But this takes the equation outside the realm of common sense. Any person, no matter his wealth or lack thereof can reasonably be culpable for the less fortunate worldwide. And the good feelings you mention have no association with the suffering of others, it’s (as you describe it) merely pleasure gained from the fruits of one’s labor. Those fruits may or may not have included unethical behavior against one or more persons to get there, but that’s a different matter. I think it prudent to suggest that if one is morally responsible for the less fortunate, that responsibility can only reasonably extend to the those in one’s immediate sphere of existence.
It appears you didn’t fully understand my previous post. Wrongdoing is very often not obvious to the wrongdoer. I suggest knowledge of wrongdoing and its accompanying culpability are available to the mind of the wrongdoer in degrees. In the part you’re referencing I mention the starting point for blameworthiness in previous post:
" Those who give in repeatedly to wrong–true-false propositions, i.e., knowing that to cause detriment is wrong, as in inventing justifications (hiding the truth) because the abuse is found to be pleasurable] eventually create a false-false state where the false (abusing the less fortunate is good) is accepted as true. Thus, abuse is the act of a significantly falsified mind."
It was late at night, probably didn’t word this clearly. I’m suggesting that all wrongdoing begins with some knowledge, on some level, that the decision being contemplated is wrong by virtue of at least one [probably many] t-f relation in the decision-making process.
A t-f relation denotes the truth value of those elements of the mind’s information involved in the decision to do desired wrong in connection with the false, wrong or immoral information of a proposition used to contemplate a desire to perform that wrong. The discord this relation causes in intellectual operation can probably be mapped to the sense of ‘guilty conscience’ we’re sometimes said to feel in recognition of a false, illegal or immoral desire.
The important thing about this relation is that it causes tension and resistance (the secular version is called ‘cognitive dissonance’) in the mind; moral responsibility affixes by degrees to one’s reactions to tension/resistance raised in contemplating the pursuit of a desired wrong. My mention of the truth being hidden from the contemplator but eventually resulting in a f-f condition refers to the increase of self-falsification of the essence—and causally, the mind—of the desirer by recurrent pursuit of paths to justification for wrong desire. We falsify our own essence by repeatedly ignoring the dissonance and contemplating the wrong action we desire. In other words, this position is that we falsify our own essence or stain our souls by bad or unsound choices.
In a sufficiently falsified state, a f-f connection (or collection of connections) is achieved by the contemplator. In other words the contemplator comes to hold the false proposition (I am justified in performing x) as true. At each successive level of falsification, the contemplator becomes less culpable for the wrong he desires because he has, by inventing justifications for why he is not morally/ethically responsible for committing the wrong he desires, falsified (convinced) himself to believe that wrong does not exist for him in the equation. Another way to express this is that quantitatively sufficient f-f connections between intellect and propositions to justify the commitment of a wrong are established so that the motives and grounds for doing wrong [false] are held as acceptable [true]. The f-f connection translates to the holding of a false proposition or belief as true: Joe deems himself justified to p because q and r, where p is wrongdoing (by reasonable external standards) and q and r (as elements of a set) are false reasons Joe uses for justification. Joe eventually accepts the false as true, or the wrong as not-wrong, or possibly even as good.
Culpability doesn’t lie in libertarian certainty, it almost always attaches by decreasing degrees to the wrongdoer and is stronger in the early stages of contemplation of a wrong desire than late. This explains why, when accosted for his crime, the criminal often has trouble explaining why he did it…he knows intuitively that he “knew” on some level (though almost certainly doesn’t recognize and can’t articulate the process involved) his desire was wrong. Sorry about going on and on, I feel I’m not explaining sufficiently.