94. My first
personal consideration, once I became convinced that Open Individualism is true,
was that it gives an inner relief to
personal problems. It allows us to face bad luck with more courage, it
reduces many existential problems to social problems, and even without any
divine justice, it provides an automatic compensation between the overall
pleasures and pains: you are always the recipient of all of them. This does not
mean that we have to accept them passively, but on the contrary we should try to
distribute them fairly and to avoid localized excesses, as most of us try to do
when managing the good and the bad along our own lifetime. My hope is that the spreading of the awareness of the
Open Individualism View may help humanity to adopt more solidarity in their
behavior, ceasing to be the first cause of their own suffering. It is
definitely not advantageous for a single individual to do something that may
cause personal gain, when it is actually a loss for the whole community.
95. Making us
aware that other people are like ourselves at a different stage of our own life,
Open Individualism promotes the
individual incentive to participate in social problems and improve the human
condition. This should become compelling for everyone, promoting Utilitarian
ethics and global solidarity as a rational consequence. Because Open
Individualism allows us to consider the lives of all the living beings as though
they were different stages of our own life,
ethical behavior ends up coinciding with rational behavior, as Kolak points
out in I Am You. But we nonetheless have to be aware
that Open Individualism is currently not widely accepted, and even
in the best possible future there will always be some people that will continue
to not accept it. This is normal because
people are born with a different view about themselves, the view that Kolak
named Closed Individualism. Open Individualism is a cultural achievement. No
child and no animal can understand Open Individualism. For this reason, I think
that a full Utilitarian View is not viable, but rather that it will always be
necessary to consider other moderating
elements that make the resulting ethics more similar to
prioritarianism.
96. Moreover, a
system of ethical or rational rules cannot be separated from the evaluation of
many factors that change with time, preventing designing of a definitive system.
What is ethical in a world full of
resources may no longer be ethical in a world where the same resources are
limited. Specifically, in our modern world, you cannot ignore that some
resources, such as oil, are non-renewable, while others, although renewable,
have their levels of maximum allowable consumption that cannot be overcome, such
as the availability of food, or require investments to be exploited to their
maximal potential, such as solar energy. Thus, ethical behavior is behavior that gets the maximum possible benefit from the
available resources, also taking into account their development, so that overall
well-being may continue into the future in the best way. To achieve this
goal, it is necessary to minimize wastage, which means adopting regulations that
barely exist in the current form of capitalism, where profit justifies waste and
exploitation. The dependence of ethics on the availability of resources prevents
it from being translated directly into an economic theory; it can only indicate
the limits to be respected.
97. Open
Individualism may be seen as promoting an idyllic view, where everybody loves
everybody else. Actually, it will always be possible to have conflicts when
different groups of people propose different solutions for some important
problem. I hope that in this case an Open Individualist may help to manage these
conflicts within the best possible spirit of cooperation. We must not forget
to be cautious about overrating our
individual or collective capabilities in finding a good answer to our practical
problems. Even when we are motivated by the best of intentions, we should
always be aware that we cannot be sure that our decisions are the best ones.
Even in connecting more brains to form a unified mind we cannot gain a God-like
infallibility and omniscience. Thus, we have to continue to make our social
decisions with a degree of uncertainty, being aware that it may turn out that
our predictions are wrong.
98. When
something goes wrong, we have to keep in mind some moral considerations. We
cannot punish or reward any particular person,
we should punish and reward just the behavior of individuals. This would be
effective if done so that the punishment
or the reward has positive effects for the behavior of the whole community,
but there is no sense in punishing or rewarding people who are not able to
understand their deserts, or who have changed so much that they would not behave
in the same way anymore. The punishment of bad behavior should be like the
medicine given to treat a disease; there is no sense in thinking of punishment
as a sort of social revenge. The only goal is to prevent it from happening
again.
99. Open
Individualism has some consequences that you may not like. For example, you may
be against abortion because you think that everyone has only one opportunity to
be born, so abortion is an act against another person.
According Open Individualism, there is no another person. This does not mean
that abortion is a good thing, but that it is not a crime against another person
who will not have any other chance to born. In aborting, we are just excluding
from existing another form of the same subjectivity phenomenon that currently
experiences my own life. Abortion can be a waste if the child is healthy, but if
the newborn has a severe disease, abortion may be the best choice. This may
sound wrong for you, but imagine what you would think if God in person said that
you will be that unlucky newborn in your next life, and offer you the chance to
skip that life, knowing that anyway you have an infinite sequence of different
lives to live. Maybe you will choose to skip it. This is exactly the situation
according to Open Individualism.
100. I look
forward to a future in which this view is widely known and accepted. I invite
you to consider how much better that
world will be, compared to the current one.
We are the owner of all our lives. This does not make us more intelligent or
wiser, but it frees us from the fear of death, and invites all of us to
collaborate honestly. The value of life consists in the good things that we
leave to other people. The bad comes in considering that as long as this idea is
not universally accepted, we have to bear a huge number of bad lives because
many people do not care about the destiny of other people, and these other
people have to suffer injustice and pain as a result of that. For this reason, I
continue trying to spread the knowledge of Open Individualism. I hope you agree
that this change in our moral view would be so good that it gives by itself a
good reason to support Open Individualism, even if the arguments that I tried to
explain as clearly and succinctly as I could in this paper still do not sound
convincing to you.