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The Good Life

Balance vs. Integration
by Joseph Rowlands

Years ago I attended an Objectivist meeting where the participants discussed short-term vs. long-term interests.  What struck me at the time was that neither standard made sense as a complete moral standard.  The participants were quick to identify some of the problems.  If you picked your "short-term" interests, you would become hedonistic and irresponsible, and unable to plan for the future.  If you picked your "long-term" interests, you would live your life in a constant state of denial, always living to improve your future, but never being able to enjoy the benefits you've accrued.  Another way to phrase it is "quality vs. quantity".

The problem here is that neither standard works on its own.  If you try to pursue either one, you doom yourself to either a short life, or a long and painful one.  And yet you need some kind of moral standard to help you evaluate you choices in life.  You need to have elements of both.

There are two "solutions" to this kind of problem.  The first is what the participants gravitated towards.  It's a system of balancing the two independent standards.  You can choose to do some of each.  You can still work towards long term goals, while taking some time to enjoy yourself in the presence.  You can do some of each, and try to avoid making one contradict the other.  In other words, you wouldn't sacrifice your long term interests for a quick benefit, and you wouldn't make your present life miserable for the sake of some future gain.

This method has a major flaw.  While you may try to find a "balance" between the two different goals, there is no rational method identified for determining how to find that balance.  Since the two standards aim at different kinds of goals, how do you go about measuring the relative importance of the opposing goals?  The point of a moral standard is to be able to compare your choices.  How do you compare two choices that are measured by fundamentally different means?  You can't.  What you're left with is choosing based on what you feel is more important.  In other words, you're using your emotions to decide.  The hope, then, is that your emotions are more rational than you are.  That's not going to work out very well.

I said there was a second solution to the problem.  And this one is real.  Instead of looking to find a balance between the two standards, you can identify a third standard that successfully integrates the first two.  Without going into too many details (which I discussed in my SOLOC2 speech "Time and Value"), the solution is to have a more integrated view of your life.  Instead of seeing it as the current state, or some future state, you can view it as a progression and as a process.  This works to integrate your short and long term interests into a goal-directed process that is its own reward.

While I've focused on this one example, there are frequent examples of people upholding two incompatible standards and trying to seek a balance towards them.  In a recent conversation I had, a friend suggested that parents should live primarily for their children.  He also said that of course, they need to live for themselves as well.  His solution is that the parents have to find the right balance for themselves.  I mentioned that one of the reasons why the line between these shifts so much over the generations (with many of the current generation putting more emphasis on the children and willing to sacrifice themselves in the process) is there was no rational method of choosing between these two, or at least none that was identified.  Instead, people go with what they feel is the right trade-off.  That feeling comes from their own experience, but also from society's expectations, their religious or philosophical convictions, etc.  As expectations shift, so does the line.  It doesn't mean any of it is rational.

This isn't to say that there cannot be a rational method of choosing.  One possible method is the idea of integrating your child's life into your own life and values.  This successfully provides a framework where your life and your child's are not in opposition, and you can make rational trade-offs between the two.  But the existence of a solution is not the same as identifying and putting that system into practice.  While the parent believes his or her life is in conflict with their child's, and so sacrifice is necessary for one or both of them, they'll always be stuck feeling their way to the right solution, combining their decisions with guilt when they don't sacrifice, and resentful when they do.

One important point to mention is that it's possible that for these kinds of problems, a person has implicitly grasped the unifying standard, which is why they're able to make some semblance of a rational choice.  In the short-term and long-term interests, it's clear that the participants were able to recognize the benefits of both, and could probably make rational choices in extreme situations.  But without drastic costs leading them away from bad choices, they'll have very little guidance of the relative importance of either.  Only an explicit rational standard can provide that kind of guidance.

Let me also be clear that I'm not suggesting that trade-offs are impossible.  As an engineer, I constantly have to make trade-offs between simplicity, power reduction, performance, etc.  These may seem like incompatible standards, but they're not.  They're just aspects of the overall product.  When we make these kinds of trade-offs, we do so with reference to what we think will maximize our business profits.  The important point here is that the "balancing" going on here isn't a balancing between two standards, but it in fact a selection based on a single unifying standard, in this case overall profits.

One area where this kind of "balancing" problem comes up is when people try to overcome a false dichotomy.  For instance, Objectivists understand that there is no mind-body dichotomy.  Both our minds and our bodies our important.  A successful life attempts to integrate the use of the two.  But what if someone tries to overcome this dichotomy by choosing to find a balance?  Maybe they'll exercise a lot or have meaningless sex, and at other times they'll have lofty ideals and abstract ideas.  Instead of using the two together to successfully improve his life, he may use both on occasion in an unrelated way.

There are plenty of other ways people can and do overcome false dichotomies by practicing both halves.  They may accept that both deduction and induction are proper ways of gaining knowledge, and put it into practice by ignoring degrees sometimes, and ignoring logic at other times.  Or they may reject a dichotomy between reason and passion by normally being reasonable but occasionally letting their passions take control.  Or they'll balance idealism with pragmatism, occasionally sticking to principles despite the cost, and other times abandoning principles in order to get the job done.

If we're going to uphold rationality, we need to reject these "balanced" approaches.  They don't work, and they force emotions to be your primary means of making decisions.  And worse, the emotions are not the products of any rational standard.  Instead, the emphasis should be on proper integration.  These dichotomies can only be resolved by finding a unifying standard that includes the best parts of both, but without the negatives.

So next time someone talks about finding a balance between two approaches, take a look to see if they have an integrated standard in mind, or whether they intend to "feel their way" to a decision.
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