Following Your Strengths Into a Moral Quandary
Childhood, adolescence, and college are all periods in our lives when we test our skills to determine what we’re really good at, and discover what we really suck at doing. After determining this, we try to specialize in an area that overlaps with our natural skill, and hopefully use this skill to build a successful career.
Some people are able to visualize objects in their mind with intricate precision, manipulating them with ease. These people are often drawn to fields such as engineering and graphics design, where these skills are essential. Others have adept fingers and precise tactile feedback, making them lean towards the trades such as carpentry and plumbing. Others have a talent for speaking and using words, and find themselves leaning towards the legal profession, where they can use their oratory skills to persuade jurors of their client’s innocence. If you’re lucky, you find that you are just just plain gifted, and nearly everything comes easy to you. In these rare cases, the sky's the limit, and you’re able to pursue just about any field, regardless of your “inherent skills.”
But what do you do when your natural skills conflict with your moral code? For example, what if you are a skilled orator and your greatest skill is persuading people that you’re right? You could be a great trial lawyer, or a politician, or an amazing salesperson. Yet, whenever you convince someone that you’re right, you feel guilty. Whenever you use words and logic to change someone’s opinions, you feel terrible. And whenever you work for someone else, and they see this talent in you, this ability to use words carefully and craftily, they want to exploit it for their personal gain. Imagine that your best skill is fighting, and after every fight you feel horrible about the physical pain that you just inflicted. You know that your opponent was trying to do the same to you, but that doesn’t make you feel any better.
In this impossible situation do you give up trying to make money with this skill that causes you moral conflict and guilt? Do you become more creative with how you can make money with it? Or do you fall back to another skill that doesn’t produce such moral conflict to make money? Perhaps you try to use your skill in a way that will neither produce financial gain nor moral conflict, instead using it for creative purposes. If so, is it a shame or a loss in some way that your greatest skill is not being used to its fullest potential?
Socrates and Plato have influenced modern philosophy perhaps more than any other men, yet who is to say whether that influence was good or bad? Who is to say that their ideas or thoughts were in line with reality or distorted? We know that words and logic can create fallacies and deceive us. We know that “common sense” cannot be used alone in reasoning, and that many scientific truths defy our “common sense.” We also know that intuition and feelings sometimes betray logic. Where is the line drawn between “true feelings” that are illogical, and logical words that have no basis in a physiological reality? If we need a mind to perceive, and any mind can be deceived, how do we ever truly know that what we’ve said or done is true unless supported by cold hard reproducible science? This moral ambiguity can cause paralysis to one whose skills lie in the gentle manipulation and persuasion of the human mind. It’s a quandary to which I have yet to find a satisfying answer.
Perhaps the true conundrum lies in the fact that the mind can use skills that produce material success but simultaneously generate guilt. Material success does not indicate moral righteousness or wickedness, and therefore is a byproduct of these skills, and not a justification of them. Following our moral compass without regard to material success may lead one to a life of celibacy, mutism, isolation, and asceticism that borders on suicidal. Our actions have consequences, however large or small, and being sensitive to the outcomes is key. While material success may be one self-serving positive effect of using our skills, we must always balance material success with our moral compass, assessing whether we feel guilty or innocent regarding our actions. It is only by listening carefully, and checking in with our conscience, that we can proceed forward in a materially and morally successful way. A tightrope balance it is, but no one ever said it’d be easy. With great power, comes great responsibility.
