To Know the Reason Why
We human beings often choose to act simply because we cannot immediately think of a reason not to. Yet thoughtlessness is not clarity, and the absence of a ‘No’ is not the presence of ethical permissibility. Acting without a reason is not the same as acting for a good reason. Let us challenge ourselves to act with good reason.
To live lives worthy of our own respect, we must choose actions whose purposes we can identify and incorporate intentionally into the fabric of our being. Clarity begins with asking ourselves why we are choosing what we are.
Fortuitous that we all intuitively understand the obvious: our repeated behavior shapes the sort of person we become.* If you do kind things for your family and friends or for people on the internet, you become — through doing those kind things — a kinder person. If you invest the effort to think about how others feel, you become — through that thinking — more empathetic. If you practice giving to others, you become a more generous person. Each time we do kind, empathetic and generous things, kind and generous things become easier for us to do. This is ancient insight: character is not merely possessed, it is practiced into existence.*
Obviously the opposite is also true. Each time you do things misaligned with what you believe in, the more natural it becomes for you to do those things yet again. Do them repeatedly and we become unrecognizable for our previous characters. We become the sort of person who does those horrible sorts of things. Habituation builds virtue and vice with similar efficiency.
If this is how we are formed, then anything that shapes our patterns of action shapes us.
This is where our modern context matters. Mindless choices that we would not endorse upon our reflection are commonplace. One could argue that mindless choices have grown dramatically more common — even among the most thoughtful people — since the proliferation of individualized media intentionally designed to hypnotize our animal brain. If habituation builds our characters, then technologies that bypass reflection inevitably influence who we are becoming. It is urgent to recognize and reject this drift.
The hypnotizing, brain-numbing, high-dopamine-inducing sights and sounds we are subject to daily — willingly or unwillingly — and even the confident advice-giving of our beloved personalized LLMs do not release us from the responsibility of thinking for ourselves. Nothing does, ethically speaking — but they do make many people feel satiated or justified long enough to behave in a way inconsistent with what they profess to believe. Our environment can help explain our behavior, but we remain answerable for the character we create with each choice we make.
So let us begin with reasons. Ask of our actions: what good is this serving? Does this align with the person I am choosing to become?
A life without cognitive dissonance is not accidental. It is authored.
When we fail to invest the temporal, cognitive and emotional effort to decide on our actions and do them for the sake of what is good, we lower not only our own standards for the way in which we decide our actions, but also our standards for the person we actively become.
Let us, then, live intentionally. Take ownership of what you choose, of the character you cultivate, and of the harmony between what you care about and your actions. Everyday happiness is possible when our reasons, our choices, and our identity agree with one another.
(*) Nicomachean Ethics Book Γ Chapters 1–5 lines 1110aff.
