210811 What I learned in my studies this morning

Duty and virtue,

A river flowing, pushing.

I must swim with it.

Daily Stoic:

I have a penchant for theory. My personality, mental structure, and formal training all incline me to abstract thought and contemplation.  I'd love it if being a virtuous person were thought-based and never needed include action.  Easy peasy.

Alas, it is not to be.  As James said, "Faith without works is a dead." (2:17)

My duty is to be a positive, virtuous influence in the world.  To do good things, not just think good things.  If I only believe the right things, and understand the right things, I make no difference.

Given my natural inclinations, making sure I participate in moral action is difficult for me.  Sometimes I don't even realize that I am woolgathering and failing to act.  I find myself overlooking opportunities right in front of me.

Also, to do the right things takes courage.  (There's a reason it's a Stoic cardinal virtue.)  Even when I realize what needs be done, sometimes I am too cowardly and refrain from acting despite knowledge and opportunity.

That is my challenge then: find the insight, and courage, I need to be a better influence for good in the world.

Today's Meditation:

From Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, Letter XLVII:

In this letter, Seneca's lesson for Lucilius is twofold:

1. Slaves are humans just like the rest of us

2. Do not worry about the opinions of others.

Though we would go further and say slavery is, by its very nature, abhorrent, we can still look past ancient moral failings and see what we can learn form the lessons.

Too often, we dehumanize others.  In this case, through slavery.  To think however, that because we are enlightened unlike these backwards primitives . . . oh . . . wait . . . did I just dehumanize the ancient Greeks in my attempt to show that we modern saints don't dehumanize people?

We strip people of their humanity and agency on a daily basis.  Maybe it's treating a fast food employee, waiter, or retail worker shabbily.  Maybe it's believing, truly believing, that The Other Guys™ (in political terms) are stupid or evil.  Or maybe it's something as simple as not even recognizing that the person we are interacting with is a living human and treating them as a cog in the machine we need or a tool we can use to accomplish something.

One formula of Kant's Categorical Imperative is apropos here: treat others as ends in themselves and not just means. “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end and never as only a means.”

It's hard to always treat people with dignity and respect.  It's hard to always remember that this should be our goal.  It's easy to forget and to fall back into bad habits; even if we successfully learn this lesson, a momentary lapse is all it takes to begin using others to further our ends rather than treating them as ends, themselves.

But we still need to try.

We'll cover the second lesson tomorrow.