Romanticism and Ethics.
Why the two are at odds
Romanticism is a very broad term; basically it means something/someone seems awesome. For example, many vegans have romantic visions of PETA, viewing the group as almost infallible.
Ethics is basically a code of conduct/mortality. There is no universal ethical system, so it’s hard to create a basic underlining principal for ethics.
This is a problem for romantics and point of this article; it’s hard to think ethics are complicated when the organization you adore gives you an ethical guideline. When you love someone, you tend to love their ideas, even if they’re bad. This is further complicated by an organization’s culture. An organization’s culture is usually focused on helping synchronize the members into working towards a common goal: selling lawn gnomes, protecting animal rights, or educating people about God. If everything has a few basic principals to work from, it makes it easier to work towards similar goals. It makes selling gnomes easier because you can inform the consumer about the gnomes; none are injured in transit to your home because they’re all transported in the same protective case. No chipped hats over here!
At this point, some ethical guidelines may disagree with the organization’s culture. It seems incredibly wasteful to put a lawn gnome in tons of packaging just so you can leave it out in the rain. If someone has romantic feelings towards organization’s culture, ethics looks like a total douche. When forced to choice between the gnome company you love and some environmentalist calling it bad, you’ll probably pick the one you love. It also just so happens, the organization you love also keeps teaching you how to love and build upon the organization more.
That’s the thing, romanticism isn’t black and white, it’s just black. This makes it conflict with every other color. Romantic ideals are an immovable object yet they are hardly infallible. Such blind devotion is merely going to make you blind to every other color in the spectrum. This sometimes even conflicts with the romantic ideals. For example, I love animals. I used to volunteer at a shelter. It never occurred to me that someone would create a puppy mill and mass bred puppies in poor conditions to make money with designer breeds. Through romantic ideals of an animal shelter, I was totally unaware of such a possibility and thus limited my ability in shelter care.
That’s the thing, for ethics to work; you need to be an asshole willing
to break some hearts. Someone whose hands aren’t particularly clean. The
world is complicated and wide eye ideals are going to fail at seeing something
in the distance, you need to squint.