Should people set a higher standard for others than they were able to have for themselves?
Parents always try to raise their kids without the burdens they grew up with and generally try to curb their dishonesty and explicitives even if they don't quite do the same. And if a parent smoked a kid might argue that if their parent did it than why should they feel compelled not to even though it's clearly not a good decision in general?
Same with politicians running on morals despite their own indiscretions.
Same with employers setting high productivity standards even though they themselves can't realistically do it.
Do people lose track of what's reasonable when they seek to make those they might consider below them better?
Same with politicians running on morals despite their own indiscretions.
Same with employers setting high productivity standards even though they themselves can't realistically do it.
Do people lose track of what's reasonable when they seek to make those they might consider below them better?
Comments (17)
Politicians are in no position to set moral standards. They can make speeches and pass legislation, but they can't be your conscience.
Quoting TiredThinker
No, that's different. It's not about morality or behaviour; it's about profit. Employers can demand more work for less pay, or more hours for the same pay. In a market where unemployment is high and illegal immigrants can be recruited as slave labour, they can get away with that. In a society where trade unions have teeth and workers have pride, they can't.
Quoting TiredThinker
Rulers and bosses don't try to make anyone better; they try to make people behave the way that serves them best.
Which is nothing like parents wanting to instill the values of their society in their children. They're imperfect themselves; they know quite well that the kids will also be imperfect. But they hope enough of the indoctrination sticks to keep those kids out of jail and crippling bar fights.
You must first ask yourself what it is the parent wants out of the child by procreating them in the first place? If it is to instill values so that they are carried out by someone else, what is that? Seems unnecessary except as a social experiment: "What would it look like to instill X into someone"? Sounds like a strange social experiment to play on someone else's behalf! And we call that kind of thinking just "Plain ole traditional wantin' rootin and tootin' procreate and raise a family!". But it is never questioned. Question that desire of the parent first, before anything else. It all lies there as to what and why we are wanting other people born to get out of life. There is a cruelness to the scheme (You're it! Pass it On! :scream:)
Lots of people have kids without having thought it out. Just seems to be the natural thing to do. (It is.) Many couples want a baby as a testament to their love - something wonderful they create together. Some people just want a kind of immortality. Some want "someone who belongs to me"; someone to love and cherish. Some have a kid or more foisted on them by an insistent partner eager to replicate. Some do it as a duty to the nation and their forebears.
None of these motives determine the ethical upbringing of the resultant progeny.
Here's one that might: The child was begotten as a pledge to the Church, in return for some divine favour, and is raised for the priesthood or cloister. Not so common these days....
My point was that the very act of "upbringing" is a sort of ethic itself. No one existed beforehand to need to be brought up. Wants and desires lead to consequences for OTHERS. The birthrate is declining (luckily), not necessarily because people don't want to "force" lives unto others, but perhaps there is some of this couched in terms of "economics" (no resources to properly raise a child), and climate change (they don't want to bring another person who will suffer from or contribute to it). But perhaps it will finally just be because it is wrong to force others to simply "go through it", when it doesn't need to happen in the first place! That is, they don't want to force the various negatives of life unto another (moral reason, not lifestyle, or lack of resources).
That is to also say that, "bring up" a child is a (de facto) political act. One is to say, YOU deem that a child NEEDS to be brought up into this world. Somehow this is waved away as "natural" even though humans are not purely instinctual like other animals, and can deliberate on most things, including raising children in this world.
This reminds me of Aristophanes The Clouds where after attending Socrates "thinkery" a son argues with his father, who sent him there in order to learn how to argue his way out of his father's having to pay his gambling debts, that if it is right for a father to beat his son then it is right for a son to beat his father. The father's response is to burn the thinkery down.
In this example I would question infinitum, the circular thinking in why a person needs to be taught to not smoke in the first place, taking the example from the OP. Why do people need to go through the rigamarole at all? You only need to teach the next generation if you think there needs to be a next generation to be taught. This of course isn't a given. You choose to have the next generation, so you cannot just say, "Because it happens". It is not the photosynthesis, or gravity we are discussing, but decisions, and values, and wants and "wanting to see a certain outcome". It is that outcome I am questioning.
You can choose not to procreate but there are others who will not make that same choice.
Aristophanes was a comic poets making serious social commentary. No doubt the play drew a great deal of laughter from the audience. In terms of teaching by example the son learned his lesson well. One thing the audience is left to consider is what it might mean to honor your father when your father is not honorable. On a larger scale what is at issue is the problem of the ancestral.
Fine. But it doesn't answer the OP question.
If you don't raise kids, you have no values to impart.
If you don't generate offspring but bring some up that were generated by other people, you do have to set standards of behaviour for them. For a parent, that's unavoidable. And to some extent, the standards are pre-set by the society in which they live, because nobody wants to nurture a child until puberty, just to watch them fall prey to a regime or neighbourhood inimical to differentness.
However, whether those standard are higher or lower than the parents hold themselves to depend on several variables.... possibly including the origin and early life of the children in question.
So I guess what I am getting at is there is an implicit assumption in the idea of standard setting. Surely, children need standards. What are standards but practical ethics by which to live by in order to function well. This would be akin to Aristotle's Golden Mean perhaps if taken to an extremely abstract level. "Don't pollute the body so you can be healthy and happy." "Share when possible, but don't necessarily do so much you go poor". "Help the old lady across the street, but you don't have to help every person you meet", etc. Cool cool. Even if YOU don't do that, you want that for others. But THERE is the point- WANTING OTHERS.. There belies the inherent tension. What is it that we WANT OTHERS to carry out anything, standards, work, etc.?
I have no need for people to follow standards, but I create people and now they follow standards. But why do you create people that follow standards? Because people need to be here TO follow standards? Because people need to be here.. for what? It's a built in pyramid scheme.. I create standards for my participants to meet because I WANT THEM TO!!
And are those moral standards higher (i.e. more stringent, more exacting, more rigorous) than the ones you set for yourself?
Standards (aka ethics) are binding because of their rightness, not because the person espousing them follows them or not.
If practically, it sucks to teach someone whilst you yourself are a hypocrite, then yeah that indeed is pretty bad in a practical sense. It takes a sense of self-understanding on the child's part that might not be there to transcend the actions of the parent's actions and only listen to their ideals.
However, THAT this whole thing needs to be passed on, I question anyways. AS IF the torch has to be passed.
Most bosses are. And maybe you could do their job as well as they do, and maybe you could do the jobs of every other employee - or maybe not. I don't see the connection to higher or lower moral standards. Presumably, every one of those people is equally capable of lying, cheating, backstabbing and pilfering, but some refrain more consistently than others.
Children learn their behaviour from many sources, of which public entertainment (including video games) is a considerable part. A major influence, too, is the peer group. My teenaged son once told me, "Practically all my generation steal." (Practically none of mine did!) I'm sure most of their parents taught them that stealing is wrong, but by about age 10, parents have very little influence. Teachers very rarely have any moral suasion - that is, only a few, rare, charismatic teachers leave a mark on their students' character.
Whatever their own shortcomings, parents have only a few years time and limited power to instill values in their offspring. The society, its ambient ethic and aesthetic, takes over once the child is out of the home for half of its waking hours. Which is fitting, because the child will have to navigate all of its adult life in a social environment that's different from the one in which their parents operate.
Quoting Vera Mont
Why the operation though? There is a book Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Humans are operatives in something elses operation. It is a bit like how immigrants are encouraged to immigrate, even illegally, due to low birthrates by native born citizens. People are used to fulfill roles of standard followers- parents, government/economies, perhaps God in the theological Western sense of a powerful entity that needs people to follow his vision. Of course WHY any of these entities need standard-followers IN THE FIRST PLACE is circular logic. Standard bearers are needed to bear standards, you see. How can we have any standards if we dont have their bearers!
I mean, I failed miserably to understand that message.
I don't see any problem with this. Management and leadership are often very different skills to those held by the worker.
Quoting TiredThinker
The fist example is hypocrisy which is a different subject.
The second example may not necessarily be a bad thing. In pervious years, I have often done work my boss isn't able to do and I have done it faster and better than he or she can. That's how it works if you have hired for a set of skills.