For the Anti-Woke to Consider: Morality vs Benefit

[Purple Knight]

Question for Debate: Is this analogy a good one? Do you understand the other side better now?

Imagine you wake up in a slightly different world, where murder is not assumed to be immoral, not religiously or secularly. The third commandment was never written. Laws against murder just didn't happen. The first thing you see out your window, on your first day in this parallel world, is your two constantly feuding neighbours... killing each other. Within half an hour the corpse patrol collects the body of the loser, but they don't arrest the winner and he's just out there mowing his lawn, wearing a tourniquet on his arm but otherwise it's as if nothing happened.

You learn that people kill one another all the time and consider it normal. Because of this, the world population is lower and people don't squabble over resources. There is less crime (all other general legal conventions are present, except those against killing another human being), virtually no serious crime, and the idea that someone would ever commit a crime and get off on a technicality, or multiple offend, is unheard of. If people make nuisances of themselves, someone just gets rid of them. The only legal annoyances still largely present are victimless crimes. Since there's no one who wants to bother wasting the effort killing the local crackhead unless he's hurting somebody, this does unfortunately still leave the legal system to deal with it.

This world is anathema to you. You just know murder is wrong. You can't imagine just having to accept that your spouse, best friend, or child can simply be gone at any time. You're free to take revenge of course and kill the murderer, which deters it, but it does still, occasionally, happen. Not only do you know murder is wrong, you can't live like this. It's crazy. It's horrifying. There are all these airtight arguments about how much good it does for society to have legal murder, and they're not only logically sound, they're borne out by reality.

Imagine yourself campaigning to change this society you find yourself in, not because it's the logical choice for it to change, but because of a mere moral impulse: This is wrong. Imagine that people find you to be a moral elitist. Why do you want to take away our working society and replace it with one that is broken? This will hurt everybody, why the heck are you so stuck on this? You woke idiot, stop trying to use fake problems to stir up trouble. The only answer you can give is the same one you had as soon as you found yourself in this parallel world: This. is. wrong. In this world there are others like you, under the same banner of this is just wrong, but many of them are hustlers using moral denouncement to make a buck, because they've seen that they can. As far as you though, your morality is simply higher than the morality of those around you, and this is not some value judgment but a simple acknowledgment of the fact that there's a slider of morality versus benefit, and you feel an overriding need to turn the thermostat to the left, and have society suffer a little more, so that it can be more moral.

Do you understand the other side better now? Not the hustlers or those who make money by it, but those who actually believe in it and don't gain anything from it.