Moral Sense, Making Corrections, & Virtue as the Highest Goal
Wednesday Wisdoms for June 26, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
Moral Sense
🤨 Quote
“All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”
Adam Smith
Source: Just Babies
Observation 🧐
How do we know what is right and what is wrong? One of the age old questions that sought to answer this was the debate between whether we are born as blank slates or whether we have a preprogrammed sense of morality.
While we have often argued morality is a construct of our societies, it would seem, according to current psychological research, that we are in fact born with an innate sense of morality.
The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has stated that current research shows “There’s a universal moral chord that all humans share, the seeds of our understanding of justice, our understanding of right and wrong, are part of our universal biological nature.”
In experiments with babies, it has shown that as young as three months, babies are more inclined to support, copy, and want what puppets that were acting nice compared to puppets that were not.
As Bloom states, “We are finding in babies what philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment described as a moral sense. This is not the same as an impulse to do good and avoid doing evil. Rather, it is the capacity to make certain types of judgments—to distinguish between good and bad, kindness and cruelty.”
On our quest to make just decisions, decisions about what is right for a given situation, we must remember that decisions of compassion, of a desire to help others, are born from within, and are part of our place within our broader role within society.
We therefore must come to treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated. The experiences we put into the world should be reflective of the ones we wish to receive in return.
🤔 Question
How do you manage to ‘treat others as you wish to be treated’ if the other party is not treating you how you want to be treated?
Making Corrections
🤨 Quote
“A good man delights in being admonished, but the worst people have the hardest time enduring correction.”
Seneca
Source: How to Do the Right Thing
Observation 🧐
A true seeker of wisdom will at times find themselves with diametrically opposing views on the same topic. Perhaps they hold these simultaneously, or maybe they change their opinion from day-to-day or week-to-week.
A seeker of wisdom, however, does not always hold themselves to a standard of “thought entrenchment” that our culture tries to push. A seeker of wisdom instead provides themselves the ability to be flexible with their thoughts, trying out arguments for and against their beliefs, working on pros and cons until they can come to a concensus of what they truly believe.
But today we allow ourselves to be truncated in thought because we will have publicly stated something and don’t want to recant—we’ve got support, or opposition, and we see changing our stance as a loss. Or as opening ourselves up to criticism.
In fact, the only thing that loses in situations like this is our mind. We never have true flexibility to test our ideas in public. But this is what we need, we in fact need others to poke holes in our logic, to provide opposing view points so we can see if and where our beliefs/arguments fail.
Rather than run or hide, we should embrace this type of discourse, it is the only way to truly grow.
🤔 Question
If you were to grant yourself freedom to change your mind, with no repercussions, what would be a thought you shifted opinion on?
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We explore the wisdom of Cicero on virtue and relationships for our final Wednesday Wisdom this week.