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373 days until the start of class as I return to graduate school.
In yesterday's post, I lamented that shortage of time. I reported wanting more time each day to read, to write, and to prepare for graduate school.
Yet, I spend a fair amount of time playing online games. Actually, one online game: Lord of the Rings Online. On the Landroval server, my current main characters are the hobbits Alphred Trout and Hedgerow Shrewburrow.
Time after time I have protested the amount of time and money spent on useless activities such as sports, movies, and computer games- resources that could have been spent on other things such as food and medicine for the global poor. Yet, here I am wasting time and resources on a computer game.
Am I a hypocrite?
Technically, no. A hypocrite is somebody who applies a different moral standard to other than he does to himself. If I were to condemn such time-wasting activities in others, but not in myself, then I would be vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy.
However, I judge that I would be a better person if I did not have these interests. If I were to hold myself up next to a person who lacked these interests, and who worked more fully on products that produced a social benefit, I declare myself the morally inferior person. I wish I had been that person. However, I am not.
People have reasons to condemn those who are like me in this respect - people who waste time on games. I can think of no good defense against it.
I do not engage in these activities free of guilt, but often with the knowledge that there is something else I should be doing - that I should want to be doing.
These points are relevant to a class of argument popular in public debate. The examples of this class that I am most familiar with involves somebody who is strongly anti-gay being discovered soliciting same-sex partners. A common response is to call this person a hypocrite and assert that this discredits everything that person has said on the subject.
The person who uses or defends this response is more interested in scoring rhetorical points than in a reasoned discussion of political and social matters. This is an ad hominem argument. The claims that a person may make on the harms of smoking do not become false on the discovery that the person saying them smokes. Warnings about alcoholism do not lose their merit by being uttered by an alcoholic.
I want to be clear that I believe that there are no good reasons to oppose homosexual relationships. However, there are sound and unsound ways to refute the claims of those who do oppose those relationships. The gay person has nothing to be ashamed of. The person who resorts to rhetorical tricks to score political points does. They are living a lifestyle that is harmful to society as a whole and deserve condemnation for that. Using hypocrisy and demagoguery in defense of a true conclusion does not make it legitimate.
Ironically, we can find genuine hypocrisy in those who shamelessly use these fallacious arguments to score political points. When others use fallacious arguments against them, they condemn the practice. Yet, they engage in the practice that they condemn without even a nod to the idea that the same principles they use to condemn others are applicable to them as well. So, while being gay cannot be reasonably condemned, being a demagogue and a hypocrite certainly can be.
This does not deny that those who condemn homosexuality for no good reason - who uses fallacious reasoning in defense of the claim that it is legitimate to harm the interests of others - are themselves morally flawed individuals as well. In their case, they have bad arguments AND a bad conclusion, rather than just bad arguments.
Returning to the topic of this post, nothing I have written above invalidates the arguments that show that people generally have many and strong reasons to discourage the playing of video games as a notorious waste of time, keeping people from engaged in more productive and potentially helpful tasks. I cannot deny that I would be a better person if I were somebody who spent less time playing games and more time actually trying to produce something useful - such as useful philosophical ideas.
Finally, I want to make it clear that the discussion here is not about sacrificing something that one enjoys in order to wade into something useful that one does not like. My arguments here are about molding what people like and dislike. There is virtue in being the type of person who likes doing things that are productive and useful, and who dislikes wasting time on meaningless activities such as video games. It is a virtue I do not have in the degree that I think can be argued for, but it is a virtue nonetheless.
I should add that, if this was an activity that I performed alone, then I would find it easier to give up. However, this is an activity that I engage in with others, and that makes the thought of quitting so much harder. I would miss the people. And, I suspect (hope) that they would miss me. Relationships are hard to give up. Relationships ought to be hard to give up. That's a subject for another day.
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