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2024-11-04 22:17 EST

Today I have been thinking about choice, and risk, and guilt. Specifically, I think there's a general assumption in our culture, a moral framework, that because our actions have consequences, we must pay for any adverse decisions. Surely there's nothing big happening tomorrow that would lead to these kinds of thoughts.

It's not hard to trace this thinking back to Christianity, and Protestantism in particular. The promise—or punishment—of an eternal afterlife that reflects what you have done is, in popular reckoning at least, meant to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. There is also another implicit part to this—that there is an ultimate authority on what is good or bad, which is contained in a code of presumably sufficient detail to guide your decisions. The commandments, so to speak.

I think this is a problem, for a number of reasons. First, there is the issue of the afterlife, and that ultimate authority, and whether either actually exists. I will not address that here. There is also the issue of whether it actually prevents people from doing bad and encourages doing good—whether you can be scared into goodness. There is a common line of skepticism around this that is analogous to "a lock only keeps honest people out": a "bad" person won't concern themself with ethics, and a "good" person will only be wracked with guilt. It is the guilt element of this moral framework that I take issue with here, and its inevitable consequence of discouraging risk.

It is perhaps not surprising that many Christians (and Evangelicals in particular) are vehemently opposed to actions like divorce, abortion, or even innocuous things like tattoos. Marriage, procreation, and body modification are all supposed to be permanent decisions, and thus things that should be carefully weighed and only done with utmost certainty. This then leads to the idea that living life with such carelessness will cheapen and decay morality. The supposed gravity of these decisions falls apart under the slightest pressure because none of these things are irreversible. Are these things really signs of hedonism, or is are they simply acknowledgments that very few decisions are truly world ending?

There is an excellent piece by Devon Price which argues that there is no "safe life": everything you do carries risk, and that is unavoidable. To me, the kind of overthinking that asks you to avoid risk rather than weigh it is very related to avoiding an action because you (or even other people!) may regret it later. This kind of avoidance is by definition reactionary: instead of being proactive in your life, you become a victim of it.

This brings me back to tomorrow. There has been so, so much moral hand-wringing over the US presidential election. Should people vote for Harris to prevent Trump? If you do, are you endorsing the genocide the current administration is funding? Are you voting justly?

I dislike these questions because they presuppose the Protestant guilt complex. Instead I would like to propose another moral framework.

Imagine the world as a web of interactions between you and every other person. Every time you interact with someone the line connecting you two in the web changes. These are your social relations. They are occasionally symmetrical, but very often not. Most lines in the web are barely anything—these are strangers. But you do still have a line. It's unavoidable; you live on the same Earth.

What is justice in this framework? It's a negotiation between you and every other person. There is no standard set of boundaries; what may make one person feel cheated could mean nothing to another. Communication, honesty, solidarity—these are the elements of justice.

And you will not be perfect. You will hurt people. You will not atone for everything, and atonement is solely with the people you have hurt. You cannot atone for an injustice by dealing with a third person. There is no justice by proxy.

This may make you seem less culpable than in the Protestant framework, but I think that is a simplistic view of it. Especially when considering something as amorphous and world-defining as capitalism or colonialism, you may be culpable of a lot that you haven't knowingly done. For example, a common criticism of decolonization is that it is not the fault of settlers to have been born on colonized land, thus they do not "owe" anything to the natives of that land. However, if you take guilt out of the equation, and think about what settlers have indeed done to negatively affect the livelihood of indigenous peoples, things become clearer, if less manageable.

I don't have an elegant way to end this. I'm not married to what I have written here, but I do stand by it. I think a lot of arguments about morality, however, are trying to square a circle by working within the standards of our society. If there's anything this election has shown, it is that there is no redemption in it, whatsoever.

Tags: 2024 US presidential election • guilt • justice • risk