https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=24Z19tv-Jvg
Hello there. So what I’ve decided to talk about today is ethics and morality. Now, I did a long forum talk on this with Manuel Post, who is awesome. So you should listen to all the conversations I have with Manuel. We’ve got a bunch on here. We’ve got a playlist on The Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. I’ll link the playlist here if I can remember and ethics and morality are confusing for people. So I wanted to try to do a shorter form definition. You can engage with the longer form video if you want. But for now, I’m going to try to do a shorter form of ethics and morality for those people who want to grab like my framework and try to use it and work with it. It makes it a little bit easier. Obviously, I’m not going to resolve ethics and morality for you. Right. I’m just trying to give you the framework. So let’s jump in. Ethics and morality are two different things. The way I like to conceive of them, the way I think is the easiest to conceive of, the most useful is to say you’ve got ethics and that’s the ethereal or the realm of platonic forms. Right. That’s the ideal. Ideal your ethics. And then you’ve got this idea around morality, which is the implementation. Now, this is kind of important. The reason why it’s important. And again, there’s a long form video that I did with Manuel on this. So if you want to deep dive, go there. We get into these sorts of things a little bit deeper. But the reason why it’s important is because as long as I can have some amount of trust or hope or faith, those aren’t the same thing that your ethics and my ethics match, then we can trade. So it’s actually really important to trade. Roughly speaking, if our ethics match close enough, otherwise we can’t trade. Now, if in the trade, a mistake is made, that is a mistake of morals, not ethics, which allows you to make a mistake in your implementation of the trade without me having to condemn you as a heretic or like never trade with you again. I can just understand that you made a mistake. That’s why a moral error and an ethical error are not the same. And this is important because this is kind of the way we use these terms, whether we realize it or not. A lot of people are using this formulation like in their heads without really understanding it, but they are. And so somebody can be immoral about a thing without being unethical overall. We see this with people. You’ll condemn somebody as immoral because of maybe how they deal with the opposite sex, for example. But you may still be able to live with them or operate in a world with them in it. Whereas if someone’s unethical, yeah, you can’t do anything with them at all. If someone’s unethical, that means you can be, you’ve got to just get rid of them from society, at least from your trade network. You just can’t deal with somebody who’s unethical because you don’t know what they’re going to do. Whereas an immoral person is probably in a box. It’s contained within a box. So it’s kind of important that ethics is kind of up here. It’s this higher ideal form of something and the morality is in the implementation, in the doing and the interaction. And that is a lot easier to see. Ethics up here is harder to understand. It’s all conceptual or mostly conceptual, probably all conceptual. Whereas this morality is something that in an action can be moral or immoral. You can cast actions into your imagination, things that didn’t happen yet, but you cast them as actions to figure out whether or not they’re immoral. And then unethical is why I don’t understand that person’s ethics, right? Or I understand that person’s ethics and they don’t match mine and therefore they’re unethical. They’re lacking in ethics. So in other words, they don’t have a framework grounding them. And therefore you don’t know what moral or actions are going to take in the moment because there’s nothing grounding them. They’re not connected to this world of forms, this ethical realm of perfection. So that’s a real problem. When you don’t conceive of it that way, people get confused. They swap the words around. I swap the words around. It happens, right? But it gets confusing as to what people are actually meaning, right? How they’re conceptualizing these things in the moment. And usually when they’re talking about ethics, again, that’s that higher pure ideal realm. And morality is that realm of implementation and what you actually do in the world. And being able to trade with somebody is really important. And trade just isn’t, you know, I’m swapping this for that. Trade is also cooperation. I’m going to trade my time, energy, and effort for your time, energy, and effort in the future. Or maybe I’m just going to give you my time, energy, and effort. And you may feel indebted for that. For example, a lot of people feel guilty when people do things for them. I’m not going to name anybody that might be making this video or anything. But there are people like that, I assure you. So yeah, you want to reciprocate. And you want to be able to reciprocate. And that gets into cooperation versus competition, another great video that I have that if you haven’t watched it, you should definitely check that one out. So yeah, this is kind of important because it really gets to the root of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it when we’re using the words. And this channel is this distributed cognition channel here, where I’m trying to work through the cultural cognitive grammar, right, which is sense making, roughly speaking. That’s what I’m after how people are using words, not necessarily the dictionary definitions, but how people are using them when they’re talking about these things versus how they’re being interpreted, right, versus maybe what you think they’re being viewed as. Because those are three different things, right? What we think we’re saying, what we’re actually saying, and then how it’s being heard. And the middle one’s hard to understand, but it’s there. It’s definitely there. The zeitgeist is that middle thing, right? It’s what’s actually out there. And how people are interpreting it is the thing that confuses the zeitgeist, right, or confuses people. Like, well, we’ve got this example over here and that example over there, but they’re using the same words. So ethics and morality are all wrapped up in this because we swap those words, as I said earlier, and it’s hard to know why someone’s doing something, right? And in the modern world, we don’t have a good map or expression for ethics, right? And we don’t even have a good understanding of ethics. Like, we don’t know what we mean when we say ethical behavior. And that’s a problem. Ethics and morality is all about virtues and values, right? You’re pointing to the virtues. You’re pointing to them through the values. The values are changing in hierarchy based on what you’re trying to do and where you’re trying to go and where you’re at at the moment, right? And all of this is terribly important. It’s terribly, terribly important. And we have to be able to map these things out for ourselves. Otherwise, we don’t know what people are up to, what we’re up to. We don’t know how to cooperate correctly. And that’s wrapped up in intimacy. And so that’s why I think the intimacy crisis is actually the thing that leads to the meaning crisis. That’s actually the great problem. This is also why we can’t navigate ethics and morality, why we’re shrinking everything down into a single identity because we have to, because we don’t have the sophistication, the mental cognition, the tools, and the framework in our heads to work out complex ethical and moral ideas. So we shrink the world down into a tiny binary understanding. I have a video on that, binary thinking, into a binary understanding. And then when everybody does that and they have different binaries, different binary understandings, we just end up with a lot of fighting. And this leads to bad prediction of the world. I’ve said this before, bad prediction of the world leads to a problem where you become angry and resentful because there’s bad prediction of the world. That’s no good. We don’t want that. Fair enough. We don’t want that. That’s terrible. But we have to find a way to resolve it. So that’s what’s important about ethics and morals. That’s why I think very few people actually have thought it through well enough. They may have values that they’re not aware of, that they’re enacting, and always look for how people act, not what people say. Don’t care what you say. If I want to know what you believe, I’ll watch how you act. That’s a paraphrasing from Jordan Peterson. Of course, I was doing that a long time ago too. Dr. Peterson is not the only one that had that pragmatic approach to the world. So ethics and morality is a tough thing. There’s a lot there. Virtues and values are not easy. It’s hard to even get a good list of them on the internet. The source of all knowledge in the world. Tell me about values. Tell me about virtues. You get 17 different lists with very few overlaps. Yeah, it’s a really big issue and it’s something that’s super important. I just wanted to give you the quick outline so that maybe you can know how much you don’t know about your own moral stance in the world, about your own ethics, and about how complicated values are to work out, and how that leads you and others into binary thinking, into shrinking people down to a single identity. Maybe it’s race, maybe it’s ethnicity, maybe it’s sexual orientation, maybe it’s whether or not you worship the climate god this week. Who knows? But we always shrink people down into these, or lately we’ve been shrinking people down into these really simple constructions. But I think that’s because we’re scared of ethics. We’re trying to resolve it. And that’s the only way to do it in a complicated world with a lot of complexity that we don’t understand and believe that we do. If you believe you’ve got to handle on ethics and morality, first of all, I think you’re nuts. But if that proves not to be the case, then you’ve got to shrink the world down to something simple. So we start oversimplifying our models. And that, I think, explains the current world quite nicely. A lot of people need simple models because they can’t deal with ethics and morality. So hopefully you found this video helpful. Either way, please leave a comment, do a like, a subscribe, whatever you gotta do. Tell your friends, tell your family, sign up your pets for my YouTube channel. I need 45 more subs. I need to get 300 so that I can get on Odyssey with autoload, which would save me from the pain of trying to manually upload all of my videos from this YouTube channel onto their crazy service. So yeah, just trying to grow the channel and help more people out, help them work through cultural cognitive grammar issues, help people to sense make, get some of these issues better thought about in the world, give people access to models. I got models on here. I’m gonna do some more slides. We’ll do that next time. And it’s great that I get to do this. I like doing this. I don’t do all the work. Obviously, I couldn’t do all the work. I’m not good enough. Certainly video editing drives me crazy. Building thumbnails is about all I can handle nowadays other than just doing the videos. So I’m grateful that I have people helping me and I have a lot of help on the Discord, on Clubhouse, places like that where I get fed information. I get to see the zeitgeist, right? I get to talk to people and I understand where frustrations are coming from, hopefully, at least to some degree. And that informs all of this. Comments help, whether they’re on Clubhouse or on Discord or in email or in the comment section, all of it helps. So I really appreciate that. And I want to thank you, as always, for the thing that I’m most grateful for, which is your time and attention.