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 with more health and joy and less pain 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, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for efficacy one of 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 physical 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, 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 faculties that we use to gather information about our world? How easily can our perceptions and any reasoning based on those perceptions be fooled by our own yearnings or fears?  

                                            

                                

                                                                        Karl Marx 

Consider, for example, a girl that I knew when I was at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx's vision of the world to come true. For her, 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 in other lands. The harsh living conditions and the secret police that obtained in these states were temporary measures that would be remedied as soon as the capitalist dogs had been eradicated from the earth.

She had so utterly deluded herself that I used to feel weak as I listened to her. She saw oppression in the faces of all of the workers that she passed as we walked the campus. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. Her eyes were working, but what she "noticed" as she walked through her day was deeply biased. She used to carry a list of 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 own beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Can I even trust what I see?"