The Importance of Principles

Every man should have a set of sound principles to which he can turn when any proposal is presented to him. When people have a sound and accepted set of principles, the everyday decisions of life are much less difficult. In some respects, perhaps the situation could be compared to what happens on the playing field: If an umpire knows the rules, if he knows the principle that covers each play, he can immediately decide without hesitation and without thumbing through the book. But if he doesn’t know, or if he doesn’t immediately decide, or if for any reason he is persuaded to depart from the rules, he must certainly face loss of prestige, with the players, and with the public, and with himself. Expediency sometimes persuades people to meet a pressing problem by compromising a principle. But the part we sometimes forget is this: When once we have compromised a principle for any purpose, however justified it may seem at the moment, we are thereafter embarrassed by it. No matter what the pressure, no matter what the advantages, no matter who the personalities, it is always pitiable when any person moves beyond the bounds of ethics, or honor, or honesty. It is always pitiable when a person’s principles become too flexible to be trusted. It is always pitiable when a person is persuaded to step just a bit beyond safe bounds⎯for if he takes one step beyond the boundary, why can’t he take two steps? And if he takes two steps, where can he stop? The fact is that when a person has once stepped beyond the boundary, he has made the next stopping point difficult to determine. And this is where the old-fashioned virtues come in, and the old-fashioned regard for them: They establish that point beyond which one know the cannot safely proceed. Life can be simpler, safer, and more satisfying if a person has a sound set of principles from which no preferment or profit or persuasion could induce him to depart.