Moral Desert...

Today's post is going to be a little educational but bear with me... Moral Desert. Howard Simmons was the one who propagated this concept. Simply speaking, Moral Desert says that good people should be rewarded. Seems reasonable and straightforward, right? Well, this is moral philosophy so OBVIOUSLY there's more. The idea is that we believe that we deserve to be praised for good behaviour while punished or blamed for bad behaviour. And this seems pretty central to the societal moral deliberation and practices. Like it is universally accepted that good people should be rewarded and bad people should be punished. But the practicality of the concept is slightly tainted... For example, I bet that more than 90% of the readers of just this blog don't always follow the basic rules of society. Like traffic lights. Say it's past midnight and you are driving home from somewhere. If you're a lame ass dork like me, you're driving home from your cousin's place. If you're a cool dude/dudette, you're driving back from a restaurant or something. How many of us would actually stop at a red light? It's dark, it's late, the roads are empty, you're already driving above the speed limit, and there's no cop at the signal. The punishment is taken out of the picture. And if you've been living on earth, you'll know that sometimes, it feels like being good gets you nothing. So, now the scenario is that the good doesn't get you a reward and the bad gets you no punishment. What are you choosing? Are you choosing to cruise through without a second thought? Are you slowing down a little, just to be safe? Or are you stopping at the light? Yeah, I see those guilty smiles. That is where it goes to shit.

So the concept of Moral Desert is that basically you do good things and you should be rewarded. But we have switched up the rules a bit where we do good things and we SHOULD be rewarded. And when the gratification is delayed, we chalk it up to being no good. I was good for 6 months and I got NOTHING in return. So why should I be good? Well, why should we be good? What is the need to be good? What is the use of being good? And in asking these questions, we've already corrupted our motivations, assuming that we do eventually try to be good after these questions. Why must we do something good out of requirement? Why should we do good because there's a use for it? There is a use for it, no doubt but being good because you have to, that obligation corrupts our motivations. We are no longer being good for the right reasons. We are only being good, being nice to people to get what we want. Moral Desert...