Who's Not-So-Bad?

 I'm a good guy. I write a blog with a lot of moralizing. I think, now and again, about victims of war shivering and hungry in their basement shelters, as long as I am not distracted by a chill watching from our snug TV room while Russia bombs Ukraine. Then I get a snack, turn on the heater and doze off. OK, I admit it. I feel good that I'm not Ukrainian or Russian. They can sort it out. I guess that makes me a not-so-good guy.

More moralizing: remember what I said last time about nested groups with conflicting duties. When we call somebody a good guy or a bad guy, we are speaking from the perspective of a particular group at a particular moment in history, which may not match the group from which the guy in question is acting. Because we are anchored in the group from which we act, we see ourselves as good and some outsiders who owe duty to another group as bad. Each of us is a bad guy as well as a good guy depending on the group to which the judge belongs. The way out of this moral quagmire is to position ourselves in a group with duty to the welfare of everything now and forever. Then we might be a little less sure of our own virtue and the villainy of others. From that point of view, we will be more inclined to weep than judge, as we fight a personal war over the conflicting demands of justice.

You may think I am raving. Consider this. I usually start the day with a hot shower. Good? We have a gas fired water heater. What's good about burning natural gas to get clean, lobbing a carbon dioxide bomb into the atmosphere every morning and adding my little bit to the collapse of the biosphere? This morning I skipped the shower and saved carbon dioxide. You may want to stand upwind, but from the perspective of the future planet, today I am not-so-bad.

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P.S. We weep for Ukraine. We do what little we can donating to NGOs supporting victims of war. I don't mean to diminish the tragedy. I want to highlight the looming tragedy of climate change in which we are all culpable, especially we privileged citizens of the developed nations who are complaining about the inflating cost of our safety and comfort. As the planet strains under human excess, we citizens of Earth need to prove we are not-so-bad.

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Marks of Time: Rachel Plotkin, The David Suzuki Foundation