Essay Sample on Moderation: The Key to Everyday Life Success

Introduction

Many positions and theories advocate for the need for moderation in everything that we do; for example, Buddhism talks of the middle way of moderation that touches on moderating the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Sigmund Freud, Abraham Maslow, and Plato, among other great scholars, all mentioned the need for moderation as anything when done to the extreme has the potential of bringing with it unprecedented outcomes that may not be beneficial, especially in everyday life. Aristotle talks about the golden mean to refer to having a balance or rather a mean between two extremes, and the mean, in this case, is moral behavior; hence, moderation can be helpful in everyday life whereby people find a compromise between two extremes to act morally (Klose, 2015). Honesty in everyday life involves moderating between committing actions that could be dishonest or choosing to lie to get away with something.

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The main purpose of moderation is to help people identify situations where they are stuck in rigid extreme ways of thinking and hence go beyond such ways. The hierarchy of needs by Maslow is a good example of this position where individuals grow from one level to another until finally, they achieve self-actualization where they have almost no limitations. Although moderation is important in everyday life, some positions, such as Islam and Orthodox Christianity who view extreme devotions and adherence to one absolute answer as the way to go. People who align to such positions are expected to follow certain rules and way of life without which they face consequences that may involve punishment. Extremism involves having beliefs that other people may consider unacceptable because the world, as we know it today, encompasses current events that, at times, require compromise (Parekh, 2018). Without moderation, it is hard to maintain morality and society in general because people would do whatever they believe to be right without looking at the impact their actions would have on other people. As human beings, we should be capable of compromising our beliefs based on the current state of events. Moderation helps to ensure normality, and in everyday life, it ensures consistency and accuracy in several current events such as activities of students in school.

Communism versus Capitalism

Economic justice is an element of social justice that involves a set of moral principles used for building economic institutions, and it is a basic human issue that has been continually debated worldwide. Adams Smith and Karl Max both presented two versions of economic justice, which are communism and capitalism. Karl Max expressed his belief of communism to center on the notion that suffering and inequality is mainly propagated by capitalism. Examples of such inequalities include market prices being high on specific goods and favoring a few individuals in society. Capitalism contains seeds of its destruction, and because capitalism requires an underclass in society inequalities but be established to promote this (Szelenyi, 2017). Moreover, Marx also believed that the history of the world is marching along five stages that will make it possible for the world to enter a new age of classless society.

Adams Smith views capitalism as involving an invisible hand that guides supply and demand in the economic market. Examples of current events that promote capitalism in the world today include taxation in free markets as well as the intervention of the government in economic matters, which in most cases guide economic institutions towards actions that favor a few groups of individuals. The invisible hand mentioned by Adams smith works by using the self-interest of individuals to create the lowest prices for the best products. The problem with communism is that it tends to produce inefficient economies that are not sustainable because taking from a person's ability and distributing to each according to need leads to a lack of innovation because people are not motivated.

The problem with capitalism is that it has caused excess materialism because individuals tend to focus on amassing more wealth for themselves, creating more demand for products hence high prices, which in turn can lead to failure of markets. Capitalism is not efficient in practice because the wealth of capitalists is depended and generated by what Marx terms as the proletariat, who may eventually lead a revolution to overthrow capitalists and its supporters. In practice, people get fed up with the inequalities of capitalism. Communism, on the other hand, communism in practice contrasts with the goal of making rules and mechanisms that drive the economy, and with no incentive and motivation for work, putting communism in practice becomes difficult.

The Four Postures

The epistemic postures consist of attitudes that exist towards epistemic objects such as evidence, knowledge of even inquiry, and it is concerned with the theory of knowledge under the four different postures of reason, science, experience, and authority. To begin with, the posture of reason deals with the reason for believing in a proposition usually through presented facts, which form part of the belief in a truth related case. The posture of authority, on the other hand, deals with forming a belief based on authority (Hetherington, 2018). It involves deferring to the opinions of others with a hope of learning from their experience and in the process, supplementing our limited scope in regards to finding truth in a particular case. Epistemic authorities tend to motivate others to not only adopt their beliefs but also provide the higher-order reasons that allow others to reassign considerations to align with the reasons for and against the view in question from the authority.

The epistemological posture of science holds the view that science is a belief that bears proper truths on a number of propositions, and science has the ability to answer some primary questions that may not be properly answered by other means. Lastly, the epistemic posture of experience holds the view that a person's belief of what is true can be based on the person's experience, which does not shape the real world but is a way of gaining knowledge. In most cases, this belief is only relevant when there is awareness in the experiences relied upon because, without awareness, experiences can be fallible. Finding objective truth can be challenging for a number of reasons, and these ways of finding truth each provide a unique approach that can be preferred by different individuals. It is because while some people prefer reason and logic, others may opt for experience as a way of finding the truth (Lehrer, 2018). Some groups of people believe that science holds some of the most significant truths on earth and hence is the essential source of knowledge.

Plato's theory of knowledge bases its ideas on the posture of experience in which case if the soul is immortal, then it holds all knowledge that can be accessed by the mortal body through reason and experience. Socrates also had a theory of knowledge that held the view that distinguishing between right and wrong is not based on society but rather on people's ability towards reason and logic. From the epistemic postures, it can be noted that science has some setbacks relating to providing truths, while authority can be misleading since it is not an absolute source of knowledge. The best way to find the truth is to use logic and reason because they deal with evidence and facts rather than experiences and science or even authority which may be faulty in so many ways

References

Hetherington, S. C. (2018). Knowledge puzzles: An introduction to epistemology. Routledge.

Klose, B., & Kovenock, D. (2015). Extremism drives out moderation. Social Choice and Welfare, 44(4), 861-887.

Lehrer, K. (2018). Theory of knowledge. Routledge.

Parekh, B., & Berki, R. N. (2018). The distinction between moderation and extremism. In Routledge Revivals: The Morality of Politics (1972) (pp. 66-80). Routledge.

Szelenyi, I. (2017). Capitalism after communism. In Twenty-five Sides of a Post-communist Mafia State (pp. 637-649). Central European University Press.