I was reading a LifeHacker post on How to (Not) Get Banned from Commenting this morning, when I ran across this section:
Do you ban readers who criticize your posts? Nope. We thrive on constructive criticism. We’re always listening to what you have to say and trying to improve. If you do think something we posted was inaccurate or horrible of us, follow these steps: 1.) Remember that there are real-life, flawed humans behind the words on this site. 2.) Outline, calmly and politely, what you feel the problem is, either in a comment or in an email to tips at lifehacker dot com. We correct inaccuracies the moment we know about them, and we love to hear your opinion, good or bad. However, if your comment is a disrespectful teardown that doesn’t help us learn or make the post better, you’re out.
Completely valid and legitimate — I’ve run a forum myself before, and I made it clear from the beginning that it was run as a benign dictatorship, not a democracy. But something about the “flawed humans” part just rubbed me the wrong way.
The dictionary definition of “flawed” is simply imperfect. That’s fine — “nobody’s perfect” is a truism. But saying that something is flawed, to me, implies that it could have been perfect, and that there are perfect examples out there to compare it to — a flawed diamond, for instance. That generally doesn’t work when applying the term to people. People aren’t perfect, but unless they’re physically or mentally disfigured, they’re not really flawed either.
I’m going to say something heretical: people always do the best they can. Everyone, every time. Not true, you say? Fiddlesticks.
You take a test and get a B. “I could have done better,” you chastise yourself. No you couldn’t. You could have prepared better, but at the time that you took the test, you did the best that you could — unless you deliberately marked some answers wrong, it’s the only thing you could do.
You run a race and come in fourth. “I’ve run faster than that before. I could have done better.” No you couldn’t. Your body may have been capable of running faster, but you are not solely your body — you’re also your brain, your emotional state, your knowledge, your belief systems, how well you’ve eaten and slept recently, and dozens of other factors. They all have different states and cycles, and if any one of them is below optimal, it’s going to affect the entire system.
It’s been said that free will is an illusion. That’s both true and false: you do make choices, and those choices are yours — but could you really have chosen differently, given the circumstances and what you knew at the time? Sure, you can choose whether to have a banana, an orange, or a granola bar in the morning, if all three are readily available. But could you choose to jump over your back fence to beat up a new neighbor who was minding his own business and who you’ve never met before? “Sure I could, if I wanted to,” you think — but you couldn’t want to. Not without some reason, something that seems valid to you at the time, regardless of its actual logic.
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is fond of saying that we humans are simply “moist robots,” programmed by our experiences and genetics. As uncomfortable as it may be for some people to contemplate, there’s a lot of truth to that statement.
I prefer to think that people have free will. Perhaps, as the physicist Penrose suggests in one of his books, it’s because of quantum mechanics that we have free will. I think there is a reality behind such a persistent belief as free will.
I don’t think you really understood what I said. Sure, you do have free will — but only to a point. You won’t choose to do something unless there’s a good reason, or at least no reason to avoid it. And you can’t make a choice that you don’t know exists.
Freedom means independence. How independent of your genetics (i.e. your physical wants and needs) and experiences (including your beliefs and your knowledge) can your will really be?
Free will means the ability to choose, nobody says that you can make decisions in a complete vaccum. Besides, you just said humans shouldn’t be described as flawed, but now you say that they have biases. I think you’re contradicting yourself. “Best it can” and “has no flaws” seem to me to be unrelated, because “best it can” just means “performing the best it can, minus flaws that stand in the way of it doing what the goal is”. This “could have done better” underlines that there are flaws inherent in the process, to claim the opposite seems to be a semantic mistake in your argument.
Also, to address another, more central point of the argument, the claim that “if something is flawed, that implies that something also exists that is perfect, else there’s no such thing as being flawed” is a mirror-image variation, albeit the first one I’ve seen of its kind, on the ontological argument falacy. St. John of Ansalm posited the Ontological Argument for divine existence “If we can concieve of things not greater than we can concieve, there must be something greater than we can concieve.” The first arguement against this, more relevant to our discussion, was: “If there is an imperfect island, we must be able to conceive of a perfect island, and if we can conceive of a perfect island, therefore one must exist.” Now, this is absurd to say that just because we see flawed items, we must be able to say that that perfect items exist, yes? The reverse is also true, there is no connection between the existence of perfect items, and flawed items. Q.E.D.
To address “could have done better”, we should add the qualification, “if”. “I could have done better if such and such were the case”. I don’t think one can argue against that. Now, this is a pretty futile “monday morning quarterback” thing to do I agree. However, I think I’ve already demonstrated above that this doesn’t have a real connection with there being no such thing as a flawed human.
‘Fraid you completely missed my point.
The only point I seem to have not to addressed is “people always do the best they can”. Let’s say I think a) is the best thing to do, then latter discover it was b) that was the best thing I could do. Did I do the best thing?
Yes — you did the best thing that you knew of at the time. If later information shows that it wasn’t the best thing, there’s no point in flogging yourself over it, because you didn’t know that at the time.
But again, you’ve completely missed my point, and I see no way to make it clear to you, so I don’t see any reason to continue this thread.