Dave Policar, 2000.
I wrote this in response to a friend's email, informing me that the two addresses to which I'd sent an earlier message were effectively the same address. She added that "you can keep sending to both, but I get two copies." I enjoyed my own response so much I figured I'd include it here.
While I appreciate the explicit freedom of action (after all, implicit but unarticulated demands for change are often dangerous), I choose to change my behavior to bring it more in line with my own notion of proper communication protocol.
No reaction to this on your part is required, since you made no demands that would thereby cause you to incur responsibility for my behavior. I must admit, though (with some chagrin), to a (technically unjustified) sense that, by (infinitesimally) improving your experience of the world I am imposing on you some (negligible) ethical responsibility.
It's actually not clear to me, on reflection, just what I consider you to have incurred a responsibility for. In fact, the more carefully I think about this the less convinced I am that "responsibility for" is even the correct phrase. I think what I really mean to say is "debt". The difference being that I find it easier to define a debt operationally in terms of the types of actions that would discharge it. The spirit of the distinction I'm drawing is captured by the statement that a debt is an ethical transaction whereas a responsibility is a debt-generating state, although I don't defend those as definitions of the two concepts taken individually.
So, recasting terms, I admit to an (incorrect) sense that my actions have imposed on you a negligible ethical debt which is stereotypically discharged by a reciprocal act of improving my experience of the world. As I say, I admit this with some chagrin, as I consider that sense technically unjustifiable and its existence makes me anxious.
On the other hand, I can rationalize my implicit attempt to force debt on you by observing that the magnitudes involved are so negligible (they are in effect "microdebts"), that you can simply be assumed to have reciprocated in the normal course of your existence. In fact, on further reflection, I observe that you've conducted yourself over the course of our relationship in a way that leads me to the belief that you are actually reading this nonsense, and that this belief (for which you are in part responsible) is currently giving me a non-negligible (in fact rather substantial) amount of enjoyment, so not only has your comment about the identity of email addresses paid off its own debt, it has if anything left me in your debt.
Admittedly, to believe myself in your debt for an unasked-for improvement of my life is ethically no more defensible than to believe you in my debt for the reciprocal improvement, but I find myself made less anxious by it. Further, I take on faith without exploring in depth the belief that an analogous argument to the one above could be made to defend the proposition that my (technically nonexistent) indebtedness is compensated for by an analogous (currently left unspecified, though it occurs to me that my writing this nonsense with the belief that someone is probably reading and enjoying it may well qualify) improvement in your life, and even further I take on faith that all such virtual microdebt events could in principle be renormalized in a way that justifies treating them as mutually negating.
Indeed, as I think about this it seems to me that this notion of microdebt renormalization could underly a theory of morally justified self-sacrifice without having to give up the idea of rational self-interest, even in situations where no actual debt-exchange path is identifiable (that is, where actually solving the N-level renormalized ethical equation is just too messy). This is, of course, not a novel idea, but previous formulations of it (for example, theories of the genetic underpinnings of altruistic behavior, or the superrational strategy in a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma) have the major failing of not including the phrases "microdebt renormalization" and "N-level renormalized ethical functions" which I find extremely rewarding to say. (Well, actually, I have yet to say them -- indeed, I suspect they have yet to be said at all -- but I've been writing them and activating circuits in my head as I do so that are at least related to, if not identical to, those activated by saying or hearing them (the words, not the circuits), so I feel justified in describing myself as (metaphorically) saying them.)
Editor's note: Later that day I did get to say them, to the same person. I was right, they are fun to say.
It occurs to me that this while this kind of renormalization is all well and good at ethical quantum scales, it doesn't necessarily apply to macroscopic ethical events such as, for example, the admittedly "rather substantial" debt I assume (despite my better judgement) by deriving enjoyment from the belief that you are still reading this. So, while intriguing, my theory doesn't really get me off the hook. However, either because I've really oversaturated this whole idea by writing about it at such length, or because I'm more willing to excuse my own ethical debts (existent or otherwise) than other peoples', I find I no longer really care. So I guess we're OK, then.