Poll of the day: virtue and merit.

[featherynscale]

Standard poll disclaimer: not all possible descriptions of human experience are represented by the answers given below. This is not hard science. It is not even social science. It is still a better-designed poll than half of the crap that Harris or Zogby put out.** Choose the best answer. If all answers suck equally, don't answer. Nobody's forcing you, darling.

[Poll #945207]

** Seriously, I took a Zogby poll the other day which asked the question "Can a woman be sexy if she is a size 14 or larger?", and the only two response options given were "Yes, sexy is about attitude, not appearance", and "No, appearance must come first". No option at all for people who thought that women who are size 14 or larger could actually have an appearance that was attractive. It was like answering "Have you stopped beating your wife?".

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking that's part of the issue -- how you define worth. In my estimation, if you are asking 'worthy of what?', you're probably more in the 'some are more worthy than others' camp; the question requires some inequality to be meaningful.

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it does, but choosing that one makes it possible for one to deny any inherent worth in simply being an entity, and I wouldn't say that exactly. I wonder if it connects to ones who consider "being" or "doing" more important. It would seem to follow that "being" people would be more likely to see people as equal, but "doing" people would evaluate their actions as being worth more or less than other actions.

I have a hard time separating who people are from what they do. It seems to be inherently linked to me.

[zylch.livejournal.com]

I agree on the difficulty of determining between "being" and "doing" -- to me, what someone is is defined by what they do, and what they do is determined by what they are. It's a recursive relationship. (*noted potential for misuse of "recursive," but if it's the wrong word I can't think of the right one.)

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I think when people are being authentic, who they are informs what they do to such a degree that they are inseperable. However, I also think that most of us don't match up who we are and what we do as well as we might, most of the time. I know plenty of people who are kind and who have no time to feed the hungry or whatnot. Or people who are intelligent and who don't contribute to intelligent conversation for fear they'll be laughed at. And so on, and so forth. They *are* the adjective, but they can't or won't *do* the verbs that the adjective implies. Should we give people 'credit' for that?
And on the other side, I know people who feed the hungry and who are not, by their estimation or the estimation of others, particularly kind, and so on. Given a choice, I will likely hold them in higher esteem than the person who has it the other way around, but I understand that other people won't think that.

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

And there you have one of the main points of the parable of the two sons. Who honored his father, the one who said he would work in the fields and then didn't, or the one who refused to work in the fields, but then relented?

Talk amongst yourselves.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Seriously, I'm voting for the guy that's out there working, regardless of how grumbly he is about it. The other kid is a flake.

[kellan-m-solan.livejournal.com]

I was already writing featherynscale's post in my head before I got to it and I suspect she said it better than I would have.

I do a lot of things I don't feel are particularly reflective of my nature--sometimes out of fear, sometimes coercion, sometimes simply because not doing them would make a fight I don't feel is worth losing myself in. There are many things I could do because they would reflect some inner need, but I don't do them for very external reasons (I could feasibly protest for better environmental protections, which I believe in strongly, but to do so in any way that might be effective would require association with organizations I have ideological differences with. So to do this in a manner that reflects my true self I would have to do it alone... which is essentially pointless).

There are also things I do which are primarily a result of who I WAS. My work, for example is a combination of: a.) I was the kind of person who thought it more important to pursue what I valued at the time instead of wasting my days at school b.) in this society if you don't do school there are limited ways to make decent money. c.) this is the opportunity to not be piss poor that presented itself to me, it could have been something vastly different, it just wasn't.

Action is more important than words, yes. But to infer meaning by observing trivial day to day actions is probably an inaccurate way to draw conclusions about people. Now say, what I would do if the apocalypse came tomorrow might be more reflective of who I am. What kind of car I buy is probably less so. Who I make friends with might be indicative of something about me, but is hopelessly complicated by happenstance (who I happen to meet, where I happen to travel, what I happen to be doing, what languages I happen to speak). Whether or not I choose to buy organic food, probably says very little. What I do and what I am, while perhaps causally related are certainly not the same thing.