A New Mission Statement

If you’ve looked thoroughly through my website, you might have noticed that I put a mission statement in my About page. I think it’s important to have some guiding principles for your life, to guide you to do the right things in it. Many people rely on religion to do this, but I’m not religious so I don’t have that option - instead, I have the right and duty to determine this for myself. I am writing this because, five years after writing the original statement that used to be on my About page, I want to improve it. Here, I will explain the new statement with some commentary (inspired by this essay) about why I’m using the statement I’m using; every word I’ve put in it has had some thought behind it.

My Previous Mission Statement

The previous mission statement I had on my site was as follows:

  1. Uphold my principles
  2. Make future me proud
  3. Live a good life

I had made this as part of an assignment for a university course, back in the summer of 2021. I’m glad I made it, but it has some problems.

The main problem with it is that it is vague, especially the first two principles. It is the way it is because I wanted it to be compact and simple, but the first statement just hides the complexity in the definition of “my principles”. My mission statement should include my principles!

My New Mission Statement

After lots of thinking, I have decided on some new principles, which I will explain in the next few sections, along with why I chose them and why I worded them the way I did.

(1) Make people’s lives better

The first principle in my new mission statement is to make people’s lives better. This is probably the single most important objective of morality; even if it isn’t the only one, I hope everyone can agree it’s important. “Don’t hurt people” is a corollary of this, as hurting people is the opposite of making people’s lives better. I’ve chosen to use this instead of that because it’s also good to do good things - doing nothing is not perfection!

Finally, I used ‘people’ instead of ‘others’ because it’s also bad to hurt yourself & good to live a good life. That does not mean you matter as much as everyone else combined. Therefore, this subsumes principle 3 of the old mission statement. And although I use the term ‘people’, this also applies to nonhuman animals to some extent.

(2) Treat others as you would wish to be treated

This is the Golden Rule, preached by every civilization in history. Most reasonable moral laws, including all good parts of the Ten Commandments, derive from this rule. It also implies equal consideration of interests.

These rules are also in order for a reason. The Golden Rule works on the assumption that everyone else has the same interests/desires as you - something that is usually, but not always, true. In the rare cases where it isn’t, Rule 1 takes priority.

(3) Base your beliefs on facts and evidence

The first two principles talk about moral behaviour, but it’s also important to be informed about the world. This principle guards against all sorts of bad epistemology, such as dogmatism, superstition, avoiding criticism of your ideas, and more. I don’t feel like I need any other “intellectual principles”, as this covers all of them.

My New Mission Statement

So, my new mission statement is:

  1. Make people’s lives better.
  2. Treat others as you would wish to be treated.
  3. Base your beliefs on facts and evidence.

Much better!