morality

I love thinking about human psychology. In particular, I love thinking about things humans do that are non-obvious, but pervasively drive their behaviour.

I can think of two general principles that drive a great deal of human behaviour, yet are non-obvious.

I'm a Christian and a feminist. Membership in both groups is a key part of my identity. If you talk to someone with a simplistic understanding of these groups, though, they might be surprised that it's possible to be a member of both groups!

The problem is that we aren't very good at differentiating subgroups that happen to share the same label. We lump Catholics, Pentecostals, and Unitarians into one group called "Christians". We even lump Canadian Christians and American Christians into one group!

I'm an environmentalist, so I like the idea of reducing consumption. It's almost an axiom of economics by now that eduction leads women to have less children, thus reducing a nation's consumption.

But at some point, all nations will be developed. China's citizens are now "getting their car", and soon there will be millions more from Africa "getting their car".

I feel like I tell lies as a part of my job in social work. With more frequency than I'd like.

This is more pronounced at the summer camp I work with, since we work with children. I'll talk about that, but I experience a similar feeling of "I'm being patronizing right now" when working with adults at my workplace.

At camp, we lie to campers for many reasons.

I have a problem with moral outrage. 

On the one hand, I often believe in the causes people are outraged about. On the other, I get so sick of the way they treat the causes as God's own truth. Let's pick an example cause: people being angry because they want a higher minimum wage.

I think the best salespeople truly believe in what they're selling. So it's a good thing that people really believe that there should be a higher minimum wage. On the other hand, the argument that a higher minimum wage would lead to less jobs has its merits too.

People love complaining about YouTube comments, and I do too. I disagree with lots of people in YouTube comments.

People also love hating democratically elected leaders; which is their right. Among the people I know, it's common to hear people saying "Stephen Harper doesn't do anything right" or "Rob Ford should never have been elected". I'm not really in a position to evaluate these claims and probably agree based on what I know.

Beer is a vice, so I shouldn't feel particularly proud of drinking it. But I feel a certain kinship to those with vices. Drinking beer isn't pleasant, on first glance. It can be bitter and literally tastes like poison.

Last night I watched some videos from the "Kids React" series, which is a great way to see what people are thinking. Kids are getting their ideas from others and recombining them in their brains just like I am, they're just more up front about it and say it in simpler words.

I'm watching Ender's Game right now. Spoiler alert!

The book/movie plays with an interesting moral situation. The Formics come and kill a whole bunch of humans; morally reprehensible. But then from their perspective, killing little mindless ants is like cutting off fingers from the one actual mind at the centre of the Formic fleet. From ours, it's awful.

Then Mazer Rackham killed the one live Formic in the fleet - murder! Reprehensible! At least, reprehensible to the Formics. Of course, in reality the humans killed one mind, and the Formics killed thousands.