Fundamental Principle - Everyone Deserves Positive Regard
Dr William Kelleher says, that the fundamental principle of ethics is
that:
Every person
always deserves positive regard.
By 'positive regard" I mean:
You should value each person as you would value a treasure. You should give the
person full attention, then get involved in finding common ground, in boosting up
that person, seeing if you can find something to compliment him\her on; trying to
make that person feel good, and seeing if you can be of service........not that
you shall give up any of your principles in so doing.
If we assume that only some persons do -- instead of all persons
-- or if we presume that a person sometimes deserves negative regard -- then we
are presuming that we have the discretion to pick and choose who and when. This
is an arrogant and quite arbitrary presumption. It makes us feel like a King of
olden times; and that sense of power is quite a satisfying feeling. But it is highly
immoral.
Hence we are left with
the proposition that ALL PERSONS ALWAYS DESERVE POSITIVE REGARD.
And this is the fundamental basis of subsequent
ethical reasoning.
When you do not place persons below
ideas (-- do not sacrifice them to an ideology --); or when you refrain from using
people as you would use things, and you , on principle, decline to manipulate others,
but instead you treat them with respect, and you strive to find common ground, to
work things out, then you gain the most value. And then you are being moral.
Let us now turn to some possible objections to the idea
that ALL PERSONS ALWAYS DESERVE POSITIVE REGARD.
First Objection:
How will we encourage people to do good?
Some will object that people know what is good, but are
just lazy.
According to this view, disapproval or punishment is the
only way to force these lazy people to be good.
Reply to
First Objection: If love does not teach someone how to behave, nothing else will.
Evidence, in my own experience, has taught me that love
is the strongest motivator.
When people punish or disapprove of me because I
am doing something they do not like, I may conform my behavior to what they seek,
but that conformation usually comes with a price. If someone thinks that
the only way they can get me to act in a certain way is by hurting me, it shows
me that they have a low opinion of me.
B.F. Skinner found that punishment often brought about
an outward conformity, but an inward rebellion. He believed, and showed
experimentally, that positive reinforcement is much stronger and more lasting than
punishment.
There may be people that do not respond to positive reinforcement,
and those people should be isolated from others so that they will not cause harm
to them, but it does not make sense to make their lives more miserable than they
already are.
Second Objection: Saying that all people always deserve positive regard appears
to indicate that we should make no value judgments.
It seems that if we should always treat people with positive
regard, we should never make any value judgments. According to this objection,
the idea that “we should treat all people with positive regard” is a value judgment,
and therefore it is a self-contradictory principle.
Reply to Second Objection: We can, and do, still make value judgments all the time.
Saying that we should not judge people “in-themselves”
does not imply that we can make no value judgments. We make judgments of value
everyday, even in the simple process of making a grocery list.
We can still judge people’s actions as being good or bad,
based on whether they are “life-supporting” or not. We should just not judge
people themselves in their essence as bad.
When we judge a person’s life as bad because they
have performed bad actions, we are throwing out the baby with the bath water.
We are throwing away a treasure that we should be cherishing and building up.
Third Objection: If life is intrinsically valuable, the ultimate sacrifice of giving one’s life
would be impossible or, at least, wrong.
It seems that it would be wrong to ever sacrifice a life
for any reason if life is intrinsically valuable.
Reply to Third Objection: Sometimes it is necessary and right for one to sacrifice
one’s own life to improve the lives of others.
Socrates, himself, drank the hemlock poison to do what
he considered right even though it meant his own death. Socrates may have decided
that doing what was right would support more life for future generations than setting
a bad example for them would have.
Fourth Objection: This life does not seem to be good.
For many people, life does not seem to be good.
It is painful struggle for them from birth until death. They have been mistreated
and abused for much of their life, and this world does not seem good to them.
Reply to Fourth Objection: The environment is bad, but not life itself.
When a person’s life supports have been kicked out from
under them, life itself does seem to be bad.
However, this may be the problem of throwing the
baby out with the bathwater again.
Just because everything that is happening around
someone is horrible, it does not mean that the person’s life itself is not a treasure.
All it takes is transform the situation is to improve the environment.
Sometimes the environment is actually our own inner world.
There is an old story that goes like this:
A belligerent samurai, an old Japanese
tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell.
But the monk replied with scorn, " You're nothing but a lout - I can't waste my
time with the likes of you! "
His very honor attacked, the samurai
flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from it's scabbard, yelled, " I could kill
you for your impertinence."
"That", the monk calmly replied,
"is hell."
Startled at seeing the truth in
what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in it's grip, the samurai
calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.
"And that," said the monk, "Is heaven."
The sudden awakening
of the samurai to his own agitated state illustrates the crucial difference between
caught up in a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it.
Socrates's injunction "Know thyself" speaks to this
keystone of being aware of one's own feelings as they occur..,
Even though we know we should not hate others, we still
do it every day.
It has been built into us over the years, and it is going
to take a lot of effort and practice to break the habit. However, if we are aware
of our own inner world, we do feel an inner voice telling us that we are making
a mistake and actually gypping ourselves every time we make the judgment that we
and other people are not treasures.
When we are true and authentic to deepest inner
self, it is obvious that love is better than hatred and much more in alignment with
our true inner being.