Meme: Six for sixteen

[Stolen from lutraphile and lyonesse. Small world.]

I love the meme of "Six things I would tell my sixteen-year-old self". It's an awesome idea.

But my sixteen-year-old self wouldn't have listened. He was a brat.

More specifically, he didn't care about understanding how to get along with people, because he didn't care about other people. He had only just noticed that one person could be worth caring about, and had not yet generalized.

And then, some of the other things that he learned the hard way were still good for him not to learn too early. For example: "Higher education isn't for everybody." He knew that school was largely a waste of time (babysitting/busywork), but had not considered that an undergraduate college education is crafted as a continuation of high school. And that it's worse, in that now you're paying them for the privilege of being told what to do. But going to college kick-started a new and better life, in all respects other than education (and romance). So I would certainly not go back and warn myself against it.

No, I think I'd have to advise my self from other times.

I'll make an exception to the social bit for my thirteen-year-old self: "I don't care if it was accidental. Even you now know how insensitive that was to say. Learn to freakin' apologize, just this once."

To my seventeen-year-old self: "You think this is bad? Well, you're absolutely right. But it's a walk in the park compared to shit you'll go through later. Wallowing in misery will only make you more miserable. You have to get out and do stuff. Make yourself happy, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Live life, and eventually you'll remember why it's good."

To my eighteen-year-old self: "Don't part your hair in the middle. Try different conditioners, not that 2-in-1 crap. Ditch the ugly-ass tortoise shell frames. Shower and floss more."

To my nineteen-year-old self: "Learn to distinguish between playful and vicious jokes at your own expense. Your friends are playful. Lighten up."

To my twenty-year-old self: "Someone who cannot be true to herself can never be true to you."

Or later: "Her betrayal hurt her, too. Don't rub it in."

Sheesh, what a sad note to end it on. In general, this is intentionally an upbeat and happy journal, reflecting my intentionally upbeat and happy life. But I don't ignore the past in my life, so I needn't do so in my journal.

Two weaknesses in Utilitarianism's strengths

Disclaimer: I have not yet studied modern thought on Utilitarianism. (Ghandi took back the book he had lent me before I read it.) So this is simply from the perspective of a philosopher, not a philosophologist. For all I know, this has been said before.

Utilitarianism suffers from two weaknesses:

The first is derived from Utilitarianism's greatest strength: It aims directly toward maximizing goodness (or Quality, or whatever you'd like to call it). This is, I think, the secret aim of all other philosophies. Another philosophy might say that "Doing X is the best thing you can do." It makes X the ostensible goal. But it justifies that goal by stating that it is the "best;" i.e., the most good. It unquestioningly implies that whatever action is the most good is what one should do. The proponents of that philosophy may go to great lengths to prove that X is the best action, never noticing that the goal of X, and thus their ultimate goal, has been goodness the whole time.

But in driving right to the heart of the matter, Utilitarianism runs into the same difficulty already known to Buddhism (which also acknowledges goodness directly): The Good cannot be defined. This leaves Utilitarianism in a seemingly awkward position, compared to most western philosophies. Its primary goal appears nebulous, while the others are fixed upon narrow paths whose goals, while definitively incapable of being as worthy as goodness itself, are frequently better defined and thus more comprehensible.

Many Utilitarians circumvent this vagueness by using happiness as a measure of goodness. (That is, the quality of an action can be measured by the happiness it creates or preserves.) This is a generally useful schema, though it does leave them open to attacks (which are weaker than they seem¹) based on the imperfect correlation between goodness and happiness. Rather than bow to this imperfection, John Stuart Mill expanded his definition of "happiness" to include other significant results of good actions, such as intellectual satisfaction, pleasure, and freedom from pain. But he got caught up in the problem of how to decide what is best when there is disagreement, because he still hadn't defined "good". So he fell back upon trust in the opinion of the majority, a method that has since been discredited by U.S. elections. No other easy schema could have sufficed: Any that could, would have provided a simple definition for "good," which we already know to be an NP-hard problem.

The second weakness of Utilitarianism is its lack of guidance. It provides a goal, but no means to achieve that goal. Again, this makes sense, given that goodness itself varies with people's situations (internal and external). Even aside from that, no one lifestyle can maximize goodness for everybody, given that people have differing resources and abilities. Yet, guidance is appealing in a philosophy, and occasionally even useful. It is certainly possible to compile sound philosophical advice, and even to tailor it to the needs of the individual. Such endeavors are Utilitarian simply by being worthy of doing. Yet the advisory content of such compilations seems to lay outside of the scope of Utilitarianism. (On the positive side, this lack of completeness places it ahead of those philosophies and religions whose advice is useless or harmful. An independent Utilitarian is more likely to do good than an organization is.)

Footnote 1. For example, there's the "happiness pill" argument. If we had a cheap pill with no harmful side effects, which caused blissful happiness, would a society of people who spent their entire lives experiencing nothing but this drug-induced happiness be the best thing possible? The questioner knows perfectly well that it is not (even if they are unsure as to why), and hopes to lure the Utilitarian into admitting that a philosophy of happiness could lead to a result far removed from goodness. The simplest response is that such a society is not the best thing possible, on the absurdly simple grounds that it is not "possible" at all. For one thing, such a society is unsustainable; its populace would have its basic needs unmet. (Every counter to this objection that I have heard involves robots.) For another, such constantly euphoric people would never develop an emotional capacity for happiness; they would never move beyond the capacity for raw pleasure.