. Like you talk about some simple coping strategies like, “good and bad being inconsequential when compared to an infinitely large universe.” These are just copes we develop to reconcile the brutal nature of the world.
Getting back to morality, i think, the more we are separated from the “bad thing” that happened the harder it is to apply a moral framework around it and even if you did, trying to teach that framework on a scale that will reach everyone is mostly impossible.
So end of the day we are still just picking battles, which is usually just harm reduction.
Thank you for the reply :)
Well, trying to teach others to think like me is not something I will attempt: in the end, what I have come to think about anything is just a result of my biography, there is no point in trying to imprint it onto other people. And for the coping part, two things:
- the world was before me, will be after me. If I get wounded by how it is, that’s on me
- I am not talking about good and bad being inconsequential, I am talking of them not existing as actual reality, same way words do not exist as reality: they mean what they mean only because some people agreed on it. There is nothing to cope with
Don’t use being poor to justify your shitty choices bro, wtf? Trash take.
You just assume I’m poor. Nice.
I’m sorry but this is fucking stupid. WHO is calling WHAT immoral? Someone babbling on recycling, who the fuck cares about recycling?
Poorest people are 100% capable of making choices that align with their personal values as anyone else. This is such a fucking Christian thread. What, do you think morals come from the Bible? what a joke
I think the line of thinking is when you’re struggling, resisting temptations that cross moral lines has a greater impact on your life. You get to make these decisions all the time and it’s a lot easier to make the moral choice if you’re financially secure.
