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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ l o c a t e d
I D : : E q u a l i t y
T Y P E: : R E C O L L E C T I V E
Landamaeris have been interested in moral categorising and hierarchies of worth presumably since the dawn of our species. We took the stereotype that people born with red feathers were more prone towards violent acts all the way into space, and discrimination based on patterning and feather colour still somehow exists.
Theoretically, fleetism promises equal rights both legal and moral for all citizens of the Mobile Fleet, but neither of these things actually work out in practise. Transgender people are often denied healthcare, poor people can't afford legal defence, etcetera etcetera. That's not actually what I want to talk about right now, though; I'd like to take a minute to think about the opposing view held within qhispik.
Qhispik philosophy posits that all men are made equal, but there are some problems with this that I've found. The simplest and most glaringly obvious one is in how the saying itself talks about all
men being made equal: it's likely that Mazov meant 'men' as a way to refer to all landamaeris, but given when he lived, it's also entirely possible that he didn't (I admittedly can't be arsed looking it up.) Anyway, my point with this is: The idea that everyone is more or less equal underpins qhispik philosophy. The model posits that everyone is morally equal at birth, regardless of things like feather colour, sex, or body patterning, and that they should therefore be treated without discrimination. The entire point of this philosophy is to counteract the discrimination that still existed during Mazov's time, and it serves as a very useful foundation upon which to fight arguments for why one group is innately inferior to another.
There are generally a lot of unpleasant philosophical implications from the idea that the landamaeri experience is not universal. Just on a responsibility allocating level, having everyone on an equal playing field is quite necessary for society to function; but the moment you look any closer, you realise it already doesn't work that smoothly. People with learning disabilities, for example, often get treated like they're incapable of making their own decisions by courts and the legal system. Some people with neurodegenerative diseases genuinely are. These are fairly extreme examples, but what of the differences between people with testosterone as their primary hormone and those with estrogen? While neither seem to have particularly pronounced behavioural effects, they definitely
do have effects; testosterone in particular - while not actually an outright cause of aggressive behaviour as some mistakenly believe - does seem to contribute to increased confidence in one's own beliefs and stubbornness in the face of competing evidence. (The science on this is admittedly a bit shaky still, but my point is that: I'm fairly sure the profiles of people on estrogen VS testosterone are indeed different. The actual ways they're different are less important in this situation.)
Presuming that the former point is the same, this means that even if it's only on a small level, experience of life is already split down the middle by a dividing line drawn at birth. Certainly, it's not a very large one, but it's enough to spark some degree of discomfort about just
how big those differences are; and what, at a scale of 10 billion people, their impacts on society look like.
Then you have neurodivergence, where the differences are
much more exaggerated; to the point where you can be absolutely certain that someone with an attention deficit condition is having a completely different life experience to a neurotypical landamaeri. My- I guess 'issue' isn't really the right word, it's more like what makes me uncomfortable about it- is that it feels very difficult to argue that neurodivergent and neurotypical landamaeris are on an equal playing field morally or experientially. Part of what makes it so awkward is that neurotypicals are a massive majority; if landamaeri cognition was simply immensely varied by default and there
wasn't a norm, then we'd have built our society around the assumption that everyone functioned differently, and we wouldn't have ideas like 'baseline morality' that people had to adhere to in order to be a 'good person.'
And that's... I guess that's kind of where I get stuck? It's really hard to model this problem when such an integral part of it is that neurological minorities are minorities. It seems sensible to make hypotheticals where we aren't, so that one can examine our behaviour in a vacuum- but the thing is,
we're not in that vacuum. We never will be.
Yuyayni are 3% of the landamaeri population and seemingly always have been; it'll probably never go higher than that. With that in mind... what kind of strange situation does that put us in, both morally and philosophically speaking?
This hearkens back to my worries about the suggestion that
yuyayni might be more naturally empathic and egalitarian than
ch'ikan and therefore more 'morally good.' I do not like the thought of this, but my dislike of it is largely founded from the social and philosophical problems that would arise if a small subset of the population really was more inclined towards socially beneficial behaviour. But the thing is... there are already conditions that exist in the opposite direction. Perhaps not morally - I'm not aware of any neurological condition that just makes you a worse person - but certainly on a practical level; for that you've got physical disabilities. And certainly, no one is pretending those don't disadvantage you.
I guess what I'm getting at is: If
yuyayni really are actually more moral than
ch'ikan, that I don't like the implications of that doesn't stop it from being true. But I'm... not really sure what to do with that information. It's likely nothing
can be done with it; save keeping it in mind for times when
ch'ikan call us 'evil' or 'soulless' for not openly expressing empathy in the same way that they do. Ah, but actually- perhaps that's why it's stuck in my mind so much. On its own, it shouldn't even matter whether we are a tiny bit more moral than the
ch'ikan, but they spend so much time calling us biologically immoral compared to them, that I suppose that might have made me value the concept of neurological inclinement towards ethical behaviour; when in truth, the fact that we're all sapient should really mean we get equal treatment no matter what.
I think sometimes that the worst part in living in a society ruled by
ch'ikan is that it's possible to have internalized values like this, and not even realise that's the case. Now that I'm typing it, it feels utterly irrelevant that we might be a tiny smidge more moral than them; but it felt so important just a minute ago. ...It really is upsetting, how opaque our reasons for doing things can be to us, and how difficult it is to separate oneself from the beliefs of the environment they were brought up in.
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N O T I C E : : m e m o r y _ s t r e a m _ t e r m i n a t e d
