Chapter 3  Foundations For A Moral Code: Empiricism And Its Flaws

Part A

    At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so that we can then figure out how to navigate through its currents over the years with more health and joy and less suffering and misery for ourselves and our children. If we get the basics of our world right, we have a reasonable chance of figuring the rest out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track over and over. People who don’t make these concerns the primary ones of their lives tend not to pass their short-sighted values and ways of living on to their children because they tend not to have any. People who do want to find better and better ways to live do pay attention to the universe around them and as a result do transmit their genes and their belief systems more efficiently over time.

        

       So we want to understand this world and our place in it. However, as we study this problem in a general way, if we think hard about it, we realize that there is a deeper problem. We begin to wonder just how reliable our basic information-processing system, i.e. the human-brain-hardware-human-mind-software, is. Can we trust the senses and faculties that we use to gather information about our world? 

 

Karl Marx 

  Consider, for example, a girl that I knew when I was at university in 1971 who was a Marxist. For her, all was Marx: all the troubles of the world were attributable to capitalist manipulations and conspiracies and only a world workers’ state would ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world at that time were rife with corruption, for her, was always somehow due to the capitalists. The harsh living conditions and the secret police that obtained in these states were temporary measures that would be discontinued as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth. She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to begin to feel weak as I listened to her. She used to carry a list of provincial government people that she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes”. I wonder where she is now. But I know that she taught me something: she taught me how fully humans can delude themselves. 

    Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has learned that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my beliefs can I trust?”, “Can I trust my moral beliefs?”, and “Can I even trust my everyday ones?”

Clostridium botulinum 

    Another example: I may think I know all about bacteria and how to can foods at home in sealer jars. I’ve looked through microscopes. I am confident that my picture of the microscopic level of the world is a true one. But if my knowledge of home canning only covers common bacteria, my limited knowledge of bacteria and of canning may prove to be a dangerous thing. The usual boiling water bath for foods canned in jars does indeed kill most bacteria, but for some microbes that is not enough. Botulism is nothing to be played around with. Botulinum bacteria can be boiled to death, but their toxins survive. My partial and inadequate set of beliefs about home canning might get me killed.    

  Or consider a few even more basic examples. Even my senses sometimes are not to be trusted. I may believe that light always travels in straight lines. I may see, half-immersed in a stream, a stick that looks bent at the water line, so I believe it to be physically bent. But when I pull it out, I find that it is straight. If I am a caveman trying to spear fish in a stream, a blind adherence to my ideas about light will cause me to starve. I will overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, eats.

  I can immerse one of my hands in the snow and keep the other on a battery-powered heating pack in my pocket. Then I can go into the cabin to wash my hands in some standing water in the sink. One hand tells me the sink water is cold, the other, that it is warm. Can’t I even trust my own senses?

     We can barely imagine the revolution in thinking that a person made blind and deaf at nineteen months old would undergo when she began to break through her solipsistic shell. Helen Keller’s story is too complex for us to analyze here, but it clearly involved the re-writing of most of her system of beliefs, when she made her breakthrough at six years old. It is amazing, in both human and philosophical terms.   

    When we seek to find some things in our experience that we can count on and believe in absolutely, we are stopped by questions like: “What do I really know?” and “How can I be sure of the things that I think I know?” and “Can I even be certain of what I see, hear, and touch?”

               

        We know that we have to have a base on which we can build the rest of our system of thought or we may, at some time down the road, suddenly realize that a whole set of ideas and ways of living that we had been counting on is founded on an illusion. Whole sets of ideas can be rendered unusable simply because we suddenly realize that they are founded on a lie.

  Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, may turn out to be a fraud. To me, Nazism may sound logical. If I am told, as a boy, by teachers whom I trust that every race on Earth, including my own, must fight to survive, I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of the biosphere of this planet. If I believe it, I may sincerely conclude that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of my like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is over.

World War II cemetery - France 

   

    The problem all along was that the Nazi worldview was built on a set of myths. Humanity is all one species, and the Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact. In Science, there is no "Aryan race". Different human nations/cultures, not races, do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned, and therefore, cultures can be amended by experience. And war is not the only way by which cultures can evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it went on; it didn't fizzle out and vanish, which only means, in fact, that millions of Germans, and of their adversaries, died because of an illusion.    

    Very basic ideas lead to more complex ideas which lead to ways of acting and living. Knowing how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how belief systems can lead us astray, I now set out to try to construct a reliable base on which I can erect the rest of my thought system.