Sophocles, Locke, King, & MERRY...What Do Ya Know???

My time in Malawi has made me intensely reflect on the ethical theories of several social thinkers, and I have concluded that I span human life’s long timeline by way of my agreement with Sophocles, John Locke, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe that a Higher Law definitely exists in societal life. As a social change agent, I will always try to make the world a better place to live and ensure that all human beings are granted their inherent human rights defined by Locke, guided by the principles and values of my Higher moral law. In doing so, I will always check the laws of the state with the principles of my Higher moral law. This curiosity, or questioning the status quo, acts as the catalyst for my deepest passion—social reform.

How do you weigh pain across the human race? Many people in developed countries believe (or try to believe) that pain is weighted differently in Africa and other under-developed parts of the world where poverty and poverty-related death is rampant. Millions of people die of AIDS, Malaria, and other infectious diseases every year. Many people in developed countries accept this as merely the nature of things and attempt to comfort themselves in the thought that people in these parts of the world accept this situation just as they do (as the “nature of things”). As a result, they believe that the pain caused by these deaths is not weighted as heavily as it would be in the United States or anywhere else in the world where this disease-death rate is not nearly as high.

In Mill’s utilitarian theory, everyone’s happiness has the same weight, and everyone’s pain has the same weight. In Appiah’s theory of cosmopolitanism, all people should be valued equally, and we have an equal, moral obligation to all human beings on the planet. I agree with both of these social thinkers. Of course the occurrence of death in Malawi is NO less painful or less significant than it is in the United States. Every human being experiences the same emotions with the same weight. We all have moral responsibilities to every human being we meet, regardless of who they are or where they come from. Valuing all people equally will also increase humans’ capacity to make consistently moral decisions, which is desperately needed now and into the future.