He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.
I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”
Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.
But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
Realising:
- everyone has performed good and bad actions
- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.
: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.
I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.
As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.
Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.
It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?
Only if they were linked - you blew up a plane that was about to be flown into a building for example.
That's completely different from one day taking over a plane and landing it safely because the pilot was out of action, and the next day shooting down a plane for fun.
You can't save up to murder your wife by giving to the homeless.
That's a bad example (because all 99 will die anyway if you don't do something, so you're not really killing 49 to save 50), but ignoring that, I don't think you can trivially answer such questions. They have been discussed by many philosophers for the last few thousands of years and we don't seem to have a common agreement about ethics and morality.
Would you change your answer if the building was a prison for 50 child abusers, and the plane carried 48 newborn babies (plus the pilot)? Why? A human is a human, right?
And you are also missing the point of the comment - the key thing is the principal of least harm only applies if the things are directly linked.
I suspect you'd find it hard to find a philosopher over the last few thousands of years who thought that the concept of saving up societal credit so you can kill you spouse is somehow a valid one.