Life is full of surprises, even willpower and discipline can come from the least expected frontiers. I had avoided smart phones like plague for years with great success while trying very very hard to make meditation a daily habit with no luck. Early this year, I had to take the leap (for work) and bought that dreaded smart phone (and loving it).
Thanks to Ben, I downloaded the meditation app Insight Timer last week and for the first time ever, I have been meditating everyday since then. It's only 15 minutes a day but the app has enforced a discipline now. I don't have a precise answer on how this app is helping me but I am glad to stay perplexed as long as this habit is implanted. It's paradoxical that the gadget blamed as the paragon of distraction is helping me focus.
There was an another insight from Katja Grace this week:
I would like to think I wouldn’t have been friends with slave owners, anti-semites or wife-beaters, but then again most of my friends couldn’t give a damn about the suffering of animals, so I guess I would have been.
- Robert Wiblin
People here and now are no different in these regards, as far as I can tell. We may think we have better social norms, but the average person has little more reason to believe this than the average person five hundred years ago did. People are perhaps freer here and now to follow their own hearts on many moral issues, but that can’t make much difference to issues where the problem is that people’s hearts don’t automatically register a problem. So even if you aren’t a slave-owner, I claim you are probably using a similar decision procedure to that which would lead you to be one in different circumstances.
Are these really bad ways for most people to behave? Or are they pretty good heuristics for non-ethicists? It would be a huge amount of work for everyone to independently figure out for themselves the answer to every ethical question. What heuristics should people use?
Thanks to Ben, I downloaded the meditation app Insight Timer last week and for the first time ever, I have been meditating everyday since then. It's only 15 minutes a day but the app has enforced a discipline now. I don't have a precise answer on how this app is helping me but I am glad to stay perplexed as long as this habit is implanted. It's paradoxical that the gadget blamed as the paragon of distraction is helping me focus.
There was an another insight from Katja Grace this week:
I would like to think I wouldn’t have been friends with slave owners, anti-semites or wife-beaters, but then again most of my friends couldn’t give a damn about the suffering of animals, so I guess I would have been.
- Robert Wiblin
People here and now are no different in these regards, as far as I can tell. We may think we have better social norms, but the average person has little more reason to believe this than the average person five hundred years ago did. People are perhaps freer here and now to follow their own hearts on many moral issues, but that can’t make much difference to issues where the problem is that people’s hearts don’t automatically register a problem. So even if you aren’t a slave-owner, I claim you are probably using a similar decision procedure to that which would lead you to be one in different circumstances.
Are these really bad ways for most people to behave? Or are they pretty good heuristics for non-ethicists? It would be a huge amount of work for everyone to independently figure out for themselves the answer to every ethical question. What heuristics should people use?
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