Extistential Commentary on Advice

Advice is the sharing of past experience and its results. Even if the person giving the advice has no direct experience, the person searches through their similar past experiences to decide on what they would do in the situation. The urge to give advice is almost uncontrollable. But why are we so overcome to give advice? Advice is only understood through the mortality of the moment. Kierkegaard was puzzled with time in his journal; one could only live life moving forward and understand it by looking backwards. Trapped in this temporal paradox, we are never able to learn from our experiences to relive the moment. The mortality of the moment banishes the past, never to return. The only way we can relive the moment with the experience that we have learned from it, is vicariously through other’s future experiences. Giving advice allows one to rewrite their own regrets, this urge is almost uncontrollable. Additionally, as we pass through each stage of our life, the mortality of the moment dies, and accordingly who we were in the moment dies, as well. Sharing our experience allows us to pass on to the world what we have learned for the good of others and preventing our experiences from having been suffered in vanity. This is our last chance to rebel against our mortality, in a bid for immortality. Advice is our last chance to rebel against the cold purposeless of the forces of the universe; a universe without design and teleology. Through sharing human experiences we are able to establish a relation to each other, to help each other live lives of purpose.

Of course the challenge for the one who receives the advice is to sift through the others experiences to get what would be helpful in your own life.

Politics

I want to encourage people to vote and have their voice heard regardless of their particular beliefs. Voting is a vital part of democray and a necessry duty to protect our own rights.
That being said, here are some interesting facts about President Bush and his administration, that I made for a friend last week.

Read books to children while we were being attacked on 9/11, started a divisive war because of weapons of mass destruction that were never found, linked Iraq to Al Qaeda which was also unsubstantiated, keeps us in a divisive war that has killed almost as many Americans as 9/11 (with no progress, exit plan, or end in site), Our own government certifies that terrorism is more of a threat now than before his policies, he turned a record surplus into a record deficit, outsourcing, FEMA, Katrina, Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame leak, Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley, Ken Lay, wiretapping, Patriot Act, suspending habeus corpus, disregarded the standards of the Geneva Convention, funding sex ed that says condoms don’t work, ruining our foreign relations with almost every country, and opposed stem cell research.

I’ll leave the reader to make their own conclusion

The White Whale

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
-Moby Dick, Chapter 41

Law School is very demanding. When law school begins we choose to commit significant amounts of time and energy to become a lawyer. The level of competition, the quantity of reading, and the difficulty quickly become apparent. But we affirm our commitment. We reason that, although, challenging the reward of becoming a skilled lawyer with a good job is worth the grueling conditions.

Each week I have noticed that school has become more demanding. People have become more competitive and the difficulty has escalated. Each week people make a decision to commit more time and anguish to compete. They have come this far and might as well go a little farther. Students reason that success will justify the sacrifice. But, one day you wake up and realize that in trying to create this great accomplishment in your life, your sacrifice is destroying the very thing that you are trying to improve, your life.

I am reminded of Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, at one point, was presumably normal and rational. Ahab loses a leg in an encounter with Moby Dick. After losing his leg, he becomes obsessed with the whale. Throughout the tale he turns a commercial whaling ship more and more obsessed with the whale. They go on a hunt for Moby Dick instead of whale oil to sell. In trying to catch the white whale, Ahab eventually gives up everything. In seeking his revenge to make his life better, he in turn makes his life inevitably worse. Ahab eventually sacrifices his life in catching Moby Dick.

We all become Ahab from time to time. We become so engrossed at the task at hand that we lose perspective. Law School can be a large white whale and if we don’t watch out, we can lose perspective. In continuously sacrificing more to reach the goal of law school success, people stop living. They no longer do what is important to them and sacrifice their own values. They replace all their fun with studying. Despite the nobility of the sacrifice, it will ultimately destroy them, just like Ahab. The importance is realizing that the sacrifice is not worth goal. When you look around you will learn that Law School is full of Ahabs and we are often under threat of Ahab’s monomaniacal psychosis ourselves.

So look to your lives and make sure not to lose your guiding values because it is very easy to scream, “Death to the White Whale” and become lost ourselves. We must always be seeking to make our lives better. Certain abilities are out of our range at the time. Accepting our limits is more noble than rejecting our humanity. We can always seek to diligently improve, but giving up our values is never worth catching the white whale. Sacrificing our humanity and morals is never worth any goal.

Aristotle and the Sand

One of the most important aspects of my values is a constant quest of self-improvement. Only through self-improvement can you constantly adapt to become the person who you want to be. Everyone makes mistakes, that’s one of the qualities that makes us human. Our great gift is that we can use these mistakes, to learn and continuously better ourselves. We can take the experience with us to always remind us what we did and how we grew. When we learn from our mistakes and make a change, we are most human. That is why I believe that this process must be continuous.

Recently, a friend disagreed with my philosophy of improvement. He responded by telling a tale of a King that would grant a man anything he would wish, for saving the King’s life. The man had an odd request that baffled the King. The man only asked to put one grain of sand on the King’s table. But, each day the King was to put double amount of sand as the previous day. Although, a seemingly meaningless request at first glance, the sand began to add up. Pretty soon the King wasn’t merely putting a few grains of sand, but instead rooms-full, then countries-full, and then the entire world. The moral of the story is by constantly becoming greater, you could bite off more than you can chew.

Although, a nifty story, I think my friend misinterpreted the meaning. I disagree that one should stop improving out of fear of doing too much. Instead, recall Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Means; a doctrine that strove for the middle ground. A popular misinterpretation of Aristotle is that the mean personality trait is always directly in the middle of the two extremes. What Aristotle meant to say, as far as character goes, is having too much or too little of a particular trait is, generally, a bad thing. The sand is having too much of one trait. Constant improvement is when you have multiple options and you continuously choose the option that allows you to become a better person. One cannot become too good of a person, if they are constantly becoming better at balancing their personal traits. One cannot err by picking the best choice. The quest to improve is the same quest as becoming more human. To place limits on ourselves, is to limit the potential of what we can become. But growth can be malignant like the sand, if one is not careful. Growth must always be balanced by reason and seen through the compassion of our ethics. Our growth must make our lives better, not worse. Although, growth has the potential to do both, it seems foolish and inhuman to stop growth out of the fear of a malignant growth. Our humanity demands the courage to face our challenges and grow.

The Fallow

There is an old concept in farming, which dates back to at least Roman times, of every third season leaving the soil bare of crops. The barren season, called the fallow, would allow the soil to rejuvenate for future growth. Without the fallow, the soil would become less and less productive, until growth would altogether stop.

The reflection needed for self-growth is like the fallow.

Every so often, you need to pull yourself out of your day-to-day routine and account to yourself for the person who you are. This is not to scold yourself for making mistakes, but instead to reflect on them to make sure that you are growing into the person you want to be.

A month and a half ago I moved to a new place for law school. This presented me with a whole array of new challenges: a new subject to learn, large quantities reading, a new routine, finding new places, finding the right social scene and most difficulty making new friends.

I think that I have done a reasonable job in responding to these challenges. I have learned how to budget my time, dodged the heat from professors, and have been meeting a lot of new people. But despite these triumphs I have been deeply troubled and couldn’t exactly understand why.

Over the last weekend, I took a break from studying and did a lot of thinking. I realized that in searching for my identity, I had ironically forgotten who I was and what I stand for. I had learned to study better, but forgot why I value the leisure hours more than study hours. I made many new friends, but for many of them had been motivated by their social prowess rather than their character and desire to have a good time. I was not balancing my values, setting lofty goals, and always improving. I was acting shallow and unlike a humanist philosopher.

This was the source of my trouble and decided that this needs to be corrected.

I share my story as an example of how easy it is to get caught up in law school, or the legal world, or any profession of stress. We become so encapsulated in the importance of mundane details of our daily lives that we forget what matters and who we are. I think it is necessary for a person to be able to pull back and reflect to realize the significance of their activities and why they are doing them.

One of the most important aspects of being human is growing into the person that we want to be. Ironically our ambitions can easily get in the way of our improvement. We need to pay special attention to our lives in such as busy world because it’s easy to get lost. It is necessary that we make sure that we make time to ask ourselves, if what we are doing each day is on the path to our self-improvement. If not then we are being disingenuous and only cheating ourselves out of happiness.

Equal Opportunity

One of the most important values in our society is having equal opportunity under the law. Although, in practical terms, we have yet to reach this goal and probably never will, it is important that we always strive to reach for it. I don’t think this is a Democratic or Republican issue, but an American issue and more importantly an issue necessary to any humane society.

People are born different. This is not only beneficial to our society, but is a vital part of societal growth. Our differences allow us to bring many diverse backgrounds and perspectives into our society. We can take a look at the ideas for ourselves and decide which ideas we find are better than others. But, when we allow differences in birth, to dictate your opportunity, then we aren’t allowing a marketplace of merit, were deciding your chance to succeed at birth. Weather for financial reasons, mental handicap, physical handicap, racial, or any other reason, society should strive to give people equal opportunity to succeed.

This is in no way communistic or socialistic. These terms deal with the redistribution of wealth. Compare opportunity in life to opportunity to win a race. Equal opportunity means having an equal chance to compete in the race. Equal opportunity does not mean taking the rewards of the winners; it means that everyone should get a fair shot at the starting line. The question of how to redistribute wealth of the winners of the race, if at all, is a completely separate issue. A society based on merit means that everyone should have the opportunity to work their hardest and be the most creative that they can. Being on equal footing when the race begins ensures that the race will be based on merit, not on your starting position.

Its terribly naive not to acknowledge that someone growing up in a good area with lots of wealth and connections has the same opportunity as someone who grew up poor in the ghetto. This is not equal footing at the starting line.

If you don’t think that all people should be entitled to the same chances to succeed, then you believe in entitlement.

The very fabric of a democratic rights-based society is designed to eliminate as much entitlement as possible. Entitlement is the belief that birth alone, should dictate the opportunities that a person should have. I openly admit that it is impractical to eliminate all entitlement, but it is a necessary part of improving society to constantly try to decrease entitlement. Our moral conscious depends on a good faith effort.

A claim that entitlement is necessary and impractical to eliminate is simply wrong. We as a society were able to eliminate our feudal caste system, slavery, primogeniture (rights of the firstborn), different rights for property owners, and racial and sexual discrimination. We were able to ensure racial suffrage, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. Indeed our very break from England echoed to the note “that all men are created equal”. All of these causes were at one point considered impractical. But as a society we made a decision that we value the elimination of entitlement more than the status quo. We decided that the status quo isn’t good enough anymore and that we have the capability to do better. Since it is the government’s job to ensure its citizen’s rights and we decided that these rights should include less entitlement, then it is the government’s job to enforce these standards of fairness.

I am not arguing anything besides that equal opportunity is a worthy goal for society to value, regardless of politics. One can be for or against raising taxes, for or against affirmative action and still be staunch supporter of equal opportunity under the law. Your politics deal with the implementation and type of equal opportunity that you believe, not weather you believe in this concept. Society must have an interest in ensuring equal opportunity regardless of income, sex, race, or any other non merit based quality. If fairness means anything, it means one should be able to have a fair chance at the beginning of the race. If you disagree with this goal you believe that birth entitles you to a lifestyle, not your own merits. This strikes me as a particularly unjust and inhumane belief, not worthy of a society that values moral progress.

My General Principle of Ethics

I have always had ethical problems with Immanuel Kant and strict duty-based ethics. I don’t think a strict duty-based ethics is immoral, just not human. Mr. Kant believes that you should always act in accordance with duty. Your most important duty is based on a ranking system of obligations within the categorical imperative. Although, Kantian deontology allows for a duty to be happy and towards self-improvement, these are not ranked highly in the obligation chain. More importantly these are seen as valuable only as they contribute towards your duty.

Always doing your duty is a repulsive concept. As a human we have passions, make mistakes, make jokes, do the wrong thing, and have fun. We do these things not because they are valuable in contributing to something else, but because we value them as part of the human experience, in themselves. The sterility of life being lived only according to duty is inhuman. Being constrained to not generally pursue happiness, but instead having to follow a list of duties, is inhuman. We should get to value happiness as a worthy pursuit in itself.

Kant justifies his ethics of duty in the concept of self-dignity. We do these duties because we have respect for ourselves. I agree with Kant that dignity is an important concept and should be highly valued. We should certainly value the concept of obligation that contributes to dignity. Since we value dignity so highly, in many situations an obligation should overrule our hedonistic tendencies to pursue happiness. But dignity is not our only value. Even if you assume it were the cardinal value, it is precisely because of this self-dignity that we can not always follow duty. Always following duty is not treating yourself with respect. In certain situations there are other worthy ends that should be pursued at the expense of duty.

The best way to look at ethics in my opinion is to avoid making broad principles. Instead one should look at the details of individual situations and evaluate based on our previous experiences. In each individual decision one should evaluate which value or values are of the most importance. In some situations it will be obligation. In other situations it will be happiness, or whatever other values or sub-values is deemed to be most important. Some small detail could change what is most important. Also certain values playing together could over rule a value that would be seen as greater than either part. I would identify this ethic as a situational prima facie value based ethic.

To avoid all the technical jargon, we should make ethical decisions based on our experiences, not on broad principles. We should look at individual cases, look at our past experience, and render judgment based on what values are most important in this particular situation. That seems like the most human way to approach ethics, especially since it allows for improvement and growth of morality.