More on jerks...

Since it has been concluded that virtually all occupations within a free-market seem to carry some kind of moral baggage (the clerk that works for someone who profits from selling meat products, the CEO of most any major corporation, the person selling fruit on the street for profit), it should be pointed out that there might just be varying degrees of jerkhood, kind of like Dante and the nine levels of hell... The clerk probably has little awareness in regards to how business is conducted, whereas the owner(s)/manager(s) know exactly what is done to see that their establishment makes money.

Now assume that the person who "runs the show" is using unethical means to insure their place in the market. Who is more of a jerk? The clerk, who is unaware, or the owner who is completely aware? The seemingly obvious answer would be the owner. What if we assume that the clerk does know what is going on at said establishment. Does this make the clerk a jerk for continuing to work there, for continuing to support such an organization? It would seem so, but there is still a clear difference between the clerk and the owner... the owner has control, the clerk doesn't. The degree of control that the clerk has amounts to whether or not they should decide to stay working there, which could have strong consequences in regard to their life situation.

So should the person that has the power to change the way they do business do so for the sake of being ethical? What if it means losing business, or even going out of business... this is probably a hard choice for some jerks to make, especially if they have been running things a certain way for a long time. Questions like this could be applied to many situations. If a person is aware that 8 billion chickens are slaughtered every year in the US alone, should they feel like more of a jerk the next time they eat chicken than if they hadn't been aware of this fact? I guess it would depend on one's moral standards, which after all is the root of this discussion... moral standards, who decides what they are? Religion? Politicians? Parents? GOD? Your T.V.? I personally believe that each individual decides for themselves what they think is morally right and wrong, or rather, that the whole issue is relative to the agent. As one can imagine, this creates a multitude of problems because everyone's standards never completely agree with everyone else's.

It seems clear to me that this is why there are constant battles, disagreements, wars and the like. But at the same time, many are compelled to look out for the well being others... possibly in hopes of reaching a moral consensus that might never arrive. There may be too many individual, cultural and societal differences in experience and tradition that are responsible for our worldview for such an objective consensus to ever be reached.

Which leads me to a requested topic for a soon-to-be-posted post... How much of what we do and how we think is controlled by our DNA? Maybe everything that we do, from the individual to the mass is literally programmed into us and this idea that we have control over certain things (what we like, what we eat, how we act) is ridiculous. There does always seem to be a battle between instinct and intellect, and we would be lost if we used either to an excessive degree. Maybe our DNA forces us to create morals for the stability of the species. Anyway, gotta run...more on this later.