Can you really make a difference?

Great Debates
1

What are the implications of making choices as an individual that do not amount to a drop in the bucket globally, but would have bad effects if everyone behaved that way.

Example: Let’s say I want to drive that “gas-guzzling SUV” from now till my death bed. (ignore for a minute whether we’re really affect global gasoline supplies at all with our behavior). The amount of fuel I’ll use and pollution I’ll create compared to my driving a Prius is negligible in terms of the the world supply. And I do mean negligible. It’s not even noticeable if someone were to calculate the world fuel usage at the end of the year, and isn’t that what we’re worried about. It’s probably less than the total amount of gas dripped on the ground returning the handle to the pump by the sum total of Americans. Does my use push the cost of a barrel of oil up by $.0000001. Maybe, but that’s still negligible.

Another example: voting in the US. Your vote doesn’t make a difference. You think it does? Next time you vote, check the paper the next day and see what would have happened if you reversed your vote on every issue. Same result, I guarantee. The latest presidential election hammers the point home even more deeply. You’re a Floridian that voted for Bush? Switch it to Gore and see if it made a difference. [heck, if the entire state of Montana voted the other way, it wouldn’t have made a difference.]

Other examples: Trashing recyclables. Not putting money in the collection plate at church. Cheating on your taxes.

The question that comes to mind is “well, Trunk, what if everyone thought that way?”

The answer is, “well, questioner, not everyone thinks that way, so I’m not worried about it.”

So, in cases like the above, are there really any practical arguments to be made against the statement “the individual doesn’t make a difference”?

What are the ethical arguments of behaving in a way that you don’t think everyone else should behave (knowing that they won’t).

2

You already stated that you do make a difference, a small difference obviously, but still a difference. So the question is not as much logical or practical, that has already been answered, but social/psychological is my take on it.

3

Given that history is littered with accounts of individuals that made a difference in some way or other, I think the answer is yes - you can make a difference; you might not make a difference, but you certainly won’t make a difference if you don’t try.

Maybe your friends and neighbours would think just a little more about their consumption of fossil fuels if they saw you taking a positive stance on the issue, maybe they would be motivated to drag their butts down to the polling station if they saw that you could be bothered etc, or maybe they don’t bother because you (and some other folks they know) also don’t bother - the ultimate implications of your actions can reach farther than the chain of primary cause and effect.

Anyway, If what do polls consist if not individual votes - that your individual contribution seems swamped by the masses doesn’t mean it isn’t counted.

4

Butterfly_Effect

5

I’m not talking about individuals making a difference like John Wilkes Booth or Hitler.

I’m not even talking about a guy that’s one of 7 members of a city council. I’m looking here at the end results of personal decisions that society en masse is forced to make:

If you believe that driving SUV’s contributes negatively to the environment, then I need a measure of something that is altered by my driving that SUV. If you think you can measure emissions on a global scale, or fuel consumption on a global scale to the degree of accuracy that demonstrates the negative effects of my SUV, you’re crazy. So, is my NOT driving an SUV really accomplishing what it is suppose to accomplish?

If you go to vote to make a difference in getting a guy elected, then you might as well stay home, because your voting has no effect on that.

Heck, they poll 1500 people and get within 3-4% of the national opinion.

Does anyone think things get done differently because the final tally for president was

15,345,351 to 10,234,987

instead of

15,345,350 to 10,234,988
?

6

OK, try this on for size:

You drive a new Navigator, the guy next to you on the freeway needs to prove his wiener is bigger than yours, he goes out and gets one too, and so on and so forth till fuel consumption IS impacted on a global scale. Or you drive a Prius (hell, even one of those funky looking hondas) and help to normalize their appearance for others who might have felt like it would be a good idea, but didn’t want to draw attention to themselves by buying one of those “weird” cars. Also, you contribute to the further research and design of future such vehicles (case in point, ford and saturn are making hybrid SUV’s).

You don’t vote, or do vote or whatever, the people around you (cause one of the ways that people learn/decide to behave is by modeling) decide to vote or not vote partially based on what they saw you do, or by a feeling, or whatever, so on and so forth till your vote DOES matter in the election.

You can’t go about looking at your behaviors as though they exist in a vaccuum, they have context and consequences beyond those that are tangible.

7

Pretty iffy stuff.

Even if I buy the argument that what I drive will influence others to drive the same then why won’t just as many people be influence by the guy next to me driving the Prius.

If I don’t vote, and my next-door neighbor does vote, why should my actions have any more influence on others than his actions. And, to be in reality, my actions probably have a lot less effect on people than the constant barrage of “Go out and vote. It’s your civic duty” that we get from media, politicians, and pundits every year. I suspect that a lot of people don’t vote for exactly this reason, though they don’t exactly formalize it as I do. When someone doesn’t vote because they’re too busy, they’re really concluding “I’m too busy given the effect my vote has.” If they were one of 4 voters for the president, you better believe they wouldn’t be too busy.

That’s rambling though and besides my main point – here, rephrased a little more concisely: What are the ethical problems with behaving as an individual that would only have practical problems if (most) everyone else did it?

8

“Can you really make a difference?”

Yes. Yes you can.

“What are the implications of making choices as an individual that do not amount to a drop in the bucket globally, but would have bad effects if everyone behaved that way.”

One minor example (and I believe there are probably thousands!)…How about littering? If one person throws their crap out their car window onto the street, or craps in the street for that matter, it wouldn’t make an impact globally. But if everyone, or most everyone, decided to litter or crap in the street, that might “have bad effects”.

How’s that?

9

> What are the ethical arguments of behaving in a way that you
> don’t think everyone else should behave

Simply put, you do it because you know it’s the right thing to do. You do it for your own peace of mind.

Consider a typical vegetarian. He isn’t trying to change the world. He’s not trying to get meat taken out of supermarkets or win some kind of vote, he’s doing it for his own personal reasons.

You should go out and vote, not because you think your one vote will put your side over the top, but simply because you want your opinion registered.

You should recycle and give up your SUV because you know it’s the right thing to do, not because you think you will be personally changing the world.

10

There are six billions of us.

So…act in such a way as to improve your 1/6 billionth of the world.

One Yogini: excellent point re littering. We all have the power to make the world worse in small, but meaningful ways. Simply by not doing so we already contribute to a better world!

Trinopus

11

Thank you Trinopus. :slight_smile:

“You should recycle and give up your SUV because you know it’s the right thing to do, not because you think you will be personally changing the world.”

And,

WELL SAID Flash-57.

12

The Carbon Footprint Calculator will give you a pretty accurate idea of how much CO[sub]2[/sub] you personally contribute to the atmosphere each month, so you can see the difference you could make in hard numbers if you did things differently…

Grim

13

P.S. Having said that, I agree with Flash - do things differently because they are the right thing to do, not because of the difference they will make…

Gp

14

  1. it would have exactly that much influence, and with you driving a Prius too, that’s twice as much. So that’s his just as many plus yours, so that makes twice as many total. That’s not even subtracting the absence of the negative effects of the Navigator you don’t drive. :confused: sorry, that got a little weird.

  2. your lack of vote doesn’t have any more or less influence inasmuch as you both have equal influence to begin with. It just matters where you choose to place that influence; even more importantly that where you choose to place it is in line with your beliefs. If you genuinely believe that the best thing for you to do is not participate in voting, then don’t vote. If you believe that you should vote but don’t simply because you don’t feel as powerful as you want to when you do vote, well… most people can’t live that way and be happy at the same time. That’s the ethical problem. You’re providing the world with one more cynic and robbing the world of water and oxygen that could be used for someone who is willing to act on his beliefs.

15

I think Trunk is trying to say: Making sacrifices gets me nothing, and amounts to a flyspeck on an Elephant’s ass, so why should I do it?

There is really only one good reason, and that is altruism. It’s been fairly well demonstrated that altruism is beneficial to a species as a whole, even if it causes an altruistic individual to come to grief.

So, the key to great personal success is to behave completely selfishly, while encouraging altruistic behavior in others, all while not getting caught at it. The thing is, if everybody else out there were only in it for themselves, the world would have been incinerated a long time ago. So you’re counting on your neighbor to be a good doobee. You’re counting on him to be a self-sacrificing putz, basically, while you make off with the goods.

My advice to you: Don’t start topic threads pointing out individual insignificance. It doesn’t help YOU for other people to know that. Don’t bring it up at parties. Don’t even go there, ever. Give a little to a charity, and chat up this charity as much as you can. Volunteer some time to play cribbage with poor crack babies or whatever, even if you find them repulsive, and tell people what a warm feeling it gives you. Put up a web page extolling the virtues of altruism. All of this might cost you 50 bucks and maybe 40 hours of your time a year, at first. If you’re charismatic, you might gain something of a following.

You can see where I’m going with this. Say you toot your own horn in an effective and efficient manner, and somebody decides you’re a leader of some sort. They will actually give you their own money and time to help you be the wonderful guy they think you are. You might get your own TV show, or even a political office. Once you’re at that point, you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want. You can hire people to handle all the charity window-dressing stuff. You’ll just be taking money from one poor sap and siphoning it off to another, while skimming some socially acceptable amount off the top. Sure, you’ll have to speak occasionally, and show up for some meetings, but the rest of the time you can play golf, fuck beautiful women (or men, if that’s what you’re into), travel, eat nice meals, and so on.

In the end, you will have left the world no better or worse than it was before. But YOU’LL be far better off than you would have been. Just give up on this honest philisophical bullshit and learn to use altruism to your advantage.

Hell, I think I’ll take this on the road. Cha-ching!

16

Unless you’re a hermit, it is silly only to consider the direct result of your actions/inactions - the plain fact is that most people are embedded in some kind of society and the things they do not only have direct (and possibly insignificant) consequences, they also affect the mindset and subsequent actions/inactions of those around them.

17

“If I do not commit murder, I am not being particularly virtuous, because other persons WILL commit murder. Therefore, I may kill freely anyone I dislike, because if I don’t kill them, someone else might have, and at any rate, they would have died eventually anyway.”

We all make a difference.

18

The world is made up of millions of small circles. I have a very strong and hopefully positive impact on my circle, i.e. family, friends and everyone else I have contact with each day. In turn, each of those people have a circle of their own, in which they do all they can to create a positive “circle” environment. This applies to everyone, so eventually indirectly, what I do in my circle touches many and connects on a much larger scale than it feels like to me. So while it may not always impact what car someone drives, it does have it’s own subtle force.

19

IWLN said:

I really like that. Can I steal it?
As to the OP: You can make a difference, as you point out the difference is small but it does exist. The only question is whether you feel it is worth the cost to you to make the size of difference you’ll make. And this examines only the literal difference you make. There is no denying the domino effect of taking action.

20

Sure. :wink: Hmm…That’s the fourth stranger I’ve found in my circle today. :eek: