Every so often, I get asked about myself. The question is well meaning. It has every intention of getting to the root of the problem. When I hear the question, I cannot help but feel a certain foreboding that some interest will even come into play. From a young age, people have taken an interest in me. I have often thought that they stood to gain by doing so. Certainly, I am not as interesting as the interest in me is; I have often thought that. The reason for their interest has often been more interesting to me. Reasons for things capture my interest, far more than a person having such-and-such an interest in me. Of course, the world at large has interests in things; it wants to know how things work, and who works them. It wants to know who said what to whom to cause them to do an action of consequence. History works in the present. But it is not without reason. I have often thought that people should not act like there are not reasons for things. If I am anything to this day and will be going forward, I am someone who has always, and will always be someone who defends the idea that things have reasons, that there are reasons for everything that happens, and whether you like what they are is immaterial. Of course, one should like what they are, or at least that they exist, because it is essential that we have reasons, no matter what they are. Bring them forward and let us evaluate, I say. And it should be that the reason for things, when pursued to the final cause, as dispersed as the headwaters of reason may be, has a beauty that we like. I have often found that if it is worth pursuing, the end result is beautiful to the pursuer. I, and you, and everyone is the result of reasons of some sort or another. We weren’t created without a cause that at least two people agreed on, normally speaking. So there are reasons. And we should defend the idea that there are reasons. Without admitting of reason, we could not admit of things. There are probably reasons for people to ask me about myself, but, however, advanced those reasons may be, some of it, I suspect, is out of politeness, as much as curiosity. And the truth is, those reasons often conflict with one central reason of mine for my life, which is that I live for my influence on other people. My eyes have never been able to avoid seeing and my heart has never been able to avoid feeling some unavoidable measure of the suffering and heartbreak of the world, and to make that less has been a reason for my doing of things since I had use of reason, as far back as I remember. Injustice, heartbreak and war has made a reason for me to alleviate suffering of other people. I have given a good account of other people to yet other people for so long, that it may be up to others to give a good account of me. And though those others may be wrong in the particulars, they have their reasons for doing so, and as much right as I had for trying to bring the world out of suffering. But let us all give our reasons, and we may yet get closer to the truth.
We must attain, interrogate, critique, and transform measures of attitude, perception, and belief, revealing conclusions about the nature of what someone knows. So I want to show you a modified Venn diagram — modified by me, so please be patient — and which describes two aspects of social psychology that influence policy, behavior, and belief through structures of law and the way we approach thinking about questions involving human disputes within institutional structures; so you can see that, roughly dividing this category of looking at people and their relationship to larger systems and how those systems in turn see people into two camps, you have situationalism, which means people‘s social context shapes choices, and you have dispositionism which basically pre-judges people on social characteristics leading to the notion that someone can be at fault for who they are. Of course, there’s some fuzzy areas in the middle. For instance, you can say that context and sense of self sha...
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