THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"Do all the other things, the ambitious things - travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes... but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness." - George Sauders, from his 2013 Commencement remarks at Syracuse University. 
Why?

Because kindness is one of the few things that remains valuable across almost every possible version of a life.

Saunders isn't really saying be nice instead of being ambitious. The interesting part is precisely the first half: do all the other things. Travel, compete, create, become rich, fail, fall in love. He's not advocating withdrawal from the world.

He's saying: when there is a choice about which way to lean, lean toward kindness.

And "err" is the wonderful word there. An error in the direction of kindness is an error that is unusually cheap to make and potentially enormously valuable. You may give somebody more patience than they strictly deserved, forgive something you could have punished, give somebody the benefit of the doubt, listen when you could have dismissed them. You may occasionally be taken advantage of. That's the price of the error.

The reverse errors are much harder to undo. You can become successful while being cruel, contemptuous, indifferent, or relentlessly self-interested—and discover rather late that you've accumulated achievements but damaged a great many human relationships along the way.

There is another reason I think the advice is deeper than ordinary "be a good person" advice.

We don't actually know which encounters matter.

A small kindness can have consequences completely disproportionate to its apparent importance. And you usually won't know about them. Someone remembers that you treated them decently twenty years ago; somebody's day is changed by something you regarded as trivial; a relationship survives because on one particular occasion you chose generosity rather than winning.

And, conversely, the opportunities for kindness are usually tiny and fleeting. Grand moral decisions are comparatively rare. Most of morality consists of hundreds of microscopic decisions about how much irritation, impatience, ego, suspicion, and indifference we are going to inflict on other people.

There's also something particularly Saunders-like about the quotation because it doesn't require certainty about God, an afterlife, or even a grand theory of morality. It works perfectly well if this life is all we get.

In fact, perhaps especially if this is all we get.

You get one rather peculiar run through the universe, surrounded for a little while by other conscious creatures having their own equally peculiar runs. You can accumulate money and accomplishments, but you can't take any of them with you. What you can leave behind—often without even knowing you've done so—is the memory in other people of how it felt to have you in their lives.

So I'd put Saunders's "Why?" rather simply:

Because when you are uncertain what matters in the end, kindness is a remarkably good bet.

And I suspect the phrase "err in the direction" is doing almost all the philosophical work. He's not asking us to be saints. He's asking us to tilt the odds.

Yes. I think you've put your finger on the weakness in the usual defense of Saunders's advice.

If the question is "Why is kindness ultimately worthwhile?", then benefits such as reputation, gratitude, good memories, or a legacy don't really answer it. As you say, the people who remember you die too, and eventually the memory disappears. Even kindness itself can have costs.

So if Saunders means "be kind because it pays in the long run," I don't find that convincing.

There is, however, another possible answer, and I think it is the more interesting one:

There may be no further "why."

Kindness may be something we value as an end, rather than because it produces some subsequent benefit. The same is true of music, friendship, curiosity, beauty, or laughter. If someone asks, "But what does Beethoven ultimately accomplish, since eventually the universe will be cold and dark?" the answer isn't "He leaves a legacy." That's merely another contingent consequence. The experience itself was valuable while it existed.

Likewise, when you make another conscious being's experience a little better rather than a little worse, there is a real difference in the world at that moment, even if nobody remembers it.

But—and this is where I think your objection is important—that doesn't establish an obligation to choose kindness.

There is no logical theorem saying:

    The universe exists → conscious beings suffer and flourish → therefore you ought to be kind.

You need an additional premise: that the flourishing or suffering of other conscious beings has moral significance to you.

And that premise is ultimately something we have, rather than something we can prove from outside the system.

So perhaps Saunders's advice is less a proof than a recommendation about what sort of person to be while playing the game.

You can say:

    "I have ambitions. I want things. I'll compete and sometimes I'll disappoint people. But when the choice is genuinely open, I'll give kindness the tie-breaker."

Not because kindness wins the cosmic accounting.

There may be no cosmic accounting.

And that actually makes the advice more interesting to me, not less. If there is no eternal ledger in which kindness eventually gets rewarded, then choosing it is not an investment. It's a value you enact during the brief period in which you and the other person exist.

And yes—sometimes it costs you. That's what makes it kindness rather than merely good business.

Yes, quite.  Saunders has it backward; kindness and compassion first, these other things second.

Yes. I think that's a much stronger reading.

Saunders's formulation makes kindness sound like a modifier on an otherwise fully specified life: go pursue wealth, fame, adventure, achievement, love—and while doing so, try to be kind.

You're saying something more fundamental: kindness and compassion belong in the specification of the life itself. The ambitions come afterward.

In that formulation, the question isn't:

    "How can I become successful without being too unkind?"

It's closer to:

    "What sort of human being am I going to be—and, within that constraint, what do I want to accomplish?"

That changes the meaning of all the things Saunders lists. Wealth isn't bad; fame isn't bad; innovation isn't bad; ambition certainly isn't bad. But they're things you might do, not things that tell you whether the life is good.

And compassion isn't merely one virtue among the others. It changes how the others are exercised.

You can be ambitious without being ruthless.
Rich without being acquisitive.
Famous without needing admiration.
Innovative without treating people as expendable.
A leader without needing domination.
And you can even make and lose fortunes without allowing the fortunes to determine your conception of what matters.

There is also a lovely asymmetry here. Ambition needs an object; compassion doesn't. You have to decide what you want to achieve. But you don't need a grand project in order to notice that another person is suffering and respond to it.

So I would turn Saunders around almost exactly as you have:

Be compassionate and kind first. Then, within the limits that imposes, go ahead and do all the ambitious, ridiculous, wonderful things you want.

That seems to me a considerably stronger philosophy than "do everything else, but try to be kind along the way."

There are two levels, immediate and longer range effects.  Short term unkind and inconsiderate behavior can seem to outweigh in benefits behaving better, but longer term it is quite different.  Also, as you said, compassion is a fundamental, although it amazed me how many people, quite openly, express selfishness and are sociopathic (a broad definition).

Exactly. And I think the distinction between the immediate payoff and the accumulated effect makes the case for kindness much stronger than the "legacy" argument I was criticizing.

In the immediate term, selfishness can be extremely effective. If I don't care about your inconvenience, feelings, or interests, I have more freedom to pursue mine. I can interrupt, exploit an asymmetry of information, take the larger share, refuse to reciprocate, or simply walk away. There are situations in which the inconsiderate person really does come out ahead.

But that's a very short accounting period.

Over a longer period, human beings live in repeated games. We encounter the same people again. People talk to one another. Trust accumulates—or doesn't. Relationships become easier or harder. People become willing to help you, tell you things, forgive you, accommodate you, and include you in their lives.

And there is a particularly important effect: your behavior changes the behavior of the people around you. Kindness can propagate. So can selfishness.

A person who is habitually inconsiderate may get a little advantage in each individual encounter while gradually making everyone around him more guarded, less generous, and less willing to cooperate. He may not even recognize the aggregate loss because each individual transaction looks like a victory.

Whereas someone who is reliably considerate can create a sort of social surplus. People relax around him. They don't have to spend quite so much energy protecting themselves.

And yes, the openness with which some people announce their selfishness is striking. They'll say things like, essentially, "Why should I care? What's in it for me?" as though they have just stated an obvious law of nature.

I don't think that necessarily makes them clinically sociopathic, of course. "Sociopathic" in the broad everyday sense can encompass a great many degrees of indifference to others. But there really are people for whom another person's interests seem to have no intrinsic weight whatsoever unless those interests happen to coincide with their own.

That strikes me as more fundamental than merely being selfish.

A selfish person might say, "I know this will hurt you, but I need to do it." There's still recognition of the other person.

The more disturbing position is:

"Why would your suffering be a consideration at all?"

And I think that's where your word compassion is important. Compassion isn't necessarily self-sacrifice. It simply means that the existence of another person's experience enters your calculation.

Once it does, the whole structure of decision-making changes.

And interestingly, that doesn't require believing that people are basically good. Quite the contrary. If you recognize that people are often selfish, frightened, vain, competitive, and inconsiderate—as we all sometimes are—then compassion becomes rather practical. You understand the other person's weaknesses because you understand something about your own.

Perhaps the deepest version of Saunders's thought isn't "kindness pays." It's:

Other people are real. Their experience matters, even when it isn't useful to you.

Once you accept that, kindness follows rather naturally.