Interesting Atwood article today - h/t Marisacat.
I quote the penultimate sediment:
Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust, without a system of reciprocal altruism... No one would ever lend anything, as there would be no expectation of being paid back.
*italics mine
The idea of humanist ethics [exemplified in Kant's moral theory] is the the notion of simple reciprocity - gift giving, ‘alighting’, recognition [xeno code]. It comes from the notion of charis, grace - the cult of the Charities. In the earliest manifestations, it involved giving comfort to strangers, recognition of the equal right to speak at symposia [...dinner parties], and a celebration of social recognition - in an equal way. I know, I know... referring to Homer is not always the best thing, but the essential ethical problematic of Iliad was the stripping of Achilles worth by Agamemnon when he took Breseis. It’s not like Aristocratic works have, for the most part, ever been especially feminist, but the idea [which also translated into a proto-feminist work, Antigone] was that ethics should be fundamentally about equality. And the pragmatic way that this equality can be expressed, is through reciprocity.
Reciprocity gets a bad rap among philosophers of ethics who have never understood the history of moral theory - it’s often dismissed as a primitive code. But, it is the basis of Kant’s idea of ‘the kingdom of ends’ - where each rational being must be recognized as equal because they are a rational being. It is the origin of Hegel’s notion of ‘recognition’ - that our moral code evolves toward equality because we all progressively see in others our own subjectivity. It is the basis of Marx’s contention that the universalization of subjectivity through the consciousness of value will lead to a world where we can be critics and cattle farmers upon our choosing, and by our choosing - that the division of labor and paradigm of production are things which can end in a Star Trek Next Gen utopia of each choosing their own life. And Nietzsche? Well, a world of aesthetic personalities is a world full of humans recognizing the other - ‘alighting’ the other, giving comfort to the other.
But in the unforgiven world of economics, politics and social order, the founding idea of ethics has always been generally dismissed, despite the lip service of 'democracy' and 'capitalism'. What Atwood forgets is that we don't have something to recover from - we have something to aspire too. These ideas, while clearly articulated and delimited through history [even ancient history] have yet to inhabit the world.
Until now, it's simply been the cunning of the same, despite the costumes.
So what do we do?