What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.
What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.
These pair of sentences are my moral axioms. I know that I have done wrong when I have significantly broken one of them, that is to say, I have done something that is not only good for myself, but benefits me at the cost of others. This, I feel, is something people have lost touch with in our world, especially the overwhelming majority of libertarians, social conservatives, and neoconservatives, as well as the vast majority of corporations and the people who pander to them. It was the lack of these axioms that has slowly, but steadily destroyed the tax system and economic regulations that were set up in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, it is the lack of these axioms that causes people to stand aside and watch as laws steadily strip us of our social liberties, of our environment, of everything that makes tomorrow worth living for. It is the lack of these axioms, I feel, that on the whole has caused more ills for humanity than everything else combined in all of human history.
Before I continue, I wish to fully explain what these axioms stand for, how they function for me, and then move onto how a lack of them has caused more evil in human history than any one human has ever committed, and how it is the lack of them that has allowed the most evil things to be done. At the same time, it may be a truer statement that rather than completely lacking these axioms in their personal mental vocabulary, most people simply do not consider them, think on them, or consider the implications, which is every bit as bad as lacking them completely, if not worse. I'm hoping that by this time you have had a little time to mull over the pair of sentences above, and have actually bothered to consider them a little by reaching this point, if you have not, then I ask that before continuing on, read them once more:
What is good for me, is not necessarily good for everyone.
What is good for everyone, is necessarily good for me.
On the one hand, our first axiom is simple and self explanatory, its meaning should be immediately obvious to everyone. When I do something that benefits myself, there is absolutely nothing that says it helps anyone else, or even that it avoids harming someone else. Let us consider the act of theft for example: I walk into a store, grab some item on sale, and bolt. I've certainly benefited myself here, but I have caused some amount of damage to the owner of the store. I might not even have caused damage to the owner of the store, whoever owns the store, assuming it is a chain store for example, most certainly has more than enough money to cover the loss. The damage done to that person is probably infinitesimally small to the point of practical nonexistence. But what about the store employees? The ones who must answer to the owner for the theft? What about the security guard or the system put in place that did not prevent me from making my theft, surly someone in this interaction between the person who actually bought or produced the merchandise to sell, and myself who stole it, has been harmed by this action. Thus, we can see that simply because something benefits myself, that doesn't mean I have not harmed someone. At the same time, the first axiom does not state, nor even imply that what is good for me, necessarily harms others, this is an important distinction to make, as far too many systems of morality seem to believe that certain pleasurable acts, "victimless crimes" are in fact morally reprehensible. There should be no law preventing me from, for example, singing in the shower provided I'm not harming anyone else by it (and I do hope that my singing is not so incredibly awful that it might actually cause someone who heard it physical, mental, or spiritual harm.). At the same time, there should be no law preventing me from drink alcohol or partaking of drugs that do not cause me harm or do harm to others (for example, marijuana). If there is no victim of a "crime", then how can it legitimately be called a crime?
The second axiom is trickier, and this is the one far, far too many people do not consider, I am especially looking at the libertarian crowd in this case, for they seem to actively ignore evidence of the truth of this statement in many cases. When I do something that is good for everyone, or support something that benefits all, I am part of that all, part of that everyone. When I support a tax that pays for better schools, when I support an additional fee in some process to gain a type of license so that it might pay for better funding to park rangers, I am hurting myself a bit, I am losing something of myself in the immediate, but the benefits are enormously spread out to everyone, myself included. The same can be said of social security, public health care, and in general, a whole lot of things the government should be able to provide yet does not due to a lack of funding and from political lobbyists who out of selfishness seek to destroy such efforts. This is a much more obvious example of something I'm giving up in order to benefit not just myself, but everyone, and in a far less obvious way. When I give money in taxes to public health care, social security, the fire and police departments, and make efforts to defend those things, I know, since I am obviously well off enough to be at least middle class in our society simply by virtue of having the free time to post this blog and pursue a career in game development as well as maintain a multitude of geeky hobbies (and those are all expensive), that I will likely never ever use any of these services. My house is unlikely to be burned down, or robbed, or that I will ever find myself in a situation so economically desperate that I will require social security or public health care. So why do I support it? Sure it's useful for other people who need it but if I'm never likely to use it in my life, then why should I support it? How is the second axiom maintained? The answer is simply that I do not know that I will never use these things, that I will never need them. Bad luck, disaster, or any number of horrors can dash my good fortunes, and I may have need of these things in that time. Simply by knowing there is a safety net there, I am better off than I would be without it, able to take greater risks, strive harder to succeed, worry less about falling into squalor or economic ruin, because I know such things will be there to catch me before total ruination. Not enough people seem to realize this, not knowing that they are shooting themselves in the foot by choosing lower taxes over greater benefits. Similar things apply to internet neutrality, unions, economic regulations, and all of these highly "liberal" and "progressive" things that give power to the government to protect us from what it truly be protecting us from: Random Chance and Human Evil/Stupidity from fellow citizens, not from nebulous, far off "enemies" and "terrorists".
Now that I have fully explained both Axioms, it comes to the idea of why such things have lead to the worst human evils. In the words of Winston Churchill, who was quoting Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." And unfortunately it is almost programmed into the human consciousness to do nothing against evil if it does not benefit us directly to do so. Our instincts work against us, they tell us to do only what benefits ourselves and those who are immediately close to ourselves: friends and family and people in our immediate community. Our instincts tell us to fear opposing anything that doesn't immediately effect us, especially when it is being enacted by those we see as powerful, for that is to risk security. This instinctive cowardice is what has allowed such evils as Stalin's reign of terror, the holocaust, genocide, McCarthyism, and heaven knows how many other evils and atrocities across human history, and will no doubt allow for infinitely more. Those who do not consider these pair of axioms, who allow themselves to think only of themselves and their immediate peers, while not evil in their intentions or actions, certainly allow for evil to occur, and will continue to do so until they begin to contemplate, and act, upon the spirit behind these axioms.
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