Odds and Ends

Unfortunately for my desire to get out and into Boston more, rain has persisted the past few days. In fact today was the first sunny day all week, so of course I spent it in an office and then going jogging instead of getting out and really enjoying it. Alas and alack.

So that said, I haven’t got much to post. I moved into the studio I’ll be using for the last 2/3 of my stay in Cambridge, and I’ve got some pictures of it. The room is fairly large and the futon is fairly comfortable, making my only complaint the lack of an air conditioner.






As for work, I’m finally spending most of my time doing things other than data collection; I’m getting to do actual statistics (read: economics, as that’s what it’s turning into). That makes me feel both better for my employers for getting value for what they’ve employed and better for myself as it makes it more likely something worthwhile will come out of my stay (such as perhaps another paper on which to put my name? We’ll see…).

So with nothing much to say I decided to post something I wrote 2 years ago and just found again. I heard again a song from a few years ago about putting yourself in another person’s shoes and decided I had just heard that phrase once too often. My personal diatribe against is as follows.

One of the great equalizers in moral arguments is that it is impossible to understand another's decisions unless we walk a mile in their shoes. As generally seems to be the case in such arguments, this platitude is used especially to excuse the morally questionable decisions that another person makes. The reasoning behind this platitude is that if we found ourselves in the same situation as the person in question, then we would have at least considered as a possible course of action the very thing we are decrying as immoral.

The problem with this argument is that we are always asked to walk the mile that has them in this trouble, in the precarious position; more often than not, could we choose a mile to walk in the person's life, we would choose to start before they got themselves into the trouble most likely by another action we question. And this is the argument's flaw—it asks us to grant as a hypothetical premise that we failed to follow our code of morality, and then asks us whether we could deny that breaking our code of morality is a reasonable option.

The argument is supposed to show that morality is non-absolute, that in certain circumstances even the strongest adherent to a moral code can admit it (unfairly, to the arguer's eye) restricts our choices. What it actually shows is that we will be much less limited in the future if we only bind ourselves now to our moral code. Asking, for instance, if a girl should be allowed an abortion because she got herself pregnant and having the baby would ruin her life can be circumvented entirely if we teach her to follow a morality in which sex comes after she is in a position to care for the potential child. Asking if I should harm someone to help me escape after I rob a store can be circumvented entirely if I am taught to follow a morality in which I do not rob stores.

Chesterton spoke of moral codes as a set of walls, as did many of his contemporaries. But where they referred to the confining walls of a suffocating moral code, he recognized them as the invigorating walls of a liberating moral code. We are children playing on a cliff-top, he said, and we build walls that we may relieve our fear of falling. Liberate us from these walls, then, and you risk liberating us from our freedom. For the walls shelter and protect us, defining a place where we might with furious passion live our lives to the fullest. But if the walls are removed, so too is the furious passion. We become, instead of children playing lightheartedly in our place of safety, a huddled mass edging back from the cliffs afraid that we might fall.

In this modern time we hear grand and glorious, perhaps vainglorious, exaltations of liberty and freedom, and the speakers of these statements entreat us to move to unbridled liberty, the cure-all, the elixir of life, the silver bullet of their philosophy. But this freedom of action is bound by the necessity of feeling the consequences of these actions. These consequences can be avoided very simply by avoiding the actions that cause them. The morality decried as restrictive and primitive by these champions of liberty does indeed limit what we may do; but by limiting what I may do I free myself of what I must feel.