Can Implies Should:

My resolution for this year was “no excuses”. Now, within its final month, I find myself reflecting upon motivation, why so many people lack it, why this seems to be a problem which afflicts “intelligent” instead of “stupid” people far more often, and where it originates.

 

Like many intellectual excuses, it must surely have its origins in some philosophy that got too big for its own britches. There’s a concept in the work of Kant which I would hear a lot while I was a debater back in college, which is that “should implies can”. In a nutshell, this is the delusion that, so long as I’m not capable of doing something, I am under no imperative to do it. “I can only be required to perform that action which I can perform.”

 

That this delusion was not challenged but assumed to be a sacred truth can only be explained by thinking on the narcissism of debaters. Obviously, moral obligation goes beyond your individual ability. Life constantly presents you with impossible assignments which you’re much too weak and inexperienced to finish. It would even go so far that you’d be punished for not doing the impossible.

 

Yet now I take some heart in recognizing this for what it is: the heart of true humility, the key to motivation. This is why we fail so often: it’s because the World is bigger than the limitations we are bound by. Yet if we assume, with narcissism, that this gives us an excuse to keep on failing, then we’ll never grow to overcome those limitations. 

 

If I think my limited abilities define my obligations and my duties, then I pass up every opportunity to strengthen and empower my abilities, for it seems easier to choose the weaker route if I assume that it absolves me of responsibility.

 

Yet when I truly care, with desperation, for the outcome, then I make no such excuses. I will take whatever opportunity I’m offered to transcend my limits. In accepting that my obligations are far greater than my meek abilities, I find the motivation to improve myself and maybe to fulfill the moral needs which I could not fulfill when I was weaker. *That* appears to be the key to happiness.


**[({R.G.)}]** 

  
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