April 15, 2013
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At the edge of the pool
I think it was [Zanshin] who told me a parable which I often refer to: there is a big difference from being in a pool, and peeing, and standing outside of the pool, and peeing into it.
The question is– how does this difference define our sense of what is lawful, and what isn’t?
I’m working on an paper for an intellectual property class. It will deal specifically with the usefulness of the law in an age of digital media. The paradox of it all is that I’m a law student– I would like to work in an area where I can help to reform laws to help the underprivileged and the marginalised; yet what I do in practice is break the law in many small little ways on a daily basis. I won’t admit what laws I actually break– lets just say that hypothetically, I do.
Why do people break the law? Because doing something by the law is often tedious, and it costs more. It’s so much easier for us to offset our costs onto someone else than to do the legwork ourselves. That’s the whole point of stealing: it’s to save the amount of work hours taken in producing a unit of something, by skipping the production phase and just having a product instantly. Don’t have a job? Don’t have money? That’s all units of work hours– but if you just steal the apple, you can bypass all of that. Of course, the fundamental problem with stealing is that if it goes unchecked, then the people who actually do put in the units of work hours will just die because they can’t cover their costs. They’ll have no apples for themselves. And they’ll have no incentive to be involved in producing apples, if they can just steal them from someone else too. This all results in a race to the bottom, where eventually, all the apple trees are bare, every last apple gets eaten, and not a single apple tree ever gets planted again.
So where does the line get drawn?
Stealing a grape at the grocery store (like every good asian kid learns from their parents and grandparents, to check if it’s tasty before buying)? An apple?
Perhaps our sense of moral relativism connects guilt with public shame only– that’s why there’s a much higher chance that we’ll download a music album by torrent, but we’ll be super scared to walk into a music store and put a CD in our jacket when we think nobody is looking.
I guess the questions I’m getting at are these– do we actually feel any genuine guilt about anything, or are we just scared of being punished when we are caught? Do we really have a sense of morals, or is that gut feeling just a conditioned aversion to public shame?
I often joke that I’m a sociopath, but sometimes, it’s only half a joke. That’s because I’ve really spent a lot of time defining, for myself, what I consider right and wrong. And the conclusion I’ve reached?
Like I said, I won’t admit to actually doing anything wrong– but, hypothetically speaking: If I wanted to, I would feel no more– or less– guilty downloading a movie than I would walking into a shop an just stealing a DVD. The only considerations that would cross my mind are if I could be caught.
The important thing is that guilt doesn’t play a part in my life– but that doesn’t mean I know right from wrong.
The difference between what I’m saying is that I make my decisions in life, both right and wrong, based on a consideration of my relationship to my environment and the people around me. My actions are justified by the relative importance of these connections, weighed against others.
I am not driven by guilt, or remorse– although I might learn from regret.
It could be phrased within a religious context. Since I come from a Catholic background, I can distinguish between two basic types of followers.
Group 1:Do you do this thing, X, or not do this thing, Y, because God said you shouldn’t? This is the guilt approach– you don’t care what’s right or wrong, you just are following your conditioned reflexes to prefer or avoid certain behaviors. It’s a passive role in life– because if you go this route, you are basically taking a back seat and trusting the reasoning of someone else.
Group 2: Or do you X or Y because you agree with God’s reasonings to encouarge X and ban Y? Do you understand that the reason why God made these rules is because these things have implications on the systems that you must cohabit with others in?
Nevermind that Group 2 doesn’t really need God to begin with, since they’ve arrived at the same conclusions. My main point is that Group 1 makes choices based on guilt– which, the example of media piracy in an internet age points out, is actually dependent on the fear of public shame, not on an actual relationship with morality.
