Finding Your Personal Philosophy

Source: pxhere, public domain

All of us should have a personal philosophy, a clearly identified set of core beliefs. That's foundational to figuring out the life we want to live. To offer an example and perhaps help motivate you, here's mine:

Relationships

All consensual relationships and sex should be respected.

Abortion should be legal on demand. The mother and father’s right (except in anonymous sperm donation) should trump the fetus's right in determining when if ever to take on the temporal, emotional, and financial cost of parenthood.

I believe in parenting by conversation, never with corporal punishment. The latter teaches that violence is an acceptable response to annoyance.

Often, we're too quick to exert psychological or physical abuse on those we claim to care about.

Money

Money and especially materialism usually cause more harm than good.

Big Finance corporations control too large a percentage of world wealth. Some redistribution, merit-based, is required.

Corporations need enforced regulation to keep them from polluting and marketing unworthy, even unsafe products.

Capitalism can create too many losers and socialism can create too much laziness. Hence, a mixed economy is often wise: a basic safety net and lightly regulated capitalism.

Work and Education

Work and education intersect so I cover both in this section.

People who work long hours should get more respect, not be pathologized as workaholics.

Individualism can be underappreciated. People can aspire to community, collaboration, and teamwork but too often, when expedient, take care of themselves. That may be why most of the communes, co-ops, and Kibbutzim of the ‘60s failed. It may also be why, in school and in the workplace, there can be disgruntlement about team projects. Members who don’t pull their weight know that someone else will do it. Or in student teams, a bright student might do most of the team’s work or sit bored listening to and having to give equal time, respectfully no less, to the lackluster. It can be particularly frustrating when a quality individual's pay or course grade depends on the team's performance.

The world may be better when merit is prioritized over race and gender in hiring, student selection, and what policymakers and the media choose to focus on.

Efforts to close the achievement gap will likely continue to fail ($22 trillion already spent over the past half-century and the gap is as wide as ever) until the educators talk with the biologists—the environment can build only on what genes already provide. Even a perfectly-tuned VW will lose badly to a Porsche. Therefore, an intelligence “pill” is needed to close the achievement gap—as long as it is ethically dispensed. It should be purely voluntary and available free to the poor as are most medical treatments through MediCal and other such programs. That’s why I, for example, fund the Society of Neuroscience's Nemko Family Prize for the best dissertation on the biological basis of higher-level reasoning.

Recreation

Mind-altering drugs such as marijuana and, yes, alcohol, should be illegal because of the millions of lives they can ruin: the abusers, their coworkers, their families, their friends, and the people potentially injured or killed in attacks or accidents. The dangers of alcohol are well known, but marijuana is far more dangerous than activists would have us believe. The risks include cognitive, social, and emotional impairments, and increased cardiovascular risk, even in the young. For example, see this research review on marijuana’s cognitive and emotional effects by 40 leading MDs and scientists. Another review and this just-published one warns of increased cardiovascular risks. Then there's this research review finding increased lung disease. Making matters worse, marijuana use is increasing in jurisdictions in which it has been legalized, including in children. In response to the argument that Prohibition didn’t work, alcohol consumption dropped by two-thirds in Prohibition's first years and by one-third later. And when Prohibition was lifted, alcohol consumption returned to its pre-Prohibition level.

Now, do you want to say or write about your core philosophy?

I read this aloud on YouTube.