In Other Words

Ethics: First Proposal

This entry goes on from an entry earlier today click here to read it. Please note that some things here might not make sense without reading that entry first.

So now that I’ve put out the rules for my approach I want to get into my original theory. I have one. We’re bound all to have one, even if we haven’t thought about it in great detail. I will post the theory here and then see what is right with it and what is wrong.

First off, like I said last time, there is no absolute good and evil (with absolute I mean perfect, unchanging, unalterable absolutely perfect good and evil. I will from hereon in refer to absolute good and evil as GOOD and EVIL). Without GOOD and EVIL mixtures of good and evil become rather hard to measure. It is like trying to understand the chemical composition of a substance without having (even a potential) periodic table.

I base the lack of GOOD and EVIL on the lack of proof of their existence. Without GOOD and EVIL all other good and evil becomes a grey mass of relativity. Good and evil are up for personal interpretation. (I will sit down later and try to prove that without GOOD and EVIL you cannot have relative good and evil)

Right now all ethics is based on the assumption that good and evil exist. How can you judge an action as unethical if there is no good or evil? We can only condemn murder if we believe that it is an inherently evil act. We can only praise a Good Samaritan because we believe their actions (as their name suggests) are inherently good.

Take away the inherency and your left with nothing but opinion. This action is good only because I believe it is. Rescuing a life is only a good action because we say it is so. What we say is true, becomes true. Relativity.

For most this idea is scary and I believe that this is why many embrace God. God is an absolute. Accept that one absolute can exist and it becomes possible to accept that other absolutes exist. Of course, as I outlined in my previous entry, I will not for the sake of this argument accept the existence of God. He or she might exist, but I do not think or ethical model should be dependent on that.

(At another time I will explain how the existence of absolute good and evil and the existence of God actually generates some very interesting ethical dilemmas)

So what now? GOOD and EVIL are out, so we must now find another way to scale our ethics. In steps Darwin. I think ideas (or Memes, as they are sometimes called) experience Darwinian evolution just as our species does (heck, even if you don’t believe in Darwinian evolution on a species wide scale, you should at least be able to embrace it on a Meme scale.)

‘Good’ mutations survive and prosper, while ‘bad’ mutations simply die out. As the environment of our mindscape changes entire Meme species are eradicated and replaced by new ones who aim to fill the niche left behind. Even while thousands of other Memes came and went (the world is flat, Zues sits on mount Olympus, flying is impossible, etc.) ethical Memes (there are many) continued to thrive, change and grow.

(Interestingly enough, GOOD and EVIL are also Memes...)

The reason some Memes survive while others die is because they give the people that believe in them a decided edge over other people. The Meme ‘Cooking meat is good for you’ won over ‘cooking meat is bad for you’ because the people that believed in the first Meme lived longer and better. Thus they replicated more often and slowly forced those that believed ‘cooking meat is bad for you’ to change or perish.

Ethics was a good meme because it gave man a better chance for survival (a society that had less murder was more likely to prosper than one that had a lot of murder). I believe that we started believing in GOOD and EVIL for the same reason. It was easier for a group of humans that believed that they had GOOD on their side to win over a group that was uncertain about what they were doing and if it was the right course of action.

So, what I propose is that ethics should be measure on the scale of whether it will ultimately help or hinder. This is not Utilitarianism, before anybody mistakes it as such. I am not talking about the survival of the species. I am talking about the survival of the Meme and the people that believe in it. Some ethical models win over others because they give their believers a decided edge. I want to find out why. Based on that I want to then reexamine ethics and create an encompassing theory that creates a flexible, yet ultimately beneficial ethical model, that is suitable to the situation and the living conditions.

Understand that I do not propose that people can simply change their ethics at a whim so that they might get what they want. If that would have been the best ethical model then that would already be supreme. There is a good reason why ethics holds us back from certain actions, while it proposes others. I just don’t believe this is because of GOOD and EVIL but rather because of something far more basic and essential to our survival.

So that is my initial proposal for what I want to do. The next step is to examine it, try to prove it and probably rip it apart. Once that is completed we will collect the pieces and create a second proposal, to then repeat the process again. Repeat ad infinitum, (or until we have the truth, which, by the way, is another one of those annoying absolutes).

posted by Symbol @ 15.11.05