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I. Enlightened Benevolence. The strong desire to see all allowed
the opportunity to live their lives happily, and fully,
enjoying the good things in life - including oneself.
Martyrdom, callousness directed inward, is not to be
encouraged. When one gives advice to another, one must always
view that person as an end in himself, and have his best
interests and his wishes at heart, when speaking. To talk
another into harm's way, is to harm him oneself, and then
attempt to dodge responsibility by conning the victim himself
into doing one's dirty work for one.
Opportunity, here, should not be confused with a grant.
Unconditional kindness, the ending of responsibility for one's
freely, and knowingly unreasonable actions, would leave
ourselves and others defenseless before those who would prey
upon us. When we say, that one is not to deny anyone the
chance at happiness, that includes oneself.
Of course, needs and desires often conflict, and one need must
be balanced off against another. A lot of philosophy centers
around this type of conflict of opposing goods. But while
conceptual systems exist to work these conflicts out, they
are merely abstractions of living bodies of custom, which they
can't completely describe. To seek to dispense with that
examination of custom, is to try to design a way of life for
man, in a state of total ignorance regarding his nature. It
is, at best, wishful thinking to imagine that this can work.
For this reason, our value of respect for tradition, to be
stated, is crucial to our upholding of our value of
benevolence. It is this recognition, of the limits of the
power of reason, as much as anything else, that defines the
difference between Germanic and Southern European social
outlooks. Rather than fixing on a particular theory, and
clinging to it stubbornly, heedless of its failures - as if
by doing so, we were keeping a promise we made to God
or ourselves - the way proposed here, is to see systems of
morality as the product of negotiation, not between people,
but between goods, as we remember past efforts to balance one
off against another. In order that this approach not
degenerate into an adversarial system of mutual predation, we
must respect the next value mentioned.
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