Wanderer Above A Sea Of Fog 
                                                      (Caspar David Friedrich) (credit: Wikipedia.org) 




I have been trying for the last few months to put the main tenets in my moral philosophy into works of creative literature: stories of various types. But I'm going to step away from that plan for this post. Here's a non-fiction piece that's pretty prosaic. But that's necessary, in my view, now and then. Fiction is so easy to completely misconstrue and interpret in any of several ways, many of them opposite in worldview to many of the others. So here's a way of understanding my moral philosophy explained in direct, plain English. As direct and plain as I can make it anyway.

It's not a light read. Moral Philosophy is not light reading. But if you want answers to the profound question of our time - What are "right" and "wrong"? - you may find some better understanding of the whole matter in the lines below. I hope so. That was my intent.

Find me on facebook, and discuss things with me there if you like. Dwight Wendell. I'm easy to find.

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Deriving “Ought” from “Is”

Most modern philosophers and scientists say that you can't derive "ought" from "is". They mean that you can't get any definitions of what "good" or "bad" are from any of the facts in the real, physical world. The following argument shows otherwise.

1. First, understand Cultural Anthropology. A society’s whole system of beliefs for programming its citizens to act, survive, and multiply is called its culture. A tribe’s culture is its total set of memories of past experiences plus the programs that people of the tribe have found useful for sifting through those memories when they meet up with a new situation and need to devise a way to respond to it. A tribe's memories of past experiences, along with its tried and true methods for handling new situations, enables it to guide its community actions so that it survives and flourishes over the long haul. Useful strategies to heal illness, get food, pick mates, raise kids, etc. are all in there.  

2. The most important long-term programs that we, the members of a society work out, over generations, are the most general ones. These allow us, once we've learned them, to react effectively to situations which may not be exactly like the situations that our ancestors had to deal with, but which have general patterns in them that are like the patterns in the problems that our ancestors faced. For example, we may never have had to deal with a tsunami, but if we do what our grandparents told us to do, i.e. head for the high ground when the animals do, we and our culture will go on. I may never have seen a sea leopard before, but if I know where a mammal’s heart must lie, I know where to shoot to kill one.  In short, general principles that generally work in the real world are very valuable. We teach them to our kids because they get good results. Note also here that I'm assuming that societies compete to survive just like species do. Every society has to evolve and work out better, more timely versions of its culture on an ongoing basis or it dies out. By famine, plague, or war, and most often, it's war. 

3. The largest, deepest, most general, and most profound principles we have are what we call our values. They tell us how to design the program of actions and interactions that we engage in, day in, day out, with other members of our society and with plants, animals, and objects in our environment. Our values help us to prioritize – decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what to do about it, every minute of every day. (About everything we see and hear all day long, "What's that? Is it a threat, an opportunity, or trivial? What should I do about it?")

4. We live by our values, and if they work, they guide us as we design all of our other routines for living. If the values are well-designed, i.e. well-matched to the principles of the physical world, then they will guide us to survive and live well, generation to generation. Smart values make the evolving of our culture happen in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way. Over centuries, values steer societies past pain. That is all they were ever meant to do. Values control how we pick and modify our behavior patterns and our behavior patterns enable us to dodge hazards and seize opportunities in the real world, so that we survive, generation after generation. Therefore, our values must be in tune with the deep operating principles of the real, physical universe.

5. Now, second, understand the deepest principles of the physical universe: entropy and quantum uncertainty. In essence, they tell us that life is always both hard and uncertain. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) says that life will always be uphill. Metals corrode, fabrics rot, animals and people die. Suns burn out, galaxies disperse, and planets crumble to dust. Life swims against the entropy current. Life is hard and will always be so. Then, quantum theory tells us that life is not only hard, but also unpredictable. Life is constantly hard (entropy), but it also often “goes sideways” at the worst possible moment. Furthermore, there is no way to lay out a system which will give us the foresight we’d need to keep us from running into all possible jolting experiences. Our values guide us to better odds of surviving, but never to certainty.   

6. Now, third, put Physics together with Anthropology. In tribes that have worked out effective systems of values and behaviors, the people keep expanding and thriving in spite of the hardness and scariness of life. Their values are designed to handle adversity (entropy) and uncertainty. The values that guide us to handle entropy are courage and wisdom. If a society teaches young people courage - teaches them to go at life, seek challenge, take in new territory, work out new ways of handling every challenge so that courage, élan, and drive are just habits that they live by – then that society is more likely to survive, flourish, reproduce, and pass its way of life on to its children. If it does not handle challenges well, it dies out. Maybe because of a surprise in the environment (a drought, a plague, etc.), but more probably because another society that is more vigorous overwhelms and absorbs it and its out-of-date way of life. It loses a war.

7. The other value that has proved to be important to use along with courage for dealing with life’s adversity (entropy) is wisdom. If we only programmed our kids to seek challenge, many of them would end up dying young because they would be constantly engaging in risky behaviors that would sooner or later get them killed. Therefore, we must also teach them to assess the potential risks and benefits of every venture they may be contemplating, and to take only those risks for which the probabilities of success look high and the probabilities of disaster, low. You must take risks, but make them calculated risks. The patterns of behavior that arise in societies that value both courage and wisdom have proven very effective in the survival struggle. Teach the kids: venture, but venture with a smart plan. This wisdom is embedded in myths, Jason needs Chiron, Arthur needs Merlin, Dorothy needs Glinda, Luke needs Yoda, and Katniss needs Haymitch.

8. As the balance of courage plus wisdom enables societies to deal with adversity, so the value we call "freedom" enables us to respond to uncertainty. Teaching kids to value freedom encourages every citizen to develop her/his talents (e.g. carpentry, math, athletics, art, cooking, healing, etc.). This gives a society a wide range of choices ready to use as it faces the challenges that the future will throw at it. Note, however, that no one “Renaissance” individual will ever come close to mastering all the skills that society may need to call on in some crisis in the future. Our best bet as a community is to try to encourage a variety of people with many different skills and lifestyles so that no matter what the future throws at us, someone in town will be able to handle the crisis and guide us through the hazard. Therefore, valuing freedom means encouraging the maximum variety of people and lifestyles that we can. Freedom, as a value taught in our society, is simply a way of increasing our tribe’s survival odds over the long haul. 

9. As wisdom is the value that we teach each new generation in order to balance their courage and keep it from leading them into taking foolhardy chances and dying young, so the value that we teach to counterbalance and stabilize the effects of freedom is love. Courage alone would destroy the young persons who lived only by it; freedom alone would tear the community apart as many different kinds of people lived different kinds of lifestyles and had no respect for their neighbors. Prejudice, riots, then society breaking up would inevitably come. Like Wisdom trains and focuses courage, Love trains and focuses freedom. Therefore, love your neighbor, not in spite of the ways in which s/he is different from you, but because of those same weird ways. Someday in the uncertain, dangerous future, those ways, weird as they seem to you now, may save your community or nation, plus you, and everyone that you care about.

10. The values of courage, wisdom, freedom and love are not just sweet-sounding. They provide guidelines for designing ways of life that work. Many varied jobs, done well, make a team, a community. In the long run, for our whole species, if we want to survive, these values simply make sense. Therefore, being kind isn’t just nice. Over the long haul, it’s our best bet. And being "good" means being brave, wise, creative, and loving all at once. These character traits are seen as virtues in every culture on Earth. Together, these virtues form the values-base that guides all successful human societies as they design their ways of life – ways that in the end aim at one simple goal: to survive. Using these virtues, each culture works out its own way of life to suit its territory, by trial and error, over generations of hard experience. Many cultures are possible in any given environment, but all of them will share these large values because the values work.

Entropy/hardship + Quantum uncertainty/hazard + Cultural evolution 

                                ==►  Morality (courage, wisdom, freedom, and love)                

         

In short, our values became what they did in every society out of reaction to the deep principles embedded in the physical universe itself. 

("Ought" has now been derived from "Is".)         (QED)



 

                                                        Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures

                               (credit: William Murphy from Dublin, via creativecommons.org)