I'm sick of justifying ethical behavior in terms of profit. We use phrases like "adding alt-text brings more customers to your site" or "protected bike lanes increase revenue for local businesses."
You should add alt-text descriptions to images because it helps people.
We need to build bike lanes because it makes cities safer and more accessible.
Reduce carbon emissions because it's the right thing to do! Discussing these things in purely economic terms misses the point.
My mind finally broke today when I got this comment on IG saying "public resources should only go to people who work jobs in this city". I typed up a response about how providing shelter for people who need it "saves taxpayers money" and could feel myself dying on the inside for even needing to explain it that way. What the fuck is wrong with people. Do things because they are the right thing to do, not because it might benefit you directly.
@sashin I totally agree with you. I feel deeply engrained in talking about how things might benefit or hurt me financially and had a hard time explaining it beyond that lens. I wish it was easier for me to talk about it beyond the context of economic cost/benefit.
@docpop somewhere I saw a comment this week of someone saying bicyclists don't bring business, they can't afford a car so they can't afford to shop either, or something along those lines and I just sighed and closed whatever app that was.
@rasterweb@docpop@DEDGirl I was thinking along similar lines. So only working people should be able to drive or cycle on streets? Only working people should be able to walk on the sidewalk? Only working people should be able to use the library or enjoy the services of the fire department?
People like "sicktitz" (🙄) refuse to understand: once you remove public services from one group, you're removing them from everybody and we might as well use chamber pots & empty them in the streets.
@courtcan@docpop@DEDGirl It sounds like the ramblings of someone who has been abused by the system so they think they need to abuse others when they would be better of realizing we're all being abused by the system.
@rasterweb@docpop@DEDGirl I swear I sound like a broken record to myself, but this week especially I keep running into this concept: "the purpose of a system is what it does." We are all being abused by the system, which means that is the system's purpose.
@courtcan@rasterweb@docpop It’s not just lames that think this. It’s ingrained in American culture. All policy is always about “working Americans”. Disabled, elderly, children, retired, are always expendable.
@docpop There seems to be a plethora of people who type like this online. In person I feel they are meek, shriveled and the ones complaining on Redditt that they don't know how to find friends.
Even more than missing the point, it sort of fortifies the worldview that everything comes down to whether it makes profit for someone or not. That cost/benefit is purely in a Western capitalistic mode rather than true costs and benefits.
@meganL "it fortifies the worldview that everything comes down to whether it makes profit for someone or not."
Damn, that's really well put! I'm so deeply engrained in this way of thinking that it's still hard for me to justify ethical behavior beyond how it affects businesses. I hope that changes someday. It would be nice to talk about how things can benefit society without relying on a capitalistic worldview.
@docpop A fundamental truth of human nature is that a large percentage of people’s choices, especially business choices, are made for essentially selfish reasons. People will do a bit of effort or pay a bit of a premium for altruism and ethics, but it’s not moving the needle on the big topics like decarbonising the economy. We can complain about that and wish everyone would see that from a game theory pov it’s all a big prisoner’s dilemma - but it’s simply not how most people think & act.
@docpop Totally agree. And on top of that, it can obfuscate economic oppression. Like when we argue for disability recruiting because disabled employees are demonstrably more loyal, ignoring that the cause of the loyalty is the lack of opportunity elsewhere.
@docpop that's the same feeling that I get when we have to argue about whether school lunches and breakfasts raise test scores or not. Who cares? The result of free school lunches and breakfasts is that kids don't go hungry.
@docpop You are absolutely right. However, we're living in a capitalist world, where a lot of strong players, i.e. companies & businesses, are actually more interested in profit than ethics. I hate it, too. But you've gotta use the arguments tailored to your target audience. That's a core lesson of rhetorics. Would I rather, we abolish capitalism? Yes, absolutely. But has long as we haven't done it, we might as well convince it with arguments to do the right thing. Pragmatism. 🤷
@Yuki it would be, but I really don't think speaking the language of profit actually affects change at a company. I think what actually creates change is when an employee becomes passionate and pushes for it intenrally... or when society embraces a change and pressures a company to keep up. So instead of using corpo-speak, I'd rather focus on the societal benefits to win the people over that can push for change within a company.
@tobi82 I don’t know if that question was rhetorical or not, but I’ll take it as a good faith question.
I do wear masks to protect people around me and myself. I appreciate it when others wear masks in public spaces too. It’s a nice thing to do in crowded spaces and it keeps us all better off.
Bringing it back to this conversation, I think it shows that focusing on getting people to care about others is more effective than focusing on personal benefits.
@docpop Effectively - evil rich people have nearly all the money/power now and so to get anything done we have to make arguments that appeal to evil rich people.
@docpop I think it's done in the erroneous intention of trying to get wannabe capitalists and the oligarchs they fawn over to start giving a shit about other humans. It kind of makes sense until you realize their aims are diametrically opposed to what they would cast as "impractical feel good hippy dippy bullshit" (i.e., being a decent human), imo
@docpop yeah it's Framing 101. "we'll stop doing the right thing the moment it becomes unprofitable, but somehow we'll always find an excuse to keep doing an inconsistently profitable unethical thing"
@docpop
Humans' tendency to monetise and generally frame everything through a capitalist lens depresses me. Similarly, the whole concept of "earning a living"
@docpop We have bike lanes in places, but they are useless. They are too narrow - if a car passes you on a bike lane they are actually illegally close - and force you to cycle over the sunken and mis-fitted storm drains, potholes etc, which is dangerous and damaging.
@docpop North Americans are conditioned to believe they are all "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", so it's quite hard work to plant the idea in their mind that bad luck/illness/poverty can happen to anyone at any time, and that the next person on the street might be you.
@docpop Yes, but whatever motivates people to do the right thing is at least in the right direction. If someone doesn't have enough empathy to do something because it's right, but their bottomline motivates them to do the right thing, it is still a plus.
Even though they do lead to better prosperity all around, but it is funny how the right wing has managed to strip a moral and communal sense and replace it with greed. Irony in they prance around as the moral ones. I can see another reason in it, it comes from asshats like Milton Friedman himself who argued people and society run on greed. In other words, his immorality or sociopathy, dictate that the only motivation people have is selfishness and somehow it is made social by profit.
@docpop I think some of it is that people feel like they have to say it that way or no one will listen, particularly people in decision making positions.
Its important to talk about principles but sadly many people are too deeply lost in their selfish capitalist mindset to undestand anything else, therefore a two pronged approach might be necessary!
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