Ethics and Consequences

[rowyn]

One of the kind of quirky things that I believe is that what is ethically right is also what promotes good in the long term for all involved parties. I don't mean "this is how I define what is ethically correct"; I think of "promotion of welfare" as the logical consequence of ethical behavior. The key quirk here is the "all". Some examples:

* Treating women and men as equals is in the best interests of men.
* Slave-holders are harmed by the ownership of slaves.
* Race-based oppression damages the oppressor.

And so forth. I don't think that the institution of slavery is only bad for the people enslaved or even "does enough damage to certain classes that on average humanity is better off without it". I mean it is bad for absolutely everyone including the people who appear to gain from it. This is counterintuitive, because it looks like a good deal for slave-owners, who get the benefit of the slave's labor at "no cost". Of course, "no cost" is wrong: there is the cost of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the slave (dead slaves do not produce labor). And the cost of insuring the slave remains at work, whether this is by imprisonment, guards, social conditioning, societal reinforcement, or whatever: it is not free, even if the costs are hidden to the individual slaveowner. The slave-owner will realize some short-term gain from using slaves. But if one set up two societies, identical except that one was free and one had slaves, I think that the free society would do better across every class of people in the long run; in the very long run, the poorest 10% in a free society would be weatlhier than the richest 10% in a slave-holding one.

I'm not sure this is demonstrably true in any unambiguous way. I'm pretty sure that you can make a case that some moral evils were the "best practice for success" in a given era. But I still have this feeling like the course of human history is lurching unevenly towards a better world, one with more freedom for all not just because freedom is a good thing (which it is!) but also because that's what works. That the tinpot dictators who think they can win by making everyone else lose are just wrong. Life is not a zero-sum game.

And it's an uneven, unsteady progress towards freedom because it's so counterintuitive, because the obvious thing is that if I take something from you then I have gained and you have lost, when in fact we have both lost: the benefits of what I might have made if I had not been spending my energy taking from you, or what you might have made if you did not redirect your energy towards defending from me. But bit by bit, as a race, we're figuring it out.

I think.

Comments

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Perhaps living in a global dictatorship -- a world with no separate (legal) nation-states -- would make one feel better about living in personal misery. But humans are pretty resilient; we'd survive for long enough to put things right, I expect.

A global government is not the real problem -- but the undoing of the experiment of having people live in a free and open society ... that's a deal-breaker for me.

You're given a ration of bread to eat. You manage to trade some "extra" bread for a different food you prefer, and save it up a bit. That food winds up being valuable to someone else, and suddenly you have a business.

And must be put to death by the Lennon/Lenin's "global no-state" because now you have possessions, and are accumulating wealth by serving the needs and desires of others.

I think it's self evident that people would need to change to be able to live in that sort of world, though.

Oh, yes. We are not well-equipped by evolution to be merely functional units of a superorganism -- through the human hive royalty would like the arrangement. They always do.

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

You're completely missing the point.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could see rainbows every day?"

"No, that would be horrible. The excessive precipitation would drown the world and reduce the forests and fields to mosquito-bearing swamps that would spread malaria and everyone would die in agony. Why do you want everyone to die in agony?!"

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not trying to be argumentative. Living in peace would be a great thing. But living without the legal ability to own or acquire possessions doesn't strike me as pleasant.

The fact that Lennon's song includes the outlawing of separate nation-states doesn't change the individual's situation much, except for eliminating any place else to go. And communist countries have always striven hard to remove those choices anyway.

Premise 1: You are not allowed to have possessions. (It would have to be this way -- Man has accumulated possessions even before writing was developed to document them -- it is a natural notion shared by many creatures, including any that include the concept of "territory.")

Premise 2: Competing nation-states are outlawed. (This must be a law, as otherwise any group could declare their area a nation. And some, even if collectively insane, will want to.)

Result: Everyone is happy, there's no greed or hunger (one must be outlawed, and the other perhaps given rations such that there can be no "official" hunger). China's quite good still at "official" versions of reality, as was the Soviet Union.

I am not making the connection between the premises and the result. Many people are made happy by "doing their own thing" -- but the song (and the various Communist Party platforms) call for no one to "own things" anymore, making doing something that doesn't support the State a bit tricky.

And there would be a State -- because if creating a global State were outlawed, who could enforce that law? Instead, only the creation of a second State would be prevented.

John Lennon did a lot of great music. I even enjoy this piece -- simple and melodic and soothing -- as long as I don't track on the words.

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

You keep specifying 'separate nation states' but that's not the point.

You're supposed to imagine a world with 'no countries', not 'no competing countries'. Zero is not equal to one. If you can't imagine a world where people didn't set up a country to enforce laws, or where people had to be forced not to own things by some authority, then you're not imagining the thing you're being asked to imagine.

I agree that it's implausible that humans as they exist today could live in that sort of society. They would wreck it in just the ways you said.

But the people who sang all the hippie songs really did hate the government *a lot* -- in particular, the government telling them what they could do. They're the left-wing version of libertarians.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Really, I think the key is that -- imagine if these concepts had never been invented. People would still have 'their things' that they tend to use, and 'their territory' that they mostly stayed on, and people would probably respect that since stability helps make things comfortable and presumably everyone wants to be nice to each other by default, but they wouldn't have any special *right* to the things or veto power over their use.

And if no one had ever invented the concept of authority... that one's a bit harder. I'm not sure I can imagine it really. x.x A precondition would be a complete inability to hurt other people, for one thing.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Rather, a lack of need to hurt someone else. Essentially, we are asked to imagine ourselves as angelic beings, without a prime authority figure to lead us, aside from perhaps group consensus.

We'd need to be a hivemind to achieve this.

[rowyn]

I think it'd work with a hypothetical race that was incapable of being harmed or controlled by any external force, had no physical needs, and could freely create any material objects. Humanity with sufficiently advanced technology might come close to this (for example, impenetrable personal force fields and matter creation / transportation similiar to that shown in Star Trek, freely available to anyone.)

I would be quite surprised if we get to anything remotely like this state of being in my lifetime. :)