Posted: Oct 18, 2015 3:56 am
igorfrankensteen wrote:I clearly didn't describe things well enough there.
The fact that something pleases me, is NOT what makes it a principle. The fact that I adhere to it whether I am pleased about it or not, is what makes it so. You have backwards, what I was stumblingly trying to say.
So your accusation is false, or at least a misrepresentation of how "pleased with yourself" means a very different thing to me, than it does to unprincipled people. I have made adjustments to how I described my principles, when I have discovered that my description of them was inaccurate relative to what I actually believed. I have never set them aside for the sake of personal gratification, or denied them temporarily, or made up excuses for why it's okay to ignore them.
It is perhaps a subtle distinction, which I know that a lot of people willfully refuse to make. Especially if they want to excuse their own failure to follow their own claimed principles. But it is a very real distinction, nevertheless.
You said in post 12 above that your principles "have absolutely nothing to do with how anyone else conducts their lives", but in this post you seem to be judging other people on how they manage their principles?
It does seem to me that principles are essentially social, a part of the way we've evolved to operate in effective groups. I suspect that everybody making up their own principles is rather like everybody making up their own language, it defeats the point of the exercise. The problem as I see it is that we've evolved to be most comfortable thinking of principles as having an independent existence, which science has shown fairly conclusively they don't, so we flounder when trying to argue what principles a group should impose on its members. About the only starting point is that we have to cooperate or die, which these days means global cooperation. I also suspect that humans have been arguing about principles since language evolved, there's always been ongoing tension between individual or sub-group competitiveness and the need to set it aside for group cohesion.
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