There is an individual I know who has probably pissed off entire communities with a lot of ambiguously moral situations. People don’t keep it a secret they don’t like her, and occasionally someone who notices her object to how they treat her will quip “if so many people wreak of being shit to you, maybe you should check your own shoes”.
Once in a while though, I noticed she would respond to that statement with “if it were my own shoes, it’s also the shoes of the local authorities, as they have no problem with me, only those of you they’re stepping on do”. Oddly enough, this is completely true. I see situations like this where it’s the masses VS people in positions of wisdom (with situations like this making you wonder if the people in positions of wisdom are enough to outweigh the masses) and I am intrigued because it makes you ask why both exist, and it makes me wonder if people who spend so long not putting salience into a systemic process of conflict mediation have trouble navigating how to deal with it.
I would wonder if they reflect, and reflect, and reflect, until some trivial detail triggers a eureka moment, for example two people might be fighting bitterly with each other and it might be difficult to put one as more moral than the other, until you realize one of them had been previously banned from the place they’re fighting in.
The last time you had to assess who was the asshole in a certain situation, what was that tipping point, that last straw, the tiebreaker that made you realize there was a slightly larger moral weight on one side than the other?
What.
Seconded.
The tipping point is always context.
Not sure what kind of answer you are looking for but in this world there is rarely a smoking gun and the question you need to ask is “what’s was the context of this?”
With out providing some kind of context and framing it as one person is arguing with many you leave out the context to understand what the conflict actually is.
Every time someone makes a post about the super evil mean mods are out of control and suppressing them.
Then you look at their modlog and see all the vile hate that keeps getting removed.
Given the instance you are using, I think their complaints are probably justified
Yeah, you’d be surprised at that…
Laws aren’t morals
Your example is spot on.
Sometimes you start shit with people to draw attention to them.
Morality isn’t objective. This is because you can’t say “people shouldn’t hurt each other” without implying “hurting people is bad”. And you can’t say “hurting people is bad” without implying that “suffering should be avoided”. And it’s turtles like that all the way down.
The bedrock of moral thinking is not rational. Somewhere, in everyone’s thinking there are unexamined values. Cultivate your sense of confusion because most of life works this way.
