The general purpose of this post is to explain why it was maybe not ethical to support this idea before, but it is now.
Before I forget, I should say that I still don't know what a political leader might say as an explanation for what some people might see as a major change in culture except the one offered in the one-step plan to eliminating unemployment: "demand is low so companies should reward people who accept a smaller work load". I read a few transcripts of political speeches last year but I do not believe I have ever seen a video of one on an important topic.
So to return to the idea of a way of categorizing people as either "nice" or "mean"; or "selfless" and "selfish"; or "the strategy of prioritizing the goals of other people when a conflict is encountered" vs "the strategy of completing your own goals". It is not really possible for the poor to oppress the wealthy in the normal sense, since a rich person can instantly become poor if they choose to but the reverse is not true.
If "mean" people are seen as harmful to others, "nice" people cannot directly confront mean people. Other mean people can, and nice people could choose to become mean in order to do this, but if they do this it might be difficult for them to become nice again. So nice people will often try to act as if mean people do not exist by avoiding them.
However, it can be difficult to determine if someone is mean or nice because naturally, mean people have no incentive to reveal this information and one theme this site has frequently returned to is that problems result when too many people agree on correct standards of behavior without an awareness of the inaccuracy of even seemingly obvious standards. This means some nice people will deliberately present themselves as what people assume mean people will be like. In some cases the only way to determine the strategy used is how someone reacts upon learning they have made a mistake and are not sure whether people are aware of this.
This probably has to do with communicating the degree of 'control' one has over a situation but this is getting off topic.
Situations without clear information about whether someone is nice or mean do not result in definite 'ethical' conclusions, which for this purpose can be defined as whether it results in a knowledge cost for nice people who are exposed to the situation. Since we can assume that every person has a finite memory and decision-making capabilities that only synthesize a limited pool of relevant information, we are not able to ignore situations that seem like they are important.
This means that while someone can choose to do something that seems like it would help mean people, nice people are not morally obligated to support that choice or make the same decision. Since nice people cannot directly challenge mean people, someone who is nice might even feel morally obligated not to do anything to help someone they feel is mean.
With basically any conflict, people on each side feel that their own team is nice and the other team is mean. This conclusion logically follows from thinking that the people on one's team have good intentions and also thinking that they are competent in their evaluation of the possibilities of the situation and the value of each outcome. So to the extent that poor people and wealthy people see each other as being in conflict, poor people will think that rich people are "mean" and rich people will think that poor people are "mean"—in the form of wanting and accepting welfare at the very least, or maybe in convincing people that it is the opposing team that has nice people and not one's own team.
The result would be that poor people think it is unethical to do anything that would help the rich, while rich people think it is unethical to do anything that would help the poor if it imposes any additional cost on the rich. The idea on this site is meant to help both groups of course, which might be why people are as apathetic about supporting it as they are toward any other change.
But proving that the concerns each group has about why the other group is 'mean' takes time to do and is not a trivial effort. Without explaining these attitudes, assuming they existed, it was not possible to say that supporting this concept was an ethical thing to do.
Admitting that there were unmet goals, and that the existence of a group of mean people was preventing fulfillment of one's own goals and the goals of many other people, would have been contrary to the culture of the United States which embraces conflict and would have also implied the use of the 'selfless' strategy regardless of whether it was in accordance with cultural norms. Few people are willing to admit this, and so it is difficult to confirm the perception that mean people exist. This means it is also difficult to determine how people would have reached that conclusion except through very indirect methods and the patterns of mistakes that people make, in things like pointing out dishonesty which does not imply that the person making this accusation is 'selfless'.
This indirect method of analyzing a situation also makes it difficult for someone of normal ability to present evidence of mistakes, because everyone seems to stop talking when they learn that people they know are wrong.
(I am not sure if this post has any original material.)
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