The question of the daww 3ale

Note: this is the first blogpost in a series of 3 about approaches to practical life, thought of from the perspective I get from what I'm seeing around me. The reading that's inspired this is Raymond Gueuss' 'Outside Ethics.'

It can be surprising to realize that the question that ethics tries to answer is "what should I do?"

Ethics in common understanding or even for some ethicists seems more limited than that, it seems to be concerned with difficult choices, like whether or not it can be the right thing to break the law when it can create some good result.

Most of the time, we are faced with some decisions that are not as difficult as that last one, like what to have for lunch. Here I'm trying to investigate the area in between the decisions and situations we think of when we say ethics and those we don't think of, things we can call "almost-moral-dilemmas."

One of the almost-moral-dilemmas I face on the road in Lebanon is the daww 3ale. That's the high beams. Very often when you're driving at night on a mountain road, the lights on the side of the road are not on. People use their high beams so they can actually see something, except (sometimes) if there's someone in front of them or someone coming the other way. I'm going to describe the second case. This post is mainly about my own perception of it but it seems like everyone in Lebanon who drives on mountain roads at night deals with the question.

When you're driving with your high beams on and someone comes the other way, the "polite" behaviour is to turn your high beams off and stay with the normal light setting until the other car passes you by. The same behavior is expected of them.

Unfortunately, very often, the other person has the daww 3ale for a few seconds before they turn them off, and sometimes they just leave them on. That introduces some uncertainty about their moral character and problems for you as a driverf.

I was polite for a while but then I started getting frustrated by people who just left it on. I felt like an idiot. So I started flashing the lights when I came opposite someone who leaves the high beams on, sometimes doing it to people who didn't deserve it. Then some days I started leaving them on anyway when I was in a bad mood and I didn't feel like making the effort.

I haven't found a consistent approach to deal with it that makes sense. It seems like, as a driver, you're either an idiot who is nice to everyone - even assholes -, or the moral police who calls bad people out in a pretty blindly self-righteous way, or the asshole themselves. I choose from each depending on how I feel but I still think about this question afterward.

The next post is going to be about a more moral almost-moral-dilemma, which 3aksesser (driving against the traffic) and how it's inaccurate and limiting to think about it in terms of civilized vs. backwards (a language used not by foreigners this time but by Lebanese people from different social and economic classes).