Posh Ethics

One strives to be bettah… Surely, rising to the cream of the riding crop also entails, at least at the level of the horse’s arse, that one has acquired an expensive taste in ethics, paid for with the sweat of the rubble.

Cold Mirage

“Ethics is for and about persons.” That much I am sure of in my dreams and nightmares. Kant said so: “we all are, above suspicion.” Sad story is that persons are all around, but that it is difficult to catch any, at least in public, where most of them are, even or especially when alone… Is it a private matter, like going to the toilet?

They appear, seem to, with a smile, perhaps promising person, and then they vanish, leaving tarnish.

"you shall know them by their finery"

What would it take to presume persons innocent – innocent of being non-persons, mere things after all, since that is what they use ostentatiously as a disguise… or was it as their moment of reality?

Good manners do of course forbid to go on and on, moaning about this, whatever it is… We aspire to drift in and out, like a humming bird in glistening plumage, or as the bee known for its sting. Surely, this is not worth talking about, at our brief annual celebrations every week…

What happens when we exert ourselves, having accomplished the right to privacy, to fulfill the promise of that right? Do we actually have something to fill that space, something worth protecting so fiercely that we have built a whole codex of armor around it?

Yes, I want to respect you as a person, but, whatever you are, “where art thou,” when you are no longer in public where person non grata est? And if privacy only means hiding your curlers and undergarments, what am I respecting when I try to not bond, for reasons of ethics?

best left unspoken

Again, lamenting absence is distasteful, breeding forbids talking about breeding of persons…, of animals, yes, of course, etc., etc…. So ethics? What’s the point, except for the lower classes, of course, to keep them from emerging as persons. Can’t bloody force them, of course, and seducing them should be left to hired hands, such as advertisers, preachers, and car salesmen. One does what one does. It is even unthinkable, in company, to have to say “let’s not get personal.”