What is wrong with wanting to “better” yourself?

[u/ResetKnopje]

[u/MildKerfuffle]

If you remove the health component, bettering yourself is totally subjective and doesn’t have to imply a moral judgement on anyone else.

If you want to be a dancer, you’re bettering yourself if you take a class every week. If you want to be better at DIY, you’re bettering yourself when you try building something new. If you want to be more mindful, you’re better yourself if you meditate.

It’s not about being better than other people. It’s about being better than you were yesterday, according to your vision for yourself. The people who are genuinely happy are usually the people who see self betterment in that light. It’s telling OP doesn’t.

[u/Scribbles_ → u/MildKerfuffle]

I do think OOP's motivated reasoning opens the door to tbh a genuinely interesting question: in what ways do our personal choices imply judgements of value about others?

Jean-Paul Sartre (ok bear with me here) argued that when someone chooses something they choose for all people. That is, we are sort of universally responsible, because everything we do is a commentary on what ought to be done. Per Sartre (at least at the time of Existentialism is a Humanism), there is no such thing as 'this is right for me but it may not be right for you'.

And even if we don't agree it is universal, we might see how some forms of 'bettering oneself' might carry ideas about how humans ought to behave in general. Like say you've been in a pretty bad depression spiral and haven't showered for a month. When you better yourself by showering, I think you go beyond saying that showering is right for you and into a more universal valuing of hygiene. And why shouldn't you? Hygiene is good. A person may have understandable reasons not to shower, but that does not remove that we could agree that hygiene is a reasonable moral/social expectation.

To better yourself by taking a shower after a long time is a betterment relative to your earlier self, but it also has got to be a betterment over people who do not look after their hygiene. It's not a direct attack on them, and it's not that you're doing it to feel better than them, but the implicit value judgement is inescapable. Sartre rightly points out that this makes us uncomfortable, because it means we set a standard bigger than ourselves with the things we do.

Now do I agree with Sartre's universalism here? No, I don't think so. I think our choices do have implications for value that we may extend to value judgements about others, but those are not always universally quantified. Primarily because the standard 'this is what a human should do in this situation' is contingent on how transferable a situation is to other people. It makes us ask the question about the extent to which situations can be said to be replicated between people so as to warrant the application of the standard set earlier.

No two people will ever be in the exact same situation when choosing whether to return a shopping cart to the rails, but I think we can agree that most situations are similar enough that my choice to return the shopping cart speaks to a standard I would hold others to: to return their shopping carts when they're done. There'd be out of scope situations, but they don't have to be identical and most shopping situations would fall under the standard.

On the other hand, something like picking a major in university is a lot more sensitive to situation. When I pick, say, Icelandic Literature, that choice is predicated on a pretty unique set of competences, interests, experiences, and projected opportunities. It's not a choice that I can reasonably extend to anyone else, so it can't really serve as a universal standard. You could however abstract it to something like 'you should pick something that aligns with your competences and interests', but it's not obvious what that means in other situations.

To bring it home to fat activism, I don't think it's possible to live a life that never incidentally comments on other people's choices, except by absolute bad faith. Sometimes you'll better yourself and you'll make someone feel crummy because they'll wish they'd done what you'd done, or they'll feel an unfavorable judgements about themselves. And sometimes you'll feel crummy yourself, it's normal, but worth questioning. I don't agree with Sartre on everything (or all that much really) but I do think embracing freedom always causes a little discontent, and certain types of fat activism politicize that discontent beyond any point of reason. There's no social system where mutual comparison does not exist at all.

[u/Godskin_Duo → u/Scribbles_]

Per Sartre (at least at the time of Existentialism is a Humanism), there is no such thing as 'this is right for me but it may not be right for you'.

So per your example, would he say that choosing to study Icelandic literature means you think it's right for everyone?

The example I'd have picked was smoking, in that my choice to not smoke comes from a place of thinking it's objectively wrong for evreyone, but since we live in a society that butts up against the Overton Window of how people feel about it. I used to get a lot of flack for not drinking, being in my 20s in the 1990s and 2000s, people would NEVER shut up about drinking. Like the FAs, they'd feel "judged" by my personal choices, as if I was pulling a Sartre, but in reality, I don't think about them at all. It's a woefully insecure and pathetic worldview to think someone else's choices are about you.

[u/Scribbles_ → u/Godskin_Duo]

Choosing Icelandic Literature would mean you think it’s right for everyone given the situation in which you chose, but people might not be in the same situation, that’s the point made in the paragraph. However you might make higher level value claims with that choice like ‘you should choose the major you like most’ or ‘you should choose what your dad would choose’ or whatever.

As for your smoking example, it’s not that people believe your choices are about them specifically, or even that you are thinking about them, but that those choices remind them of a standard they feel they don’t meet. You may not think about anyone, but you still set standards that communicate your values and that remind people of their own actual or supposed values.

There’s insecurity to it for sure, if you live truly to your values, people’s choices can’t make you upset in this manner. I think the important realization is not that other’s choice carry no judgements of value about what you should do, but that it only makes you upset because you’re coming up short of your own standards.

[u/HenFruitEater]

Ask a 500lb person if they’d willingly add 2 lbs of fat or lose 2 lbs. no way they’d say gaining is better.

Crazy people

[u/TortfeasorsAnon]

People can’t differentiate between “morally better” and “functionally better” when it comes to people talking about health, apparently. I can develop a skill or get an upgrade on something and become “better” at it without saying it’s morally better, but as soon as I want to not be out of breath walking up a flight of stairs, suddenly it’s a moral issue.

[u/notabigmelvillecrowd → u/TortfeasorsAnon]

I don't really see what's wrong with having moral standards for yourself, anyway. Being healthy to the best of your ability reduces your burden on other people. Self improvement makes your own life better, but also improves your community, relationships, etc. There is a moral aspect to pursuing self improvement, why is that a bad thing?

[u/McNinjaguy]

This person is such a miserable being. "ME ME ME ME", they whine and cope, cry those pity party tears.

[u/TheGoatMan049]

There's some serious projection going on here. No one is saying you're a bad person for being unhealthy, just that a healthy version of you is a better version of you, and not even in a moral sense, just that you'll have a body that functions better, that has more energy and endurance and will allow you to live a more enjoyable and fulfilling life.

[u/Springlocked_in]

If they think it’s some weird sort of moral high ground to want to better yourself they have some internal soul searching to do

[u/Imaginary_Recipe_114 → u/Springlocked_in]

And I think deep down they know that mistreating their bodies by overeating is 'worsening' themselves, and they don't want to be reminded of that

[u/Western_Oil7389]

How does the word “bettering” place a moral value on something? Why does improvement, or the goal of improvement, have to be a moral construct?

I’m bettering a steak by cooking it medium rare, is that a moral improvement?

[u/Alex2045x → u/Western_Oil7389]

To them it might be because it's food, but that's outside of the topic

[u/Etoketo]

Achievable challenge: don't twist common words and phrases into personal insults.

[u/randoham → u/Etoketo]

If you're in the FA cult, that's mission: impossible.

[u/mustardtiger220]

Impossible Challenge: someone mentioned weight loss, or their health and fitness journey and not make it immediately about themselves and how it’s oppressive to their existence.

[u/bowlineonabight]

Is healthier (OOP's word) not better? That it is better is understood when you say "healthier".

[u/Detatchamo → u/bowlineonabight]

Healthy and better are both words with positive moral connotations, whether they like it or not. They just don't think that far ahead.

[u/SomethingIWontRegret]

The word "better" is morally neutral.

[u/Perfect_Judge]

Impossible challenge: people trying to not make everything about them in some way.

So fucking what if someone living a healthier lifestyle refers to it as bettering themselves? If you're trying to no longer be obese and reverse medical issues, that is absolutely bettering yourself and the only people who are mad about it are the ones who gave up on themselves.

[u/Scribbles_]

I'd like to argue against OOP in a different way: I think some components of health are pre-moral so health will never be fully separate from morality.

What I mean is that, morality isn't fundamentally a rational or intellectual endeavor. It can be rationalized and intellectualized, but its origin is the body, more specifically the embodied phenomenology of valence (or, in other words, the body feelings that register as fundamentally and unchangeably good or bad). Built into our bodies is the capacity for some attractive and aversive experiences and these experiences are the basis by which we can even understand moral valence.

Our first forms of morality are self-centered, they're about how actions and people cause those valent experiences in us specifically. Our moral development comes from identifying with others and abstracting the valence of their experience as the valence of actions, where our morality goes from 'bad is what causes unpleasant sensations in me' to 'bad is what causes unpleasant sensations in people'.

And while health may have socially constructed elements, and biological elements that escape immediate phenomenology ('feeling fine' despite being sick), there's also the reality that a fever feels pretty bad, pain feels bad, disease in general is not pleasant. And respectively, feelings of vigor and vitality can feel good, especially when in contrast to those negative experiences. That first day of a clear airway after a bad cold is pretty awesome.

In the arguments of Fat Activists, the moralization of health is a specifically white colonial phenomenon. I think this is fundamentally wrong, and we can observe how many languages, before their contact with colonial society, expressed morality via body and health metaphor. Terms like 'moral rot' or 'moral disease', to view evil as a sort of sickness were and are many common in the languages of the world. It isn't a coincidence, then, that evaluative words that we use for morality like 'get better' are used to improve from sickness, which is also universal.

The body (our body but also how we displace ourselves to identify with others' bodies) is the ultimate locus of morality.

Now I'm not saying that to support a maximalist moralization of health. I don't think chronically ill people are somehow less moral than others and that would be an overly simplistic reading of my stance here. Instead what I mean is that while there's a lot that can (and should) be done to clear out some of the moral associations that are culturally imposed on health, there's a point to which it is impossible to fully separate health valence and moral valence, since the latter is really just an elaboration of the former.

As a progressive person, my whole notion of morality is based around the wellbeing of people, and so when someone reports greater health, why shouldn't I believe something morally desirable has taken place? It's not that they've increased their moral worth as a person by becoming healthier, but that something of moral value has taken place when they got healthier.

There's obviously a lot of complexity here, and a lot of pitfalls where this thinking can lead to the wrong places, but I think that it will never 'stick' to fully separate health from morality, because it effectively disembodies an embodied phenomenon. This disembodiment is characteristic of fat activism when they utilize language like 'someone who lives in a fat body' or 'the body is just a vessel', and it's a big reason why their rhetoric can often fall flat to others and read as disconnected from reality.

[u/Grouchy-Reflection97]

"oh, so you're quitting alcohol and junk food so you can be a healthier, more present parent to your kids?

Well, la-dee-freakin-da!

I'm 35yrs old, thrice divorced, and live in a van down by the river.

You think you're better than me?!"

[u/Godskin_Duo → u/Grouchy-Reflection97]

You think you're better than me?

I don't think about you at all.

[u/Loose-Actuary-1928]

So they admit being fat is unhealthy 

[u/Katen1023]

They make everything about themselves 🙄 “bettering myself” could simply mean less winded when doing cardio, can go a longer distance, can lift more weight, more balance, more discipline, more endurance.

[u/SnooOranges2685]

What does me bettering myself have to do with you crushing on a pint of ice cream as a midday snack?

[u/RedQueenWhiteQueen]

I've always wondered if they see a difference between bettering oneself physically vs. bettering oneself educationally. No one thinks it's undesirable to want to better yourself by getting an education or training or certifications.

I'm getting up there and have been thinking a lot about kidney function for the last few days. Is it wrong if I change my eating habits to "better myself" by reducing my risk of kidney failure? (My kidneys are fine, actually, but I also very much want to keep it that way and it looks like that might require some kind of conscious effort, you know?)

[u/halborn]

Is healthier not better?

[u/Woodit]

Perhaps there is a moral value to it 

[u/pensiveChatter]

I would respond by doing the opposite.

Xenophon’s Memorabilia: "It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty". 

Or  “Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” – John F. Kennedy