Reply To: Article on "F" - (Draft)

[fayest42]

I’ve been wanting to respond to this, but I wanted to mull it over a bit first. And I’m still mulling it over now, but I think if I don’t respond soon, it’ll probably fall by the wayside, and I’ll never respond. So here are some of my half-formed thoughts.
First of all, I’m really glad you wrote this article because understanding the distinction between being a “feeler” and a “thinker” (and more specifically Fi and Ti) has been my biggest struggle in understanding CT and how I fit into it. The definition I used for “feelers” before finding CT was #3 (Makes decisions based on feelings), which led me to believe I wasn’t a feeler. So I was glad to see it clearly explained that that definition is not used in CT. As I went down the list, I was quite curious to see what definition CT would agree with. When I got to Definition #5 (Making Decisions based on Ethics) and saw that CT mostly agrees with this, my first reaction was disappointment. The connection people sometimes make people the feeling functions and ethics has never seemed right to me - I always thought it had more to do with values and that ethics was an overly specific narrowing of that concept. As for how it fits me, while I could imagine myself as someone who makes decisions based on my values, perhaps, I have never seen myself as someone who makes decisions primarily based on ethics. I don’t even consider myself to be a particularly ethical person (not that I’m horribly unethical, but just that I don’t consider ethics a top priority for me, and I also recognize that I have a tendency to be pretty selfish). I recall that one of the descriptions of Fi said something about how an Fi-lead sees what is true and what is ethical as being the same, and this was one of the things that didn’t make any sense to me since I see them as being completely unrelated. But since this was just “mostly” in agreement with CT, I let it go for the moment and moved onto definition #6, the true CT definition: “An implicit mental recognition of biotic and cognitive agents.” The abstractness of this definition makes it hard to have an immediate feeling of either relating to it or not. I certainly sometimes do things like assign “a ‘living’ quality to a thing/being” or treat “an object as warranting a consideration of their living needs,” but I also sometimes don’t do those things. And as you point out, a “thinker” will also sometimes do these things because everyone has a feeling function. So it’s hard to really judge whether I’m a T or an F type based on that definition.
One of the interesting results of mulling this over for a while was that I realized that ethics might play a bigger role in my life than I thought they did. I recently had a conversation with some friends in which we recounted any times in our lives when we “broke up” with a friend, and I realized that in both of the two cases in my own life, I “broke up” with a friend because they had done something I considered unethical, even though it had no impact on me directly. I also realized that even though I have an intellectual belief in moral nihilism, I still have an internal “feeling” about what is ethical that can be quite strong at times - sometimes annoyingly so. But while that feeling can be very strong about certain types of ethical dilemmas, it can be pretty much absent about other types. And oftentimes my decision to act “ethically” is based more on a fear of authority than on a personal sense of ethics.
I still think that ethics don’t play a big role in the majority of my decision-making. Oftentimes this is because I just don’t see an ethical component to the decision (e.g. “Should I take a walk or ride my bike today?” I’m sure you could find an ethical component to that decision if you really tried, but it’s not glaringly obvious to me). Other times a decision does have a clear ethical component, but it’s not my top priority. For example, in deciding whether or not to send my son to daycare this fall, there’s an obvious ethical component because sending him might mean increasing the spread of covid in the community. While that component is part of what I thought about when making the decision, it was a smaller part than the potential effect it would have on my own life and the lives of my family members.
Another thing that occurred to me when mulling this over is that the term “ethics” tends to conjure up for me a concept of imposed ethics from the outside, which I may or may not agree with. But I might have my own personal ethics which don’t necessarily agree with the ethics of the outside world, and therefore I don’t necessarily think of them as being “ethics.” But perhaps that’s essentially what they are (but then again perhaps those would be better called “values.” What exactly is the difference between ethics and values?).
I also wonder how my behavior in regards to ethics has been affected by my development of Ne and partial development of Te (I've definitely noticed that just in the last few years I've started doing this thing when I'm making a decision where I remind myself to approach it by just thinking through what the results of those decisions would be and then picking whichever decision would work out for the best, which I'm guessing is the influence of Te). Perhaps if I thought back to a time in my life when I only had Fi developed, I would find a stronger focus on ethics (I did choose to become a vegetarian at age 16 for ethical reasons, which seems to be very stereotypical of Fi-leads). It's hard to say for sure though because I'm not sure at what age I developed Ne, and I don't have a great memory for things I thought as a child/teenager.
Anyway, sorry for the very unorganized and incomplete nature of these thoughts. I hope there might be some useful nuggets in there regardless.