Ranting, panting

Ethics are the intersection of logic and empathy. If there is a flaw in either the logic or the empathy, then the ethics are flawed. Considering the fact that we are highly prone to flaws and biases in both logic and empathy, there is strong grounds to question the utility of ethics.

How reliable is our sense of logic? In truth, most people do not use it. When we do, we need to stop (and think). We spell it out, write it down, talk it over, but eventually just resort to force. If we can't figure something out, we get frustrated and angry. It takes people years to figure out simple algebra, many people have math anxiety, and professional debaters, scholars, and politicians regularly defend positions which are logically indefensible (yet they win!) So, it is safe to say, I think, that we humans are not too great at logic - our logic is unreliable, at best.

How great is our empathy? Humans are fairly unique in having the ability to see things from the perspective of others. Evolutionarily, this ability has developed fairly recently. We have a much longer history of forcing our perspective on others, or of simply using others, regardless of their perspective, for our benefits. Looking at the record of human events, we fail in the empathy department. From bombing foreigners, to immigration police, to racism, to womens rights, to failing to sacrifice luxurious living for a few pennies of medicine for children, we fail. The small degree of empathy we do have is reserved for those in our immediate social circle or is a carefully cultivated garden of compassion growing from delicate social and economic conditions.

Rather than trying to simplify things to ethical rules which can be codified into enforceable laws, we should remain skeptical and agnostic. As appealing as it may be to some, there is not one set of rules for universal hapiness and salvation. No matter how much we justify, threaten, build idealogical frameworks, and claim that it is for the greater good, the fact remains that ethical rules are simplistic, unreliable, impose a set of values, and are dangerous tools for social manipulation.

Ethical Smethical

I was listening to an interview with Peter Singer, a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton. He is best known for his book Animal Liberation, which helped start the animal liberation movement. From my understanding, his philosophy is to apply ethics as fully as possible. This got me thinking about the ultimate value and motivation for ethics.

What are ethics? How are they different from values or morals or cultural preferences? How much do ethics really affect our daily lives in comparison with biological needs, impulses, culture, etc? Are ethics essentially a set of rules for optimizing something we value?

Singer believe in utilitarianism - optimizing the greatest happiness, least suffering state of sentient beings. This might work if we all had the same values, but we are humans - we strive for different values. We strive to differentiate ourselves from different groups - especially when young and trying to establish ourselves socially. This is the fundamental flaw in following ethics too far: ethics are based on sets of values which are not universal.

Singer puts a high value on sentient life - life that is conscious and aware. This includes non-human animals, which leads to the conclusion that it is wrong to harm or to kill animals. If animals are somewhat aware, then it is somewhat wrong to kill them. I have to admit that it strikes me as somewhat wrong that ten billion animals are processed (killed) each year in the meat industry, but I am sure that many people less moved by this statistic. In fact, I currently place more value on the athletic benefits of eating meat than on the suffering and death the meat industry creates. Others place more value on the taste of chicken or steak.

Why should we care about ethics? One reason is that how we live affects our self-image and our self-esteem. Living in accordance with our ethics makes us feel good about ourselves, but if we are just trying to feel good, then ethical living may compete with whatever we are compelled to sacrifice. Another reason to care about ethics is that it gives us something to talk and debate about. It provides a venue to differentiate ourselves from less-ethical, "weaker" thinkers, etc. But I think the real reason is that it gives people justification for imposing their values on others. It leads to many of the same evils as fundamentalist religiosity - exclusionary, us-versus-them, smug thinking.

So, are ethics, at best, misguided and, at worst, evil?

Mutterings of unscrupulousness

"I understand what you are saying, but it makes me uncomfortable. Your thoughts are disturbing. Your moral second-guessing and cost-benefit analyzes are akin to rationalizing about how pointless it is to stop if you hit a homeless person on the street.

"The fact that you could so freely consider these possibilities makes me feel that you are morally unreliable… You would probably be dishonest and deceitful if it was to your advantage. If you offered me your friendship, I would wonder what was in it for you. I get the feeling that if I ever needed your help for something, then you would simply ignore any feelings of loyalty you might have and just do whatever suited you best.

"You cannot be trustworthy and calculating at the same time..."

...

“You just don’t get it!”

If you could see things from my point of view, you would understand. Other people see things from my point of view, so there must be something wrong with you. In fact, if you don't get this, then I don't think I can trust you at all.

Ineffectualism

I'm an adrenaline junky. If a book is boring, I don't finish it. If an idea is not interesting or relevant to what I am thinking about, I am not interested in it. But, I am interested in a lot of different ideas... for a short while, until the next big idea splashes across my brain, flooding my senses with novelty and expectation.

I have recently amped up my intake of ideas. My brain is positively percolating with unprocessed, unrefined connections, similarities, metaphors and potential fields of exciting study I will soon forget about. As soon as I buy into one idea, a better or different idea washes it away. The amount of information available through books, web pages, and podcasts is far more than I can consume, much less digest.

Oops, I just found a new podcast, "Facts, Ethics, and Policy Guiding Neuroscience Today." Gotta go.

The Sanctamonious Animal

"The ethic of divinity pertains to a sense of exalted purity and holiness, which is opposed to a sense of contamination and defilement." (Steven Pinker, The Blank State, p 271)

Feces is bad - kills people (cholera)
A little bit of bacterial or viral contamination is all that is necessary to lead to sickness or death. This fact has sculpted our genetic expression.

As Dan Gardener states in Risk, we tend to polarize uncertainty into high-risk, low-benefit (Bad) or low-risk, high-benefit (Good).

In a form of ethical insurance, we are willing to pay an avoidance premium to reduce our risk...

From politics to religion to entertainment (hero, villain), polarization seems to resonate.

On human tragedy

Is feeling sad good enough for the 102,000 dead in Burma, or the 8500 who just died in an earthquake in China, or the 200,000 who have died in Darfur, or the 81 who died in Lebanon, or the 20 people who died from tornadoes in the Midwest yesterday, or the 42,000 Americans who died in car accidents last year?
Or how about the 1,000,000 people who die every year from malaria?

Photographs of bodies floating in flood water seem very grave, and they are... It makes me feel gravely concerned and sad... and somewhat defensive. I don't mean to belittle these deaths, but I am irrationally annoyed by the obligation to feel badly.

56,000,000 people die every year - many of them die from violence or disease. Obviously, it is pointless to feel badly for all of these people. But it seems that reading about the most sensationalistic of these deaths is part of life. While the less tragic or concentrated deaths don't make it to our headlines, the more tragic do and give us material about which to have apalled conversations about the tragedy of it all.

Why do these headlines provoke an annoyed reaction from me? It maybe because there is nothing significant I can do about the situations. On the one hand, I feel that these tragedies should be made known, but on the other hand I feel my understanding of the situations is extremely shallow and superficial.

Like my understanding, my sympathy is also shallow and superficial. "Wow, that's incredible... Hmm... wow...", I say, slowly shaking my head.

Mirror Mirror

The brain is a funny thing. It makes me laugh.

Some brain researchers think that mirror neurons hold the key to how we derive meaning from language. I will make the spectacularly speculative leap that they also hold the key to the origins of religion.

First let me explain what mirror neurons are.
When we see someone doing something, regions of our brain which are normally responsible for the doing become active despite the fact that we do not actually do what we see the other person doing. For example, if I see you smile, regions of my brain that control my ability to smile become active, even if I do not actually smile.
In language, what is said is reenacted by the mirror neurons. Talking about smiling causes regions of my brain that control my ability to smile to become active, even if I do not actually smile.
Apparently our ability to understand a sentence is affected by the compatibility of our emotional states with the emotional content of the sentence.

Next, let me make the leap from mirror neurons to our almost irresistible tendency for personification - "representing abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities, including physical, emotional, and spiritual; the application of human attributes or abilities to nonhuman entities."

I contend that the attribution of sentient, humanizing traits to nature is a centrally human way of understanding the world because, as seems to be the case with language, it is the only way we can meaningfully understand the world. When we take away the personification, the sense of meaningfulness weakens... When choosing between a highly meaningful (personified) sense of meaning and a dry, de-humanized sense of meaning, I think it is safe to say that the personified meaning will have more appeal.

The only new idea here is the role that mirror neurons play in our understanding of the world. This additional de-humanizing, reductionistic bit of data, I think, adds new weight to an old argument.

Copy and Paste

Growth Fetish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (couldn't have said it better myself)

Growth Fetish is a book about economics and politics by the Australian liberal political theorist Clive Hamilton. Published in 2002, it became a best-seller in Australia, a very unusual feat for what is normally considered a very dry subject. The book has been the subject of much controversy, and has managed to infuriate commentators on both the left and right.

The thesis of the book is that the policies of unfettered capitalism pursued by the west for the last 50 years has largely failed, since the underlying purpose of the creation of wealth is happiness, and Hamilton contends that people in general are no happier now than 50 years ago, despite the huge increase in personal wealth. In fact, he suggests that the reverse is true. He states that the pursuit of growth has become a fetish, in that it is seen as a universal magic cure for all of society's ills. Hamilton also proposes that the pursuit of growth has been at a tremendous cost in terms of the environment, erosion of democracy, and the values of society as a whole, as well as not delivering the hoped for increases in personal happiness. One result is that we, as a society, have become obsessed with materialism and consumerism. Hamilton's catchphrase "People buy things they don't want, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like" [1] neatly sums up his philosophy on consumerism.

Hamilton proposes that where a society has developed to the point at which the majority of people live reasonably comfortably, the pursuit of growth is pointless and should be curtailed. The surplus wealth could then be diverted into the essential infrastructure and to other nations that have not reached this level of wealth. Hamilton adapted the term Eudemonism to denote a political and economic model that does not depend on ever increasing and ultimately unsustainable levels of growth, but instead (page 212) "promotes the full realisation of human potential through ... proper appreciation of the sources of wellbeing", among which he identifies social relationships, job satisfaction, religious belief for some, and above all a sense of meaning and purpose.

Hamilton relates the fetish for growth to a "development mentality", and to a neoliberal "instrumental value theory [which] maintains that, while humans are valuable in and of themselves, the non-human world is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the wellbeing of humans" (page 191). To this he contrasts the stance of the "transpersonal ecology" described by Warwick Fox: this is "centred on the notion that only the ego-involved, contracted self can imagine itself to be distinct from the natural world and that expansion of the self beyond the boundaries of the personal necessarily means that one's awareness, and ground of concern, extends to the natural world" (page 194).

Clive Hamilton is the former Executive Director of the Australia Institute, an independent think-tank which is widely regarded as one of the very few viable left-leaning research centres in the country. Hamilton resigned from the Australia Institute in 2007. Growth Fetish itself reflects many of the findings from the AI's report Overconsumption in Australia, which found that 62 per cent of Australians believe they cannot afford everything they need, even though in real terms their incomes have never been higher. The report also found that 83 per cent of people felt that society was "too materialistic", with too much emphasis on money and things, instead of what really matters. The Institute is also researching the growing phenomenon of downshifting, which Hamilton feels may be a response to the growth fetish, laying the foundation for a post-growth society.

This Modern Product

My focus these last few days is on consumerism. I am coming to believe it is the primary motive force in modern life, yet most of us are only peripherally aware of it as a term over-used by dooms-day sensationalists. I believe we have morphed into a society with clearly consumerist values, and I believe the metamorphosis is a perfectly natural consequence of real life in our modern world.

In the most mundane, non-sensationalistic terms, consumerism refers to economic policies based on the belief that the free choice of consumers should dictate the economic structure of a society. The problem with this belief is the assumption of free choice, especially with regards to children born and raised in social environments saturated with highly sophisticated marketing forces in virtually all aspects of their lives. In this situation, corporations, rather than consumers, dictate the economic structure of a society. In other words, corporations dictate the emotional undercurrents which determine the decision making choices of individuals. These emotional undercurrents, essentially, are what we value – in fact, they are our values. Our values, in this modern life, are increasingly indistinguishable from the needs of corporate profits.

Why rehash old topics which have been around since before the time of Karl Marx? We have heard these arguments before. People have been aware of the evils of consumerism for over a hundred years, yet it has done nothing to prevent the continued shift to an increasingly corporately dictated lifestyle. The knowledge and wisdom of the few, it seems, is useless. Movements created by a small group of committed individuals quickly become subject to the limitations of marketing... Many of the same problems with marketing products also apply to marketing ideas. Simplistically, in competition to reach broader audiences, ideas need to become more easily and quickly understood or accepted. It is ridiculous to try to understand a product, so marketers appeal to emotions. Emotional marketing works – it bypasses understanding and goes straight for acceptance. The same applies for ideas – they quickly become products that are quickly and easily emotionally accepted, or they are displaced by ideas that are...

Consumerism is an old idea that is a product passed along and communicated in an emotional current with very little urgency or newness. Along with a thousand other ideas and concepts, the emotional currents which carry it are displaced in our minds by the much more powerful emotional currents of our cars, our homes, our finances, etc. But the actual subject matter of consumerism is the nature of the emotional currents which drive our decisions and choices regarding these more pressing concerns. For example, we feel the need to buy a newer or nicer car because they are everywhere around us. We feel the need to buy new computers, or technological gadgets, because they too are everywhere around us. We feel the need to eat fast food, or packaged food, because it is so easy, quick and available. Everywhere around us are faster, better, nicer, newer, easier, sexier products. As soon as we buy these products, a new generation of products grabs our attention... And everyone – from federal government policy makers, to corporate shareholders, to your next door neighbor – has a vested interest in your continued and increasing consumption, because the entire economy – from your job, to government social programs, to the price of gasoline - is designed for growth and consumerism.


If you have time, please read this article. I found it very interesting.
The Fastest Growing Religion
http://consumerism.ca/thefastestgrowingreligion.htm

Consumer Technology

My attention span is short and my time to write is even shorter. My topic of rant today is, once again, the woes of society and the perils of freedom. Specifically, we need an education system focused on critical thinking rather than the usage of technology.

My focus is on the public education system because the education system is an area of major influence on peoples’ lives which is in the governments’ control.
I juxtapose critical thinking with learning technology skills because the former is displaced by the later by our economically oriented educational policies, and the former is clearly more important for making rational, sustainable choices.
I have written before about why and how our current education system is economically focused, but I would also like to show how this has ingrained consumer values in our culture.

Without an adequate understanding of logic, of human nature, or of the history of societal change, we are ill equipped to handle the responsibility of freedom. To recite hackneyed rhetoric, freedom requires responsibility, maturity, and understanding. In a society that prides itself on freedom, special attention must be placed on the education of the people that equips them to make well-informed, mature decisions. Without an adequate education which teaches people to think critically and makes people vigilant of the tendencies and tactics of people in power to concentrate their power, we cannot assume the people will make reasonable decisions.

A loosely regulated, free-market system is probably the best economic option we have, but it is not without serious shortcoming that our education system should make us clearly aware of. If we are not aware of the shortcomings, we become victims of the shortcomings.

The economic growth ideology of the Western nations has created a consumer culture with consumer values which are at odds with sustainable cultural values ranging from conservation to intellectualism. Consumer ideology is deeply rooted in our western societies. It is an integral part of our identities, our self-esteems, and our purposes in life. We build our individual identities on brand names, on cleanliness, on newness, on trendyness, on the kinds of cars we drive, on the clothes we wear, on the technological gadgets we own, and the music we listen to. If we do not buy ourselves nice, new things, then we feel shabby. If we have an old car, then we feel poor and low class. If we have slightly worn clothes, then we feel shabby. If we do not have the latest gadgets, then we feel boring and old-fashioned. If we do not have enough money to buy all of these things, then we feel like something is wrong with us. If we make less money than our peers, then we feel less capable and inferior.

There are natural tendencies in human nature that make us particularly vulnerable to consumerism. Marketing science continues to find new ways to play our emotions and urges to buy more of everything. The admirable efficiency of capitalism unfortunately applies to marketing as well. We are born and raised in an environment of marketing influences that pushes us to (and beyond) the limits of our abilities to consume. We have very little, if any, educational preparation to resist these influences.

A technology focused education system not only does nothing to prepare us to resist marketing influences, it actually promotes marketing-sensitive values. Technology is focused on newness. Newness requires new consumers, new markets, and more consumption. A high-tech society is a high-consumption society. For new technology to be developed there must be a consumer demand. We are taught to value technological advancements. We are taught to embrace, without question the value of consumer electronics – of newer, faster, better technology.