I'm a humanist, and I want to tell you about it

"Oh, the Queen of Peace

Always does her best to please

Is it any use?

Somebody's got to lose."

"Queen of Peace" - Florence + The Machine

(This is not a book review. Though I wanted to use my opinion on a book to open this text, I also preferred to focus on something else in this concrete post.)

The Spanish reader was terrible to me. As one of the critiques mentioned in the exam pointed out, it's a matter of entering into the story as an ethicless a**hole or never entering at all, and, as I've shown once or twice in this blog, my ethics and ideals are always accompanying me, making any kind of anti-human cynicism something to look down to.

That led me to leave the subjective part of the reading exam for the end so it was the only thing I missed: everyone around seemed to have found the book hilarious, and an exceptional opinion in a reading exam will always have a chance of pounding the summary alarm, which translates into "she probably hasn't even read the book and just got the plot without the humour." Sorry, but I, personally, can't find the brutal murdering of a man who was retaking his life with newfound hopes funny (have I mentioned he was on a wheelchair?) in spite of how many times the sadistic author tries to nail down unfortunate jokes a person with a sense of poise and rationality would hardly ever get (okay, I admit having laughed out loud with the "estás pa'llá" thing, but that's all). If that gets me a fail in Spanish, I'm pretty okay with it, even though I spent a good amount of time reading it and a good amount of nights without sleep due to the terrible feeling I ended up with, because that's precisely the worst: the realism of the novel implies such events could be taking place right now at some place, and it's hard to sleep with that going down your throat.

The reason why these aspects of the book had such a hold on me has been suggested several times both in here and in Littlest Things, but I think this needed a concrete post to express it. That for, I'm profitting the chance to tell you about the ethics I live by, as branded with iron in the deepest of my thoughts:

1. Every human, for being so, is the greatest of existing things and must be treated as of it.

This means nobody deserves to be hurt by default in any way, and by "hurt" I mean anything the concrete human being considers negative and undesirable in that concrete context. When it comes to responding to negative actions (see postulate 2), the punishment must be given taking into consideration the opinion of those affected by the negative action and in any case must have a similar moral weight than the so mentioned action (and that makes two noes to shooting the character mentioned before in the head, in case someone was thinking about taking it as a consequence of his in comparison harmless actions).

2. An action must only be considered negative if the affected third persons (in case there are any) consider so.

This means a human action is only negative if it affects others in a way they don't agree with. This also leaves doing drugs in private, taking junk food, working out and playing sports in the same level of acceptability, since the only person affected agrees and decides to get the action happening. If a person has chosen to be negatively affected by a human action (e.g. "I saw this gay couple kissing and it affected my morals because, you know, God and stuff, and I couldn't look away because, uh... That question is affecting me negatively!") the case probably requires a closer analysis.

3. A punishment to a negative action must never affect the way a human being is treated by others unless the consequences of the so mentioned action involve a similar effect to the affected persons.

To offer a real-life example, this would disable public shaming as a punishment of anything but public shaming, and even in the case of public shaming the significance of it must be similar to the significance of the initial action.

I accept that ethics are subjective, but I think assuming "some are naughty and some are nice" just like Father Christmas just does NOT work. Our starting point when it comes to passing judgement on people and their actions should be the acknowledgement of the fact that good and evil are subjective creations of our society and that, regardless of what we do in our lives, we're all still human beings and like to be treated with some love. Someone we'd consider evil might be able to become someone we'd consider good if treated with love and affection by us. At the end of the day, most of our behaviours come from our life experiences and learning, and we're constantly getting them new.