Paper. Plastic. Cans. Glass - wait, no, white glass and green glass should be separated. Compost. Oh, but I heard pizza boxes don’t go into cardboard if they have grease stains on them. Look, the whole recycling thing is getting kind of confusing, do we really have to? I mean, isn’t all that stuff going to get dumped into the same trash burning plant anyway? And then there’s the whole thing with China not importing plastic anymore…
I hear you. Sometimes we wonder whether we’re taking it too far, or not far enough. And depending on who you’ll ask, you’ll be alternately labelled a naïve do-gooder — or communist Lucifer incarnate bringing about the downfall of Freedom, Democracy, And Western Civilization™. Look, that’s what you get for looking for advice on the internet.
Here’s a very simple mental model to live by:
Be better than the average person you know.
There, that’s it. Here’s a lovely implication: you don’t have to be perfect. You can be a moral human without being a saint. It’s okay to not always live up to all of our ideals. It’s okay to fly every now and then, even though you know it’s terrible for the environment. It’s okay to be late for that meeting. It’s okay to throw that banana peel in the trash. Sometimes. Just be better than the average person you know.
Why is that a reasonable moral standard? Because it creates a self-reinforcing loop. If everybody acted a little more morally than the average of the people they know, we’d continuously raise the bar for what’s average, and for what’s good. Over time, we all progress to being better, kinder, more thoughtful beings. Or, well, asymptotically approach moral stagnation, if you subscribe to the calculus approach to ethics.
Kant or Won’t?
I didn’t just come up with this of course, but rather built on the shoulders of giant Immanuel Kant (and before you queue the Kant puns, I guarantee you will not come up with anything original):
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law1
Fun fact: Kant was such a terrible writer that generations of philosophers wrote in dense, incomprehensible and endlessly winding paragraphs in order to honor him.
In essence, it means whatever stupid reason you have for doing things, make sure the world doesn’t collapse if everybody else did things for the same stupid reason.
For example: if you’re think it’s fine not to get vaccinated because if everybody else is vaccinated, you’d be safe too, you’ve got around 235 years of moral philosophy to catch up on.
The problem with Kant (voted least fun philosopher to be quarantined with in 2020) and his Categorical Imperative is that it doesn’t translate well to the subtleties of recycling your garbage. Will the universe collapse into a logical paradox before climate change will render this planet uninhabitable if your maxim of throwing leftovers in the trash instead of the compost if the compost is on the other side of the kitchen became a universal law? Chances are, maybe not. But you still know it’s the wrong thing to do, somehow.
Here’s where being better than average comes in, and I mean better in the sense of… gooder. If everybody acted according to that maxim, we’ll effectively continuously try to out-good each other, while accepting that nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes and have our bad days.
How to use this mental model
Whenever you have that nagging feeling that you might get caught, that’s your moral compass telling you its needle is spinning! Time to assemble your parliament of plebeians, a mental meeting of your median mates. Don’t invite any heroes, priests, or the UN ambassadors for climate change; invite the five people you actually spend the most time with. Ask yourself: what would they do?
And then do something better.
I can quote this from memory now because I almost failed my high school philosophy exam because I couldn’t. Yes, to graduate from German high school you need to memorize Kant. I think that explains a lot about my people, I’m just not sure what.