Ethics of Individual Motivation and Self-Restraint

Many social goods and ills are attributed to individual motivation and self-restraint, without asking to what extent our support for public ethics contributes to those personal effects, alongside our support for personal and group values.

Individual motivation is a lot easier to appeal to, and to achieve, in a secular framework of public ethics and instututions for fairness that go beyond self-interested personal and group values butting heads to get ahead.

Similarly, individual self-restraint is a lot easier to appeal to, and to achieve, in a secular framework of public ethics and institutions for fairness that provide opportunities for civil democracy to establish multilateral arbitration and relatively unbiased enforcement when conflicts occur.

This distinction of appealing to ethical frameworks is profound because without it, we are left asking people to motivate themselves and achieve in a context that often pits powerful group values or 'clubhouse democracies' against minorities, and asking people to show self-restraint in a context of everybody for themselves.