Two able-bodied people arrive at a closed door and need to pass through. At the same time, each one extends a hand to open the door, insinuating on showing this kindness to the other person. They think it is morally required to do such acts as they have the power to. However, both of them have the power to do so here! Who "should" open the door out of consideration? No one should in that no one could have to. This might be a very trivial example on one level, but it is of vital importance that it cannot be true that both people, or either of them, should by default try to perform this act of kindness.
Pragmatically, person A and person B would both remain at a standstill if each strives to do what they allegedly should. Neither individual would be able to get anywhere for the day, much less in their life at large. Pragmatism has nothing to do with making something good, though. For instance, it does not matter if using physical force to persuade someone to reveal information is situationally useful—although the victim might say anything to convince the torturers to stop, with no way to automatically verify it, posing its own problem for both abstract epistemology and mere pragmatism. If torture or a given form of torture is immoral, circumstances and actual usefulness could never legitimize it.
The inconvenience of both people in the example of the door being unable to get anywhere if they simultaneously, relentlessly try to perform an act of kindness for the other is not why they cannot be obligated to both show respect or consideration by opening the door for each other. But, if doing what is morally right requires that someone else not act as they should, then, well, it simply cannot be morally correct after all. Only one of them can open the door. It does not follow, of course, that cruelty and behaviors driven by sheer disregard for others are valid. The necessary truth of the matter is just that certain acts of kindness cannot be obligatory because only one of the multiple parties involved would then be righteous, meaning one person must err for the other to be in the right. This entails a contradiction, and contradictions cannot be true.
It is logically impossible for this idea about morality to be true no matter what, because it is contradictory at its very heart, contradictory towards itself and in turn ultimately towards the laws of logic which are inherently true. Kindness has been touted about as if it has a status that literally cannot be the case. Submission is similar. While there are all sorts of asinine but popular concepts about one-sided submission in, say, marriage that are false for separate reasons, total, unflinching submission in a matter from both directions is likewise impossible. If both wills are in total alignment, there is no genuine submission. If each will is different, then there are situations in which it is logically impossible for both people to submit.
This sort of approach to kindness and submission are objectively erroneous not only because no one's subjective whims are authoritative, but also because both parties (like spouses) cannot both do what is supposedly "ethical" in this case. Thus, it cannot be ethically mandatory, though perhaps trying to benefit the other person can be good in a wholly optional sense. There are many other possible scenarios that exemplify the point, like the fact that an employer cannot show a kindness by allowing a worker to leave early without a loss of pay if the employee is to go above and beyond and do as much as they can for their employer during a shift.
Far more than the lower sort of practical problem with mandatory two-way kindness in such circumstances, there is an intrinsic logical problem with the idea that kindness is a duty of all people wherever they have the power to show it. Some actions which are kind or that express submission can indeed be ethically mandatory. This does not contradict logical axioms or any other necessary truth. Even so, acts of kindness and submission cannot always be obligatory from two different directions at the same time. As simultaneously simple as it is, it is an inflexible logical fact that doing something which inevitably involves another person being unable to behave as they should already cannot be ethically correct. Logic renders many forms of kindness entirely optional at best. And if someone does not morally have to do such a thing—if it is untrue that they should—then, short of irrational or wicked motives, they cannot be in the wrong for abstaining.
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