I was out for dinner today at this coffee shop place in Sea Park. And by coffee shop, I mean like the hawker center type of place, not the Old Town White Coffee or Poppa Rich type places. I would put a picture of the place and the food, but hey, I'm utterly useless as a food blogger, remember? But anyway, there's a stall there that sells a particular type of Penang food. That's not the interesting bit - seems like every fricking stall has the word 'Penang' in it. Penang Char Kuay Teow. Penang Curry Mee. Penang Assam Laksa. Penang Mi Goreng. Whatever. But the thing that fascinates me about this particular stall is the lady who runs it.
The next paragraph is what went through my head as I observed her:-
"At a guess, she's maybe 65-70 years old, perhaps older. Or maybe she's younger but looks older because she's had a rough life. Has she had a rough life? I don't know. I wonder. I wonder how she comes to the place every day and how she goes home. Surely she walks. She doesn't strike me as someone who would have a car. Maybe a relative drops her off. Does she have relatives? Maybe someone else who works here drives her to work and back every day. Where does she live? Is she happy? She looks, for lack of a better word, very feeble. She walks very slowly. She has a badly hunched back. What type of life must she have led? I wonder how she feels about her life. Does she feel lonely? She must feel lonely. Who does she talk to? Does she have friends? How did she end up in such a state? Isn't it rather sad that her life has led her to this point simply because, for whatever reason, she didn't end up in a wealthy family or with a family, in the first place, assuming she doesn't have a family. And on her stall, she has a newspaper clipping by some Chinese newspaper with an article about her stall on it, coupled with a picture of her. Is her stall really that good? Or did some reporter feel sorry for her, seeing her in her feeble state, and decide to promote her stall in hopes that she would get more customers, and thus more income? The clipping is also laminated which means that, at one point in her life, she was proud of that clipping. Is she still proud of it? What's her life story?"
I shit you not, I actually thought of all those things when I was observing her bringing food here and there to customers at the coffee shop. Which made me think, life is fricking arbitrary. It is for everyone. We really did not choose to be born. We have no control over who our parents are. I don't believe in souls or reincarnation or that kind of thing, but seriously, if you believe in souls, then it does stand to reason that every soul has an equal opportunity of being born to any given family no? Taking spiritualism out of it, every individual in the world came into existence entirely arbitrarily. I could have been born the son of a miner in Chile, or the son of the King of Spain or whatever.
While, yes, it doesn't really matter how arbitrary this is, simply because this is just one of the things we have to just deal with - we can't change anything nor do we have any control in the first place - the consequences of this arbitrariness matters. I'm quite frankly too lazy to go trawl the interwebs for empirical evidence that a person's background affects their future, but I strongly believe it does. And, I also don't believe that all humans are born with a blank slate or, in other words, a consciousness that is like a blank piece of paper that just needs to be written on. I believe that genetics matters. In nurture versus nature, I don't believe that a person is who they are simply because of nurture or simply because of nature. I think the answer, like most things in life, is somewhere in between.
BUT, that said, either nurture or nature, how a human develops then is pretty arbitrary. If I was born, because of recessive genes, color blind or more susceptible to diabetes, that's just my fortune, or lack thereof. If I was nurtured by irresponsible parents or by apathetic teachers, what can I really do as a child who doesn't know any better?
And so, yes, existence is pretty fricking arbitrary. That's no real surprise and not a difficult conclusion to draw, unless you believe that everything's fated or scripted by some higher power or something. That's fine too. But of course, I don't believe in that line of thought. A better question is simply, is it fair that existence is arbitrary?
Well, from a purely statistical standpoint, and this is actually some pretty mind-boggling reasoning, every individual theoretically had just as good a chance as the other of being born to the parents of one another. I find it difficult to wrap my head around this because, well, if there was no 'me' before I came into being, how the hell could probabilities be assigned equally to 'me'? But anyway, I could have just as easily been the child of Michael Jordan (in which case, life is awesome) or I could have just as easily been the child of a serial child abuser (in which case, life sucks). But since every individual has the same odds, isn't it fair? Doesn't life treat everyone indifferently then? The universe is indifferent, as Don Draper has said before. And if the universe is indifferent to everyone, then how can it be unfair? I just wound up with better luck than a lot of others and worse luck than some others.
But if I recognise that my station in life arose because of completely arbitrary matters (for example, being born to parents who recognised the importance of being outspoken), then shouldn't I also recognise that the stations in life of other individuals also arose because of completely arbitrary matters? For the sake of consistency, absolutely. But if I know that sometimes, where they are in life wasn't a result of their poor choices or their mistakes, say, that old lady in the coffee shop (assuming she didn't make a series of poor life decisions), then shouldn't I try to remedy this inequality in fortune?
I don't necessarily think, and in fairness I haven't thought this out through and through, that I should be obliged to equalise this arbitrariness. Of course, it's easy to say when I'm on the rock and roll side of the arbitrariness coin. I may believe differently if I were on the other side of the coin. This is where moral reasoning should come in handy. From a more libertarian perspective, I don't think I should be morally compelled to equalise this arbitrariness. But this gives me an uneasy feeling. After all, if I want to get ahead in life, I want to do it because I worked harder or I'm more skilled or that sort of thing. I don't want to get ahead by virtue of having more opportunities than others. I want to beat people who have had the exact same opportunies I had.
At the basic level, I suppose it comes down to making sure that the starting line for everyone in the race is the same. But what if I was born fully healthy and I was racing against someone who was born without a right leg? Is it really fair to argue that, "Hey, that's just the breaks. That could have easily been me. But it's not. So, let it be."? I don't really know but my initial thoughts are that it's unfair. So what would make it fair? Well, for one, what would NOT be fair would be amputating my right leg to bring me 'down' to a fairer fight. Personally, I think that's completely morally objectionable. I should not be penalised just because I have an advantage. But I do think the converse is the way to go. Don't penalise me but help the other person by giving that person a prosthetic leg or something. Then let's race from there. I think I'm comfortable with that.
To be honest, I didn't really have a conclusion I wanted to draw when I first began writing all this. That's why it's labeled 'Ramblings'. But I do want to make the point that seriously, existence is fricking arbitrary. Like Rorshach says, "Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." He goes on to describe the non-existence of God but that's not what I'm trying to get at. But maybe, if I were to draw one conclusion, it would be that, if we believe that existence is arbitrary, and that we are all not tied to destinies or fates by some higher order puppet-master, then the moral reasoning employed on the perspective of existence is vastly different from moral reasoning employed on an existence with predetermination. I don't really know what sort of reasoning would go into figuring out this whole arbitrariness thing, but I think it would be worth a good try.
The next paragraph is what went through my head as I observed her:-
"At a guess, she's maybe 65-70 years old, perhaps older. Or maybe she's younger but looks older because she's had a rough life. Has she had a rough life? I don't know. I wonder. I wonder how she comes to the place every day and how she goes home. Surely she walks. She doesn't strike me as someone who would have a car. Maybe a relative drops her off. Does she have relatives? Maybe someone else who works here drives her to work and back every day. Where does she live? Is she happy? She looks, for lack of a better word, very feeble. She walks very slowly. She has a badly hunched back. What type of life must she have led? I wonder how she feels about her life. Does she feel lonely? She must feel lonely. Who does she talk to? Does she have friends? How did she end up in such a state? Isn't it rather sad that her life has led her to this point simply because, for whatever reason, she didn't end up in a wealthy family or with a family, in the first place, assuming she doesn't have a family. And on her stall, she has a newspaper clipping by some Chinese newspaper with an article about her stall on it, coupled with a picture of her. Is her stall really that good? Or did some reporter feel sorry for her, seeing her in her feeble state, and decide to promote her stall in hopes that she would get more customers, and thus more income? The clipping is also laminated which means that, at one point in her life, she was proud of that clipping. Is she still proud of it? What's her life story?"
I shit you not, I actually thought of all those things when I was observing her bringing food here and there to customers at the coffee shop. Which made me think, life is fricking arbitrary. It is for everyone. We really did not choose to be born. We have no control over who our parents are. I don't believe in souls or reincarnation or that kind of thing, but seriously, if you believe in souls, then it does stand to reason that every soul has an equal opportunity of being born to any given family no? Taking spiritualism out of it, every individual in the world came into existence entirely arbitrarily. I could have been born the son of a miner in Chile, or the son of the King of Spain or whatever.
While, yes, it doesn't really matter how arbitrary this is, simply because this is just one of the things we have to just deal with - we can't change anything nor do we have any control in the first place - the consequences of this arbitrariness matters. I'm quite frankly too lazy to go trawl the interwebs for empirical evidence that a person's background affects their future, but I strongly believe it does. And, I also don't believe that all humans are born with a blank slate or, in other words, a consciousness that is like a blank piece of paper that just needs to be written on. I believe that genetics matters. In nurture versus nature, I don't believe that a person is who they are simply because of nurture or simply because of nature. I think the answer, like most things in life, is somewhere in between.
BUT, that said, either nurture or nature, how a human develops then is pretty arbitrary. If I was born, because of recessive genes, color blind or more susceptible to diabetes, that's just my fortune, or lack thereof. If I was nurtured by irresponsible parents or by apathetic teachers, what can I really do as a child who doesn't know any better?
And so, yes, existence is pretty fricking arbitrary. That's no real surprise and not a difficult conclusion to draw, unless you believe that everything's fated or scripted by some higher power or something. That's fine too. But of course, I don't believe in that line of thought. A better question is simply, is it fair that existence is arbitrary?
Well, from a purely statistical standpoint, and this is actually some pretty mind-boggling reasoning, every individual theoretically had just as good a chance as the other of being born to the parents of one another. I find it difficult to wrap my head around this because, well, if there was no 'me' before I came into being, how the hell could probabilities be assigned equally to 'me'? But anyway, I could have just as easily been the child of Michael Jordan (in which case, life is awesome) or I could have just as easily been the child of a serial child abuser (in which case, life sucks). But since every individual has the same odds, isn't it fair? Doesn't life treat everyone indifferently then? The universe is indifferent, as Don Draper has said before. And if the universe is indifferent to everyone, then how can it be unfair? I just wound up with better luck than a lot of others and worse luck than some others.
But if I recognise that my station in life arose because of completely arbitrary matters (for example, being born to parents who recognised the importance of being outspoken), then shouldn't I also recognise that the stations in life of other individuals also arose because of completely arbitrary matters? For the sake of consistency, absolutely. But if I know that sometimes, where they are in life wasn't a result of their poor choices or their mistakes, say, that old lady in the coffee shop (assuming she didn't make a series of poor life decisions), then shouldn't I try to remedy this inequality in fortune?
I don't necessarily think, and in fairness I haven't thought this out through and through, that I should be obliged to equalise this arbitrariness. Of course, it's easy to say when I'm on the rock and roll side of the arbitrariness coin. I may believe differently if I were on the other side of the coin. This is where moral reasoning should come in handy. From a more libertarian perspective, I don't think I should be morally compelled to equalise this arbitrariness. But this gives me an uneasy feeling. After all, if I want to get ahead in life, I want to do it because I worked harder or I'm more skilled or that sort of thing. I don't want to get ahead by virtue of having more opportunities than others. I want to beat people who have had the exact same opportunies I had.
At the basic level, I suppose it comes down to making sure that the starting line for everyone in the race is the same. But what if I was born fully healthy and I was racing against someone who was born without a right leg? Is it really fair to argue that, "Hey, that's just the breaks. That could have easily been me. But it's not. So, let it be."? I don't really know but my initial thoughts are that it's unfair. So what would make it fair? Well, for one, what would NOT be fair would be amputating my right leg to bring me 'down' to a fairer fight. Personally, I think that's completely morally objectionable. I should not be penalised just because I have an advantage. But I do think the converse is the way to go. Don't penalise me but help the other person by giving that person a prosthetic leg or something. Then let's race from there. I think I'm comfortable with that.
To be honest, I didn't really have a conclusion I wanted to draw when I first began writing all this. That's why it's labeled 'Ramblings'. But I do want to make the point that seriously, existence is fricking arbitrary. Like Rorshach says, "Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose." He goes on to describe the non-existence of God but that's not what I'm trying to get at. But maybe, if I were to draw one conclusion, it would be that, if we believe that existence is arbitrary, and that we are all not tied to destinies or fates by some higher order puppet-master, then the moral reasoning employed on the perspective of existence is vastly different from moral reasoning employed on an existence with predetermination. I don't really know what sort of reasoning would go into figuring out this whole arbitrariness thing, but I think it would be worth a good try.
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