Everyday good and evil

A lot of moral philosophy is focused on edge cases: where the everyday give-and-take between people has broken down. Classic examples are the Trolley problems or ticking time-bomb scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. You want to explore the limits of ethical theories just as it makes sense to start a puzzle at the corners and edges.

But I’m more interested in the banal stuff in the middle. The stuff we actually apply in marriage, family, and work. I’m interested in ways to navigate daily life, not only because that’s what I actually do – as opposed to interrogating terrorists – but because I think that’s the useful model for what we do in larger communities that are at peace, when the basic rules of engagement are in place and generally accepted. In politics and in economics, in other words.

Conflict erupts in everyday situations all the time, but we don’t immediately resort to violence to sort it out. We try to find win-win solutions where all parties are happy with the outcome. That’s economics. When we can’t find win-win solutions we sort out who wins and who loses using a pre-defined set of rules. That’s politics.

Finding win-win solutions, finding the least awful win-lose solution… that happens through negotiation. Through communication. So the everyday playing field of right and wrong, good and evil, is how we converse with each other.

The ethics of negotiation is an ongoing preoccupation of mine: I aim to talk about it, but just as much to practice it in how I write. A blog, like any published writing, is part of our social negotiation.

Obviously, there are more ways to communicate than speaking, writing, and body language. Our actions also send signals. But right and wrong behavior is not just about what signals we choose to send and how we choose to send them. It is also about how we choose to receive them. An upcoming post will be about our responsibilities on the receiving end.