I read and respond to some thoughtful comments…

Family History – Follow-up

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I pull no punches…

Family History

A refund!

Oooh! And they will also send me a check or whatever for $600 as part of the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008!

Go ahead and take my money. You are committing evil by pointing a gun in my face and demanding my money, so go ahead and take it. You commit further evil by claiming that it’s my “duty.”

It’s not my “duty.” It’s your fucking gun in my face. It’s evil.

So go ahead and take it. You’re still evil.

What must be one of my all-time favorites:

Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue pt. 1/2

Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue pt. 2/2

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

- Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

How often have you heard it said that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”?

Setting aside the potentially condescending nature of being “quoted down” (a form of being “shouted down” used by people who think they’re smarter than you), it’s even more irritating to discover (as I did by accident, today) that the quote isn’t even correct.

In my experience, the misquote is generally used by people to pooh-pooh the application of a standard consistently, such as when you attempt to point out that, oh, being treated with respect is necessarily a reciprocal arrangement, or that pointing guns at people and shooting them is murder no matter what uniform you wear.

The misquote is bandied about so much that it is taken as fact despite its almost immediate instability when you take it out of the context of ethics, such as in any of the other sciences, or even our day-to-day life.

We expect and depend upon consistency for our daily living. We depend on atoms consistently obeying the various laws of physics; we depend upon our bodies consistently processing oxygen and nutrients and waste; we depend upon the relatively consistent behavior of other living organisms, including human beings; we depend upon the relative consistency of language… there is so much in our lives that we depend on acting in a consistent manner from the second-to-second existence to the long-term stretch of our lives from cradle to grave.

So why does ethics get this weird little exception? That is to say, why are ethical theories so fundamentally inconsistent and at odds with our daily experience?

An example of an inconsistent ethical theory is the following: murder is immoral, unless you are a soldier/police officer and told to murder by a politician.

Just mull that one over for a little while. Consider the implications of that theory. “Soldier,” “Police Officer,” and “Politician” are just labels. There is nothing magical about a uniform or a ballot box that transforms these people into super-human entities where murder is not only not immoral, but moral and worthy of praise!

You can’t escape the inconsistency by claiming that an election enables this change, because an election is nothing more than the agreement (or the appearance of an agreement) of a majority of a group people. Murder does not become moral merely because millions of people seem to agree that it is any more than time reverses itself or past events cease to have happened when we experience personal regrets.

If we go back to the original quote by Emerson, he makes a whole hell of a lot more sense. “A foolish consistency,” as it were, would be one in which we ignore the facts of reality and our experience.

Our world is overflowing with foolish consistencies, ranging from the “murder” example above to beliefs in the existence of deities and spirits to the idea that bringing a child into this world makes you a person worthy of love and respect.

Of course, we cannot force others to be consistent (or, maintain honesty and integrity), but we can maintain that as an expectation in our relationships. It’s rarely easy, of course, because so few people actually desire consistency. A lot of people (if not most) would rather confuse and belittle those who truly desire consistency so that they can continue acting in a highly inconsistent manner while claiming consistency.

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