On Chapter Eleven "Higher Laws" (Assignment Four)

“Oh, so if the others jumped out of the window, you would jump as well, would you?” My mother has been uttering this sentence as long as I can remember; and I am sure you know this pedagogic phenomenon as well. Whenever I had complied with the view or the actions of others without reflecting them myself, my mother criticised this heavily by using the sentence. She drew my attention to my blindness, and as soon as I had spent only one thought on the matter I had been angry with myself. In most of the cases I reckoned the idea I had followed so credulously was conflicting thoroughly with my personal set of mind.
A brief anecdote as an example: I had always been skilful at school but this is not necessarily a trait that attracts many friends. To put it in a nutshell, I had been and probably forever will be a “nerd“. As a young teenager this bothered me severely. Thus I tried to downgrade my performances to fit in with my friends who had oftentimes been not as successful as me. My mother (thankfully!) has corrected my footsteps on my way of life, and has repeated the sentence among numerous talks that have influenced the way I am depicting myself now. Of course I am struggling from time to time as everyone does. However, this represents a crucial point in your life because you distrust your own convictions, may it be through others or yourself. Featuring character means then to convince yourself of the justness of your beliefs, or at least the concession of faults on your side. In my eyes, this poses one of the toughest challenges you are confronted with in life.

No doubt that there are several institutions that establish laws, guiding principles, behavioural codes, and norms which all have been composed to regulate the daily routine of a group of people; may this group be a religious, an ideological, a political, or any other socially bound one. But if everyone was to obey blindly, these institutions would not need a judicial system of some kind. In fact, we have seen in Western history which catastrophes can happen when the individual does not question external authorities.

Thoreau says that the individual’s conscience will defeat common social rules if he or she produces the slightest objection (Atkinson 204). He moreover suggests that the same conscience can drive the individual to insanity but according to him “[n]o man ever followed his genius till it misled him” (Atkinson 204), which I strongly question considering socio-political ideologies like National Socialism. Furthermore every reader of “Walden” will have a dissenting image of the end of the path the ‘misleading genius’ might take. What strikes me is that Thoreau thus supposes an individual should not only question mankind but also herself. How should I be able to make reasonable decisions when I constantly scrutinise the moral ideas of the society I belong to and simultaneously my own? 

Nagel proposes a conflict between the idea that personal instincts should be overcome in order to achieve universal morality and “the values tied to the personal point of view” as the only basis of ethics (online article). Again I can’t comprehend how we should lead unambiguous lives while taking both sides into consideration. The only distinction that I can draw is that some people believe in a commonly accepted set of norms and follow them without a single look beyond them, and that others do risk this glance.

Works cited:

Atkinson, Brooks, ed. Walden and Other Writings. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. Print.

New Republic Online. “You Can't Learn About Morality From Brain Scans”. Thomas Nagel. New Republic, 1 Nov. 2013. Web. 15 Jan. 2014 <http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel/>.