While I appreciate what the author is getting at, as presented I think it shows a lack of compassion for how difficult it is to do what one reckons one ought to do.
It’s true you can simply “choose” to be good, but this is about as easy as saying all you have to do to do X for a wide variety of things X that don’t require special skills is choose to do X, such as wake up early, exercise, eat healthier food when it is readily available, etc.. Despite this, lots of people try to explicitly choose to do these things and fail anyway. What’s up?
The issue lies in what it means to choose. Unless you suppose some sort of notion of free will, choosing is actually not that easy to control because there’s a lot of complex brain functions essentially competing to get you to doing whatever the next thing you do is, and so “choosing” actually looks a lot more like “setting up a lot of conditions both in the external world and in your mind such that a particular choice happens” rather than some atomic, free-willed choice spontaneously happening. Getting to the point where you can feel like you can simply choose to do the right thing all the time requires a tremendous amount of alignment between different parts of the brain competing to produce your next action.
I think it’s best to take this article as a kind of advice. Sometimes it will be that the only thing keeping you from doing what you believe you ought to do is just some minor hold-up where you don’t believe you can do it, and accepting that you can do it suddenly means that you can, but most of the time the fruit will not hang so low and instead there will be a lot else to do in order to do what one considers morally best.
While I appreciate what the author is getting at, as presented I think it shows a lack of compassion for how difficult it is to do what one reckons one ought to do.
It’s true you can simply “choose” to be good, but this is about as easy as saying all you have to do to do X for a wide variety of things X that don’t require special skills is choose to do X, such as wake up early, exercise, eat healthier food when it is readily available, etc.. Despite this, lots of people try to explicitly choose to do these things and fail anyway. What’s up?
The issue lies in what it means to choose. Unless you suppose some sort of notion of free will, choosing is actually not that easy to control because there’s a lot of complex brain functions essentially competing to get you to doing whatever the next thing you do is, and so “choosing” actually looks a lot more like “setting up a lot of conditions both in the external world and in your mind such that a particular choice happens” rather than some atomic, free-willed choice spontaneously happening. Getting to the point where you can feel like you can simply choose to do the right thing all the time requires a tremendous amount of alignment between different parts of the brain competing to produce your next action.
I think it’s best to take this article as a kind of advice. Sometimes it will be that the only thing keeping you from doing what you believe you ought to do is just some minor hold-up where you don’t believe you can do it, and accepting that you can do it suddenly means that you can, but most of the time the fruit will not hang so low and instead there will be a lot else to do in order to do what one considers morally best.