I have no emotional passion for partisanship. Football matches (national or local), patriotism, a swelling of belonging to a religion irregardless of belief\u2014none of these do it for me. I think I understand why: it is because they are all basically, to me, arbitrary accidents of birth.<\/p>\n
I think I have the following mental model: some essence of the sense of me-ness, looking out from this body, was placed there in an arbitrary way. I could “just have easily” been born in a place where I would have been a Sikh, a Mongolian, or an East Fife supporter as the place that I did end up. As a result I just cannot feel any emotional depth to these cards that I have been dealt. Their very arbitrariness precludes me having any passion for them\u2014they seem as arbitrary to me as if I have been dealt a card saying “you will support football team number 148” at some rite-of-passage.<\/p>\n
Of course I realise that this notion of my soul being bowled at the Earth by some wild-armed deity is nonsensical. Nonetheless, this is how I’ve always felt deep down, and it is hard to shift the actual feeling.<\/p>\n
This extends to religion in an interesting way. It seems weird to me that we don’t go through a period of religious seeking, and settle on the religion that we most think is likely to be correct. After all, we only get one chance to be right (in most faiths), and what is the chance that I have been born into the right place<\/em>. If one of the world’s religions is correct (I appreciate that this is a trite view), then my chances of having been born into the right one are at best one-in-five. Why would I not, as a rationalist, try to find the right one? Yet when I tried to explain this to my parents as a teenager, the reaction was one of horror, like I was about to go out there and end up in a cult. (This notion is riffed on in a Mitchell and Webb sketch, where someone gets to the gates of heaven only to find out the the Amish were right after all, and that only Amish people will get into heaven; surely this shouldn’t be funny if we have an intuition that there is One True Faith, yet religious people seem to assert that this is the case).<\/p>\n Some of this crystallised when I came across the ideas in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice<\/em>. In that book he argues that moral actions should be guided by a principle that we do not know which of the actors in a particular situation we will be represented by. For example, the reason that we should regard theft as morally unacceptable is that if we regard the situation “as a whole” we are as likely to be at the receiving end than the active end, and so overall we would not want that situation to obtain even if the thief benefits from the act. This seemed to me unremarkable and utterly intuitive: why is this considered to be a deep innovation in our understanding of moral action? It is only by talking to other people over the years that I realise that this is a very unusual position to hold intuitively. Like M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme<\/em>, who was shocked to find that he had been speaking prose all this life, I realised that I had been an intutive Rawlsian throughout my moral development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have no emotional passion for partisanship. Football matches (national or local), patriotism, a swelling of belonging to a religion irregardless of belief\u2014none of these do it for me. I think I understand why: it is because they are all basically, to me, arbitrary accidents of birth. I think I have the following mental model: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[28,5],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}