A simple question

First let me tell you that I am very happy to be a member in this group and please forgive me if sometimes my english will be hard to understand. For now I have a simple question for all of you and I will appreciate it so much if you will notice this topic and share your thoughts about it with me. OK and now the qustion : how many compromises should a man make in his life to achieve his gouls and how will he know when to draw the line and say : "this is it ! thats as far as I am willing to go !" 

Good to have you in the group.

Don't apologize for your English. If we had to have this conversation in Romanian or Spanish, we couldn't say anything.

This is a great question. Ethics and morality is one of my favorite topics. I think it is a wise policy never to compromise your principles, which is why it is extremely important for everyone to decide what principles you will live by. If you know you cannot live with it, it's self-defeating to adopt a principle to be honest always, for example.

This question also relates a bit to the topic of "to be rather than to seem." I think a person has to ask "who am I?" If the answer is "someone who would stab a friend in the back to get ahead in business," then he or she might want to rethink core values.

There is also an interesting aspect of Confucian philosophy that applies to the issue of goals. Confucius advised his followers not to worry about getting appointed a government official (basically the goal of all educated Chinese at the time) but rather, just worry about being the sort of person who is worthy of being appointed an officer. The idea, as I understand it, is that if you direct your goals to external things, that is, things that you depend on others for, like appointments, fame, whatever, you may be frustrated through no fault of your own. But if you set your goal on an internal thing -- make yourself the sort of person worthy of whatever you want -- then you can achieve it and know you've done your best, no matter what happens.

This may even relate to chess: whether you win or lose a game often depends on the strength of your opponent, but you can control yourself: just make the best moves you can at every point in the game, and then you don't have to be ashamed of your performance, even if Kasparov crushes you in 12 moves.

 Well to relate that question somewhat to the theme of this site, I remember reading somewhere that Nabokov thought Stalin was as evil a dictator as Hitler & he didn't think the Allies should compromise their principals & join with the USSR in WW2.

Are we allowed to join the forces of evil just that we can fight an even greater one ?

 President Lincoln, who was arguably one of the most moral people who ever lived, was willing to compromise with the slave power if doing so could have both (1) put slavery on the road to oblivion (even if it was a long road) and (2) protected the United States from civil war. The slave power was unwilling to compromise and when Lincoln saw the conflict had become total war, he determined that slavery would not survive the conflict.

I take it that your options are the key question here. And we don't always know what they are, so we have to guess. I think Stalin was a worse dictator than Hitler and ultimately Stalin and his successors in the Soviet Union caused more harm, destruction, etc. than the Nazis did. (The Soviet thugs were in business for a lot longer.) But in 1941, I think Hitler was a greater threat to the world than Stalin was. So it is a reasonable choice to make to say fight this evil now, that evil tomorrow. You can morally do what you think causes the most good, even if the most good is still very very bad. (As helping "Uncle Joe" was in WW2.)

The people who I think are morally dispicable are the U.S. leftists who tried to pretend that Stalin and the Soviets were wonderful. That was clearly false, and it was helpful for Nabokov and others to point out their error.

Why do you think they pretended that ? Did they really thought it  or they were mislead ? They really belived it or they wanted to believe it because that would have been more comfortable to them ?  

Duffer,

What a pleasure to read your comments.  I'm not alone!  I do shy away from political discussions lately though because they always seem to degenerate into name calling (not on my part).