Felicity, please skip this one, as I am going to discuss what we were arguing over Friday night and I don’t want it to turn into a whole thing all over again.
In fact, I am kind of ashamed of how long I did argue about it with you. Anyhow.
The basic idea, and the crux of disagreement involves a very specific and tricky piece of moral reasoning. The issue in question is whether or not the right person with the right motive and the right intentions deserves to succeed at what they attempt even if they are using the wrong method.
Felicity says yes, and I say no. Sort of. It’s complicated.
To my feverishly pragmatic mind, I can’t imagine caring one way or another about it. To me, the person using the wrong method does not deserve success in their attempt. I don’t think meaning well matters when it comes to successfully getting something done. The world works a certain way, and your method either works according to those existing facts or it doesn’t. Period.
In fact, it would be unfair, in my books, to hand success to someone who means well but did not take pragmatic concerns into account. It would be like giving a kid an A on a test that all the other students studied really hard for just because the kid meant well.
In short, to me, success going to the person with the right method is perfectly fair, down to the mathematical level.
Otherwise, I would have to find it somehow unjust that a nice person with a good heart and pure intentions is not succeeding at giving money to a homeless person because their method for doing so is to staple their dick to the wall.
But that’s where things get tricky, because I am not at all sure whether it’s that I don’t think a good person failing due to a bad method is unfair, or that I simply do not care. By that I mean, to me, it may or may not be fair or unfair, but the bottom line is that I don’t consider the question to be worth pursuing. If it’s unfair, it’s a form of unfairness so abstract and obscure as to be worse than useless as a factor in moral reasoning.
And I am too dedicated to the humanist endeavour to waste time on petty academic distinctions when there is so much that needs to be done to help humanity live healthy, strong, and free lives where everyone’s concerns are taken into account and we all strive to make life saner, smarter, softer, fairer, and happier for all of humanity.
That is my cause and my morality. In the service of this cause, I consider it to be my duty to avoid anything that will distract or sidetrack me away from the mission into irrelevancies. The project, as it were, is far too important to me to risk losing sight of the goal because I wasted my time on earth on meaningless bullshit.
In fact, I think a lot of the problems of the world are either caused or allowed to thrive precisely because people with the best of intentions and hearts as pure and strong as a mountain stream nevertheless refuse to do the absolute basic first step in solving a problem : knowing and accepting the truth of how things are right now.
That does not mean accepting that you cannot change things. This isn’t that old “that’s just the way it is” bullshit. Bruce Hornsby and the Range put that crap to bed in the 80’s.
No, all I am saying is that if you don’t know where you are, you can’t ever get where you want to go. So the first duty of anyone who is true to their ideals, no matter what those ideals are, is to take as clear and unfiltered look at reality they can.
Once you have as clear a picture of how things stand as possible, taking how you want them to be out of the equation, you can then move on to thinking of how you want them to be and what steps are needed in order to move things closer to how you feel they should be.
But in this step, too, you must remove all irrelevancies from your thinking and focus on results. To my mind, if you do not do this, you are not truly dedicated to your ideal because you are putting your own personal issues ahead of them. All that matters is making the world a better place, and that means results. Not rhetoric, not bullshit theories that sound grand but mean nothing, not sitting around morally masturbating one another about what great people we are, not preening oneself for maximum social dominance amongst our more-PC-than-thou peer group, not being more concerned with being seen to be middle class than to help those you say you are trying to help, not patronizing attempts to help people that treat them like idiots and assume they should be grateful for the help their are getting from people who are quite obviously superior to them and who should be heaper with praise for even being willing to go near them… none of that crap.
You do whatever to truly believe has the best odds of succeeding based on an objective, cautious, thorough analysis of the situation as it is right now.
Everything else is petty stupid bullshit and a betrayal of what you claim to believe.
So I have no problem saying I do not care who “deserves” to succeed. It is utterly irrelevant and can only distract from the aims of our ideals. I would never say intentions don’t count for anything – an impractical person with good intentions is still a good person.
But I don’t feel bad for those who do not succeed when they are using the wrong method. I’m sorry they are going to feel bad about it, but that will give them the incentive to learn, adapt, and try again until they get it right.
To me, that is perfectly fair. And I know that makes me seem cold and inhuman to some. But it is the only moral path as I see it. And the only way to stay focused on the end goal.
A happier, healthier, more actualized life for human beings.
That’s worth whatever sacrifice I need to make in order to get there.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.