Ethics vs Feelings

Many times, there's a conflict between what we naturally feel and what is considered to be ethical. Our
subconscious reaction to a news event might be hatred, jealousy or other negative feelings, but we
might not be to morally argue why we feel that way.

The problem is most of our feelings in today's world are unethical, politically incorrect or even outright
harmful. It takes a great deal of effort to retrospect and self-analyze our feelings to judge whether they
are ethical or not.

Common feeling examples

Groupism, patriotism,Dunbar's number,Negative feelings to content on social networks.

1. Groupism

A. Natural Feeling: I am part of a group. I am supposed to help this group become better. I am also
supposed to compete with other groups.

B. Reasoning: Being part of a herd made it easier for us ancestors to survive in the wild. There were so
many survival benefits that belonging to a group brought. Naturally, our ancestors started developing
good feelings about belonging to a group.

C. Ethical viewpoint: Help the group. Help other groups too. There is no compelling reason to complete
in today's times of peace.

2. Patriotism

A. Natural feeling: I was born in place. I am supposed to help people in the geographical vicinity around
me. There are human-decided borders that define my country. Those outside the boarder don't deserve
that much attention as those inside the boarder do.

B. Reasoning: Patriotism is Groupism in a higher scale. Most boarders were drawn for political benefits
by a small group of individual running that country. There have been countless stories of propaganda by
governments to motivate people to join their wars to fight people over boarders. We humans tend to
justify these efforts as noble.

C. Ethical viewpoint: Wars are always bad. There is no reason to be proud of your country just because
you were born in it. It is okay to be in your country and help your country because you are used to it.
But it is also okay to move to other countries and help those countries.

3. Dunbar's number
A. Natural feeling: I cannot maintain more than 150 stable relationships.

B. Reasoning: Our brains have limited capacity and it becomes mentally hard to maintain more
relationships.

C. Ethical viewpoint: Acceding to the Dunbar's number promotes Grouptism.

Just as we push ourselves to become better humans, we should also try to push the Dunbar number limit
further. Accepting that all life forms in this world ( and outside the world if life exists) are part o the same
group counters the negative effects of Groupism.

4. Negative feelings to content on Social Networks

A. Natural feeling: I hate what's being posted on Facebook. They are just stupid selfies, people gloating
their achievements or just distracting, unproductive content.

B. Reasoning: Many of us have been taught to compete with others since our childhood. We tend to
compare ourselves with others.

We don't like selfies because they are atrention-seeking and we look downs upon those who seek
attention.

Distracting, unproductive content os noise to us and we cannot handle too much noise in our daily life.

C. Ethical viewpoint: We don't have to compete with other friends. We can applaud their life
achievements without comparing our lives with theirs.

We don't have to look down upon those who seek attention. Comedians,actors and other entertainers
are attention-seeking. But we don't look down upon them.

It is up to us to filter out noise in our lives. Social networks aren't thrusted into our face. We can choose
to stay away from them of they are noisy, or even better, adjust the content shown in our feed and tailor
it to our comfort.