Still, better than being a pig.
October 19th, 2007The last assignment for semester two of year two of uni is in. Two weeks of hard core study to come before the end of semester exams. I didn’t bother putting up the results for last semester’s assessment at the time, all the joy appears to have come out of it. High marks are no longer something to get excited about, they are now the what needs to be achieved in order to keep me from spiralling into a bitter darkness.
Anyway here they are, last semester was 1008PSY and 2000PSY, or Interpersonal Skills and Research Methods and Statistics 2. The course marks were both 7’s leaving me with a GPA of 6.75 for anyone who may have a vested interest in the fact (Mum? Dad?). Something tells me the results will not be so lofty this semester. But then I always stay that. Honestly though, I think that this time will be a bit nasty (I always say that too).
I never considered myself to be intelligent academically, or in any way particularly, despite my well rounded arrogance. According to my GPA though, I am in fact intelligent, which was quite exciting at first. However, intelligence is quite meaningless it would seem, and like money, having lots of it doesn’t actually make one any happier, sometimes I think it makes me more miserable. I am also aware that GPA is not necessarily a good measure of intelligence, but for now it will suffice.
I’ve been reading an interesting book, Right and Wrong: A brief guide to understanding ethics (White, 1998) it has one quote that I love and have to put up, despite the fact that it is completely irrelevant to my current dialogue:
Sincerity is a wonderful human virtue, but it has absolutely nothing to do with being right.
(White, 1998 p. 11)
What is relevant is an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s work. Mill refined Jeremy Bentham’s teleological (which means consequence focused) approach to ethics which asserted that something is ethical if it increases human pleasure. It gets a bit more complicated, but the basic premise is that an action that causes the most pleasure for the most people for the longest period of time and is not negated by adverse consequences is the most ethical choice.
There are some pretty obvious problems here, but that’s a different discussion. What Mills observed is that some pleasure is more important than others, of a higher quality, and a small amount of gourmet pleasure is unmatchable by large quantities of more base pleasure. An example perhaps. You want to go out for dinner with friends, you could take 20 of them out for a pub feed or 4 of them to the local 5 star. In the first instance more people will get drunk, eat and socialise and have fun. But in the second case apart from the better quality food, you’ll also get to have real conversations with people you find interesting and respect. In the first case, even if you did actually have 20 really true friends, you’re not going to be able to devote much time to them. The pub meal will produce pleasure for more people, but the second produces a much higher quality of pleasure. So Mills refined the theory to allow for this.
If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.
Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.
Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness- that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior- confounds the two very different ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
(Mill, 1963 chap. 1)
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Whilst more of the worlds flaws are perceived by me, so am I more aware of the depth of it’s pleasures. And thus, I feel a little better about feeling isolated miserable and lonely most of the time.
Mill, J. S., (1863). Utilitarianism. London, England:
Whyte, I. T.,(1988). Right and wrong: A brief guide to understanding ethics. New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall