Personally, I think failure can teach us even more than success, but only if we are willing to accept it. Of course, accepting failure is easier said than done. It is a skill that we must develop over time because it often does not come naturally. Think about it: when you are in 6th grade and lose a soccer game, you probably are not going to want to learn from it. When you are younger, failure feels like sadness and anger. But, as we grow up, we learn to deal with our emotions and in turn understand the value of failure. I think that this was something that really became clear to me in high school, and was especially true in college. As we get older, failure becomes less taboo and more of a commonality. In the college process, I was deferred from my top school when my heart was set on it. With that experience I learned the importance of making the most of your options and a situation. I decided to apply to Richmond, was accepted, and could not be happier. From failure, I learned that sometimes it can open the door to an even better path. Looking back, there is no question in my mind that failing to get into my first choice school was the best thing that could have happened to me.

We often think that failure is automatically bad. But, failure can be inherently linked to success; it just might not come in that exact moment. Every success story most likely involved failure along they. This can be true with so many parts of life: sometimes, it takes a long time and a lot of wasted effort to find friends that you truly click with. You could be applying for countless internship after internship and get rejected from all but one- or all! But, with this failure comes an opportunity to learn. It allows us to value the times that we do succeed. Part of what makes success so rewarding is the obstacles we must overcome to reach it. If we did not experience the bad times, we we would not appreciate the good times. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s true. Failure is truly what we make of it, and I believe we have a responsibility to learn from it even when we do not want to.

We live in such a complex and modern world that we sometimes think we are good for failure. But, in the readings for Dorner and Forsyth, we can see that human beings are nowhere close to perfect. Dorner starts by giving a few examples on cases where human beings were wrong. He talks about an environmentally conscious town that seeks to reduce emissions by lowering the speed limit. The entire town decides this is a group project, and so they carry it out. But, it is a complete failure and actual makes the problem worse. This actually made me think about a concept I learned about in my FYS class with Dr. Forsyth. Groupthink encourages us to convince ourselves to do something irrational because the members convince each other it is the right thing to do. Usually, it involves a cohesive group with set leaders who people trust. This applies in the case of the town hall, but it can also be found in countless other examples. One of the clearest examples of it was in the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster where 12 people died. They were not able to clearly communicate or voice conflicting opinions ultimately resulting in catastrophe and failure.

Dorner Also gives us the story of the Moro tribe. Their group is struggling because of tsetse flies, high infant mortality, and a lack of clean water. A psychologist and economist come together and see all that western society can do to help them. So, they get involved. They help them with the fly problem, give them access to better healthcare, and more. Yet, their actions again result in failure. They make the problem better at first but much worse in the long run. This example made me think of Doing Good Better and the play pump example. Dorner points out that we often try to involve ourselves in problems where we have no first hand experience. We, as western and industrialized people, have a tendency to want to fix all problems. But, it is really hard for our brains to comprehend a problem we cannot see so when we try to help tribes or create the Play Pump we are often on the road to failure. Interestingly, you can seemingly do everything right but still fail. It somehow reminds me of how we prove a logic problem invalid: if the conclusion is false and both premises are true, it is invalid. It is still possible to take all the seemingly correct actions and still come out with a false outcome in terms of what we expected to happen.

What really intrigued me from Dorner and Forsyth’s readings was the idea of good intentions. When we set out to do something, we almost always think in a way that is positive. We want to help the situations and we often convince ourselves that we can. In Forsyth’s experiment, it would have been impermissible and unethical to treat students in a way that seemingly would hurt them. But, by boosting their self-esteem which on its own seems like a good thing, they received much worse grades. Failure can be hard to accept and easy to find because we often convince ourselves that intentions matter not outcomes. This is an idea that is becoming more prominent in our “everyone is a winner culture.”

In both of our readings for today, I really enjoyed seeing how strong arguments can change your perspective on a topic. They served as a good model for my own work and helped me to understand many of the tools that we are learning about in class. Flanigan starts her argument by presenting the idea that we should not have prescription drugs and explaining the DIC (doctrine of informed consent). She makes the point that this doctrine allows people, among other things, to make decisions about what medical care they receive; essentially, it gives them the authority to say they do not want medical treatment. By allowing patients to refuse treatment, it acknowledges that patients have the right to think about their “overall well-being” not just their “medical well-being.” She then explains that “current restrictions on pharmaceuticals are designed to promote patients’ health, but not their overall well-being. For this reason, a prescription drug system is incompatible with this justification for informed consent” (Flanigan 582). She is able to show hypocrisy within our doctrines of medicine and uses this to prove her point.

While I found her proposal extremely interesting, I personally had trouble accepting it. In particular, it was thought-provoking to read her point about Adderall on college campuses. Medically speaking, there are some people that need it more than others because of various disorders. However, there is definitely a stigma in society today that adderall and similar drugs are overprescribed and how this can have negative benefits. People who take adderall and do not need to can have various bad symptoms such as: sleeping problems, anxiety, weight loss and many more. Yes, there is no question that they can help all students in the moment. But, to say that they are simply good because they can be of temporary help neglects looking at the big picture. Personally, I believe that if adderall was legalized, it would make it extremely more common and create an even greater dependance by a larger amount of students. This would inherently violate Flanigan’s wish to create a greater “overall well-being.”

After reading Hidalgo’s piece, I really started to think about some of our class discussions. One of the points we have talked about a lot is that if people cannot agree on a value theory (moral belief), then it will be hard to even have the argument. I think this is extremely important for understanding his work. He  starts by talking about the “value of freedom of movement”. If people have different moral expectations, then it is really hard to make progress. Morals can sometimes be inherent because of who we are, and it makes arguments like his extremely divisive. In my mind, much of his argument rests on the idea of doing as little harm as possible. But, in every situation, there are going to be people who are harmed at the expense of others. He urges the public that it should be permissible to disobey laws if it means stopping harm (by helping immigrants). At the same time, we have laws in place to hopefully create good and help society to be fair. Relying on value theories means people can easily disagree, and it may be hard to change their minds.

While I was not completely convinced by either argument, it made me understand how complicated it can be to make such vast claims. Moral arguments are tricky, but are relevant to countless problems that exist in the world today. I think that both authors do a great job in connecting their ideas. Both were able to make me question some of my previous thoughts which actually can be extremely powerful.