“In case of emergency,” the flight attendant tells us, “oxygen masks will appear from the overhead bins. Put on your own oxygen mask first and then assist those around you in putting on theirs.” “In case of emergency,” the cruise ship’s purser tells us, “put on your own life jacket and then help others put on theirs and proceed to your designated emergency area.”
“Don’t wait for an emergency!” I say. “Practice persistently taking care of your self first, so you can best take care of those to whom and for your values make you responsible.” Why? Because in a depressurizing plane, if you do not first insure your own oxygen supply, you will pass out and become a burden on others instead of being able to help them. Because on a sinking ship, if you do not put on your life vest first, you will require being personally rescued in the water instead of being able to help others needing it.
And, when we live our lives persistently doing what is best in the present circumstances for the optimal balance of the highest priority and largest number of those people, places, and things with whom and which we have a relationship and for whom and which our values make us responsible, we have to put our selves first (right after God) and before all others so we can help them next instead of requiring them to help us.
The hardest thing about being Great! All the time!, however, is figuring out the classic “us vs. them” conundrum. When should we invest our own life’s precious resources predominantly in our self and when should we invest them in helping those around us?
There are no hard and fast rules about this. It all depends on the ever-changing facts and circumstances that present themselves to ourselves from moment to moment in life. When making “service over self” decisions in the moments of our lives, Greatness! requires balancing several different factors flowing from the classical ethical concept of utilitarianism, as we weigh the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and decide to act in a way that maximizes the net benefits to the various stakeholders involved. This is what I refer to as the “globally optimum development” quality of life.
An excellent article on the history and development of utilitarianism can be found at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/, in which Professor Julia Driver, a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins, who, at the time I’m writing this post, teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and “philosophizes” in a blog maintained by Stanford University. In that blog, Professor Driver describes Jeremy Bentham’s (1748–1832) classic pleasure vs. pain concept as:
When called upon to make a moral decision[,] one measures an action’s value with respect to pleasure and pain according to the following: intensity (how strong the pleasure or pain is), duration (how long it lasts), certainty (how likely the pleasure or pain is to be the result of the action), proximity (how close the sensation will be to performance of the action), fecundity (how likely it is to lead to further pleasures or pains), purity (how much intermixture there is with the other sensation). One also considers extent — the number of people affected by the action.
Thus, according to Bentham, as driven by Driver, deciding on the globally optimal developmental choice in each moment requires considering as many as possible of the relevant factors of intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent.
Those are a lot of factors to keep track of all the time. So, in Part 7 of this series of posts on Prioritizing Your Relationships, we will discuss how to do the right thing moment to moment and be Great! All the time!