October 4, 2022 • 26 mins
Barry gives a breakdown of when and how to apply common rules, like being honest, respectful, and fair to others. He argues that a wise person knows that there are exceptions to rules, and that it’s all about listening and adapting to a person’s needs.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:36):
This is episode four of the Happiness Formula. I, of course,
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last we left off, we
were talking about practical wisdom. So think about this. We
say honesty is the best policy, right, but what about
when you tell your grandma her meat loaf is delicious,
when in reality, your mammar has been forgetting to season
(01:00):
her food for quite a while. Now, Mama, if you're listening,
you're meet love. It's still delicious. And this is a
purely hypothetical situation. Don't work. But this does get us
to today's episode, because Barry is going to challenge you
were thinking of what makes a quote unquote good person
(01:21):
and why you shouldn't always be honest, respectful and fair
to others. Here's Barry. So I talked about, well, we
would all agree as a good rule to follow tell
(01:43):
the truth, and how even that rule has exceptions when
your friend asks how do I look? I want to
continue on that with a more consequential example. And this
is a case reported by a doctor named Jerome Loewenstein,
who had been caring for this patient, a man in
(02:06):
his seventies for over ten years. He had a persistent
cough and fever, and antibiotics were not helping, so Lowenstein
ordered a CT scan, and the scan revealed that the
patient had masses in his lungs that turned out to
(02:28):
be malignant. In other words, he had lung cancer. Condition
was not curable. Man was in his seventies. Lowenstein explained
all of this to the patient's wife, and she immediately said,
you can't tell him he has cancer. It turns out
(02:48):
her husband had experienced bouts of depression throughout his life,
and his wife was worried that the word cancer would
just do him in. She assured the doctor that if
he just told the man that the procedures low and
Stein had in mind were quote necessary for further treatment,
(03:10):
the man would comply. Lowenstein agonized he didn't like the
idea of withholding the truth from a patient. He consulted
other physicians. He talked to his wife, He talked to
the patient's daughter. He talked to a psychiatrist who had
(03:32):
treated the patient for depression some years before. Finally, he
decided to honor the patient's wife's request. The patient accepted
the diagnosis of complicated pneumonia. He lived a decent life
for the next eighteen months, and then he died quietly
(03:55):
and comfortably. So should Low and Stein have told the
truth in this instance? It is a good rule, be honest,
but it is like every rule, a rule that has exceptions.
Wise people know when and why and how to make exceptions.
(04:17):
Here's another good rule, respect the autonomy of individuals. Respect people,
let them make their own decisions. I think most of
us would agree that this is a good way to
go through life. But this too has exceptions. Is a
(04:41):
lawyer a zealous advocate for a client or a counselor
imagine that you're a lawyer, a family law lawyer, and
you're dealing with a messy, angry divorce and your client.
Let's say the wife in this dissolving marriage feels so
(05:04):
wronged by her husband that she wants to extract every
ounce of flesh she can. There are kids in this family,
and you think that catering to her vindictiveness will have
terrible effects on the kids. So you think she should
(05:28):
be less vindictive and settle for less than everything she
might extract, And the question is here you are as
a lawyer. Should you be the lawyer who was a
zealous advocate out to get your client what she says
she wants in any way you possibly can, or should
you be the wise counselor trying to convince your client
(05:50):
that what she says she wants isn't what she should want.
Lawyers are both advocates and counselors, but they need to
know whether the particular situation they're in with the particular person,
and who is their client, whether this situation demands advocacy
(06:11):
or counsel. The same thing is true when it comes
to doctors. Doctors should respect the autonomy of their patients.
You let patients know what the options are, and patients decide,
but sometimes it will be clear to you, as an
expert what option a patient ought to choose, and what
(06:35):
do you do when the patient seems to be reluctant
to make that choice. What do you do when you
know that although chemotherapy may produce a couple of months
of on and off misery, it will almost certainly add
years of life to the patient and the patient doesn't
want to go through it. Should you respect the autonomy
(06:57):
of the patient or should you find ways to nudge
the patient in the direction of what you think is
the right decision. Finance hill advisors and their clients. As
a financial advisor, you know you're supposed to do what
your client wants, but sometimes your client wants the wrong stuff.
So when do you honor your client's autonomy and simply
(07:20):
execute your client's instructions? And when do you try to
convince your client that what he or she thinks they
want isn't what they should want. Salespeople and their customers.
Somebody comes into the store wanting to buy uh flat
screen TV and they want to buy an eight inch screen,
(07:44):
and you say, well, where is it going? And you
know what room is it going in? And they say, well,
it's going into a room that's roughly ten by twelve,
And you say to yourself, WHOA, that screen is way
too big for that room. Do you give the customer
what the customer wants or do you try to counsel
(08:06):
the customer to want something different. Each of these cases
are cases where respecting autonomy doesn't solve your problem, because
sometimes you have the potential to prevent somebody from making
a really bad decision. Should you exercise that authority or not.
(08:32):
A last example, hairdresser, you cut women's hair, cutting style
women's hair. Women come into the salon, often with a
picture they've taken from a magazine. I'd like you to
cut my hair in this style, and you look at
(08:54):
the picture and you think that's a huge mistake. She's
brought me a picture of a hairstyle on a woman
who's face is shaped like a pencil. But this woman's
face is shaped like a cantalope. This haircut looks great
on a pencil shaped face will look terrible on a
(09:17):
cantaloupe shaped face. So do you, as a hairdresser, simply
do what your client wants, or do you try to
convince your client that what she wants isn't what she
should want. These are all examples where the rule respect
the autonomy of other people sometimes needs exceptions, and your task,
(09:41):
which is deciding when these exceptions are required and how
they should be made, requires a wise judgment on your part.
Rules don't solve the problem. Another good rule treat people fairly. Again,
I don't think these are these rules are in dispute.
Respect autonomy, be honest, treat people fairly. This these are
(10:05):
the kinds of rules we would like to see people
honoring in our everyday lives. The problem with treat people
fairly is what does fairness mean. Teachers want to be
fair to their pupils. Parents want to be fair to
their children. Does that mean that teachers should treat each
(10:29):
pupil alike? Does that mean that each parent should treat
each child alike. A principle of fairness might suggest that
everybody gets equal treatment, but a wise teacher would probably say, no,
my job is not to treat each pupil alike. My
(10:52):
job is to give each pupil what he or she needs.
Different pupils need different things. I should care equally about
the progress of each and their three kid in my room.
But by doing that, almost certainly, what it will demand
of me is that I treat each kid differently. And
(11:13):
parents certainly know that if they can't treat each of
their kids alike, because their kids are very different. Some
kids are timid and need to be pushed. Some kids
are reckless and need to be protected. The fairness criterion
that you adopt as a parent is to give each
of your kids what key or she needs, and that
(11:37):
almost certainly means treating each of your kids differently. So
three very good rules. Be honest, respect, autonomy, be fair.
They all have exceptions. Rules like this provide us with anchors.
They provide us with guidelines, but they are almost never enough.
(12:03):
First of all, how to apply a rule in any
particular case, how to talk to a client is not
anything that a rule will tell you. Aristyle captured this
problem in writing about rules and their limits more than
two thousand years ago. He was fascinated by watching the
(12:28):
craftsmen in ancient ethics, in particular the Stonemasons, and how
they managed to fashion round columns. How do you make
round columns that are uniform in their roundness and that
match each other on either side of the entry to
a build? What the Stonemasons had available to them was
(12:54):
rulers straight edges. Straight edges are great at measuring things
that don't have curves, but they can't measure things that
have curves. And so what the stone Mason's devise was
a kind of ruler that bent. It was made of
soft lead, and you could put it around around column
(13:17):
and measure the circumference of the column. And so the
metaphor here is that the rule you need, rules you
need rulers, but sometimes you need to bend the rule,
and the soft lead ruler was a ruler that could
(13:39):
be bent. Be honest is a rule that sometimes has
to be bent. Respect autonomy is a rule that sometimes
has to be bent. Um Treat people fairly is a
rule that sometimes has to be bent. And the critical
thing is are these rules being bent in the right
(14:01):
way at the right time, for the right reason. And
for Aristotle, it was wisdom that assured that rule bending
would occur when it should in the way that it should.
The other problem with rules is that sometimes there are
good rules that conflict. In the case of Dr Grupman
(14:26):
talking to his dying patient, be honest is a good rule.
Be kind is a good rule. They push in opposite directions.
We want our kids to be independent, we want our
kids to be safe. Encourage independence in your children is
a good rule. Make sure your kids are safe is
(14:49):
a good rule. Those two good rules sometimes push in
the opposite directions. We need rules. Rules solve choice problems
that we sometimes face. Rules help us avoid treating people
extremely unfairly. Rules help us establish moral standards. But the
(15:10):
way I have come to think about rules is that
rules are kind of like a roadmap. Remember roadmaps. Nobody
uses roadmaps anymore. Rules are kind of like a roadmap
that gets you to the right city, but the streets
aren't marked. Now, you will never get to the street
I live on in Oakland, California, if you don't get
(15:34):
to Oakland, California. So getting to the right city matters. However,
getting to the right city won't get you to my street.
Rules get you to the right city, and then something
else is needed to get you to the right street.
And that's something else is wisdom, is judgment. If rules
(15:58):
are like a roadmap, then Barry can definitely be my driver.
We're going to take a quick break so when we
come back we'll hear more about what Aristotle can teach
us about navigating. In today's world, you have to balance.
(16:27):
You have to balance honesty and kindness when groupman is
talking to his patient and when you're answering your friend's
question about how she looks. You have to balance asking
and telling. When hairdressers are consulting with their clients before
they cut do the haircut, When students are interacting with teachers,
(16:52):
When lawyers and financial advisers are interacting with clients, you
have to balance nurturing and challenging, And this came up
earlier when we were talking about grit. You want, on
the one hand to encourage your pupil or your child
and be supportive, and on the other hand to be
(17:13):
demanding so that they stick with tasks until they achieve
a certain level of mastery. So how do you balance
nurturing on the one hand and challenging on the other.
You want to balance empathy, which is really feeling the
pain and suffering or sadness of another person, and detachment,
(17:34):
which maybe enables you to make a better judgment than
you could if you were so immersed in the situation
that you couldn't separate yourself from the person you were
trying to advise. How do you balance all of these things?
What Aristotle said is that what life requires is that
(17:57):
we find the mean. Now nowadays the mean n e
A N is a technical word that means the arithmetic average,
but that's not what he meant. He meant the middle.
But the middle is very much context specific, and so
(18:18):
virtues for Aristotle, strengths of character for Aristotle resided at
the mean between extremes that were not virtuous, and you
might argue, well, all of this is just common sense.
You know, you live life in the world for a while,
(18:38):
and you discover how to talk to people and went
to let people make their own decisions and went to
step in. You spend time as a parent, and you
learn when to let kids make their own mistakes, and
went to protect them from mistakes that might be quite serious.
It's just common sense. Well, I want to disabuse you
of that. There are lots and lots of maxims aphorism
(19:02):
sayings in popular culture that most of us have heard.
Here's one, you can't tell a book by its cover.
You've probably heard that. Here's another one where there's smoke,
there's fire. The point is that these two common sense
(19:24):
sayings that we think are true are telling opposite truths.
Here's one another one better safe than sorry, yea? And
how about nothing ventured, nothing gained Again. Both of these
are true, but they're telling opposite truths. Look before you leap.
(19:44):
He who hesitates is lost. A penny saved is a
penny earned. You can't take it with you. Two heads
are better than one. Too many cooks spoil the broth,
birds of a feather flocked together, opposites to try act
(20:06):
absence makes the heart grow fonder, out of sight, out
of mind. So here we have these pairs of maxims,
and each of them contains obviously contains kernels of truth
because they've been around for centuries. But they point us
(20:30):
in opposite directions. So is one of them true and
one of them false? No, they're both true. Sometimes they're
both false other times. And the critical thing is to
know whether this is a situation where absence makes the
heart grow fonder, or this is a situation where out
(20:51):
of sight, out of mind. The sayings themselves, the maxims themselves,
don't tell us in which circumstances they apply. It takes
our judgment, not our quote common sense to figure that out.
It takes judgment to know whether, when and how to
(21:11):
apply rules. But skilled judgment is not enough. And here's why.
You can be a skilled lawyer and use your judgment
about whether to be an advocate or a counselor to
manipulate people to serve your ends and not theirs. I'll
(21:32):
get bigger fees if we go for the jugular in
this divorce case. You're not interested in what's good for
your client. You're interested in what's good for you, and
the better you can read your client, the better able
you will be to manipulate the client. So it's not
enough to have the skill to know what a situation
(21:52):
calls for. You also need what we might call will motivation.
You need the desire to do right by your patient,
by your client, by your student, by your child, wild
as opposed to doing right by yourself. And for Aristotle,
practical wisdom was this combination of what he would call
(22:15):
moral skill, knowing how to figure out what the situation
calls for, and moral will, the desire to do the
right thing by other people. And wise people have both
the skill and the will to do the right thing.
The Greek word for practical wisdom is phronesis, and Aristotle thought,
(22:39):
and you'll see that I agree that it is the
key to happiness. What is practical wisdom? What are the components? First,
A wise person knows that no to patients, students, or
clients are exactly alike, and appreciates that rules and stand
(23:05):
at operating procedures have to be modified to allow for
the diversity of human needs, the diversity of human circumstances,
than the diversity of human aspirations. A wise person knows
when and how to make the exception to every rule. Second,
a wise person knows that different situations demand different responses.
(23:29):
She knows not only when to be honest, but how
to be honest, not only when to be kind, but
how to be kind. Third, a wise person knows how
to improvise. Real world problems are often ambiguous and ill defined,
(23:51):
and the context is always changing. What I sometimes suggest
is that wisdom is a little bit like what you
might call moral jazz. A good jazz musician knows how
to play the notes on the page, But what makes
(24:11):
it jazz is not playing the notes on the page,
but improvising around the notes on the page. And so
good rules of conduct are like the notes on the page,
But wise conduct is improvisation around the notes on the page,
around the rules. Wise people know how to choose when
(24:35):
good rules conflict, like the rule be kind and the
rule be honest. A wise person knows how to take
the perspective of another to see the situation as she does,
and thus to understand how she feels. This perspective taking
(24:55):
is what enables wise people to feel empathy for others
and to make decisions that serve their clients. Or their students,
or their patients or their friends needs. This is sort
of baked into the culture as the Golden rule, do
unto others as you would have them do unto you,
except that it's even more demanding than the Golden rule.
(25:19):
We might call it the platinum rule, because the aim
here is not to do unto others as you would
have them do unto you. It's to do unto others
as they would have you do unto them. That is,
it's not what would I want in this situation, rather
is what does she want? What does she need in
(25:39):
this situation? And how can I provide it? This is
a very very demanding standard, and wise judgment enables us
to hit that standard reasonably frequently. Finally, a wise person
uses these skills in pursuit of the right aims. Wisdom
(26:01):
is about doing, not just about judging, and it's a
about doing things that meet the proper aims of the
activity you're engaged in and that meet the needs of
the people who you're trying to serve. Well, that's it
for today's episode. Join us next time on the Happiness formula,
(26:24):
where we will learn that moderation is key, like, for example,
is it possible to be too motivated. The Happiness Formula
from One Day University is a production of I Heart
Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show,
leave a review in your favorite podcast app, and check
(26:46):
out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture,
true crime, and more.
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:36):
This is episode four of the Happiness Formula. I, of course,
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last we left off, we
were talking about practical wisdom. So think about this. We
say honesty is the best policy, right, but what about
when you tell your grandma her meat loaf is delicious,
when in reality, your mammar has been forgetting to season
(01:00):
her food for quite a while. Now, Mama, if you're listening,
you're meet love. It's still delicious. And this is a
purely hypothetical situation. Don't work. But this does get us
to today's episode, because Barry is going to challenge you
were thinking of what makes a quote unquote good person
(01:21):
and why you shouldn't always be honest, respectful and fair
to others. Here's Barry. So I talked about, well, we
would all agree as a good rule to follow tell
(01:43):
the truth, and how even that rule has exceptions when
your friend asks how do I look? I want to
continue on that with a more consequential example. And this
is a case reported by a doctor named Jerome Loewenstein,
who had been caring for this patient, a man in
(02:06):
his seventies for over ten years. He had a persistent
cough and fever, and antibiotics were not helping, so Lowenstein
ordered a CT scan, and the scan revealed that the
patient had masses in his lungs that turned out to
(02:28):
be malignant. In other words, he had lung cancer. Condition
was not curable. Man was in his seventies. Lowenstein explained
all of this to the patient's wife, and she immediately said,
you can't tell him he has cancer. It turns out
(02:48):
her husband had experienced bouts of depression throughout his life,
and his wife was worried that the word cancer would
just do him in. She assured the doctor that if
he just told the man that the procedures low and
Stein had in mind were quote necessary for further treatment,
(03:10):
the man would comply. Lowenstein agonized he didn't like the
idea of withholding the truth from a patient. He consulted
other physicians. He talked to his wife, He talked to
the patient's daughter. He talked to a psychiatrist who had
(03:32):
treated the patient for depression some years before. Finally, he
decided to honor the patient's wife's request. The patient accepted
the diagnosis of complicated pneumonia. He lived a decent life
for the next eighteen months, and then he died quietly
(03:55):
and comfortably. So should Low and Stein have told the
truth in this instance? It is a good rule, be honest,
but it is like every rule, a rule that has exceptions.
Wise people know when and why and how to make exceptions.
(04:17):
Here's another good rule, respect the autonomy of individuals. Respect people,
let them make their own decisions. I think most of
us would agree that this is a good way to
go through life. But this too has exceptions. Is a
(04:41):
lawyer a zealous advocate for a client or a counselor
imagine that you're a lawyer, a family law lawyer, and
you're dealing with a messy, angry divorce and your client.
Let's say the wife in this dissolving marriage feels so
(05:04):
wronged by her husband that she wants to extract every
ounce of flesh she can. There are kids in this family,
and you think that catering to her vindictiveness will have
terrible effects on the kids. So you think she should
(05:28):
be less vindictive and settle for less than everything she
might extract, And the question is here you are as
a lawyer. Should you be the lawyer who was a
zealous advocate out to get your client what she says
she wants in any way you possibly can, or should
you be the wise counselor trying to convince your client
(05:50):
that what she says she wants isn't what she should want.
Lawyers are both advocates and counselors, but they need to
know whether the particular situation they're in with the particular person,
and who is their client, whether this situation demands advocacy
(06:11):
or counsel. The same thing is true when it comes
to doctors. Doctors should respect the autonomy of their patients.
You let patients know what the options are, and patients decide,
but sometimes it will be clear to you, as an
expert what option a patient ought to choose, and what
(06:35):
do you do when the patient seems to be reluctant
to make that choice. What do you do when you
know that although chemotherapy may produce a couple of months
of on and off misery, it will almost certainly add
years of life to the patient and the patient doesn't
want to go through it. Should you respect the autonomy
(06:57):
of the patient or should you find ways to nudge
the patient in the direction of what you think is
the right decision. Finance hill advisors and their clients. As
a financial advisor, you know you're supposed to do what
your client wants, but sometimes your client wants the wrong stuff.
So when do you honor your client's autonomy and simply
(07:20):
execute your client's instructions? And when do you try to
convince your client that what he or she thinks they
want isn't what they should want. Salespeople and their customers.
Somebody comes into the store wanting to buy uh flat
screen TV and they want to buy an eight inch screen,
(07:44):
and you say, well, where is it going? And you
know what room is it going in? And they say, well,
it's going into a room that's roughly ten by twelve,
And you say to yourself, WHOA, that screen is way
too big for that room. Do you give the customer
what the customer wants or do you try to counsel
(08:06):
the customer to want something different. Each of these cases
are cases where respecting autonomy doesn't solve your problem, because
sometimes you have the potential to prevent somebody from making
a really bad decision. Should you exercise that authority or not.
(08:32):
A last example, hairdresser, you cut women's hair, cutting style
women's hair. Women come into the salon, often with a
picture they've taken from a magazine. I'd like you to
cut my hair in this style, and you look at
(08:54):
the picture and you think that's a huge mistake. She's
brought me a picture of a hairstyle on a woman
who's face is shaped like a pencil. But this woman's
face is shaped like a cantalope. This haircut looks great
on a pencil shaped face will look terrible on a
(09:17):
cantaloupe shaped face. So do you, as a hairdresser, simply
do what your client wants, or do you try to
convince your client that what she wants isn't what she
should want. These are all examples where the rule respect
the autonomy of other people sometimes needs exceptions, and your task,
(09:41):
which is deciding when these exceptions are required and how
they should be made, requires a wise judgment on your part.
Rules don't solve the problem. Another good rule treat people fairly. Again,
I don't think these are these rules are in dispute.
Respect autonomy, be honest, treat people fairly. This these are
(10:05):
the kinds of rules we would like to see people
honoring in our everyday lives. The problem with treat people
fairly is what does fairness mean. Teachers want to be
fair to their pupils. Parents want to be fair to
their children. Does that mean that teachers should treat each
(10:29):
pupil alike? Does that mean that each parent should treat
each child alike. A principle of fairness might suggest that
everybody gets equal treatment, but a wise teacher would probably say, no,
my job is not to treat each pupil alike. My
(10:52):
job is to give each pupil what he or she needs.
Different pupils need different things. I should care equally about
the progress of each and their three kid in my room.
But by doing that, almost certainly, what it will demand
of me is that I treat each kid differently. And
(11:13):
parents certainly know that if they can't treat each of
their kids alike, because their kids are very different. Some
kids are timid and need to be pushed. Some kids
are reckless and need to be protected. The fairness criterion
that you adopt as a parent is to give each
of your kids what key or she needs, and that
(11:37):
almost certainly means treating each of your kids differently. So
three very good rules. Be honest, respect, autonomy, be fair.
They all have exceptions. Rules like this provide us with anchors.
They provide us with guidelines, but they are almost never enough.
(12:03):
First of all, how to apply a rule in any
particular case, how to talk to a client is not
anything that a rule will tell you. Aristyle captured this
problem in writing about rules and their limits more than
two thousand years ago. He was fascinated by watching the
(12:28):
craftsmen in ancient ethics, in particular the Stonemasons, and how
they managed to fashion round columns. How do you make
round columns that are uniform in their roundness and that
match each other on either side of the entry to
a build? What the Stonemasons had available to them was
(12:54):
rulers straight edges. Straight edges are great at measuring things
that don't have curves, but they can't measure things that
have curves. And so what the stone Mason's devise was
a kind of ruler that bent. It was made of
soft lead, and you could put it around around column
(13:17):
and measure the circumference of the column. And so the
metaphor here is that the rule you need, rules you
need rulers, but sometimes you need to bend the rule,
and the soft lead ruler was a ruler that could
(13:39):
be bent. Be honest is a rule that sometimes has
to be bent. Respect autonomy is a rule that sometimes
has to be bent. Um Treat people fairly is a
rule that sometimes has to be bent. And the critical
thing is are these rules being bent in the right
(14:01):
way at the right time, for the right reason. And
for Aristotle, it was wisdom that assured that rule bending
would occur when it should in the way that it should.
The other problem with rules is that sometimes there are
good rules that conflict. In the case of Dr Grupman
(14:26):
talking to his dying patient, be honest is a good rule.
Be kind is a good rule. They push in opposite directions.
We want our kids to be independent, we want our
kids to be safe. Encourage independence in your children is
a good rule. Make sure your kids are safe is
(14:49):
a good rule. Those two good rules sometimes push in
the opposite directions. We need rules. Rules solve choice problems
that we sometimes face. Rules help us avoid treating people
extremely unfairly. Rules help us establish moral standards. But the
(15:10):
way I have come to think about rules is that
rules are kind of like a roadmap. Remember roadmaps. Nobody
uses roadmaps anymore. Rules are kind of like a roadmap
that gets you to the right city, but the streets
aren't marked. Now, you will never get to the street
I live on in Oakland, California, if you don't get
(15:34):
to Oakland, California. So getting to the right city matters. However,
getting to the right city won't get you to my street.
Rules get you to the right city, and then something
else is needed to get you to the right street.
And that's something else is wisdom, is judgment. If rules
(15:58):
are like a roadmap, then Barry can definitely be my driver.
We're going to take a quick break so when we
come back we'll hear more about what Aristotle can teach
us about navigating. In today's world, you have to balance.
(16:27):
You have to balance honesty and kindness when groupman is
talking to his patient and when you're answering your friend's
question about how she looks. You have to balance asking
and telling. When hairdressers are consulting with their clients before
they cut do the haircut, When students are interacting with teachers,
(16:52):
When lawyers and financial advisers are interacting with clients, you
have to balance nurturing and challenging, And this came up
earlier when we were talking about grit. You want, on
the one hand to encourage your pupil or your child
and be supportive, and on the other hand to be
(17:13):
demanding so that they stick with tasks until they achieve
a certain level of mastery. So how do you balance
nurturing on the one hand and challenging on the other.
You want to balance empathy, which is really feeling the
pain and suffering or sadness of another person, and detachment,
(17:34):
which maybe enables you to make a better judgment than
you could if you were so immersed in the situation
that you couldn't separate yourself from the person you were
trying to advise. How do you balance all of these things?
What Aristotle said is that what life requires is that
(17:57):
we find the mean. Now nowadays the mean n e
A N is a technical word that means the arithmetic average,
but that's not what he meant. He meant the middle.
But the middle is very much context specific, and so
(18:18):
virtues for Aristotle, strengths of character for Aristotle resided at
the mean between extremes that were not virtuous, and you
might argue, well, all of this is just common sense.
You know, you live life in the world for a while,
(18:38):
and you discover how to talk to people and went
to let people make their own decisions and went to
step in. You spend time as a parent, and you
learn when to let kids make their own mistakes, and
went to protect them from mistakes that might be quite serious.
It's just common sense. Well, I want to disabuse you
of that. There are lots and lots of maxims aphorism
(19:02):
sayings in popular culture that most of us have heard.
Here's one, you can't tell a book by its cover.
You've probably heard that. Here's another one where there's smoke,
there's fire. The point is that these two common sense
(19:24):
sayings that we think are true are telling opposite truths.
Here's one another one better safe than sorry, yea? And
how about nothing ventured, nothing gained Again. Both of these
are true, but they're telling opposite truths. Look before you leap.
(19:44):
He who hesitates is lost. A penny saved is a
penny earned. You can't take it with you. Two heads
are better than one. Too many cooks spoil the broth,
birds of a feather flocked together, opposites to try act
(20:06):
absence makes the heart grow fonder, out of sight, out
of mind. So here we have these pairs of maxims,
and each of them contains obviously contains kernels of truth
because they've been around for centuries. But they point us
(20:30):
in opposite directions. So is one of them true and
one of them false? No, they're both true. Sometimes they're
both false other times. And the critical thing is to
know whether this is a situation where absence makes the
heart grow fonder, or this is a situation where out
(20:51):
of sight, out of mind. The sayings themselves, the maxims themselves,
don't tell us in which circumstances they apply. It takes
our judgment, not our quote common sense to figure that out.
It takes judgment to know whether, when and how to
(21:11):
apply rules. But skilled judgment is not enough. And here's why.
You can be a skilled lawyer and use your judgment
about whether to be an advocate or a counselor to
manipulate people to serve your ends and not theirs. I'll
(21:32):
get bigger fees if we go for the jugular in
this divorce case. You're not interested in what's good for
your client. You're interested in what's good for you, and
the better you can read your client, the better able
you will be to manipulate the client. So it's not
enough to have the skill to know what a situation
(21:52):
calls for. You also need what we might call will motivation.
You need the desire to do right by your patient,
by your client, by your student, by your child, wild
as opposed to doing right by yourself. And for Aristotle,
practical wisdom was this combination of what he would call
(22:15):
moral skill, knowing how to figure out what the situation
calls for, and moral will, the desire to do the
right thing by other people. And wise people have both
the skill and the will to do the right thing.
The Greek word for practical wisdom is phronesis, and Aristotle thought,
(22:39):
and you'll see that I agree that it is the
key to happiness. What is practical wisdom? What are the components? First,
A wise person knows that no to patients, students, or
clients are exactly alike, and appreciates that rules and stand
(23:05):
at operating procedures have to be modified to allow for
the diversity of human needs, the diversity of human circumstances,
than the diversity of human aspirations. A wise person knows
when and how to make the exception to every rule. Second,
a wise person knows that different situations demand different responses.
(23:29):
She knows not only when to be honest, but how
to be honest, not only when to be kind, but
how to be kind. Third, a wise person knows how
to improvise. Real world problems are often ambiguous and ill defined,
(23:51):
and the context is always changing. What I sometimes suggest
is that wisdom is a little bit like what you
might call moral jazz. A good jazz musician knows how
to play the notes on the page, But what makes
(24:11):
it jazz is not playing the notes on the page,
but improvising around the notes on the page. And so
good rules of conduct are like the notes on the page,
But wise conduct is improvisation around the notes on the page,
around the rules. Wise people know how to choose when
(24:35):
good rules conflict, like the rule be kind and the
rule be honest. A wise person knows how to take
the perspective of another to see the situation as she does,
and thus to understand how she feels. This perspective taking
(24:55):
is what enables wise people to feel empathy for others
and to make decisions that serve their clients. Or their students,
or their patients or their friends needs. This is sort
of baked into the culture as the Golden rule, do
unto others as you would have them do unto you,
except that it's even more demanding than the Golden rule.
(25:19):
We might call it the platinum rule, because the aim
here is not to do unto others as you would
have them do unto you. It's to do unto others
as they would have you do unto them. That is,
it's not what would I want in this situation, rather
is what does she want? What does she need in
(25:39):
this situation? And how can I provide it? This is
a very very demanding standard, and wise judgment enables us
to hit that standard reasonably frequently. Finally, a wise person
uses these skills in pursuit of the right aims. Wisdom
(26:01):
is about doing, not just about judging, and it's a
about doing things that meet the proper aims of the
activity you're engaged in and that meet the needs of
the people who you're trying to serve. Well, that's it
for today's episode. Join us next time on the Happiness formula,
(26:24):
where we will learn that moderation is key, like, for example,
is it possible to be too motivated. The Happiness Formula
from One Day University is a production of I Heart
Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show,
leave a review in your favorite podcast app, and check
(26:46):
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