Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

People would be better off if they applied to their lives the distinction between the following concepts:

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions. If you do first year philosophy, you'll learn about these. A lot of people do first year philosophy but few people put into practise what they learn (which is probably a good thing in philosophy, since it can really mess you up. Try living a day as a Humean).

Anyway, we often confuse these two categories or ignore them altogether, such as in the arena of relationships. For example, we sometimes think that because sexual attraction is a necessary condition for a relationship, then it must be also a be a sufficient condition for a functional relationship. When we act on this and realise that sexual attraction fails to make a relationship work, we throw the baby out with the bath water and assume that it is not even necessary. In fact, it only failed the sufficient condition criteria, not the necessary condition criteria. You can see its important to remember the distinction.

Likewise, you might be deterred from giving a gift to someone you wronged because you know the recipient of the gift will not take the gift as making things right. So you don't give a gift. But maybe you ought to, because giving a gift would be a necessary step in the recconciliation process, although certainly not sufficient for recconciliation. The labelling of tokenism might be an instance of the necessary/sufficient confusion.

I think understanding this distinction allows us to consider things that it might apply to as more complex, and help us to think in a less polarized way.