Well, maybe another word would be better. Maybe 'optimal'.
Yesterday I wrote in defense of, essentially, preference engineering. It claimed that preferences and dispreferences are not immune to ethical evaluation and criticism. The jist of the argument was that there is no reason to think that what one prefers and disprefers are irrelevant to how well one's life is lived, that having strong dispreferences was, in many cases, anathema to a well-lived life. Even though some preferences are bad, and some dispreferences good, in general I think that there is a strong asymmetry. The more open one is to possible experience, the better one's life goes, and the fewer things one is actively disprefering, the more open one is to possible experience.
But yesterday i titled my post 'Perfect Preferences' or something to that effect. And I tagged the post 'Becoming Perfect'. Am I just being overblown in my speech? Well, not really. I think that ethics, taken seriously, is the quest to become perfect. And part of what can get in one's way of being perfect is if one feels enslavened to their preferences, preferences over which they have not (and probably think that they could not have) exercised rational control.
Now, of course, becoming perfect is not an achievable goal. Nor is acting (or knowing that you are acting) out of respect for the moral law an achievable goal in Kantian ethics. Nor is maximizing utility an achievable goal in Utilitarian ethics. Nor will any Christian tell you that you could actually be like Christ. But I do insist that the gold standard against which one's ethical choices should be measured is the ideal of becoming perfect.
No, I don't know what that means. But I find the maxim a surprisingly successful guide (I also don't find myself worrying about whether or not I have any grip on what success would be). I feel (possibly quite incorrectly) that I know which of my available actions is the most perfect one, or the one most conducive to perfection. The perfect person has broad and penetrating knowledge and appreciation for ways of life and living, and doesn't give up opportunities to broaden and deepen that knowledge. The perfect person is always a pleasure to be around and to spend time with. Being acquainted with the perfect person is always edifying.
However, here i come across a paradox: often we're not keen to spend time around perfect people. They quite bore us, or annoy us, or make us feel inadequate. Is this a counterexample? No, because any situation that appears this way to us is being misdescribed. Making the people around you feel bored or annoyed or inadequate is quite decisively an imperfection. So any 'perfection' that has such an effect is necessarily missing the mark. The perfect person, and here is the paradox, must make mistakes. They must be, so to speak, fallibile enough that they don't fail to fulfill their role (an essential role in the pursuit of perfection) as a postive presence in the lives of those around you. So sometimes instead of perfect (which seems analytically to rule out fallibility) I say optimal. Perhaps that's not satisfying either. Use whatever word you like...I'm interested in an inquiry, the end of which is being as skilled at being a person as possible. Just as being a skilled cook requires a great many different skills and an ability to negotiate between them, so being a skilled person requires being good at many different things and being able to exercise such different skills in a way that issues in coherent, optimal, personhood.
No, I don't expect this to convince you. But this manner of thinking is the method that i adopt when i think about what one ought to do. I don't know the source of my judgments about perfection; I don't know when they are self-validating or self-justifying. I don't think they usually are because this methodology quite regularly results in pretty massive self revision, an unexpected result if I was systematically becoming convinced that everything about me was already perfect. But I do worry about when i'm judging some feature of persons to be a component in perfection simply because its a feature I already possess. It would also be surprising if this were the hidden methodology behind my judgments, since i'm so vividly convinced of the gross distance between where i'm currently at and the ideal towards which I strive.
This thought process, the "what choice/action/belief is most conducive to perfection" is not rigorous or reliable. It's just how I think. And it's how I'll be thinking out loud (so to speak) in future blogging here. i'm interested in implicit normative commitments in every day judgments, how solid they are if generalized and regarded as a component of the perfect person, and i'm interested in what contribution very specific activities can make to the perfection of a life well lived.
All that this methodology will have to recommend itself is the persuasiveness and coherence of the thinking in which it results. So i'll leave off the metadiscourse now, while you're already (surely) convinced of my pompousness and/or deludedness, and I'll leave future writings to show what fruits (if any) this way of thinking might bear.
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