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Open Wallets, Empty Hearts

Open Wallets, Empty Hearts

Section titled “Open Wallets, Empty Hearts”

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  • We should pick it up because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we know that all who pass by face the same choice, and we wish to encourage them to choose well, and by doing so to encourage still others. There is a nearly magical yet quite rational step of induction here: if the ordinary person takes responsibility just over what he happens across, it may be enough to coordinate others to do the same. Whether our shared life holds together or crumbles comes down to small choices like this.
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  • Now back to where we started: when I see the paper towel, what is my obligation to? Certainly not to the paper towel. Perhaps it’s to the facility — a coffee shop or a public library. But I could just as well say it is they, the facility’s managers, who owe it to me to keep the restroom clean. The actual obligation is fuzzier than all this. It is to my place, my town, or, if I’m passing through, just to civic order. And the direct stakes are vanishingly small: the utility that hangs on whether or not I, on this one Tuesday afternoon, in this one bathroom, throw away this one paper towel approximates zero. No, the actual moral weight here resides in a principle. My obligation is not to the sum of all people but to my fellow human being as a category. It is a vote against turning daily life into a prisoner’s dilemma, a display of faith that asks others to do the same. It is a relation that arises because I cannot escape being somewhere, because I already find myself caught up with others in a scene.
  • It is stranger still when we recognize exactly what impurities EA promised to cleanse its followers of: sentiment, preference, personal connection, any emotion that exceeds calculation, a rooted point of view. The rationalist believes he is pursuing something when actually he is fleeing something, absolutely terrified witless that anyone might for one second mistake him for a human being.