Morality of the `Olympics
September 4, 2012
Yes, it’s true – having just spent four days at the Olympics and a day at the paralympics it really was an amazing experience partly because of the men and women in pink – the voluntary helpers who asked me no less than five times coming away from the stadium “have you enjoyed your day?”, and then “have a safe journey home”.
I found it impossible to be cynical about this friendliness. Where the “have a nice day” of a McDonalds cashier may be seen as good sales policy – they think it helps me come back again and spend more money – the same cannot be said of the Olympics. No person in pink profited personally in monetary terms from their friendliness. It seems that here it is just pure unadulterated good will and friendliness, a quality of character that truly builds society into something better than it was before. People even said “I’m looking forward to stepping outside the park and seeing some of the spirit there” – and if enough people say this then the spirit will indeed be found outside.
One of the basic questions in ethics is “why should I care about anyone else?”. It was this question that Henry Sidgwick grapples with in his great book Methods of Ethics. There is a tension between egoism, my own self-interest, and altruism, my duty to others to care for them and help them or even bid them a good day. Put ti another way, is morality just a personal thing, a question of me, my interest and feelings and happiness, or is it a social thing, a question of social space and social rules which if agreed to, followed and built upon makes the little world of my own immediate surroundings so much better to live in?
Take for example utilitarian ethics. A pleasure-based ethic, such as Bentham’s will always struggle to create a clear duty to help others because often it causes me pain, or loss of money or time, to help others. Why should I risk my life to save a drowning child when the cost of so doing may well be an extreme one – that I lose my own life.
Having said that, people often do take extraordinary risks to save a stranger. Richard Dawkins argues that this is because we are biologically programmed for altruism, the self-promoting gene is actually an altruistic gene because we found, years back in our biological history, that helping others was the best strategy for survival.
So back to the Olympics, might it be the case that the Olympic spirit is actually re-awakening something that lies deep in our biology, made dormant by the rise in individualism (or egoism)?
Putting myself or myself and my genetic family first would seem to be the default position of many of us, but does this need to be the case?
if we are going to argue for a general duty to help others, be kind to others, be welcoming to strangers, then there must be a rational basis for this kind of duty, but exactly what might this rational basis be?
This was Sidgwick’s great quest, and it remains one of the greatest puzzles of ethics.
Image copyright the author: Karen Appel (1921-2006) depicts a celebration of childhood trust. “The child in the man is all that’s strongest, most receptive, and most open” she wrote.
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