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> Research | > Pillars of Ethics |
How do people get into conflict with each other when they have good intent towards each other? They may agree on a fundamental principle like the golden rule, they may wish for world peace, and they may seek to preserve the ecology and offer a better life to future generations. But even so they may have disputes among them in place of cooperation.
For example, consider a newlywed couple, who love each other and seek to please each other. We see in the real world that some couples have a happy marriage throughout their lives, while others become disillusioned and divorce. Yet they had the same goal at the outset.
Similarly, friendships can endure or break up, and on a larger scale nations can get along well with each other or they can fall into disputes and end up in war.
The problem in many of these miserable situations is not that the people don't know the difference between good and evil. Reading philosophical debates about "who has the best definition" will not help them. The people are making mistakes in the implementation. They may share a common desire of what they want, but their behavior is producing something else instead.
To achieve ethical results, people need more than just good intent. They need to know how to do it, and they need to understand some basic principles that have been discovered over the course of history, of what works and what doesn't. I call these supporting principles the "pillars of ethics."
These pillars are universal principles. That is, they will produce good results for anyone who can understand and follow them, not limited by culture, race, gender, or other ways of dividing or categorizing intelligent beings.
These pillars are not everything you need to know to achieve good results; that knowledge encompasses everything there is to know in the domains of engineering and science, including all the social sciences in particular. The pillars are the most important things that we want to teach our children, so that they can avoid common mistakes. No child can learn everything, but there are some things we want to make sure that everyone learns.
As I observe the state of the world today, I have picked out those principles that people seem most in need of understanding, and I present them below as the "basic pillars of ethics."
The very most important pillar of ethics is caring. In its most extreme form, it is called love.
When a person cares about another person, they want that person to be happy and they are willing to go to some effort to help the person to achieve that. If the other person is sick, and they had medicine for it, they would offer it. If the other person is doing some destructive behavior that is bringing misery upon themselves or others, the caring person would wish to intervene, so that it is corrected and the misery ceases.
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This desire to help others, called altruism, exists not only among humans. It exists also among many kinds of animals, and there is an evolutionary advantage to it.
People have the most advanced capability for caring. People can care about animals who are under their care or supervision, who could suffer just as they can. People can care about others whom they have never seen, in faraway lands, or in the future (who have not been born yet). And indeed, with the power that people have collectively, they need to care. Otherwise they destroy the future for their descendants by short-sighted practices, such as farming crops to depletion, destroying the ecology, or squandering non-renewable resources.
If a person does not care, he will not fully agree to ethical behavior. He agrees when it is in his personal advantage to agree, so that others will treat him well. But if he has an occasion to profit by hurting someone, and to not to be caught at it and punished, he will do so.
Lack of sufficient caring has been a problem throughout human history. It is why slavery has existed, and it has been a cause for wars. In past eras, war was not considered immoral; conquest was fine as long as the nation didn't pick a fight that they would lose. People would care about each other within their own family, clan, or tribe, but stretching caring beyond that was beyond the capacity of many of our ancestors.
The opposite condition, excess caring, is also possible, but very rare. A person could deplete all their resources in the aid of others, leaving themselves destitute and in need of being rescued. Generally we don't worry that people would do that. When they do, it is generally in a desperate circumstance where one person rescues someone at risk to their own life, which is something heroic rather than foolish.
So our mutual welfare for now and the future, depends primarily on enhancing caring. As with trust, which has a "trust response," there is also a caring response that is almost instinctive. The more that individuals treat others with kindness, the more kind those other people are likely to become.
This is not a new discovery. Two thousand years ago Christianity was founded on the concept that a person should love others, even to the extent of loving their enemies. It's a great principle, but people find it very hard to do. If people everywhere could actually love their enemies, there would be no more wars, and furthermore the wars in progress would be brought to a stop.
If we want a wonderful world and a wonderful future, enhanced caring is the foundation of it, as foremost among all the pillars of ethics.
People are generally familiar with voting for politicians, but they may not consider how everyday actions serve as votes. As a simple example, imagine a person is driving down a highway in their car, after consuming some fast food and being left with the wrappers. A simple way to dispose of that trash, would be to toss it out the window, onto the side of the road. It's a solution that might seem conducive to their personal happiness, because they don't have the bother of bringing it home to put it in a recycling bin.
But that decision fails to consider that they are voting for a trashy road. If it is rational for one person to behave that way, likewise it is rational for everyone else to behave that way. It wouldn't take long for the road to become an unsightly mess.
If people are going to take a self-interested viewpoint, it's pretty easy to trick them into making choices that make things worse for themselves. This is demonstrated very well in the story of the devious politician.
Ethics involves setting of standards that provide a mutual benefit when the standard is adhered to. Not throwing trash out the window is one such standard.
Sometimes standards evolve naturally and sometimes they are invented. Sometimes there are alternative standards that are being considered, and the one that prevails is the one that most people vote for by their actions. If the population consists of people who think of the "big picture," who consider the world they want rather than just their immediate personal gratification, they will get much more satisfactory results.
I call this the "voting effect." Every choice you make is a vote. Enhanced Caring and the Voting Effect are powerful principles to bring forth a better world, where each generation has better prospects than the previous one.
People tend to have biases that affect their decision-making, and in particular the confirmation bias ("Wishful thinking") is problematic. That bias leads people to seek out evidence only for what they believe or want to believe.
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Believing what you want might seem conducive to happiness, but if that is a false belief it may have unwanted consequences. In war situations, for example, people tend to believe that their own side is justified, because they only see one side of the story: the side that their local journalists and politicians want to tell. They may wish that there would be no war, but yet they tend to support the war effort on their side.
Each side thinks the other side is evil, while they themselves are not; but they cannot all be correct in that belief. It follows that some of them must be doing evil things without realizing it. When the truth is eventually uncovered, perhaps long later, there will be some significant regrets among them!
Leaders know that if you can control what people believe, you can control the people. The purpose of leadership should be to serve the people they lead, by organizing them to achieve the things they want; but leaders sometimes get that backwards. They lead for their own wealth, fame, and glory, and the followers pay the price not just in money, but in suffering.
People need to keep control of their leaders, and a critical part of doing that is having access to reliable, unbiased information. In the modern world, it is possible to get information from multiple sources, from multiple nations, and to translate it automatically to one's own language. When a person "casts a vote," whether for a politician or in any other circumstance, it's best to know what outcome one is really voting for!
This point supports the previous one. No person can know everything, so it is necessary to get information from other people. It would help this process a lot of the other people are honest, to provide accurate information to the best of their ability.
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There is a natural tendency for people to wish to please others, and to try to live up to their reputation. So if a person is trusted, the person is more likely to provide correct information than otherwise. That is known as the "trust response." Therefore, when requesting information from someone whom you don't know, the best strategy is to assume they will answer honestly, until such time as you have evidence about their honesty.
As for your own decision about whether to be honest or not, it is wise to cast your vote for the kind of world you want. If you want a world where people can rely on each other to tell the truth, then in most cases you need to tell the truth also.
There are some exceptions, such as if someone seeks information for evil purposes; in such cases deception may be justified, but also those situations tend to be quite rare. It is more common for people to use deception as a matter of convenience, to avoid revealing mistakes, or perhaps to avoid being caught on something they are ashamed of. These more common kinds of dishonesty may seem like easy ways to preserve happiness, but over the long term they tend to be counterproductive to that goal.
For a more thorough exploration of honesty, check out the topic About Honesty: The Story of a Man and a Dog.
Keeping of promises is related to honesty. An honest person will make promises that he (or she) intends to keep. Also, keeping of promises makes it easier to be honest, because it is easier to be honest when you don't have anything to be ashamed about, that you might wish to hide. However, promises go beyond honestly conveying intent, because it generally requires time and effort to fulfil the promise.
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There can be situations where a person intended to keep his (or her) promise, but found it difficult or impossible to do so because of situations he didn't predict. Or he may have a weakness in making "time independent judgements," so that as temptation arises later he succumbs to it. Yet another possibility is that he discovers an adverse consequence of keeping the promise, and determines that it was better to not keep it. The principle of keeping a promise applies to promises made in order to produce good results.
When a promise is broken, in many cases that results in someone being disappointed or hurt. Suppose that someone is you. What explanation does the person who broke the promise give to you? Is it justified, such that you would make that same decision yourself in those circumstances, or is it just a lame excuse? Does the person who made the promise deserve to be forgiven? Sometimes the answer is yes, but if it is a repeated breach that is very suspicious!
Sometimes it may seem like the harm done by breaking a promise is small, and that the happiness to the person who avoids the burden of fulfilment will exceed the dissatisfaction felt by the person who suffers from the breach. But if that policy is applied to one such situation, likewise it is rational in other similar situations, resulting in many breaches by many people. The voting effect is relevant here: it's a vote for a world in which it becomes difficult to rely on anybody.
Broken promises cause a lot of misery in a variety of circumstances: ruined marriages (when marriage vows are broken), shattered friendships, defaulted loans, failed business ventures, and worst of all: war.
In a war it is typical for the people on each side of the conflict to wish the war would end, but they are trapped in a situation where they can't stop. Even if they could agree on what would be an acceptable solution, they are unwilling to implement it because they don't trust the other side to keep their promises. And this mistrust is often based on solid evidence: one or both sides have repeatedly violated their treaties.
A modern example of this is the war that Russia initiated against Ukraine, currently in progress at the time this was written. A precursor to the war was an armed conflict against Ukraine by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists in Eastern Ukraine. A peace agreement was arranged in 2014 at meetings in Minsk, Belarus, and a date was set for a ceasefire. Compliance was to be monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Though there may have been some reduction in fighting at first, OSCE reports showed ceasefire violations practically every day, from the ceasefire date and thereafter. A second attempt at a ceasefire, again arranged at Minsk, produced the same results.
The OSCE didn't place blame for the violations. They simply reported destroyed buildings, sounds of gunfire in particular areas, military equipment missing from where it was supposed to be stored, OSCE observers denied access to conflict areas, etc.. But we don't need to get into placing blame to reach an obvious conclusion: no agreement can be sustained if either side breaches it and 3rd party enforcement is not possible or effective.
This conflict continued for ten years before Russia decided to turn it into a full-scale war to take control of Ukraine. Negotiations have been held in attempt to finding a rational solution, but the need for "security guaranties" (enforcement of promises) is a major hurdle. Meanwhile people are dying and this has continued for years.
Fulfilment of desires produces happiness, and desires arise at various times. So it's pretty conducive to happiness if a person could do whatever he (or she) wants, when he (or she) wants to do it.
If a person lived alone in a tropical island paradise amply supplied with local berries and fruits, and without any parasites, diseases, or dangerous predators, presumably a person could do that. But as soon as other people are introduced to the scenario, individuals may want different things at different times and disagree about what to do. Therefore, groups inevitably set standards to regulate behavior.
An example of this is demonstrated in the rules of the road simulation. In that particular example, a society has grown to the point where they have roads and vehicles, and they would benefit from rules that enable them to travel quickly without bumping into each other. So each society will pick which side of the road to drive on (right or left), and people are expected to follow the adopted standard. Everyone is happier to have the standard than to be without it.
Notice that the rule does not fully constrain the behavior of the people. If they adopt a rule to drive on the right side of the road, for example, that doesn't dictate to them where they should go, nor when. Some people may be going to shop, while others are going to school or work, and yet others are going home, all using the same roads as times of their own choice.
Choice of destination; designed by FreePik.com
If the rules become too constrained, however, they become counterproductive to mutual happiness. One could imagine rules to optimize road use, by dictating which vehicles shall go where, and when. Instead of having busy roads at times and idle roads at other times, usage would be even, but people wouldn't necessarily go home when they want to eat or rest, nor to work or study when they wish to do those things, etc.
As a more extreme example yet, imagine dictating to each person exactly what they shall eat, how much, and when, according to one recipe book. It would be a disaster! People vary in size and in the activities they do at various times, and they are each much healthier and happier to eat suitable foods as they feel the need.
Furthermore, people have different interests, talents, and hobbies, and they choose different careers. Society benefits when people undertake different professions, because no one person can learn and do every kind of job. Not everyone needs to be the same nor do the same things.
So, in general, people in a society will be happiest if they adopt rules of prohibition or obligation that are designed for mutual benefit, and to keep those rules limited so that people have liberty.
It is also important to note that liberty needs to be protected. For liberty, people need opportunities to do things they wish to do, and so there must not be arbitrary exclusions that deny people access to jobs, education, etc., based on irrelevant attributes like race, gender, religion, etc.
Establishment of appropriate rights protects liberty. One of the most important rights is the ability to congregate peacefully with other people to express opinions and pass on information. In some nations this is suppressed in order that the leaders can control people. For example, in a nation undertaking an unpopular war, they may outlaw public gatherings, quickly disperse any crowds that gather, and arrest the organizers. Such events are not reported in state-controlled media, lest other people might realize that they are not alone in their discontent.
This is related to point #3 above, about access to accurate information. Without that, citizens are mislead, and democratic processes meant to hold their leaders responsible will not work. That information will not be available unless there are people who can gather it. Leaving that to the leaders creates a conflict of interest. This makes it imperative that people should have liberty to communicate freely with each other in private and in public, and to organize independent, honest news gathering and reporting.
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