riffing on yesterday's post i would like to dive into the problem of other people's behavior. it seems perfectly rational to accept the behavior of others as beyond your control, and leave it at that. the idea of perfect rationality is not often represented in the world. the theoretical desireability might be, but never the real thing. as it is we spend a lot of our time choking, because someone is breathing our air.
i'm struggling to find an adequate example here, because this digs deep into the heart of other, and as such includes a little of everything. i guess we can keep this personal, and talk about what my dad eats. should be far from my concern, but it wounds me deeply that he seems rather insistant on not eating food, and is perfectly content to exist on eating crap. pastries, candy ice cream and meat products. by meat products i mean sausages, lunchmeat, and by the time you get as healthy as chicken you better saturate it with enough salt, grease and preservatives that you get at least some artery clogging benefit out of it.
the upshot of this is that dad is diabetic and morbidly obese. he is also seventy four, and feels that if his diet hasn't killed him off yet, he might as well live it up. this goes back to reasonability and a nagging suspiscion that i should mind my own business. of course i find it nearly impossible to do that without at least a smattering of snarky comments. a flood of rationalizations rushes in to support my objections. it's bad for him, but to be honest, my objections are not really attached to pragmatism. i think a balanced diet is tasty. i think processed foods are bad in a number of ways, and i am troubled by things being passed off as food that are not, and the ability of people to consume all their calories from stuff i don't consider to be food.
all of this is terribly sanctimonious and i would love to just let go of it all and let people eat whatever they want to and do whatever they want to. even more troubling is that i suspect that this is where all moral reasoning unravels. i once had a moral reasoning professor tell me that the only thing that you can really say about ethics is that you don't like this or that. you can ramp up the pejorative connotation (killing disgusts me) but you can't really go further. you can say murder is wrong, but only because by definition murder is wrongful killing. as far as what can make killing wrongful, you have to retreat to dislike of a particular killing. perhaps there is something special about innocence that makes you dislike the killing of people who posess it enough to name that particular killing wrongful. most people don't like killing in general, but make a number of exceptions to allow for tasty food, warfare and other things that they like, but none of this can really establish some moral proof about killing. there is no "science" involved, other than to acknowledge that empirically speaking a vast majority of people seem to oppose many forms of killing.
hyperbole bridges the distance between wanting my dad to eat better and being opposed to killing, but somewhere there has to be a vocabulary to describe these things. depending on the day i may be more against tract housing than racism, but i would like to find some way to say that i don't like them with the power that suggests that you shouldn't like them either.
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