Often times in ethics, we are trying to give a reason why people shouldn't do bad things, and why doing the right thing is actually good for them. One way of doing this is using the prisoner's dilemma: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1899#comic. Basically, if only one person were a jerk, they could get off the hook. But if people start being jerks, everyone will be jerkish to compensate, and everyone ends up worse off.
But what about people being too nice? What sorts of ethical dilemmas does this raise? Let me give an example. I was biking up a (rather steep) hill the other day. Toward the top of this hill is a 4-way stop. Now, as I was nearing this hill, there was a car which had been fully stopped long before I reached the stop sign. They tried waving me on instead of going themselves.
If they had just gone as the rules dictated, without paying attention to me, they would have gone all the way through the intersection before I arrived. I would have slowed down, looked for traffic, and continued going through the intersection without having to come to a complete stop and start up again on a hill. Instead, they waited longer, and I had to completely regain all of my momentum. Everyone ended up worse off because of one person's niceness. (Admittedly, the world did not end for this egregious affront, but it does illustrate the point.)
A possible principle here seems to be this: special consideration for anyone throws off everyone. It doesn't really matter whether this is consideration for oneself or for another. It really ends up being the same, completely regardless of intention. Individuals are parts of some bigger whole because they interact with each other and affect each other; we are social animals and have to rely on others. The whole, in turn, is best off when order is preserved. Individuals may benefit short-term from acting disharmoniously (or from others doing such in mistaken niceness), but such behavior leads to long-term loss for everyone (of course, this “long-term” may be beyond the life of the particular individual, which is why asshole CEOs don't necessarily get what is coming to them, but that is yet another issue). (I would like to tie this to Kant's ethics, in particular to his “kingdom of ends” interpretation of the categorical imperative, but that is a different discussion.)
What is this “order”, though? Of course not every order will do – racist and sexist laws do not achieve what is overall best for everyone, so preserving any order simply for order's sake is not necessarily what is what will preserve the good. And there is not necessarily a single order – a 4-way stop sign arrangement seems to be reasonable and probably not oppressive, but there are other ways of managing residential intersections too. So ethics may be to some extent arbitrary, but that is not the same as saying that anything goes. (This actually was in part the view of the medieval thinker Duns Scotus: there is only one moral law which is necessarily true, i.e. that the first principle must be loved, while everything else is merely a fitting way of ordering the universe). So it might not be possible to find “the” one order to rule them all, but we can study particular ways of living to see which promote the good: which societies seem to give the best life for the most people?
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