How do our personal decisions affect the ways we relate to each other? Two Santa Fe College Ethics Bowl team alumnae discuss how to approach constructive dialogue when personal choices create stark differences between people. Join Chantel Hover, currently at Columbia University, and Paola Sullivan, currently at University of Florida, for tips on having healthy conversations with others, and with yourself.
Sound clip (chantel, pre intro): 23:24 -23:41
The Center for Applied Ethics & Humanities at Santa Fe College (SF) promotes the values of honesty, integrity, and civility, as well as individual, social, and global responsibility. It fosters appreciation for ethical reasoning and encourages and supports active engagement with ethics and humanities in our communities – in thought and action, (((In Word And Deed))). This podcast, a product of the center, features SF faculty, students and alumni engaging in dialogue around critical ethical issues. The first season, "Dinner Table Dynamics," features current and former members of SF’s nationally ranked Ethics Bowl team and fellows in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership. They encourage listeners to practice civil discourse as they head home for the holidays, and into extended family discussions. Learn more at sfcollege.edu/ethics. Share your thoughts (and actions) with @santafecollege using #InWordAndDeed.
How do our personal decisions affect the ways we relate to each other? Two Santa Fe College Ethics Bowl team alumnae discuss how to approach constructive dialogue when personal choices create stark differences between people. Join Chantel Hover, currently at Columbia University, and Paola Sullivan, currently at University of Florida, for tips on having healthy conversations with others, and with yourself.
Sound clip (chantel, pre intro): 23:24 -23:41
The Center for Applied Ethics & Humanities at Santa Fe College (SF) promotes the values of honesty, integrity, and civility, as well as individual, social, and global responsibility. It fosters appreciation for ethical reasoning and encourages and supports active engagement with ethics and humanities in our communities – in thought and action, (((In Word And Deed))). This podcast, a product of the center, features SF faculty, students and alumni engaging in dialogue around critical ethical issues. The first season, "Dinner Table Dynamics," features current and former members of SF’s nationally ranked Ethics Bowl team and fellows in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership. They encourage listeners to practice civil discourse as they head home for the holidays, and into extended family discussions. Learn more at sfcollege.edu/ethics. Share your thoughts (and actions) with @santafecollege using #InWordAndDeed.
Ann Thebaut 0:00
Hello and welcome to In Word and Deed a podcast produced by the Center for Applied Ethics and Humanities at Santa Fe College. I'm in TiVo professor of philosophy here at SF and in a moment, you'll hear from some of my students who have participated in Ethics Bowl over the years and a few who are fellows in the intercollegiate civil disagreement Partnership, which is committed to reducing polarization by teaching students to connect across political differences. This desire to connect is increasingly on our minds as we think about being around family over the holidays, and the prospect of sitting down to have discussions with people we don't always agree with. Today, Paola and Chantal will discuss how our personal preferences and boundaries make us inherently different from one another in our episode, apples and oranges.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 0:51
Hello, everyone. My name is Paola Romeo Sullivan. I am a non-traditional older student. I spent about a year at Santa Fe for my A.A. in Family Youth and Community sciences. It's a mouthful but transferred to the University of Florida, where I'm currently in my third year, I joined the Ethics Bowl where we won our mid Atlantic regional the two-year bowl and went on to Nationals which ended up ranking us fourth in the nation. I currently own my own marketing business called the Third Eye Collective but I look forward to helping youth in our community explore their spirituality and awareness through therapy.
Chantel Hover 1:30
And hi, everyone. My name is Chantal. I am a non-traditional student having spent four years at Santa Fe for an A. A in Political Science. I joined Ethics Bowl in its first year and loved it and so joined again the second year coming back as team captain, and in that year, we won the two-year goal. After that year, I graduated and ended up transferring to G.S. College at Columbia University in New York, where I am now. And I currently sit on the board for the Afghan Student Alliance at Columbia University. I volunteer staff at the Southeast Regional Model United Nations, which holds collegiate conferences in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina. And I also work as the Youth Education Program Coordinator at Paper Airplanes, which is a nonprofit that serves refugees and conflict affected individuals in the Middle East in North Africa.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 2:29
So, today's episode is apples and oranges, about the personal choices and boundaries we make for ourselves. a necessary part of having civil discourse is knowing yourself. And in order to have civil conversation with others, it really requires this understanding of yourself first, to understand others, you must understand yourself. And this episode is about taking inventory of the decisions you make, the boundaries you have, and the personal choices that you make day to day.
Chantel Hover 3:00
Do you ever feel like you have to defend your personal choices? Or what about choices we think are personal, but then hear on the news, social media or the classroom that it's more complicated than that. We decided to come together to talk about some of the more controversial personal choices we've made, as well as those being made around us that have recently made media headlines. What we'll try to talk through is why we've made our choices and who they really affect
Paola Romeo Sullivan 3:27
a controversial decision. That I think is you know, for me personally, Chantal is this decision of practicing sober curiosity. I made this personal choice, only about a year ago. And it really does invite some outsized reactions.
Chantel Hover 3:48
So, this is really interesting to me when we first started talking about this all for those who may not know Paola and I have not known each other for very long, but even within a few conversations, it became clear that she was not one for kind of labels or you know, sticking people in different boxes. So, I'm kind of curious now, why this term sober curiosity, because it's it sounds kind of like a label. Is it something that you use all the time? Do you stick to it?
Paola Romeo Sullivan 4:16
Yeah, so absolutely, I think so. In my journey, I think that it's been very obvious that alcohol and I don't mix. It doesn't make me feel good. It doesn't make my body feel good. I definitely coming out of sort of a fog and a haze. It takes a while for me. For me, personally, I have had members of my family have troubles with alcoholism. And so, I didn't actually even start drinking until I was 21 for the very first time and then it just became a social thing. And being the people pleaser that I am just being very it difficult decision to say no to friends and family even. So, the term server sever curiosity really invites conversation. So, when I say, oh, no, no, no, I'm not drinking. People really know what that means. And then the conversation is just shut down. And we really don't go into it as much. It's really interesting that people just, you know, they'll tend to push when you're just saying, I'm not drinking. Oh, no, no, just have one more Come on, or, you know, don't be a wuss. But it's really about being aware of how you phrase the decisions that you've made. And I practice sober curiosity. I'm not. I don't say I am sober, curious, in practicing sober curiosity, I really invite mistakes to happen. So, if I do want to have a drink, it's okay. I'm perfectly okay having a drink or two. But I really do invite those sort of lessons of understanding what my body needs. What I wanted the time, maybe why I made that decision to drink, was it just to curb the edge? Or was it just to have a refreshing Mohito? Who knows? But you know, at the time, I really like to think through those decisions. And being sober curious is really just a way of life for me right now. And it's, it's not who I am, in the sense of, I don't let it define me. It's just a decision I'm making at that moment.
Chantel Hover 6:35
I really liked that idea that you brought up about practicing sober curiosity. Instead of saying, I, I am sober curious, which kind of makes that black and white division, right, I'm sober, I'm not sober, I'm practicing meaning that there's flexibility kind of there, or flexibility at least and as you said, making mistakes and lessons. Talking about apples to oranges. I am a bit of the opposite. I'm definitely a social drinker. And, and if I could be frank, I mean, I'm, I've never really been that interested in sober curiosity for myself. But after talking to you about it, it kind of bothers me when I think not about why I might want to be super curious. But what the reaction would be in kind of the social life that I built around me, so much of what we do nowadays, particularly in college, right, consider around the bar or parties or going out and drinking. And then even at work, right, as we as you start to go into the nine to five world or even our part time jobs, right? There's often like a weekly Happy Hour invite. It's very rare that the invitation is you know, to go to a book club or even to go to a coffee shop down the street. Right? So, I can't help but wonder then has it affected your social relationships and dynamics? The way that I feel like it might affect mine? What is the reaction been? And kind of just how do you deal with it? Yeah, absolutely.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 8:04
So, I guess, as I mentioned, before, I was a people pleaser, and a perfectionist, or what Brene Brown cleverly calls a recovering perfectionist in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that. I'm not going to lie, though, it's really a lot of work. It's about taking a step back and working on yourself with unconditional love. And that can be difficult. That is that is very much a challenge. And it's something that I'm constantly working on daily, but it is something that to sort of get to this place where you can say no comfortably. It took me time to make sort of these personal decisions, and be able to back up those personal decisions confidently, without fear of embarrassment without fear of neglect, without fear of being made fun of, because those are really, you know, the funniest thing is that you think that, you know, you sort of like it's called a monkey brain, you have all these little chitchat noises in your head. It's like, oh, what are people gonna say? What are people gonna think? And, you know, every time I'd say 10, out of 10 times, very confidently, those noises are 100% wrong. They no one is making fun, no one is judging. And, you know, and I really do feel that people respect you more when you are presenting the choices that you've that you've really presented, and you've and it shows that you've thought through them thoroughly.
Chantel Hover 9:47
So, it sounds like I've been kind of over here wondering about, you know, what the social reaction is. And what you're saying is that, yeah, there's the social reaction, but that's not actually the first thing that you thought of or that even you approached,
Paola Romeo Sullivan 10:03
Right.
Chantel Hover 10:03
It sounds like the first stage was like, knowing what you really want, right deciding if that was to practice sober curiosity or not. And then you're talking about building up the confidence to be able to present your choice of not drinking or practicing sober curiosity, if that's what you want to do. And it's not even until after that, that you start dealing with the reactions after. Is that right?
Paola Romeo Sullivan 10:28
Yeah, absolutely. So, it's definitely easier to go with the flow and not rock the boat, per se. We may drink because of social reasons, we may vote a certain way, because our social group of friends voted that certain way. Or maybe you want to piss off Uncle Johnny, you know, are you maybe even join a club because our circle of friends join that club. It's absolutely normal to fall into choices and decisions that are seemingly, quote, the capacity to be your own person, but which is also known as personal autonomy choices. But they are in fact, a social collective autonomy. And what is the social collective autonomy, it's basically an autonomy that belongs to the group, and wherein the group gets to govern itself and gets to make collective decisions. So, individuals that have personal autonomy, they don't get to have that individuality, because you're making it as a collective. And in today's world, we unfortunately can't talk about personal choices without at least acknowledging the argument of personal choice, and for example, getting the vaccine can I really equate my right to choose whether or not to get vaccinated with my right to choose whether or not to drink?
Chantel Hover 11:44
I think it's really interesting that we go there, right? From this deceptively controversial idea of whether we want to drink or not in a public situation, to something that is very clearly and blatantly controversial, right in the headlines right now about whether to get the vaccine or not. I guess, something I think about when this comes up is the quote by John Stuart Mill's, he says, "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."
So, for those who aren't aware, or haven't read him, I mean, back in the 1800s, right, there was this guy.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 12:20
Way Back.
Chantel Hover 12:24
named John Stuart Mills. So, we can see that like, we're progressing this, this conversation that's been around for centuries about personal choice. And so, he talks about this thing called the harm principles, and your rights and liberties, which are basically we can boil it down right to the ethics of personal choice. So, this quote about swinging your fist is pretty self-explanatory. But to spell it out, right, the point is that you're free to do whatever you want, provided, you're not harming anyone. And so, you're free to swing your fist round and round in the air up and down the street. But the moment you see somebody walking out of the grocery store and you aim that fist towards that person's face, your freedom, your right to do that is gone, because now you've harmed somebody, right? And, and this is pretty clear about what harm is, and we should be too, right. It's not like you're offending somebody by something you've said. Or we're talking about drinking, right drinking until you embarrass yourself at a party. And it's harm is like inciting people to act violently, or drinking and then getting behind the wheel of a car to drive through town, right? Those first two things, they might hurt people's feelings, or you might do some damage to yourself either to your reputation or to your bathroom from getting sick the next day. But the second two do violent harm to other people like physical violent harm, either by you being behind the wheel, or you in front of a group with guns and pitchforks, right, inciting that kind of violence.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 14:07
Absolutely. And so, is this harm, whether it's intentional or not?
Chantel Hover 14:13
So, this harm is, is going to be intentional, right? You have the intent to harm somebody or you understand the consequences of these actions are blatant, right? If you're we've discovered, right? If you're drinking and you're above the influence, and you get it behind the car, you might not mean to hurt somebody, but you know that your judgment is impaired, right? And so that's where we step in and say that your right to freedom of movement should be restricted, because we know what comes from operating a heavy vehicle when your mind is impaired.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 14:48
Right, right. So, this is kind of where the intersection where personal choices and your wellbeing meets community wellbeing right. So how can we all agree on some level, the importance of community wellbeing sort of social contract without, you know, using all of these philosophy words, I think it's interesting as well how some of these issues become these sort of sticking points. But there are so many choices in our sort of day to day that we don't question whether or not we're making them because we either personally want to, or maybe because everyone else is doing it, or maybe because it's just convenient to go along, or whether we're doing it for the better of the community. I mean, I'm guilty of not always thinking about, you know, just living in my own world in my own bubble. And I think that not thinking about the greater good can be can definitely be challenging. So, I would challenge us all to really pick on some habitual decisions we make every day, and some decisions that we make in our social context, and really think about why we choose that. But just to highlight some differences in the personal choices we make drinking versus not drinking, getting the vaccine versus not getting the vaccine, religious, being religious being spiritual versus being agnostic. These are our apples and oranges, folks. Yeah, Chantel.
Chantel Hover 16:19
Yeah, I think something to also think through just kind of building off of this momentum we've gained right. A lot of our decisions we make, we also justify as it being our right to make, right it's our, our right, and our personal choice, whether we decide to drink or not drink. And we just talked about how to decide whether it's your right or, or not to get a vaccine that intersection between community wellbeing versus individual choices. These are two different things. These two things can also be different from your religiosity verse, your spirituality, verse being agnostic, depending upon how you exercise those things, which again, kind of goes into our harm principle, right how, how our decision affects others around us. So, before we leave, I thought it might be fun to have a little thought experiment. And so, for those of you who have or have not participated in a thought experiment, it's essentially just a situation that we're going to walk through. And it sounds deceptively simple, but it's very difficult to kind of deceit disassociate ourselves from the people that we are and to imagine a completely new scenario in which who we are and our kind of thoughts and decisions don't exist, but we're going to try it. Okay.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 17:43
Let's do it.
Chantel Hover 17:45
Okay. So, imagine you're about to enter a new world. Still humans, but totally new. And so maybe we're, you know, we've we found a secondary planet, right? A mirror to Earth?
Paola Romeo Sullivan 18:01
I'm sure Elon Musk was the was behind that.
Chantel Hover 18:06
His dream? Yeah. So, you have no idea what color people are, how many colors people are? And in what proportion? Right? And you have no idea what religion anybody is? Or how many religions there are, you have no idea what talents are highly prized and compensated. Which jobs, you have no idea what the socio economic stratum is, meaning, you don't know what percentage of people are poor, rich, etc. Do they still quantify wealth and riches based on some sort of currency. And it's kind of difficult to wrap your head around, right? So, you know nothing about the people in this world. And you also know nothing about yourself before entering it. Yet, before you enter it, you have to decide what the basic structures and principles of the society should be. And whatever you choose, you're stuck with this in the world. So, should that world be a dictatorship? Right? Do you know it? Maybe depending on your thoughts, it might be okay, if you're entering that world, and you are the dictator. But what if you're a poor creative writer in this world, right? What if you want to build this society based on everybody being out for themselves to maximize their benefits? Kind of, you know, the, this competition Doggy Dog? Well, you don't know if you're entering this world with some kind of disability that keeps you from being able to claw your way to the top. So, you have to think maybe, should there be some kind of mechanisms in place in case you come out as one of the poor or less advantaged people in this world? Do we have an obligation to one another for that? So, it's kind of a long thought experiment, but it actually highlights another philosopher called Rawls and he had this idea of original position. And the idea, right is when we think about what is our right, sometimes we're coming at it from a place of who and where we are in a society, we think about what is our right to do, regardless of what that might impose on other people that we either don't see or choose to ignore. So, Rawls idea of the original position, is that, okay, if we were going to decide how a society should be structured, which includes our rights, what we shouldn't, shouldn't do? What if we had no idea how that world was structured, and we had no idea who we would be in the world, that would be behind what he calls a veil of ignorance. And if we can take that step back, and we can kind of try to wrap our heads around this, this disembodiment, right, of being a person and how we would construct something where we didn't know where we would be placed, and maybe these arguments of what his what his rights would be different. Yeah. So yeah,
Paola Romeo Sullivan 21:05
I love that, I absolutely love that. So really thinking through not only your personal choices from a selfish perspective, right, but then this veil of ignorance allows you to literally put on this veil, that covers, you know, just I'm a very visual person, so covers your head covers your, you know, just covers everything, and you go completely, essentially blind into the world? And how do those, how do those rules and decisions really govern and dictate everything around you? Absolutely, yeah. So, to sort of wrap up the importance of personal choices, I really be examples that were given between drinking versus not drinking, vaccines versus no vaccines, being religious, or spiritual, apples and oranges. I hope everyone kind of really can take a step back and see that there are differences between even just these minute little personal choices, they may be big, they may be small, whether you're drinking water, soda, you know, those all of these decisions really do have an either personal or communal effect.
Chantel Hover 22:25
I agree. And I like how we really went from something that can be a minute personal decision right? To that really might just affect you or your group of friends to a decision that arguably could affect your community, your nation, the world, right. And so really taking that time as you go through your day and figuring out who does my decision impact? And if, in the case of the drinking, right, if your decision doesn't really impact very many people. What's stopping you from making it? Where is that that difference between personal and collective autonomy? So, I really appreciate you sharing Paola, I think this was a really interesting case to get into.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 23:05
Yeah, absolutely. I think I mean, one of my favorites was, you know, the rights in the punching nose, quote, I think, you know, really good way to sort of end that segment., because it really it really comes down. I think that when we had this conversation originally, that's that was a very visual quote for me to really think through. Just everyday decisions. Absolutely. Yeah. So, remember, your right to swing your fist and swing your nose begins.
Chantel Hover 23:36
Altogether, we have differences founded on personal choices, and those choices are ours to make. I think Paula, you introduced a section of this decision making, I hadn't quite given credence to at the beginning. Sometimes I'm so worried about how my personal choices might be received, that I and I think others don't take the time to step back and decide what our personal choices are, you know, like really sit with them, and then build the confidence to present them as felt to those around us. It's funny, this was supposed to be a segment on civil external discourse. But sometimes the internal discourse is an overlooked first step to even walking into the conversation.
Paola Romeo Sullivan 24:18
Yeah, absolutely, Chantal, and I really appreciate how you really framed the intersection of our personal and community wellbeing meet. You're literally stepping into someone else's shoes and developing empathy for another person. You really shouldn't go into a conversation to change someone's mind or to want to change someone's mind. You should want to go into a conversation by developing a deeper understanding of one another by understanding yourself first.
Chantel Hover 24:47
Thanks for joining us, everyone. On the next episode, instead of talking about our differences, there'll be talking about how to find common ground between people. Stay tuned.