Chapter 4          Finding a Foundation for a Moral Code

If we want to stay loyal to our Science and even use it to build a new moral code that works, what we want to know first is how the universe works, i.e. what we must deal with in the reality that Science says is out there. Then we can use that base and build a code that will guide us through the universe’s obstacles and currents with better odds of more joy and less pain. If we get the basics right, we’ll have a reasonable chance of figuring the other details out. If not, we’ll be misguided by our basic assumptions, and doomed to wander off track, into pain and death, over and over again. As we build, so shall we go.

People who don’t make a desire for real world effectiveness the primary focus of their thought and lives don’t pass on their values and ways of living because they die out. People who do strive to find effective ways to live pay attention to the universe around them and, as a result, survive in greater numbers to transmit their ways forward. Their beliefs and customs survive in their kids.

Therefore, we begin to build a new moral vision and code by trying to learn all we can about our world and how we fit into it.

However, as we ponder this problem, we see there is an even deeper problem, namely the reliability of our basic information-gathering system – i.e., the human brain and the mind in it. Can we trust the senses we use to gather information about our world? And, can we trust our ways of forming concepts about the workings of the world from our impressions and memories of it?

For example, in the realm of sensory perceptions, color-blindness renders some people incapable of seeing subtle differences between shades of red and orange. And color-blindness is just one of the things that can warp our view of the world even at the sensory level. Our senses are not perfectly reliable.

Then, biases we learn as children can make us notice some details and totally miss others. How many Europeans would spot cougar tracks if they walked by them in a Canadian forest? A traditional Cree would never miss them. In his world, missing signs that a cougar is active in his area could cost him his life.

                        

                                  Karl Marx (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On the topic of biased perception, consider the complex example of a girl I knew at university in 1973 whose core beliefs were all Marxist. Her view of reality was totally shaped by her political ideology. For her, all the world’s troubles were due to capitalists’ conspiracies; only a world workers’ state could ever create a decent life for all people. The fact that the communist states of the world were rife with corruption and cruelty was always due to capitalists in other lands. Harsh living conditions, secret police, and prison camps in Marxist states were “temporary”; they would be “remedied” as soon as the capitalists 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 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 utterly biased. She was unshakably determined that everything she experienced in every facet of life must conform to Marxism in every detail.

But however deluded she seemed in my eyes, she taught me something: she taught me how profoundly humans can be led by a flawed idea system to delude themselves, even when their senses are working perfectly.

Since then, of course, Communism has failed totally; the world has seen that centrally planned economies wither. But that girl was just one of many sincere, deluded people I’ve met over the years who left me wondering, “Which of my beliefs can I trust? Can I trust my moral beliefs? Can I trust my everyday ones? Or even ones about physical reality? Can I even trust what I see and hear?”

Flawed beliefs about the world can lead us to lives of error and pain. Marxism’s biggest flaw is its insistence on its own infallibility. This claim taken as an axiom means that a Marxist workers’ state will tolerate no debate, no opposition,  and no other political parties. Marxist states create totalitarian institutions that open the way for tyrants. Over and over, we have seen that once institutions that enable tyranny are there for the seizing, a “seizer” always arises. 

But Science isn’t about who the latest seizer is. Science is about the reality that comes before political thoughts even begin.

Consider a further example: if we assert, as some Marxists do, that Science is just one more social construct that must conform to the will of the people, we inevitably begin to tell our scientists what we want them to conclude, instead of asking them what the evidence seems to show.

                                                                         

                                        

                             

                                                 Trofim Lysenko (credit: Wikipedia)

A clear example of a policy that was flawed from its assumptions on up is the doctrine called Lysenkoism in Soviet Russia. In that nation in the 1920s, the official state position was that human nature itself could be altered and humans made into perfect “socialist citizens” by changing their outward behaviors. If they were made to act like selfless socialist citizens, they would truly become so, in their thinking and even in their genes. In fact, all species could be transformed in this same way.

This government position required that the Darwinian model of evolution be dropped. Dialectical materialism, Marxism’s base, was the true worldview. Under it, physical reality exists as a projection of the will of the people who have power, whoever that may be. In a Communist state, the workers get the power; the political will of the proletariat can shape all things, including physical reality and the human activity that works to understand it: Science. 

Darwin said that members of a living species do not acquire genetic changes via individual members of the species having their physical traits altered. Instead, physical traits of a species change when its gene pool is altered by genetic variation and natural selection: fitter species members surviving in greater numbers than the less fit. Therefore, physical changes in a species, in anatomy and physiology, happen gradually over many generations. 

But, in its determination to create its vision of reality, Communism required people to believe that the acquired characteristics of any organism – even, for example, a cat's being hairless due to its being shaved every day by its owner – could be inherited by that organism's descendants.¹ Regularly shaved tabby cats, for example, would have hairless kittens. For years, Soviet agriculture was crippled by the Communist Party’s attempts to make its political “truism” be true in real crops and livestock. In essence, farmers were asked to deny what they were seeing. Withered wheat. Sick cows. Deny reality.

Of course, the Marxist truism simply wasn’t the case, as many Russians on farms learned, to their sorrow. Reality is not a projection of the will of the workers, the owners, the aristocrats, the czar, or anyone else who manages to gain political power. It just is. Crops failed and livestock died due ultimately to a flawed basic assumption. In the above case, it was called “Lysenkoism”.  

Consider a few 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 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, blind adherence to my concepts about a thing as basic as light may cause me to starve. I’ll overshoot the fish every time, while the girl on the other shore, a better learner, cooks her catch.

I can immerse one hand in snow and keep the other on a hand warmer in my pocket. If I then go into a cabin to wash my hands in tepid water, one hand feels the water is cold, the other, that it’s warm. Can’t I trust my own senses?

The examples above all show how urgent is our need for some solidly reliable core thinking concepts. Get your beginnings wrong, and everything else you reason your way to will be full of flaws.

Thus, the crucial first question in building a belief system is not “What is true?” but “How can I know what is true? How can I know whether my most basic beliefs about reality – like my sense perceptions – are really true?”

How reliable is the sensing/thinking system I use to observe reality and then to form basic concepts about it?  The branch of Philosophy that seeks to answer these questions is called epistemology. It studies the nature, methods, and limits of our knowledge – what distinguishes a true belief from mere opinion.

Around our basic concepts, we build more complex systems of ideas. Basic ideas eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Flawed basics lead us into flawed ways of living that lead us to error, suffering, and death. Knowing these truths about ourselves should motivate us to try to construct a few fully reliable core concepts. Then we can build a moral system around them. 

Once we have in place a basic set of ideas that we really can trust – one that gets past political ideologies, childhood biases, and even the shortcomings of our senses – then we may build a moral system we can believe in. In this book, we shall aim to build a moral belief system that is as logically sound as we can possibly make it, from its base to the moral principles it gives us to follow in daily life. A way of thinking consistent both with the evidence of the real world outside of our bodies and with all the terms and operations inside itself.

Thus, in our next chapter, we shall discuss empiricism, an epistemology that claims to be built only on observable, real-world evidence, and to never fall back on assumptions or ideologies of any kind.

The way we begin will determine – to a high degree – the reliability of what we conclude. The moral code project we are embarking on is the most important one on which we could embark. We must do our best to get our beginning right. 

Notes

1. “Lysenkoism,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 1, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism.