How to Build a Better Human (Starting with Yourself)
Building Rebellion One Choice at a Time
The Good Place and a Better You
One could do worse to develop a philosophical foundation than watching The Good Place, a sitcom that dealt with the afterlife and the bureaucracy around it that determined how you spent your eternity post death. Through the evaluation of points accumulated in life, one could be sent to the frictionless paradise of the titular Good Place, or to the eternal torment of the Bad Place.
Eleanor Shellstrop, our protagonist, awakens in the Good Place and soon becomes keenly aware that she is not supposed to there. With the help of her assign soulmate, Chidi Anagonye, a professor of moral philosophy, Eleanor and the audience begin a four-season examination of what qualifies a person as good. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be exposed to Kant.
I won’t spoil the twists and turns, but the show does hinge on a key question; how can one be a good person in modern society, with all of the knock-on effects and ripples of each action?
How do we be decent in an indecent world?
For example, maybe you decide to show solidarity with a trans coworker by putting “Trans Lives Matter” sticker on your laptop. You order the sticker from an online retailer, unaware that the CEO uses the profits to promote anti-trans laws in several states. The pack of stickers is delivered free the day after ordering by a fulfillment company that actively fights against the wellbeing of its employees by lobbying for more lax safety and workers rights legislation. Not to mention the carbon impact of facilitating the delivery cheaply and quickly.
How does one do good when such a small act can have so many harms? How do we live ethically in a capitalist system designed for maximizing profits, not human progress? How much responsibility do we bear for the harms of systems entrenched long before we were born and powerfully incentivized to maintain the status quo?
I Needed Answers
It was these questions, and the further questions their answers generated, that led me to the creation of Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics.
So… what are Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics? They are the two parts of the moral philosophy I’ve developed as an answer to the question of being a good person in a bad world.
Building a Better You
Architectural Humanism asks what we are building as we construct ourselves? Make no mistake, every decision, every action, every thought contributes to the amalgamation of who we are. Whether we are being deliberate about it or not. The good news is that so long as there is air in our lungs and a spark in our minds the person we are is not final and fixed. This is a central precept: you can always be better tomorrow.
Knowing Where to Start
And Ledger Ethics? That is how we can manage our moral accountability. Imagine a ledger, one side with credits, the good we have done, and the other with debits, the harm we have caused. Each list of credits and debits grows over time. The point of the ledger is not to balance the two. Nor is it to provide a means to cancel out the harms with the benefits. No good can ever erase a bad. Likewise, no bad can erase a good. Within the ledger both are witnessed… and reckoned with.
So there it is, Architectural Humanism is the idea that we are always constructing ourselves, and Ledger Ethics is how we evaluate all of the elements that go into that construction.
Who the f**k am I?
But who am I? And what gives me any authority to say, “This is how people should live morally?”
To the first question, I’m nobody of special consequence. I’m not a philosopher or academic. Not a theologian or a moral authority. I am merely a person who has lived, and suffered the slings and arrows of a cruel and indifferent world. And a person who has caused my own slings and arrows for others. But I am also the beneficiary of the goodness of others.
To the second question, I can’t tell anyone how to live their lives.
What I am hoping is to give people a way of thinking, a way of witnessing, their impact on themselves and the world around them.
What to Expect
Over the course of subsequent essays, I will explain the concepts of Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics in greater detail and hopefully inspire introspection and personal reckoning. But that is up to each person, I have no power to compel any sense of ethics or morality.
I guess the final question is if I am no philosopher or moral authority, why do I even have a personal moral philosophy? Couldn’t I simply live according to a religious creed or some other philosopher’s code? Aristotle was opining on virtue over two millennia ago; Buddha, Jesus, and Muhamed all shared teachings on how to live. Even Peter Singer and other modern moral philosophers have provided answers to the questions I raise.
To that I answer this. Architectural Humanism and Ledger Ethics are not religious, but aim to fill in where religion falls short, primarily with deference to an unknowable authority to justify actions or the promise of some intangible benefit to enduring suffering.
And as for the philosophers, both ancient and modern, unlike them, I have not had the benefit of discussing and debating moral principles. I’ve had to live them across a life that’s been filled with poverty, trauma, and grief. The reason why I am so engaged with a structure of moral philosophy is because I’ve had to compromise myself in this world and seen the consequences of my compromises… and failings.
I have faith in humanity. I believe that the ideas I have, while not new or novel, but put together in a new way, can benefit us all. We can always be better tomorrow.