In my last post, I established in the most basic sense what handicapping is (as I see it): it is the act of limiting one’s self when up against others. In particular, for my purposes, of giving up on one’s own projects in order to pursue (or help pursue) the projects of others. To sacrifice one’s freedom (perhaps temporarily) to support the freedom of another. So the next natural question I would expect to ask is why would someone do this?
When pursuing our freedom in our modern world, we often run up against ethics and morality. The idea that what we may want to do is either right or good, or perhaps wrong or evil. Or to perhaps be a bit less dramatic, when I act, I can do what I want to do, or I can do what I think I am expected to do. This is literally ethics.
For those who may not know, ethics is all about oughts. As I go about my life, I am compelled to do what I want to do at any given moment in time, in a sort of selfish manner. That is, I know through my passions and my intellect what sorts of actions I want to take based on what will make me happy or what will give me advantage. If I am hungry for chocolate, I can follow a course of action that will lead to me eating chocolate. Perhaps I will walk down the block to the nearest convenience store and purchase some chocolate and then eat it. The concept I’m suggesting here is not all that complicated. In general, I pursue my interests and desires most of the time. I think most people do.
However, there are certainly times when the thing I want to do is not going to be well received by those around me. Perhaps walking to a convenience store to get chocolate seems quite unproblematic, but what if I do not wish to pay for that chocolate? What if I decided to simply break in and take the chocolate so that I could satisfy my craving? It may seem extreme to think about stealing chocolate, so perhaps I will escalate the idea to help with clarity. What if I decided I wanted money, and I decided the best path to getting that money was to rob the convenience store. This pursuit of mine is clearly becoming quite controversial.
I think most would agree that robbing a convenience store is not the sort of action I ought to do. And there it is, the word ought has already come about. I may want to do this action of stealing, but I know that I am not supposed to pursue this particular action because it is considered prohibited. I ought not rob a convenience store. This is ethics. According to ethics, I ought not rob a convenience store. According to ethics, I ought to sacrifice this particular desire or interest, and instead pursue the desire or interest of another. In this case, the other happens to be my community or society.
In its most basic form, ethics is simply a description of how I decide what I ought to do despite what I want to do. There are many different theories about ethics that try to explain my behavior, such as utilitarianism which suggests I choose my actions based on the consequences of those actions. In utilitarianism, I ought to choose my action based on whichever action will result in the greatest increase in happiness (or sometimes the greatest reduction in suffering). Using my example from above, robbing the convenience store would clearly make the store owner quite unhappy, as well as those who use the convenience store. If I were to chose another manner with which to acquire money, such as working at the convenience store instead, that would seem to generate greater happiness.
There are many other theories of ethics out there, but in cases as straight forward as the one I’ve laid out, they generally will agree that stealing is a prohibited action. All that is really different between theories is how they come to the conclusion. The reason there are so many different theories is that there are cases that are not so easy to define and so each different theory may suggest a different course of action in these harder to define cases.
The purpose of my discussion is not to dwell on different ethical theories, but to instead highlight something the all have in common: they suggest that I give up an action I may want to do and replace it with an action that I ought to do instead. That I should limit myself in some fashion, sacrificing a particular desire or interest I have and instead pursuing or supporting the desires or interests of others around me. Ethics is one reason I might chose to handicap myself.
The next difficult aspect to consider is who those others might be.