Ethics & Community Standards, Part One: 6-15-2010

 Aristotle writes in his Nicomachean Ethics that ethics serve the community. In Book II, Chapter 5, Section 5, he uses praise and blame in reference to the virtue of character. I read that as praise or blame of the community.

I think of my former life and wonder what community existed to praise or blame me. In the last year of my freedom, I did not associate much with anyone. I never socialized greatly with other lawyers. Yes, I was in Yahoo Chat, but spent little time chatting. My greatest involvement with an online community was Twitter. I saw little of my friends. I was often enough in a Muncie crack house, but that was generally limited to two other people. These were the communities to which I belonged.   

Family and friends would have unleashed nothing but condemnation for the drugs and the porn. The druggies would have not cared about the drugs, but would not have liked the porn. The wider world would have condemned me for not having had more material success.

I felt the condemnation of friends and family more than that of the wider world. The former I knew. The wider world becomes too great an abstraction for its praise or blame to be anything but generic.

When I condemned myself, it was for failing my friends and family. What was in my mind were those qualities listed in Kipling's poem "If". I certainly did not keep my head in the final crisis.

We grew up with Midwestern values - hard work, nothing is perfect, Christian virtues, and sin. Those individual values were our community values. They were in my head.

sch

[Continued in Ethics & Community Standards, Two: 6-15-2010. sch 11/6/22]