Motives.

I'm a nerd. Which you can't tell by looking at my transcripts, because straight B's does not equal nerd, and you don't have to be a math major to figure that one out. I'm a nerd because I laugh while reading my text books, I get ahead of my homework when I see a major test in the near future, I get excited when I learn how to send print jobs from my personal computer because it makes me feel tech-savvy, I joyfully check things off my to-do list, and discuss the most recent response paper I wrote as I jog home from the gym. Yep, I have nerd written all over me. I even blog in the evenings- and if that doesn't say nerd, I don't know what does. just kidding. I love to learn, and I love that everything I learn makes me a better person, and who would have thought? Who would have thought that I would find the answer to my life problems and perhaps an answer to my prayers in my Political Science class! Of the many Poli Sci classes I am in, I love my U.S. Foreign Policy. This is what I learned this week:

We are in the middle of studying morality, yes in terms of war. Can war ever be moral? Can it be justified? We learned a lot of different theories about morality, from realism, skepticism and state moralism, to idealism, pacifism and just war theory. We then began to analyze the first Persian Gulf War. Without getting into too much of a controversial debate here or taking sides, the professor posed the question, was the war just? Did the U.S. government justify their motives for going into the war? Yes, the United States believed, more or less, according to Just War Theory, it was justified in fighting in Iraq, that it had a moral cause. It was then pointed out that the U.S. was also very economically interested in the area, as Kuwait is a major oil producer, and the U.S. was motived by that too. True. But does that negate the moral justification for entering the war? Could the U.S. be motived by both moral and personal reasons? Exactly, sometimes it's impossible to separate motives. It wasn't until two hours after class that it hit me how powerful this realization was. Let's step away from the Iraq war controversy and learn that mixed motives are still moral. So that means, maybe we have more than one reason for doing something, one is selfless and one is personally beneficial; perhaps there's even more than two. What do you do in that situation? You do it. It's not wrong to have more than one motive. Maybe having one sometimes just isn't enough. Now, stop questioning yourself; you'll know if you're doing it for the wrong reasons.