Esa Kostet
Kaarinan lukio
Opettaja Liisa Meronen
2. For It's Own
Sake
There are few
things in life one should reach for simply because of the goal’s value in
itself. Almost all values are part of some larger entity, like happiness.
This is the value that controls most actions we commit in our everyday
life. The Western ideology of financial success is closely related to
happiness, but the idea arises in many other forms as well. For example,
one may ask whether a stable state of health would be valuable at all
without its purpose of serving the bigger objective, happiness. Some
people would also argue for the definitive value of things like honesty
and compassion, but these are actually just tools for mankind in the
eternal quest for a better life.
It might be
ethically questionable to put high moral values standing in the line next
to financial wealth, but these things have a surprisingly lot in common.
After all, they both serve almost slavishly the objective of happiness. An
example of the remarkable influence of happiness is a person who suffers
from deep depression. Among the symptoms of depression are
self-destructive thoughts and a growing lack of compassion towards other
people, and even more importantly, oneself. A depressed person is delving
so deep in his anxious thoughts that he no more has a desire, or the
ability, to reach for happiness. Therefore he can’t value his own health
or noble ideas like honesty because they seem to have lost their place as
one of the cornerstones of satisfactory life. Considering this relation,
it is sufficient to say that things that are desired for their own sake
are of higher value than those that are desired for the sake of something
else.
However, the
influential relation between desired things is somewhat troublesome. If
some values are indeed better manifestations of good, then it would make
sense for them to have undisputed power over the lesser values. But this
statement is only partially correct, because the lesser values affect
directly or indirectly to the higher values. As in the example of
happiness, the whole building consists of all the minor construction
pieces that each person uses to build his or hers desired mansion. If some
of these parts are removed, the whole building might fall apart, depending
on which parts are replaced. But if some of the lesser values can be
replaced by others without doing significant damage to the entity, it
becomes questionable whether the authority of higher values is binding at
all. Values that are desired for the sake of something else have all of a
sudden become crucial in the search for the higher value. It is unclear to
me if these values still serve as mere means of reaching the objective, as
the higher value could be very dependent on the single factor of the
equation. This thinking leads to the conclusion of lesser values actually
having a value to desire for their own sake.
