Michael Schur

So the maxim I'm designing here is something like, any time two people are in any kind of negotiation, one of them can drag into the negotiation an entirely unrelated global calamity and tell the other person that they shouldn't care about whatever they care about because they should care about that instead.

that world would suck, right?

Like, your sister borrows five dollars from you, you ask for it back.

She says, how dare you care about five dollars when the polar ice caps are melting?

No one wants to live in this world, right?

Kant also says, by the way, that you should treat people as ends in themselves and not a means to an end, meaning you shouldn't use people to get what you want.

Well...

Guess what I was doing?

I also learned about Aristotle and the study of virtue ethics.

So Aristotle says there are certain qualities we should all have, things like generosity and courage and friendliness and mildness, and he wants us to practice them every day so that we not only have them, we have them in the exact right amount.

We don't have a deficiency of them, and we don't have an excess of them.

Now, virtue ethics can be kind of maddeningly imprecise, but at the very least, it was pretty clear that I was exhibiting an excess of anger and maybe a deficiency of friendliness.

I wasn't nailing it, is the point.

I definitely was not getting it exactly right.

Then I learned about utilitarianism, made famous by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

And this one actually gave me a shred of hope that I was doing something good, because utilitarians only care about the results of our actions.

They only care that we are creating more happiness and pleasure than we are pain and suffering.

So yes, I'm being obnoxious

and moralistic and eye-handed to this guy, causing him some amount of pain, but an enormous amount of money is going to be given to people in great need.

So the amount of happiness I'm creating outweighs the amount of pain and suffering.