Opportunity Cost

Here's a thought: The food you eat, the shoes you buy? They are killing people.

Every $100 you spent on something is a $100 that could have been spent elsewhere. When you spend $100 on shoes, you are saying that the value of the shoes outweigh everything else I could get for $100 at this moment. Let's just say for the sake of argument that donating $100 to the right places saves the life of one random person. So the logical conclusion is, buying shoes for $100 means the person thinks the shows are more valuable than the life of a random person. And not only that, the $100 could've been used to save the person, therefore the person allowed somebody to die.

The obvious problem slams people in the face rather quickly: Then doesn't this mean we are indirectly allowing thousands of people to die? Well, yes. We are. There's really no argument that can be made at this point against my conclusions. Opportunity cost is understood in-depth in economics. But the coming points are subjected to debate, and debate people will. Since we are letting thousands die, does this make us immoral? The question lies on how we call somebody moral.

First of all, the most basic argument that leads all the way back to the very basic philosophical ideas on morality is that of moral relativism. But this is largely a useless argument. Unless you want to tell me that the people dying want to die, that you personally feel people should die, or that I think people should die, then we are all in agreement that death is bad and should be avoided. Moral relativism, while an interesting philosophical idea, is purely academic in that it does not translate to how we do policies.

But then the question comes in: How do we judge a person to be good or bad? When we call somebody a bad or a good person, we are not typically talking about one specific act they do, but rather every action and thought the person undertakes. Here is my opinion. Your good has to outweigh the bad for you to be a good person. Killing 50 kids and then opening the door for an elderly woman makes you a bad person in total. This case would be the case of a bad person doing one good thing.

I've had arguments which I did not expect. One person considered my stance to b e contradictory because a person doing good things can be good, but a person doing good things can be bad. Well, yes. That's not contradictory. Once again, whether we call a guy good or bad depends on the totality of their thoughts and actions.a

Another argument is about how my conclusions mean we cannot ever be moral. Seeing that every $100 we spend is letting people die, then we can never be moral. That's not actually an argument on the merits and logical consistency of my thought process. If it is true that it is impossible to be moral, then so be it. That's sucks, that's inconvenient, but that doesn't make my conclusions logically fallacious.

One idea is that we judge a person to be good or bad based upon the standards of our time period. Owning slaves is OK 200 years ago, but do that in 2013 and you are considered a monster. Therefore the thought process goes, because most people in 2013 constantly spend money for their own good instead of saving other human beings, doing so is the norm, therefore by this criteria, this does not make us immoral.

Which is something I do agree with, but may be problematic for the future. When slavery was practiced 200 years ago, some people questioned whether this practice is actually good. Maybe we should think about the suffering of others. It takes people who are forward thinkers, who come up with answers about morality which most people don't care for, to drive society forward. If every single person 200 years ago had the mindset that, because slavery is normal, practicing slavery is normal by the standards of their time, therefore there is no need to change, then we will NEVER STOP SLAVERY.

So sometimes I think about the future. Have you ever thought about the past? Asked yourself, how the hell so many people practiced slavery without second thoughts. How their conscience didn't eat them inside-out. Why did it take so freakin' long for somebody in the government to realize slavery is wrong? Didn't ANYBODY stop and think about the suffering of their fellow man? What was wrong with them? It seems to patently obvious that slavery is immoral. What about the future? Maybe people will come and look at 2013, shaking their heads. Didn't people in 2013 KNOW that the $80000 they earn a year and proceed to spend on themselves is letting countless people die in a variety of horrible ways? What were they THINKING? Surely SOMEBODY stopped and think, maybe what we're doing is not morally correct?