Revengineer
Well-known member
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2013
- Messages
- 172
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Fairness and honesty are great in theory, but the trouble is that practically nothing about the world is fair. People are dishonest and they get rewarded for it more often than not. I see it at my university all the time... many students are not afraid to do anything it takes to get ahead, whether it's using copies of old exams, copying other peoples' problem sets or popping Adderall during finals. They get better grades with less effort which allows them to get better jobs after graduation. For every scumbag on the news who gets caught with their pants down, there's countless more that more or less got away with something and never had to suffer any consequences. I grew up believing that honesty and integrity is the best policy and that everything else would follow, but I wonder about the limits to that way of thinking.
Stepping over others to get what you want seems to be how the rest of the world functions. I want to believe that there is some value to the ideals I cherish, that doing things the right way is a reward in itself. At the same time I can see there's some truth to the other side of thinking. For example, athletes who use steroids use them to beat the competition. When those athletes win, the rest are pretty much forced to do the same if they want to stay competitive. Yeah, it's easy for us to say they should all be punished without mercy. But are the they really wrong for breaking the rules when it's literally their careers on the line? And what makes one method cheating and another one okay? What if instead of taking steroids, they drank coffee to give themselves more energy? My point is that our ideas of right and wrong are so flexible that it's scary to think about it.
Perhaps this is just a phase and I'm simply going through some angst that I never got out of my system as a teenager. Who knows...
Stepping over others to get what you want seems to be how the rest of the world functions. I want to believe that there is some value to the ideals I cherish, that doing things the right way is a reward in itself. At the same time I can see there's some truth to the other side of thinking. For example, athletes who use steroids use them to beat the competition. When those athletes win, the rest are pretty much forced to do the same if they want to stay competitive. Yeah, it's easy for us to say they should all be punished without mercy. But are the they really wrong for breaking the rules when it's literally their careers on the line? And what makes one method cheating and another one okay? What if instead of taking steroids, they drank coffee to give themselves more energy? My point is that our ideas of right and wrong are so flexible that it's scary to think about it.
Perhaps this is just a phase and I'm simply going through some angst that I never got out of my system as a teenager. Who knows...