Food: I would like to stop contributing to animal suffering, but I also like the taste of a good meal, and I want to have a balanced diet. I do not want to spend much time studying diet, because that topic is boring as hell to me, and I believe that if I eat a random non-vegetarian diet, it will be closer to a balanced diet than a random vegan diet. Also, it is convenient to have a lunch near my workplace, with my colleagues, and there are not many vegan options there.
My solution here is to take the most vegetarian-ish choice from the conveniently available options. If I were single, I would eat joylent for breakfast and dinner, but living with other people, I again try to eat the most vegetarian-ish choice given, being open but not obnoxious about my preferences.
Work: When I was a libertarian, I was proud for working in a private sector, not working for the state. But then I realized that many private companies I worked for also did some projects for government. So I wasn't sure, if there really is a meaningful difference between working for the state directly, or using an intermediary.
Later, when I wanted to be a teacher, there was a choice between private and public school. Unfortunately, in my country, the public schools are the good ones, and the private ones are a "pay for good grades and a diploma without any learning" system. (That's because in my country employers care about you having a diploma, but don't care which university gave it to you. Of course in such environment diploma mills are very popular among students.) I tried a private school anyway, because they convinced me their school was different, but it actually wasn't, and when I saw my colleagues were blackmailed into giving good grades, I quit. And then I taught in a public school, which was better; until I ran out of money, so I returned to programming.
Maybe a half of IT business in my country means doing something for government (state or local), which often is just a pretext for stealing money from taxpayers. (When your business strategy is being friends with influential politicians and selling overpriced products for the government, it is better to sell a product such as an information system, where the average voter has no idea about what the market price should be.) So, when I have a suspicion that my employer is doing exactly this, is it my moral duty to quit? Also, what difference would it make? If they received the deal because of political connections, they will receive it anyway, and for the same price, so the only difference is what quality the taxpayers will finally receive. If I contribute to make such project better, am I doing a good thing (providing better quality to the taxpayers) or a bad thing (helping to excuse a theft)?
The work in IT itself has some dilemmas: given a choice between two possible solutions, should I as an expert recommend the one better for my employer, or the one better for me (e.g. where I can learn new things that will later increase my value on the job market, even if it means that this specific project will take a little more time and be a little more expensive)? It is very easy to rationalize here a lot; I may convince myself that using a more sophisticated technology is "better in long term" for my employer.
How hard should I work, and how much time should I spend reading the web? Especially when everyone spends a part of their working time browsing online news. Or perhaps could I use those parts of my working time more meaningfully, such as learning something new? Is it an excuse if I will later use some of such gained skills for my employer's benefit?
In most situations I choose some kind of middle way: not doing obviously immoral things, but also not going an extra mile to be perfect. -- However, this is probably how almost everyone could describe their choices, because usually there is at least one less moral and one more moral alternative compared with what you did.
I am well aware of how much my moral choices are a result of what people around me are doing. I wouldn't even call it "peer pressure", because those people do not really exert any significant pressure on me, and I am weird enough so I wouldn't care so much about being weird in one more thing. It's just... I don't want to inconvenience myself with moral tradeoffs more than people around me do.
It is obvious what this adaptation means. It prevents me from seeming immoral, but it also prevents me from taking morality so seriously that it would give me big disadvantage compared with the rest of my tribe. But that's an evolutionary description, not a psychological one. For evolution, it means "be only as much moral as necessary, not a bit more". But for me, psychologically... I want to do the right thing, but I also want to be surrounded by people who do the right thing. When people around me don't do the right thing, it feels futile when I try to do it, so I gradually give up. What is the difference? If you would give me a choice of living in two otherwise equivalent cities, only one city completely vegan, I would choose the vegan city, even if I knew the other city is available. I just don't want to have the temptation right in front of my eyes. Similarly, I would rather work in a company where everyone tries their best, than in a company where people choose the easiest way; it's just difficult to try doing my best when I keep seeing people who choose the easiest way, especially if once in a while their laziness makes my own work harder.
...But for me, psychologically... I want to do the right thing, but I also want to be surrounded by people who do the right thing. When people around me don't do the right thing, it feels futile when I try to do it, so I gradually give up. What is the difference? If you would give me a choice of living in two otherwise equivalent cities, only one city completely vegan, I would choose the vegan city, even if I knew the other city is available. I just don't want to have the temptation right in front of my eyes. Similarly, I would rather work in a company where
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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