In a morally healthy family the good of each member of a family includes and overlaps with the good of other members. When one family member flourishes, so typically do the others.
The good of the family cannot be achieved without consideration of an individual's important interests. If those interests are urgent and weighty, they must become important interests of the family and can sometimes have priority in case of conflict. Sometimes, members must split their differences in compromise. Over time, yielding to others at some times must be balanced against getting priority for one's interests at other times.
It must be acknowledged that an increasing proportion of the world's population is living in cities, in almost completely human-made environments. But we should also acknowledge that there are still a considerable number of people who wish to live in harmony with nature, and that globalization has made their ways of life increasing difficult to sustain.
Individuals understood in relational terms cannot be conceived as fully separate from their communities. Others in one's community may already be a part of the self. This conception of the person as overlapping in identity with others has normative implications for what constitutes the good of the individual and how that good relates to the good of others. One's relationship with others can form a part of one's good as an individual, such that one can have a compelling interest in the welfare of these others and in one's relationship with them.
The Zhuangzi is very good on telling us how the nonhuman-made world can enter into who we are more deeply than at the level of answering to our current interests. If the environment can shape who we are, it can shape our very interests, leading us to recognize things, events, and processes that are of genuine value and that we have not previously recognized as such.
We depend for so much on those we love that of course we want them to have desirable personal qualities and to believe that we do too. But if we pin our love for another, and theirs for us, based on personal qualities, it confers an unacceptable conditionality and substitutability on love: we don't want to be exchanged for a better model of whatever our lovers deem to be desirable, so there is a strong tendency to want: to be loved for no reason at all, simply be loved.
I argue for a relational conception of the person as a basis for an environmental ethic that can encourage us to preserve the environment not solely on the basis of satisfying human interests and not solely because we might attribute intrinsic value to the environment, but because the environment is something with which we can potentially enter into constructive relationship, as part of what makes us who we are or transform who we are and open us up to new interests.
The Daoist appeal to simplicity can be very appealing to the many of us who feel that contemporary life is overwhelming. "Less is more" can be a call to identify what it is we really need and appreciate doing for its own sake, as opposed to what we have been socialized into wanting, often to our detriment, or becoming consumed by activity that we would never do for its own sake but only for the sake of something else.
I am sympathetic to the general form of Aristotle's view: the exercise of complex and more inclusive abilities is not anything in itself that is or necessarily should be valued over simple and less inclusive abilities. Rather, value depends on what the abilities are and the ends to which they are put.
The demonization of Islam and immigrants shows that perception of difference remains one of our biggest problems, and maybe always will be for a species that began in small groups competing with other groups for resources. These apparently competing forces for sameness and difference sometimes even seem to be mutually reinforcing. The homogenizing force of globalization tends to make many people feel they are on the losing side, economically and culturally, and it is they who are most easily turned against those "others" who are demonized by demagogues.
The silver lining of Brexit and Trump is that it has undermined the perception that globalization is an unstoppable force, whether or not we think it is a good thing or a bad thing. There have always been losers and as well as winners in this process, and cultural minorities have been among the most vulnerable losers. Now that sizable numbers of people in the most advanced economies have made their grievances felt in a fashion that is hard to ignore.
I do fear that global capitalism is making us more like each other in regrettable ways, e.g., more people are increasingly captivated by spectacles of violence and aggression or of conspicuous consumption that are the subjects of the most commercially viable films across countries precisely because they don't depend for their appeal on cultural fine points; and more people are prone to deal with others on a purely instrumental and impersonal basis.
We know that global capitalism, and the commercially driven culture that comes with it, can be a powerful solvent, but many of us who benefit from it economically can regret the effect it has on our own lives as well as on the lives of others, and we should not view ourselves as helpless in the face of an irresistible force, especially since we may very well be complicit. We should be prepared to help others or to leave them be to sustain their cultures if we judge that they are of intrinsic value or of value to their members.
Both sameness and difference are issues for us. A sign of cultural homogenization is that languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. I am heartened by signs that some peoples are fighting back, e.g., the revitalization of the language of the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. But if we reject essentialism about culture, we will be cautious about overgeneralizing about what homogenization is and to what degree it exists. If we think of cultures as dynamic, internally diverse and contested, we will be aware that what looks like homogenization may be deeper down this more complicated thing.
Globalization in part means that a lot of people are walking into the room and in some cases becoming influential or even dominant voices in the conversation. Sometimes they are like party-crashers coming in and pushing people around, scooping up the valuables and eating up the food in the frig - bribing political leaders, undermining traditional economies and the ways of life that are interwoven with them, replacing them with new economic models that effectively exploit developing countries for their labor and resources.
For Confucians, we are such thoroughly social beings that individual and social interests are not in the end regarded as fundamentally incompatible. Though there will be conflicts, the central mission of moral and political philosophy is to foster approaches that will render them compatible or if that is not possible in some cases, to keep a reasonable balance so that neither side is consistently sacrificed for the sake of the other.
The things we call cultures are dynamic, internally diverse, and their interpretation is internally contested among its members. Cultures are like ongoing conversations with many voices, often telling stories about who "we" are.
It is not simply the individual who benefits from and is protected by rights, but the society as a whole. Protected freedoms to dissent and criticize those in power help keep abuses of power in check. They combat tendencies of elites to become isolated from and ignorant of the people they deeply affect through their decisions.
My own sense as an American is that we have begun to experience the disadvantages of framing virtually all moral issues in terms of individual rights. American history has consisted of swings back and forth between rights talk on the one hand and talk of duties, responsibilities, and the common good on the other hand. Recent decades have seen a big swing toward rights, and conceived in very individualistic terms, which hasn't always been the case even with rights.
I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.
Learning what it is to be among other human beings includes learning that they can be different from us as well as similar. We imagine what it would be like to experience the world differently from their locations, nor our own. We might still use analogies to understand others, but analogies point to similarities that co-exist with differences. Similar in some respects is consistent with different in other respects.
We can cooperate more easily with those who more easily intelligible to us, who are more familiar to us. But the advantages of specialization of labor often push us in the direction working with people who have different strengths and viewpoints than we do. I think that this is one major reason why moralities are always subject to change, because some of the people we cooperate with are going to be different from us in ways that often lead them to have different value orientations than we have; and interacting with them can change us.
In fact, our need to feel like big shots keeps us wedded to inadequate perspectives on the world, keeps us from exploring and dealing with what doesn't fit into those perspectives. We should be trying to formulate a bigger, richer perspective to accommodate what doesn't fit, but no matter how beautiful and true that new perspective looks to us, we should always be prepared to acknowledge that it doesn't accommodate something we haven't yet confronted.
An ethic that emphasizes relationship and community can be concerned with protecting the individual's interests, but always with an eye to trying to reconcile those interests with those of others. An ethic emphasizing rights and autonomy should be concerned with promoting enough community to foster a motivating concern for everyone's rights, not just one's own.
People come to have different moral beliefs because they have different non-moral beliefs about relevant facts. People are disposed to believe whatever justifies the practices and institutions that benefit them. But I argue that not all moral differences can be explained away in such a fashion. Some of the most profound disagreements come from differences in priority assigned to values such as relationship and community on the one hand, and individual rights and personal autonomy for the individual, on the other hand.
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