On September 29th Catalin, my friend from Romania, posted on his blog this essay. Reading it made me remember another short essay I read in school last week, an essay about technological communication and how it affects relationships, by changing the human nature from within, both ways: self-esteem and esteem in what regards others.
Practically, the hypothetical situation described by Catalin is a very simple, real one(what would happen if a man was asked to kill another, in 5 possible scenarios:
- empty handed
- with a sword
- with a rifle
- by pressing a button, without seeing the victim
- pressing a button, unidentified victim, unidentified country
He started close by, as from the moment u can feel the victim’s skin and bones strectchin’ and brakin’ in ur own hands, and ended it in a geopolitical manner, the way most of strategic killings are done nowadays.
There is no need of wondering too far speculating in order to find issues that re-describe contemporary morality.
Evidently, the question posed was about the most probable scenario that would come through if a man was asked to choose. No. 5 would come up, cause it has the benefit of loosing on the way of distance common ingredients in human nature, such as fear, solidarity and resemblance among people.
The questions I pose:
Are solidarity and resemblance a lame resource of morality, if in the long run they prove to have only a spatial-conditioned functioning? Are they an invalid principle because they require a shared space and eye-sight (a space in which two subjects can perceive each-other)? So, is our moral world simply human sense-described?
I usually think that resemblance and solidarity aren’t lame resources as I believe they are the only resources that we have. We mustn’t pretend to be moral beings, in lack of these resources, and consider them to be as futile human secretions which stand on a basement of pure fear. How real is the human morality and if it has a self-sufficient; of prime order existence or if it’s just a sequel from a much powerful, not so noble instinct- it’s a question that’s usually solved out by presuming human conscience. The fact that guilt is not dictated by fear is enough moral evidence.
Here I won’t even consider the religious argument, perceiving guilt as proof of fear of God. Our society doesn’t function anymore on eternal crediting; we have goals and expectations that consume across a life’s length. As a practical argument, I wouldn’t consider it valid.
Fear blends with self-preservation; it usually involves flash and bones, not the human soul. We act upon wanting to save ourselves the way we are and maintaining our basic physiology. So, in the long distance…moral walks away from fear, stepping behind our eye-sight and our heart beats.
Is distance an excuse for lack of morality?
I argue that a man who takes this for granted has actually reduced his human capacities, in search of an easy way for humans. If simple is touching the other’s hand and difficult is thinking of the other, pressing the button would definitely be the easy way. However, that’s not the absolute human way. There is no such thing as a legitimate exemption from morals, were it given the distance…
People in search of the ‘safe distance’ are the ones who actually reduce their capacity of projection and imaging and act upon the primary instinct of fear. ‘Safe distance’ is a fear dictated concept, which excludes a physical menace out of a range of physical harmful possibilities. Functioning within a safe distance presumes nothing about conscience. Thus, it does not provide the moral context in itself. Only for this, distance cannot be considered exemption from morals, rather an exemption from fear, given the lack of morals.
One could say that ‘safe distance’ can function as a conscience distancing…as in: what u don’t know can’t hurt u (psychologically).This is a conscientious operation however. In order to act this way, first u hold the conscience of a possible threat, then u act on dismantling it. This distance doesn’t provide impossibility for acts of conscience, just a simple path of working ur way around them.
Distance is for the ones who have a reduced semantics of their own actions, the ones who believe that a human space is truly limited by eye-sight and thus, this space can easily brake away into multiple more dimensions along geographical lines.
As I answered Catalin: luckily, today we have the Interpol, and that saves us from a few pressed buttons or follows their signal; that’s not a general rule for safeguarding world morals however.
Given our contemporary virtual space-stretching, which enables us to reach and harm people we didn’t know for sure as existent hundreds of years ago, there should be a new branch in Ethics as referred to the possibility of having worldly morals.
However, a thing we surely knew existed within our own capacities, since forever, is our ingenious possibility for re-creating and representing spaces which we cannot reach. Thus, we can consciously follow every line of personal action that goes beyond our eye-sight. Imagined consequences, given correct information, have a very strong rate of probability. We do not stand helpless at the physical boundaries of our actions, nor do we do that when such actions simply cross our physical space and go beyond. The spectator view of the world is so not in fashion anymore..
The fact that man needs to be assisted by reality or representations in order to achieve moral actions is not a proof of inferiority. Morals as a response to given contexts are the only morals we have: the morals of our actions which reflect upon others. We can’t imagine morals in a space without solidarity and resemblance, that space is our mirror, our impulse and our standard dictator. There is no such thing as a moral of solitude. We can’t have morals without our assumption that human being is a given plural and that coexistence is in fact the existence. However…our given space for perceiving this condition goes far beyond our eyes, given a pair of mind lenses.