On Ethics

Day 11

I once had an idea about ethics that I would like to try and write upon today. One of my issues with the concept of ethics is that I have never been quite sure upon what basis ethics is supposed to rest on. There seem to be several competing pictures. If I want an answer to the question 'Why should I not kill this person?', for example, then I could be given several reasons why – that it is an evil action, that it is against religious commandment, that it is against the law, that it will result in me being imprisoned, that it is a stain on the soul, that it is an over-reaction, that we should hedge our bets in case it is wrong, that it is an infringement of rights, and so on and on. I could also be given reasons to rebut those reasons, for example by not believing in a religion, in claiming that it is the proper reaction, in saying that the law doesn't apply or is wrong, that I don't believe in rights or that the person I'm attacking had already violated my rights, and so on and on. I could also be given reasons why I should kill the person – because it would make me safer, because it would fulfill my need for revenge, because the person violated some religious law, because the person killed first, because the person is a danger, because it would make me feel better, because there is no reason not to, and so on and one. Now, some of these reasons for and against might be given to me by different persons, but monks, lawyers, human right activists, sociopaths, soldiers, shopkeepers, children, parents, and people from different countries and times. Why is any one of them any more correct than the other?

Certainly some of them are more powerful than others at certain times – for example, reasons about the law will have more sway in some places and for some situations than others. Reasons about harm, religious reasons, personal reasons, and more can all make more sense in some places than others. Surely we can talk about an ethics that is necessary, but it seems to me that it is only hypothetically necessary in some boundaries, or at least that we can do not know any better. We might talk of human ethics, but then what if I am not human? If we do talk of human ethics, of an ethics that is intrinsic to humans and to the human experience and the words of humans, then what about people who disagree with those ethics? Are they not human? Or imagine that we have aliens who arrive on the planet tomorrow – should we expect them to have an ethics that is remotely similar to ours? Some say yes, because no civilization capable of traveling across the stars would, for example, embrace an ethics of rampant suicide. Yet, how can we know this? Perhaps they all die at fifty, or perhaps they live lives from old to young, or perhaps reproduce by splitting into two halves. Does it matter? It seems that it would.

Now, we can talk about ethics all day and of course I have gripes with specific ways that people tend to justify their ethics, but first I want to introduce an original thought I had about ethics when I was much younger. I tried to describe ethics, to see if I could at least get a clear picture of what I'm talking about, without all the mumble over rights, justification, virtues, and so on. I may have simply been overwhelmed by how much philosophical talk there was, and how convoluted and self-serving so much of it seemed to be. Now I feel that I've researched enough to think that thoughts about ethics are a little clearer, but they seem no less arbitrary to me than they did before. Arbitrary in the sense that they are based upon, yes, something, but what that something is seems unclear.

The way that I thought about ethics for a long time was this: W + X = A. Where W is 'what you think exists', X is at least one 'what you want to achieve', and A is the action you can take. Today we can think of W as the world, as an understanding of what exists. If you believe in the existence of souls, or you feel sadness when you seeing a child drowning in a shallow pond, or you follow certain laws, then these are all parts of W. X is, as what you want to achieve, a part of the world. It is distinguished by being an achievement. If you want to protect people that you believe exist, if you want to not feel pain or be in a world of pain, if you want to be safe, all these are types of X. Whereas W is a more or less singular world, all that is, X can be one or many goals. X might be a single goal like 'I don't want to feel pain', or X might be multiple goals like 'I want to follow the law, I want to be safe, and I wan to be happy'. These can all be articulated in different ways, but they are at heart a sort of want. They can be wants that are selfish or unselfish. They can be a basis for action, or an end goal that you want to achieve, such as 'I want a world where no person steals from another'. The combination of the world and these wants opens up a space of possibilities. It opens up an area of the world, the world which you are in and which is you, which allows for certain actions. In some cases that action is the only action possible, and so you are 'forced' to take that action. In some cases there are many actions possible that may make a world which achieves all of your goals, or which you think will do so if you succeed in doing them. After all, we can always be mistaken in our beliefs about what our actions can achieve – they are only spaces of possibilities after all. Thus, we arrive at A, at actions permitted. By actions permitted, I mean that if you are a different person and live in a different world, or have different wants, then of course your action-space will be different.

Thus we can see that there is only one this that determines an ethics – the world that exists, because X is a part of the world. We can describe any ethical action or rule in this way. Ideas about justification or rights do not come into ethics at this point – rather, those ideas are beliefs about things that exist in the world. They may or may not be correct, but there is a method for having those ideas of ethics work – you just have to have ideas that exist in every world that people may have. That is, if every person believes in rights, then rights exist in all worlds. If only some people exist believe in rights, then rights only exist in some worlds. A justification is a logical construction in the logical field of W – it can be correct or incorrect for certain types of logic. If the justification is a logic that works for all humans, then that is a moral for all humans – all humans would agree. However, then you have to say that those who do not agree are not human. Some other world is allowed to have a different ethics. Or, rather than some other world, simply some other being. After all, we are just things in the world ourselves. I have been speaking of other world here, but just as solipsism works generally, it works here too. My goal might be harmony and agreement with other minds, and so the actions of others matter to me. Ir my goal might be safety, or disharmony, or the protection of dogs, and so on and on. The big questions of ethics in this schema are not what is right or wrong, or how we justify or forbid some action, but rather – what is it that exists? What is it that is important to me – what are my foundations?

I say 'what are my foundations' because something interesting arises out of this description of ethics. Because ethics depends on the world, and the world and the person are ultimately the same, if my ethics change then so do I. That is, if today something happens and I am willing to take an action that I would not have yesterday, or more accurately to allow an existence-space in W that I would not have chosen to allow yesterday, then if I do so it is because the world is different from the world of yesterday. I am different form the world of yesterday. This is a larger difference then something like losing or gaining a limb – for losing a body part diminishes your power or action, but not your power of decision. A change in ethics however is the result of a change of your choices. It is a function of your free will that changes your ethics.

Thus, studying my ethics allows me to study myself. Since ethics are a possibility-space, to study my ethics means to study what actions I can and will take. To study myself through the world. Thus I realize if I am kind or cruel, if I break or grow stronger when pushed to the brink, or if I have it in me to something horrible or grand. Am I ultimately a coward or a brave? Since anything is possible, the space of possible actions is very difficult to study. It can be said that we do not really know what we will do in an ethical situation until we do it. Thus, what we study most are our former actions. However, this only gives us guidance about what we will do in the future, it only lets us know that the sun has arisen every other day, not that the sun will rise tomorrow. It, in short, only gives us clues about ourselves. It only gives us guidelines. What we can study more clearly is the world, but even then we do not gain anything definite because of the vagueness and incompleteness of all things in W.

I once said that I think advice is the best of philosophy. I said this for two reasons. The first is the reason that we have here – even our most intense study of ourselves and the world cannot give us ethical knowledge, but can only give us ethical clues and guidelines – ethical advice. I suspect that the same is true of physical studies, that perhaps there are alternative possible world that are just as powerful as or worlds, and thereby equivalent for life and civilization. The translation of philosophy that I have most often heard is that it is 'love of wisdom'. It seems important to me that the translation is wisdom and not something like knowledge or righteousness or happiness, or anything in between. This appears to me to be because even the best of our studies of all of these only equates to advice – not proof. At least wisdom does not claim to be proof, or even the best of all possible things. Wisdom is not the good or the just, the powerful or the revealing itself, but is only a rough mountain path ambling in their general direction. It is not a direct route, and a specific piece of wisdom may be or may not be the best piece of wisdom for a certain situation. Advice does not tell you exactly what to do, because advice is not orders. Rather, advice is a guideline, it is a hopeful shout in your direction. It is explaining Zen by not explaining it. In ethics, wisdom and advice are the best we've got. I know of no way to prove something in ethics to somebody who does not agree with you in at least one point – and so ethics, I strongly suspect, is not ever absolute. There is always another logic that allows the forbidden. The question is rather the world allows the forbidden action or not, and because the limits of the world are not in the world, we do not know the limits of the world.