Your obligation boils down to this: if the rules dont make sense, is it worth defying them? If it is, and it is worth it, then you ought to.
That is, treating the corrupt humans as just part of the natural world, with inherent danger, to be navigated around to minimize damage.
The challenge is to properly identify such people and treat them as dangerous objects, but still respect genuine people.
That is, treating the corrupt humans as just part of the natural world, with inherent danger, to be navigated around to minimize damage.
That is a fair way to put it.
If you think about it, what this does is puts people on a dichtonomy:
Corrupt and uncorrupt.
Where the corrupt are those who make their own rules and decide internally which external rules are worth following and which are worth breaking
And the uncorrupt are those who simply follow rules imposed on them.
I don't distinguish between "bad corrupt" and "good corrupt" because again, every action is an assertion. If an action is outside rules, or laws even, then it imposes a cost on those who act within said rules, and those who act within the rules impose a cost on those who dont (taxes, fines, fees, criminal penalities, shunning if you're amish, lol). There is only the imposition, the externalization of some of the cost of any assertion. "good" and "bad" are interpreted, though, by whoever is in power. Of course we can say generally from our traditions, developed through thousands of years of fighting (also a form of assertion, or one type of act), that unjustified homicide, theft, and so forth are wrong. You go back 100k years though, you don't see that.
That also allows us to explain the ethical history of humanity as an arc of greater rational understanding of "wrong and right", a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts understanding by the species, its own sort of tradition, of ethics, as a form of natural inheritance from previous generations: we have order because we fought for order, because some men acted to create it. We have peace because we struggled for peace. We have tradition because we established and maintained it. And so on. And this harkens back to one of our core and only true obligations: to make the future better for the generations to come.
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