To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, January 16, 2020
 

I was recently discussing this company, a large online retailer, with a group of youngsters in an academic context. It seemed like we all knew and agreed that this giant retailer did not treat its employees in the most humane manner be it in terms of working conditions or work expectations. However, most of these youngsters did not think this made any difference to their decision to buy from this company. Moreover, the company’s treatment of employees at the bottom rung didn’t make any difference to their own aspiration to work in the company either because they didn’t see themselves as ‘pushing carts’…or in other words…they couldn’t relate to these employees at a personal level. I couldn’t detect any empathy let alone indignation for the plight of the employees. The general refrain centred around cheap and efficient as if they were the most significant considerations.
 
I wasn’t sure how to take this. On the one hand, practically speaking, I can’t say that the knowledge of these things has stopped me from buying from said retailer. I may come up with excuses for why I still buy from it but the brutal truth would certainly boil down to cheap and efficient. I may not want to work at this said retailer in any capacity but I guess if I was really young and aspiring to be a manager at a huge corporation, I would probably not rule it out either. Which makes me wonder if the empathy or indignation I feel or presume I feel for the employees of this retailer is genuine at all. Empathy or indignation cannot just be latent or passive emotions from which no action springs because then they would simply be convenient cosmetic emotions not emotions that guide moral action… which in this case at the very least must surely mean giving up using that retailer or never wanting to be associated with it? That being the case, how could I make these youngsters think from an ethical perspective, or ask them to think beyond the instrumental values of ‘cheap and efficient’, when I myself couldn’t lay a claim to nobler action?
 
There are those for whom knowledge of the retailer’s people practices would matter and who will act on it practically even if it costs them some comfort and cost in the process. And then there are those for whom it wouldn’t matter at all, as long as their own lives are made more cost-effective, easier, and convenient. I am not quite sure what makes people have the former stance or the latter, and it seems to me that if people do have the latter stance, there is no rationale or logic that can ‘convince’ them to take the former stance. If they are not moved by a fellow human’s suffering, how can you ‘move them’? If they don’t experience discomfort in being a beneficiary from the suffering of fellow humans, how can you make them ‘experience discomfort’? It seems to me that you cannot emotionally move someone or make them experience moral discomfort if they are not wired to feel these emotions or conflicts at a deeper level… you certainly cannot move them with reason and logic.
 
It perhaps relates to how you’ve been wired as a person through life and what you cherish as your end goals. For some the goal can be to lead a life that is harmonious with a good society in general and for some it might be to lead a personally or individually successful and rich life. It is of course not as simple as that as the wiring may take its own course and goals can conflict with each other. But clearly, the more your end goals incorporate larger values, the more you would be inclined to take decisions that incorporate a consideration for the community as a whole, and the more your end goals are of a narrow self-interested kind, the less you would be so inclined. It makes sense then that some are affected by ethical problems in society and take actions, and some do not see it as an issue at all as long as it doesn’t personally affect them. To convince one who is not affected at all in this sense would also mean convincing them to change their end goals… which would essentially mean convincing them to change a large part of who they are as a person… which relates to the life they have lived and what it has taught them…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 5:20 pm 0 comments
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