Philosophical ideals
Seven old ideas, in plain words. Each one comes with a line from a philosopher who thought it through, and one thing it asks of us today.
Why does every child deserve answers? When something happens to a child, the child is owed honest answers, and so are the people who love them. Honest answers are harder than they look: here are seven ideas about what we owe each other, then how good people still get it wrong, how to work through a disagreement, and help for parents.
Truth is saying what is so. Not what helps. Not what soothes. What is so.
Telling it costs something. A record that bends to comfort fails the next person who reads it.
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.
Say what you saw. Write it down as it happened. Correct it when you learn more.
Every act lands on someone. The person it lands on is owed an answer: what was done, and why.
An answer is not a favour. It is a debt, and no one else can pay it for us.
Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability.
When someone asks what happened, answer. In full, in writing, in time.
Help works best from whoever is closest. A neighbour on the stairs reaches a person minutes before any service can.
Being near is a kind of power. Power to help is a reason to help.
If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
If you are close and able, go. Do not wait to be the right person. You are the near one.
We judge choices from where we stand. Most choices are made from somewhere else: less time, less money, less help, more fear.
Seeing from another's place means living, for a while, inside their limits.
By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.
Will you live my constraints for a day? You can say no. You can't say no forever.
A question to ask, and to be askedBefore you judge a choice, stand where it was made.
A fair rule is one you accept before you know where you will sit.
Rawls asks us to choose the rules of a society without knowing our own place in it: rich or poor, strong or sick, believed or doubted.
Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.
Make the rule you would accept from the worst seat in the room.
Some things have a price. A person does not. A person has worth that nothing can stand in for.
Dignity holds when it is least convenient: when a person is tired, poor, angry or wrong.
In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity.
Never treat a person as a means. Not a number, not a cost, not a problem to close.
Each person counts once. No title, fortune or office makes one voice count twice.
What people use, people should own, and each owner speaks with the same weight.
Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.
Give each person one voice. Then listen to every one.
Most wrong answers are not lies. They come from the ordinary ways every mind takes shortcuts. Knowing them helps all of us: the person asking, the person answering, and the person deciding.
Try it first. Count how many times the players in white pass the ball.
Play the video (80 seconds)In the original study, about half of the people who watched did not see a person in a gorilla suit walk into the game, stop in the middle, thump its chest and walk off. Watching closely for one thing hides another.
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, “Gorillas in our midst”, Perception 28 (1999), 1059–1074. Video by Daniel Simons.
Before you decide what happened, ask what you were not looking for.
Once we believe something, we notice what agrees with it and pass over what does not. Careful, kind people do it too. Psychologists call it confirmation bias.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorism 46, 1620: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it.” Raymond Nickerson, Review of General Psychology 2 (1998), 175–220.
Look hardest for the fact that would prove you wrong.
The first number or story we hear pulls every later judgement toward it, even when we know it was a guess. Later facts get measured against it instead of on their own.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases”, Science 185 (1974), 1124–1131.
Hear the second account as if it were the first.
Once we know how something ended, it seems it was always going to end that way. People who knew the outcome rated it far more predictable than people who did not.
Baruch Fischhoff, “Hindsight is not equal to foresight”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1 (1975), 288–299.
Judge a choice by what could be known at the time.
When others go wrong, we put it down to who they are. When we go wrong, we put it down to what was happening. The same act reads differently depending on whose it is.
Lee Ross, “The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10 (1977), 173–220.
Ask what the situation was before asking what the person is.
People who saw the same film of a car crash remembered higher speeds, and even broken glass that was never there, when asked how fast the cars “smashed” rather than “hit”.
Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer, “Reconstruction of automobile destruction”, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974), 585–589.
Ask open questions. Write down the answer in the person’s own words.
A close group that wants to get along stops raising doubts. Each person goes quiet, assuming the others know better, and nobody checks.
Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972.
Make room for the person who disagrees, and thank them.
One of the oldest rules of fair judgement is audi alteram partem: hear the other side. Disagreement is normal. What matters is how we go through it.
Separate the people from the problem.
You know your child better than anyone. Health workers know medicine. The best care comes when both are heard.
Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, Australian Charter of Healthcare Rights, second edition, 2019.
Sometimes a treatment you asked for is not offered. There may be good reasons. You are entitled to know them, and to ask again.
This is general information, not medical or legal advice.
These seven shape Omxus, an emergency network owned by the people who use it. Help from the nearest, answers to the affected, one voice each.
Every child deserves answers