RE: What will you do? (Ethical dilemma question)
October 19, 2017 at 6:57 am
(This post was last modified: October 19, 2017 at 7:25 am by The Grand Nudger.)
If you see your friend stepping out on his/her significant other....do you tell the significant other, confront the friend, or mind your own business? What do you do when two people who aren't your friends are cheating?
Many people who would rat out their buddies gf/bf...wouldn't rat out their buddy to some rando, and that;s difficult to square away in transition between the actors and their place in this hypothetical drama. If, for example, you were a "confront the friend" type, then wouldn't you also be a "confront the cheater, not the friend" type if the roles were shuffled back to the original? If you were a "tell the buddy" type in the original formulation, wouldn't you also be a "rat out your boy to a rando" type in this formulation?
What I;m getting at, /w the above, is that the answer (whatever answer one gives) to this question or the initial question probably has more to do with what ones own ideas are regarding personal complicity and duty..not some overriding and uniform proposition regarding the other or any harm potentially done. It's an area of incredible inconsistency. Even in the case of minding your own business in any case..the reference to harm caused by busybodying explicitly ignores the potential harm caused by the act of infidelity, or at least determines that it's likely to be greater than the harm caused by a wayward kiss.
I know I harp about this one alot, but it seems more an issue of exclusively sub-optimal ethical choices than an ethical dilemma. A "which kid do you save from the burning building" scenario. Our rationalizations for why we choose a b or c aren;t always directly related to the problem at hand..and sometimes we just don;t have a clue, so we throw shit at the wall and hope for the best. For the most part, imo, our lives are a constant stream of such decisions..as we aren;t in a position to arrange the particulars of events beyond our control so that at least one option matches up to the cut and dry specifics of a "good choice" or "the right choice" (whatever that means to a given individual). We do our best as we see it, and our idea of "the best" can change even between otherwise identical situations in which the only difference is our relationship to the situation or to an actor in the situation.
Many people who would rat out their buddies gf/bf...wouldn't rat out their buddy to some rando, and that;s difficult to square away in transition between the actors and their place in this hypothetical drama. If, for example, you were a "confront the friend" type, then wouldn't you also be a "confront the cheater, not the friend" type if the roles were shuffled back to the original? If you were a "tell the buddy" type in the original formulation, wouldn't you also be a "rat out your boy to a rando" type in this formulation?
What I;m getting at, /w the above, is that the answer (whatever answer one gives) to this question or the initial question probably has more to do with what ones own ideas are regarding personal complicity and duty..not some overriding and uniform proposition regarding the other or any harm potentially done. It's an area of incredible inconsistency. Even in the case of minding your own business in any case..the reference to harm caused by busybodying explicitly ignores the potential harm caused by the act of infidelity, or at least determines that it's likely to be greater than the harm caused by a wayward kiss.
I know I harp about this one alot, but it seems more an issue of exclusively sub-optimal ethical choices than an ethical dilemma. A "which kid do you save from the burning building" scenario. Our rationalizations for why we choose a b or c aren;t always directly related to the problem at hand..and sometimes we just don;t have a clue, so we throw shit at the wall and hope for the best. For the most part, imo, our lives are a constant stream of such decisions..as we aren;t in a position to arrange the particulars of events beyond our control so that at least one option matches up to the cut and dry specifics of a "good choice" or "the right choice" (whatever that means to a given individual). We do our best as we see it, and our idea of "the best" can change even between otherwise identical situations in which the only difference is our relationship to the situation or to an actor in the situation.
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