morality

Absence of information is important if you want to keep the outside world out, but the distractions of nature also help. You need to have to tear yourself away from what is refreshing, comforting, invigorating, calming, and you need not to want to do so. You need to feel that the minute idyll you inhabit is all that matters, all the world you need to see...

There was something particularly sobering about the map I included in a previous post - quite apart from the sheer numbers. Even if I know that it is not the richer nations that will bear the brunt of climate change, seeing it in such graphical form, already happening, suddenly makes it graphically clear why the richer nations are not in any hurry to do anything; and makes it graphically difficult to know how we can make them.

Why on earth should it matter to anyone in this country, let alone the government, that Africans, Asians and South Americans are going to die in their millions from climate change, if it doesn't matter that they are dying in their millions now, from starvation, from the bombs we send them, from the weapons we sell them, from the debt we load on them - and from the carbon effects of our mad and luxurious lifestyles, a world away. There is nothing in British government policy - and never has been - to suggest that the concerns or lives of people in the South count for anything at all: they are treated as expendable, resources at our disposal to be used as we think best. Very occasionally they are used in PR drives to earn some brownie points among the British population.

But if the government won't take anything except their chance of re-election seriously, can the public come to stop denying the link between our actions and the lives of other people in the world; and can it be made to care enough about those other people to change the actions? And then even if they - we - can make those two great leaps of understanding, can we stop ourselves backsliding later on?

The human mind has an extraordinary capacity to hold conflicting thoughts in separate compartments, to bury uncomfortable truths, and to rationalise what cannot and should not be rationalised. We know it is wrong, we know that most of us could make it less wrong by making alterations to our lifestyles that need not be radical enough to tip us into anything approaching hardship. And yet I catch myself wondering if I can justify one more flight to Georgia, and another one to Russia... Before Christmas.

For those who want to sin, and still feel good about themselves, I cannot recommend strongly enough cheatneutral.com - an innovative (and lucrative) approach to solving the world's escalating levels of despicable behaviour.

Of all people one might expect to be absolutist about morality, human rights educators must rank quite high. These are people who have apparently chosen one system of morality above all others - that of human rights - and are so sure of its authoritative position that they even educate others to believe in it.

Their absolutism in this respect often worries me: not only because human rights is a huge, complex and even disputed field, about which those working in HRE apparently have little need to know. But also because the 'slogans' of irreducibility, universality, interrelatedness, indivisibility - among others - are thrown about with little awareness or discussion of what they might mean; and with almost religious devotion. These slogans are either very radical indeed - and few people live up to them in practice - or else they are empty slogans. Then let us discuss them properly.

But they are discussed very little, and indeed, morality per se is discussed hardly at all within the bounds of HRE. HRE-ers seem almost afraid of morality, unwilling to commit themselves morally, disapproving of those who dare to make moral judgements. When it comes to the small, everyday decisions that people make, HRE suddenly becomes intensely relativist. Things are 'personal decisions', 'none of our business', 'individual choices'.

Yes - but all human actions are, at the end of the day, 'personal decisions' and 'individual choices' - with the exception, perhaps, of those carried out under torture. Even the act of torturing could be viewed as a personal decision: but how is it helpful to view it in that way?

If HRE is to make any changes in the world - which is what it says it aims to do - then surely it needs to start committing itself to something beyond what is written down in international law, to stop hiding behind the weakest and least controversial versions of the moral system it claims to believe in, and start realising that large violations are the result of small, personal decisions by individual people.

It is perfectly possible to respect - in the weakest sense - those people while still condemning the acts.