calibrating my ethics, a smidgen

There was a time in my childhood during which I was terrified of lying. Part of this came from compelling parenting, part from religious conviction, part from my brother telling me that if I lied, I would vanish to a strange world behind our living room wall on my next birthday(?!).  In whole, it meant that if I ever so much as teetered toward potential dishonesty, crushing guilt would soon follow. 

Here’s an example. Some point in elementary school, for reasons I don’t remember, I took on the habit of picking up crayons I noticed lying abandoned on the floor. To be clear, this wasn’t, “Aha, my friend dropped her cerulean; swan-dive when nobody’s looking!” but rather, “That poor dandelion nubbin lying behind the trash can. Perhaps I could use it to color in this haystack, and rescue it from ravage-by-vacuum-cleaner.”

But some point, I wondered: is this a dishonest act, pretending these are mine when they were never given to me by right? Niggling restlessness unpeeled into a profound impetus to act, fix my misdeed, and absolve myself—and culminated in me quietly dumping my vault of coloring instruments in a corner of my school one day. Redemption achieved, artistic pursuit and the sanctity of a hallway foregone.

Honestly, I miss how easily dominant my sense of right and wrong was; of the plethora of debilitating emotions I’ve experienced lately, moral compunction doesn’t always top the list. What has stuck is a desire to scaffold my ethics in a handful of stark, underlying precepts. Rules, even when self-imposed, are convenient for parsing out unexpected situations and arriving at a resolution I can commit to.

A couple years ago, I pledged myself toward a new overarching ethic: conviction that I should protect and uplift people’s autonomy, empowering to live the way they want, so long as that life did not trample on the autonomy of others.

It came with a peculiar set of corollaries. In particular, I wanted to divorce my personal sense of fulfillment from whether or not other people believed the same things as me, because freedom of thought is central to autonomy.  Consequently, I wanted to engage only with the actualized manifestations of people’s beliefs, not the beliefs themselves; if somebody thought the world was flat, I wouldn’t feel obliged to contest it unless, say, he were trying to catapult me across its edge to confirm his hypothesis.  

Today, I’m checking in with myself: how has that moral experiment gone so far? Some preliminary observations:

1. Sometimes, not trying to get people to take on my set of beliefs is the easy road. Arguments are tedious, and talking can be hard. The chasm between my internal indignation and any verbalization thereof serves as check enough, albeit now a morally accredited one.
2. Unfortunately, it also makes me a dull dinner companion: catch me studiously rearranging my cutlery during conversations of the “what I think that person should have done!” variety.
3. Sometimes, not wanting people to take on my set of beliefs is hard. Turns out I have very strong normative beliefs about morality, how people should treat one another, how people should treat me… And I recognize, I do recognize! That I only have these beliefs because I have been socialized into them, just as other people have been socialized into their own, and so their beliefs feel as strong and incontrovertible to them as mine do to me. Even so. Can be hard.
4. Are you worried that this laissez-faire attitude forbids activism or political action, and am I really going to just duck out of the progressive agenda for the sake of an oddly specific moral code? Don’t worry. I left a (n admittedly hand-wavy) loophole: if other people’s beliefs directly move us closer toward a world with more suffering or harm, I should challenge them. Not necessarily in order to convince the infracting party themselves, but for the sake of contributing to a larger conversation inching us closer to a more just world. I.e., please be a good person, Afia.

But here’s the caveat I did not expect. What about when someone’s way of engaging with you is fundamentally against your ethic of how you want to engage with others? To wit, what is the most respectful way to interact with people trying to limit my autonomy, consciously or not? If their actions have no tangible consequences, do nothing? If consequences loom, try to convince them otherwise? But if I feel so strongly about autonomy being a precursor to positive interaction, then is disengaging the only viable option?

I think I veer toward the latter, which feels uninspiring. Maybe it speaks toward some larger messages, though–about the importance of self-care, or the impossibility of true dialogue in the presence of a power differential, or what have you.

With regards to the ethical code, though, where does this leave me? Delineating strict, all-encompassing rules about how to best interact with people is probably not the most fruitful use of my time. But in a general, life-aims-I’m-devoted-toward, sense: I’m glad to report that uplifting people’s autonomy remains my Main Thing.