Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 28 Dec 2014 1:54:24am
This is very interesting but only the first paragraph of it really resonates with me. The imposition of one's own view onto others being indeed something I would heartily condemn.

The idea that human nature is egotistic leading somehow inexorably to the notion of "private goodness, public disaster" doesn't strike a chord with me. Perhaps the wheels started to come off with the idea that moral exhortations (I include ethics) are somehow unrealistic.

Lacking for me in all this is the principle of reciprocity. That which in free market libertarianism is supposed be the self righting mechanism, failing only when markets fail to value things properly and produce so called unintended consequences. In moral or ethical terms an understanding that good and evil or merely the concept of well-being can be assumed to exist doesn't have to mean that we're required to say that it is equivalent in all cases. Each case being a separate individual person who we're bound to acknowledge has a different perspective if only slightly from all others. So the private and the public good intersect visa a vis some set of commonly held values, and thus can perhaps be said to contain singular and collective egos.

If the collective ego compliments the expression of individualism in the manner that I think it might infer that, as with an ethical marketplace, some sense that unintended consequences have to be owned by society as a shared responsibility that might hove into view and settle this argument without need of the any morally absolutist impositions.