Chapter 3 – Foundations for a Moral Code: Empiricism and Its Flaws

At first glance, it seems that what we most want to know is how this universe works so we can 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 other details out. If not, we’re doomed to wander off track, into harm, over and over. People who don’t make a desire for real world effectiveness one of the primary focuses of their lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living, short-sighted as those may be. People who do want to find effective ways to live pay attention to the physical universe around them and, as a result, transmit their genes and belief systems more effectively to their children, and thus their beliefs move forward (in their kids) 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, it becomes apparent that a deeper problem exists. We begin to wonder about the reliability of our basic information-processing system—that is, the human-brain-hardware–human-mind-software system. Can we trust the faculties 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 I knew at university in 1971 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. How she yearned for Marx’s vision to come true. For her, all the troubles of the world were due to the capitalists’ 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 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 the workers we passed as we walked the campus. She saw fascist symbolism in every poster of every concert being advertised on the notice boards. She carried a list of government people whom she and her friends were going to assassinate “when the revolution comes.” Her eyes were working, but what she noticed as she walked through her day was deeply biased. I wonder where she is now. But she taught me something—how fully humans can delude themselves.

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has seen that centrally planned economies wither. However, she was just one of many sincerely deluded people I’ve 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?”