Heed What's Right: RH"L6

Quest → Injunction

The Obedience Quest is based on choosing an institution that is suitable and then adhering to the duties, prescriptions or procedures/rituals of that institution. One of the quest's essential features lies in the subordination of personal preferences. «Do Your Duty» sums up this Quest. This naturally applies to the military or a monastery, where obedience is intrinsic. But not everyone can be expected to have the mindset of a soldier or a monk.

The Injunction might focus on duty, but this social-ethical demand conveys something that seems too explicit (and even too easy) to be suitable.
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Duty is part of social life and everyone knows that. The usual obligations relate to your endeavours: i.e. purposes that you set for yourself; to your contracts: i.e. agreements with others that you willingly make; and to your group: i.e. a body that you willingly join &/or could leave. In other words, duty as part of social existence is commonly aligned or alignable with your own purposes and interests. So a higher injunction is required to make duty important, both in relation to personal matters and more widely.

With humanity as our frame of reference, we must cast our net more widely: to include situations which are inchoate, complicated, chaotic, or disordered. Now where does your duty lie? In general, it lies with «what is right». But freed of social demands, why should you take notice or worry about your obligations? Such cases reveal two aspects of existential duty: knowing duty and heeding what we know.

So the proposed Primal Injunction is to «heed what's right». That means perceiving and taking notice of your duty according to your own lights in times of uncertainty, in the face of temptation and when under social pressure to herd or be a lemming.
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Groups, communities and whole nations go mad periodically, while claiming rationality and sanity. Altering mass delusions may well be impossible, but it is possible to sustain within oneself the knowledge that the crowd, egged on further by its leaders and its own grandiose or paranoid delusions, is heading to disaster.

This Injunction highlights and validates a person's Primal Quest which is built on the significance in living of a version of right or rightness.

Potential Misconceptions

• This heeding is a personal insight, not an impersonal knowledge of abstractions, or memorization of a catechism. Nor is it something based on scientific analysis, as applies in making a rationalist ethical choice.
• It is not necessarily obvious to others what your duty is—though it may be. No two people inhabit the same psychosocial world. So what is right for you may not be identical to what is right for another, even in what is superficially the same situation.
• There have been many harmful laws in all societies, and consequences deemed good may be evils in disguise. So heeding what is right does not depend on social support or approval, nor on identified consequences. This means that neither a deontological nor a teleological perspective is dominant.
• There is no doing in this Injunction. Because the law abstracts and generalizes, your duty in the moment might lead you to accept being arrested. Because custom is often crude, your duty might lead you to being publicly vilified. However, it cannot be pre-specified whether or how arrest or vilification should influence your choice.

Why Is It So Hard?

Heeding what's right can be difficult from a purely practical perspective because everyone has so many endeavours, groups and roles in society, and each of these has so many attached obligations. So, in practice, there are continually conflicts between obligations. Conflict only disappears if you ignore your responsibilities and do not actively ensure that you are aware of your obligations.

Your groups are particularly problematic because they seek their own survival and well-being. So members rarely appreciate conflicts between your implicit personal obligations and the group's drives.

In many situations, especially when there is social disorder, perceiving what is right is extremely difficult and doing the right thing even harder. So surrender to herd emotions is exceedingly attractive.

Egotism is built around motivations like interest, desire and need. These stand in stark opposition to obligation and so make heeding what's right difficult. Heeding what is right relates to something beyond yourself. 

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• Next Injunction: see unity.

Originally posted:16-Nov-2012