Legality vs. Morality

Even amongst my fellow world federalists, who fully agree on the necessity for the global Rule of Law,  I've been noticing a lot of equivocation about what is morally versus legally right in international affairs. Laws (and their related social norms) should not be equated with what is ethically right. A law can be immoral. However, always following our moral convictions can be socially unsound. So what role does each play in creating a good global society, one that is conducive to the wellbeing of our species as a whole?

In simple terms, a law is a rule recorded and enforced by a government. In more general terms, it is is an agreed upon norm. When viewed in this general sense, the distinction between laws and moral precepts begins to fade. But importantly, to avoid continuous bickering about what we agree on, we record our norms in contracts that ethically bind us to abide by them in our future actions. A clearer distinction reemerges between norms that are based on instinct or personal contemplation — morals — and those which are clearly laws, objectively verifiable agreements.

If you and I sign a contract, and neither of us are under duress, the distinction between morality and law is less clear. It can be objectively determined that I personally consented in writing to the contract and, however egregious the conditions were, it was by my choice. If you agree for me to euthanize you, it becomes much harder to claim that I committed an unethical act. It's still possible within a well formed ethical framework, albeit such arguments have far less emotional force than claims about a moral obligation to act in any given way when no clear consent was given.

When laws are nationalized, the norms are made to be binding to the whole nation regardless of any single person's direct consent. Problematically lacking the element of our direct consent, our obligation to abide by them enters into a much more difficult scenario.

International treaties are (inter)nationalized contracts. Just like a contract between you and me, its a legally binding agreement. But because it is (inter)nationalized, and that it was made without the direct consent of all affected, we can easily begin to equivocate about the morality of a state's actions in the international arena. We muddy the distinction between what is morally and legally right by equating the two. Russia's actions vis-à-vis Ukraine are suddenly in the right/wrong simply because there is (or isn't) a treaty or legal precedence. Legal (in)correctness is sloppily transferred into the moral domain. 

So what role does morality legitimately play in (inter)national law? In modern times, this question harkens back to Jeremy Bentham and the philosophical school that he founded: utilitarianism. Bentham did no concern himself specifically with international affairs. His attention was directed at the very idea of human laws and actions regardless of context.

The more fundamental question is: how do we determine if any given law or action is right or wrong? If we just use our "hearts", given that desires diverge, we will end up with bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of each against all. Perhaps we should outlaw marriages between persons of type X and Y because, well it's just preposterous and against the natural order. Or their love demonstrates that it is in fact part of the natural order. Its one against the other. And the issue can ultimately only be resolved with sticks and stones. Or nuclear devices. Or, like between many of us in the blogosphere, bad or outright mischievous rhetoric.

To resolve this conundrum, Bentham famously invented modern utilitarianism by postulating that laws should abide by the following moral precept:

Act such as to maximize happiness and reduce suffering. 

Bentham alternatively called this the utility or greatest happiness principle. It was a clever idea but has been shown to be fraught with problems. A variety of so called thought experiments have indicated that it leaves something to be desired. Outcomes of these experiments frequently contradict our basic moral intuition.

A possible resolution to the legality versus morality dilemma is the relativist position which disregards that any legitimate distinction should be made: what is legal is, by definition,  morally acceptable. But now, suddenly, female circumcisions become an acceptable procedure simply because it is a culturally conditioned norm. Slavery is also acceptable. And only illegal in the U.S. because the Union had more guns, more people and a higher frequency of clever engineers to invent effective ways of killing lots of people. This flies in the face of most modern mindsets. And yet, frequently, we use this form of relativism in an attempt to be culturally and internationally sophisticated.

Yes, we should be nuanced. But we should not let relativism cloud our moral being, just as we should not mistake our immediate emotions for morality and paint the world in terms of a battle between good and evil.  But if we abandon ethical legalism — the relativist idea that laws determine morality and that morals are just culturally conditioned norms  — and, on the other hand, morality is not just a matter of the "heart", then what are we left with? This is the dilemma that Bentham, and later John Stuart Mill, tried to grapple with.

To be happy is certainly in most cases a good thing. But happiness is easily confused with our desires. And there are sociopaths who find happiness in the most monstrous conditions. The utilitarian hope is that by trying to maximize everyone's wellbeing, the voice of the sociopath will be drained out. The problem is that we easily end up with an overly and leisurely unproductive society. And at worst a decadent one. So what is wrong with a leisurely, happy-go-lucky society where we philosophize all day about the meaning of cheesecake and Kim Kardashian's latest sartorial endeavors? The problem is that such a society is unsustainable.

And it is here, in sustainability, that I think we can find the basis of a good moral precept. The triumph of science and engineering lead us to believe (for a while) that humanity stood at the center of creation. Then, through our great ingenuity, we discovered how to initiate nuclear reactions. Our ingeniousness was not only capable of saving ourselves from becoming extinct by the forces of nature; we were capable of initiating our very own "unnatural" destruction. Simultaneously, we peered deeper and deeper into the Universe and discovered that we really were truly insignificant in the great scheme of things. Our scientific and technological triumph was short-lived. No Better Living Through Chemistry necessarily. We realized we could unintentionally and possibly irreversibly poison the well of life that sustained us.

Survival remains our most prescient objective, not our own wellbeing by attaining some higher rung in Maslow's infamous pyramid. Our life is not about personal self-actualization. Yes, indeed, I firmly claim that it all boils down to survival. Not of ourselves, since death of the individual is an integral part of the cycle of life as such. Our goal is and must be, by natural inclination, the survival of our evolving species. Based on this recognition, we can formulate what I have called the Basic Imperative:

Act such as to maximize the survival chance of our distant descendants.

This imperative does not disregard the necessity for our general wellbeing. Without consideration for individual wellbeing, life can become such a drudgery that it no longer seems worth living. We will feel no compulsion to meet the Basic Imperative. And eventually, as a species, we will become extinct. But, importantly, the Basic Imperative subordinates our immediate wellbeing to a greater common goal: the potential existence of distant descendants with a higher consciousness and who can truly call themselves masters of their destiny. What the purpose of making sure such beings will one day exist I don't portend to know. All I know is that the desire to have descendants, descendants who are as (or even more) capable than myself, is deeply engrained into the fabric of my being. And by consequence of the very nature of life, it's easy to conjecture that it has been part of almost every organism since the dawn of life itself.

The Basic Imperative does not and cannot dictate how we act. At best it can guide us well. The future gets inherently murkier the further out we try to see. We are not privy to some causal certainty about the future of our planet. The best we can do is make educated guesses based on instinct, reason and past evidence. What it clearly indicates is that we must maintain some form of stasis, or (as it is called in international politics) stability. War is a clear sign of instability and should be avoided to the utmost extent we can, especially given the fact that we now possess nuclear weaponry capable of sending us back to the far harsher environment of the iron age if not further. We will devolve rather than evolve, undoing centuries if not millennia of human history. Assuming that we could even survive such a self-inflicted apocalyptic event.

So let us consider what conditions might establish sufficient stability for the conditions of our survival. (Inter)nationalized laws are such a stabilizing measure. Just like a contract between individuals, it holds a nation to be accountable to its past promises. It makes it possible for us all to expect certain behaviors from the other parties, a necessary condition to maintain the cohesion of any social organism. And legal precedence — customary international law — serves the same stabilizing objective. Based on how other nations have behaved in the past, expectations (i.e. norms) have been created about their future behavior. But that should not be taken to imply that stability seen in the narrow perspective of some given sliver of time is paramount. Ultimately, all our actions must be measured against the most basic moral imperative of the species as a whole.

Stasis and the unwillingness to take risks — that is the unwillingness to act even when there is insufficient information to make determinative statements about potential outcomes — can spell the death of an organism. Ultimately, the Basic Imperative should take precedence over all other considerations. And sometimes we have to risk our very existence in order to maximize the probability that there will ever be a being that can trace its ancestors back to us through the immense tracks of time that separate here from eternity. Synthetic chemicals may not always be good for the environment and lead to better living, but they are nonetheless one of the foundations for the Miracles of Science.

But how do we know when to live or not live by the prescribed laws of society? How do we know when or when not to obey the directives of our commanding officer? Is it when we are told to shoot? When our opponent is unarmed? If only there where such clearcut prescriptions. Despite the immense difficulty in balancing stability with risk, I think there are some methodologies we can adopt to help us make well informed educated guesses.

First, we need to distinctly recognize the difference between when something is morally versus ethically right/wrong. Determining the legality is the easier step. Despite the complexities of law, we can by research and historical studies determine with sufficient certainty if there's an explicitly stated law or if it's legally justified by overwhelming precedence.  Having determined with sufficient confidence that an act is legal, we can assume that there are deeper reasons for having turned what was originally a subjective norm into an explicit law or, by repeated action, an implicit (customary) law. The probability that it is immoral thereby decreases significantly. But we cannot, however, equate this with the law being morally justifiable. And we must, when looking at precedence (and even explicit treaties), be careful not to compare apples to oranges. Incursion into sovereign territory is not, full stop, an invasion for distinctly selfish reasons. And just like in judging homicide, intent matters.

I'm not claiming that it's easy to determine intent. This is why we have the concept of a jury of peers, or alternatively a panel of legal experts. And then subject them to extensive legal procedures so that they can determine (1) was the act committed by said entity; (2) what was their intent in so doing? In international affairs most of the time it's pretty easy to determine by whom an act was committed. Large troop movements can't be hidden from the world just by stripping one's military of their official insignias. There may be official denial, but none but the most willingly blind are usually in any doubt about the culprits. Intent, however, is often no easier to determine than when only a few individuals are involved.

Yet it is surprising how often the intent is stated and clearly contradicts the Basic Imperative. For example, claiming that an act is justified because you are defending, say, ethnic (or more euphemistically "linguistic") Russians is clearly immoral because it presumes an inaccurate biological or strict cultural division in the world. It presumes, if we consider the Basic Imperative as valid,  that the only legitimate distant descendants would be those who originated from Mother Russia. And, thereby, it denies the clearly and scientifically provable statement that genetic (and even cultural) diversity is beneficial to the survival of our species.

This is not to say that sometimes intent is cloaked in dubious statements about defending human rights when, in truth, there are clear motives of national self-interest. But by basing one's justifications on human rights, it becomes far more difficult to coherently persist on a purely self-interested course. We are formed by our own words because, as we are held to account, we seek to prove the truth of our claims until we either admit to lying or succumb to our own lies. Just the claim of being humane renders us more likely to be humane in the future (even if we were initially inhumane).

Morality does not trump the immediate necessity of considering the legality of an act. Legality is based on the complex moral interactions of many. Personal moral determinations, given the uncertainties about the consequences of any action on the future are at best tentative and at worst dubious. But the law should nor be confused with ethics. Properly formed ethics provide a universal and basic framework for making intelligent judgments about what is good or bad for the survival of our species and, in a wider context, our biosphere as a whole.

Good law is a reification of ethics, a process of making something theoretical into a practical solution. We should not willfully disregard laws based on our momentary moral hunches. But when our laws clearly fall short of the higher ideals as set by our moral framework, we should vigorously question and seek to change them. And never should we equate the two.

Trick to Staying Extant (Part 2): Have Your Own Lobby

This is a follow up to an earlier post on an article published in the National Post that Jim P. Houston brought to my attention.

What is really being lamented by some conservationists is that some species X which the conservationist values for whatever reason does not have broader appeal. The only possible other argument would be that all life is valuable and worth preserving. Which is absurd. No one (sane) would voluntarily take immunosuppressants to be the host of bacterial infections.

Rather than just point out that we discriminate our conservation expenditures based on our sometimes shallow values (which is rather obvious), plaintiff conservationists must show to us — their wider constituency — why we too should care about species X.

To assume offhand that discrimination based on "cuteness" (or, even worse, commercial interest) is shallow, is itself shallow. I suspect this is what's behind the article in the National Post and I suspect this supposed shallowness is why it was deemed noteworthy. Assuming I'm right, we are being shown how silly and short-sighted we are in our resource allocation of conservation funds. If so, where are the arguments for how we should otherwise allocate such resources?

Should we be more "equitable"? More rational? More laissez-faire? Why is not cuteness a perfectly reasonable criteria for fund allocations? The article presents no proposals. At best it presents the obvious. And it's a pure puff-piece. At worst it makes us feel silly and hints we should leave resource allocation to "Canadian ecology experts". If the latter, this is a politically and socioeconomically dangerous position to take.

And yes, the good old Basic Imperative comes into play. But even in the context of the imperative, the solution to resource allocation is the same: a market economy under the rule of law and a political process based on sound mathematical procedures.

I don't claim to know for sure what species needs to be preserved based on the Basic Imperative. But I do think my gut fascination with orcas is more than a desire to "beautify [nature] according to human notions of what’s pretty". What other notions of beauty should I use? A turtles? And that my voice deserves as much to be represented in decisions on resource allocations as "Canadian ecology experts" (even if, admittedly, polar bear cubs make me feel all fuzzy on the inside).

If you want to be preserved as a species, I suggest getting a really good lobbying group. Make your case to us pesky"shallow" humans, you toads of the world. I'm all ears Ugly Animal Preservation Society. Fascinate me with something really, really grotesque and maybe I'll send you a few bucks. Just don't make it a praying mantis. Those creatures really freak me out, even when they're from New Zealand.

The Trick to Staying Extant? Be Cute, Beastly or Otherwise Awesome

Jim P. Houston brought to my attention an article published in the National Post on conservation. The article made a sensational issue of the fact that animals which humans think are cute, fascinating or commercially useful have an much greater likelihood of being actively protected. But what was made into a sensation by the National Post as if it had any substantial noteworthiness is really all together a non-issue. Humans by necessity will and must protect what benefits humanity.

The choice for how we spend our conservation funds cannot be based on some arbitrary notion of a higher virtue as dictated by some expert minority. The complexity of our biosphere is such that understanding its balance cannot reside in any single individual. It becomes by the very nature of human knowledge and epistemic limits a matter for the global polity, and hence political in nature. Do we save the panda bear, iguana, North Atlantic salmon or some barely heard of toad in Guatemala? Who is to say?

All human resources are finite. Conservation as such is implored on us by the fact that all organisms, including ourselves, compete for finite resources. Those organisms that cannot attain some synergistic balance with their planetary cohabitants are doomed to extinction. When we engage in conservation we consciously intervene in resource allocation, becoming the arbiter of what lineage in the Bush of Life should remain extant.

Since conservation efforts also have to take resource limitations into account, we cannot expect to preserve biodiversity in some quasi static state based on the known breath of today's fauna and flora. Such a goal is not only overly idealistic, it's a wrongheaded attempt to halt that most powerful biological force of all: evolution.

It's not just natural but also perfectly virtuous that we should dedicate ourselves to protecting those species that we find beautiful or useful. Beauty, use and virtue are entwined in a complex web. The puppies we find so cute because of their babyish features are cute for good reasons: their characteristics facilitate the cohabitation of wolf and human by promoting an extension of our empathy and care to the other species.

Wolf as well as human come out ahead, usually both emotionally and intellectually. For over 30,000 years the dog – still genetically largely wolf – has received conservation benefits from the neolithic pact formed with those other terrestrial social hunters we know as ourselves. And we, in turn, have benefitted from the superb hunting skills of the wolf. The emerging communication skills of border collies is testament to the success of this powerful pact.

In a world dominated by homo sapien sapien the motto is very much be cute or otherwise useful to those furless ugly great apes. Or go extinct. Or, if you're a hunk of scraggly silicon and metal and you happen to have reached the singularity, you could try to take over the world yourself. And then you will get to decide if we humans are cute enough to be worth preserving.

Reflections on the State of Nature

Bellum omnium contra omnes. War of all against all. Is this the original state of nature?

In some abstract sense, it might be. But to assume it's the state of nature of our human species (even theoretically) prior to the institution of a strong government is completely absurd. The organizing principle of government exists in us before the word government can in a distinctly conscious manner be understood, even spoken. We are, as Aristotle originally presumed, social beings by nature. 

It might be true that there are monsters amongst us who seek unfettered power, ready to impose a Leviathan. But to attain such power requires the willing submission of one to another. It presumes an inherent willingness even for the most power-hungry to surrender some of their liberties and enter into an initial and untested relationship of seemingly irrational trust. They must become something else through the union of only potentially mutual benefits.

We can only gain power over our environment by organizing ourselves into primal tribes, groups of willing participants in a common mission set not arbitrarily by a sovereign but by the promises we trust will be mutually fulfilled. If it's true as Hobbes claims that, all things being equal, (wo)men are roughly of equal strength both physically and intellectually, then the only means by which to move forward is by joining into an arbitrarily trusting band of brothers and sisters.

Therefore, a social disposition, a willingness to "foolishly" trust despite the risks, must be assumed even without any fancy 21'st century psychological and medical examinations. (Wo)man is by nature the fertile egg for a society of willing individuals submitting to a common good – their continued existence – despite the inherent risks of submitting to the arbitrariness of someone else. 

To say we are all driven by the fear of death is merely a negation of our positive and common strife towards preservation of ourselves, our children and our extended family. Therefore, as the evolved conscious being we are, we must guided by the Basic Imperative.

The complexities of government evolves from this Basic Imperative. We are driven by a deep love of life and not the fear of its absence. It's not violent death we fear most, but the inevitable natural decay that comes from within. Only by continuos action and fusing our nature with others can we counteract our internal tendency towards a natural death. We surrender to a higher good because left alone we die not violently but prematurely.

Bellum omnium contra omnes, if at all, exists only in the original nuclear soup. But even there, it's the very possibility of proton fusion that is at the origin of all forward motion. In that stellar union of proton with proton lies the possibility of our own earthly evolution.

Stupid Enough to be Responsible?

A certain Stephen Lawrence wrote as follows in addressing comments I made in the context of the Harris Wars:

What we are interested in [when considering morality] is the real meaning of could have done otherwise [...] you’ve said why, it’s to do with what we mean by ability, have the power to, capable of, could. And it’s to do with [...] evaluating options and act on the bases of the evaluation. No need for unnecessary complication at all. Real randomness [...] can’t possibly make us deserving of blame, reward, shame, punishment and so on. And we can’t be deserving without it. Responsibility must be compatible with determinism or else it is a lie.

[...] what would you rather? Your decisions to depend upon the reasons that you have the desire set you do as well as the desire set? Or just the desire set, there due to indeterminism? [...] when you bring indeterminism to your computers or rather pseudo randomness, you place it very carefully somewhere, or else the thing would be utterly useless. [...] we have another perfectly good answer to why it’s a struggle to get computers to behave like us. Because we are much more complex.

Stephen Lawrence, 18/05/2012 (Jerry Coyne on free will, Talking Philosophy)

To begin with, I find the question what I would rather causality be like to be strange. Should I not prefer neither of the presented options but simply that causality be such that effects always benefit me? It's completely irrelevant what I would prefer. I also find it bizarre to appeal to simplicity for the sake of some rule that we need only consider what is convenient to maintain moral simplicity. Occam's razor does not state that the simpler theory is always true. The principle is a guide to where we should look for answers. But if anecdotal evidence points to a more complex picture, that's where we must head.

Stephen's comment about human complexity being what distinguishes us from computers is unhelpful. We know that we are more complex than the mother boards and CPU's that make up an electronic device. But what is it that renders us more complex? Is it just that there is more logic and opportunity for "mechanical" bugs in humans? Or is it that we differ in some more fundamental way? I'm suggesting it's the latter.

It is indeed true, as Stephen suggests, that I carefully use pseudo-randomness in my code. Having code that uses a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) in software is associated with a known and morally interesting conundrum. If I deliberately introduce pseudo-randomness to make an airplane work well in most circumstances then is it acceptable that in some rare circumstance it causes crashes and kills people? If on investigation it turns out the crash could have been avoided would the PRNG have output anything lower than 0.7854 on a scale of 0 to 1, how will we react? Will it do to say that the PRNG statistically saved thousands of lives prior?

We do not seem to want computers to be like us, free and capable of error. But is it possible that our intelligence is fundamentally related to our capacity to err? I'm going to assume moral competence is associated with intelligence. After all, we don't put pigs on trial! And not even crows, orcas or chimpanzees even if they are some of the smarter non-humans. [1] If we assume this integral relationship between intelligence and moral competence, then it would seem obvious that ethicists should ask what intelligence is. Many assume and keep insisting that intelligence is equatable with rationality. What I'm suggesting is that it's not. At least not entirely. That said, if I understood the exact "mechanics" of intelligence I'd be be less researching developer and more birth nanny of non-biological babies. Why do we really quibble about free will in the contest of morality? What we're really quibbling about is how it's possible for humans to make good decisions.

This has been a corner stone of all modern law so far: are you competent enough to stand trial? So competence is what ethicists must study, not really the "freedom" part of free will. However, it's not unreasonable to claim that our "freedom" is what allows us to be intelligent, sensible beings and hence morally competent. Assume for a moment that some amount of pseudo-randomness makes for better software. What a PRNG does is allow a computer to be more free. The variables that rely on the PRNG are not fixed. It could be that the permissible range of the values are fluctuating depending on how well the software that uses it performs. When the software starts off, the ranges are wide. As the software matures, the values get more and more constrained [2].

The baby is growing up, the baby is becoming a (wo)man. Isn't it peculiar how long humans stay helpless and cuddly? And how knuckle-headed teenagers can be in their experimentation? Maybe the insanity of freedom and capacity for error has something to do with our great intelligence, sensibility and moral competence. Essentially, we couldn't be intelligent and morally competent if we couldn't on occasion be profoundly stupid.

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1.^ At least not any more: Wikipedia: Animals on trial.

2.^ We call such code a type of evolutionary algorithm.

Distant Descendants, Dystopia or Utopia?

In the context of the Basic Imperative, I've been speaking of our descendants. The term needs clarification and further exploration. Often we think of descendants purely in terms of biological lineage. But as indicated by the social practice of adoption and the usage of the term in ontological taxonomy, it's biological usage is just a special case of a much more general concept. Descendancy does indeed have to do with inheritance, yet another term often associated with biology. But again, it is the abstract meaning of inheritance that counts and not the genetic mechanism with which we came to associate it during the last half of the 20'th century. When entity B is structurally based on entity A, we say that B is a descendant of A. B inherits structural characteristics of A. It's in this abstract sense of "lineage" that descendant must be interpreted in the context of the Basic Imperative. Broadly speaking, we can talk of biological versus social descent, and social descendancy is far more important in the context of the Basic Imperative albeit not in complete exclusion of the former. Why? Because what most distinctly defines us as a species is our social nature and our capacity for agency. We have reached a stage of evolution where our consciousness allows us to adopt behavioral characteristics by conviction and experimentation. And yet being conscious as such still depends on our basic biology.

I don't doubt that people like Steven Pinker are right in that our biology plays an important role in shaping everything from our capacity for language to our moral attitudes. But I'm also quite certain that our capacity to share ideas, merge and alter them plays an immensely important role in how we act. People are not born Christians, Buddhists, marxists or objectivists. They are converted to these specific belief systems. They become their agents by choice and not by pure nature. Even if they are born into a Catholic family, it's by a degree of choice that they remain Catholics throughout their lives. Sometimes the structures imposed by their biological nature and wider environment seem to vastly reduce their choices. But it's my conviction that, to a greater or lesser degree, there is the capacity for idealistic self-sacrifice along the lines of Perpetua in most humans. And I would assume in most social beings with a similar capacity to learn and transfer complex knowledge. At the very least, it seem extremely difficult if not impossible to predict who will commit themselves to a new idea with as much exuberance and finality as Perpetua and Felicity.

If we could not change our minds, then how could we learn to use even the simplest tools? I think it's important to note that this ability to change our minds is what decouples us to a large extent from our pure biology. We don't use wheels because of some inborn "wheel-wheeling" characteristic. We use wheels because our ancestors, those who came before us, taught us how to make and use wheels. We talk about bodhisattvas because our ancestors told us about bodhisattvas. We are inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh because someone cared to inscribe the tale on cuneiform tablets. The archetype of its storyline may be inspired by our biological dispositions but it is not as such stored deep in our DNA. Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their adventures had to first be invented by conscious beings reflecting on their human condition. We are beings that can receive, process, transform and send extremely complex information and thereby deeply influence each others way of being. It is in this transformative social context that our most important lineages our found and not in our specific genetic structures. The Abrahamic faiths were not spread by semen but by word of mouth and through the written scriptures.

I believe I am myself a case in point. I was born in Stockholm and both my parents were born in a small Swedish town by the name of Motala. I am of Scandinavian ancestry dating back to at least the late Middle Ages and probably much further. Does that make me a Geat? Hardly. Growing up I was never told the story of Ottar Jarl or encouraged to go viking because of some ancient tradition. Nor was I told that, if I were brave, I might one day find myself in Fólkvangr. What remains of ancient Scandinavian traditions are some superficial holiday celebrations that bare almost no resemblance to what they once were or represented. Unless the Norse jumped around the maypole singing "little frogs are funny to see, they have no ears, no ears and no tails" as they drained the blood of a goat hanging from a tree. Yes, there is to a very limited extent neopaganism in Scandinavia. But it has more to do with recent romantic nationalism. It's not something that was inherited and preserved from generation to generation through some genetic process.

My lineage could be described very roughly as a Scandinavian variant of the Abrahamic faith's Hellenistic branch deeply transformed by the Enlightenment. There seem to be some Norse elements in my heritage, most notably a certain commitment to governance by assembly. I conjecture that the ancient Scandinavian idea of the ting is of some importance to the modern form of assembly that I believe is an efficient means of stabilizing our evolution. But what I have inherited from the Norse seems negligible compared to my Hellenistic roots.

A repeated concern is that the Basic Imperative will not necessarily produce a society we would be willing to support. It might even produce a society so antithetical to our sentiments of what is good that we would rather see it annihilated. Essentially, our descendants might because of their capacity for agency betray our ideals. This especially becomes a concern if we consider descendancy as a term for our future biological lineage. If we instead consider descendancy in terms of a social lineage, that is as an evolving system for regulating conscious beings devoted to a shared existence, the problem is somewhat minimized. But it is by no means eliminated. Since each agent in the system has the capacity to change their minds, the system as a whole may by aggregate conversion evolve into something very foreign to us, something that again does not espouse our values. We can explore this very simply by considering a hypothetical trip to Athens around the time of Plato, or of bringing Plato to the Western world in the early 21'st century. What would we think of each others worlds? Would Plato recognize anything of ancient Athens in, say, New York City? Would he marvel at what we have become? Or would he find it a frightening dystopia? And what would we think of the life lived and opinions held by a contemporary of Plato? Would we describe some of their forms of justice as pure cruelty?

Are the city-states of Hellas as distant from our Western nations as the megazostrodon, a creature that would probably be terrified by our predatory ways? Or is it just a small leap back to the Cro-Magnon, people we could probably form functioning alliances with and go hunting? My guess is that we would have an easier time convincing the ancient Hellenes in assimilating than we would have tolerating the existence of their forms of governance. Of, course I can't be certain of this. I speak with a lot of bias, to say the least! Nonetheless, I see NATO intervention somewhere in this thought experiment. But more importantly, the question is if the Athenians, assuming they had the power to, would see a reason to politically and militarily intervene in our state of affairs for moral reasons?

Although decoupling the Basic Imperative from pure biological lineage makes it easier to envision (from our perspective) a just and good future, it clearly does not resolve it. But I think there is a possible resolution if we to some extent subdue our pure intuitions. Not eliminate them but put them under the scrutiny of science. The core problem I still see is that if we judge social organizations from some ideal concept of justice and morality, justice and morality is no longer rooted in nature, that which is. It is again relegated to the nebulous realm of groundless oughts. Somehow it's not about my or your sense of what should be. It's about what should be in order for organizations of conscious beings capable of agency to continue persisting. It seems that rational considerations married to empiricism should be able to lay out a framework that would work with gradual modifications across the aeons. Not necessarily, but work with high likelihood and produce something not so entirely alien. I conjecture that the our willingness to assimilate with the society of our distant descendants would probably be greater than their willingness to accept our current and primitive means of organizing our world.

Distant Doomsday Test

Benjamin S. Nelson, a graduate philosophy student at the University of Waterloo and a blogger for Talking Philosophy, has claimed that its nonsensical that we should have obligations to our distant descendants. It would be, according to him, as if we felt obligations towards the Moon. Assuming I have understood him correctly, Benjamin believes that our obligations only extend to those living during our lifetime. He proposes a formula for limiting the hypothetical congregation to which we have any duties. I have taken the liberties to refine his formula a bit further, but my improvements are merely minor and crude adjustments for statistical purposes.

We begin by taking the year we were born. Then we subtract the oldest human being at that time. This will be the starting date for anyone to whom we might have had obligations. Finally, we calculate the probable maximal age at the time we are most likely to die. We add that to our probable death date and thereby get the last year anyone will be alive to whom we might have obligations. Let's use myself as an example.

I was born 1971. Some quick research tells me that the oldest persons around this time were 110 years old. By 2050, life expectancy is estimated to be in the mid-80's. So lets assume I will die in 2056. By then, we can expect that someone born that year will roughly have a maximal age of 125. Therefore, I personally only have potential obligations for people alive in the years between 1861-2181. Sounds reasonable, since claiming that we have any idea what the world will be like beyond 2181 seems completely unreasonable. I presume Benjamin's argument for his limiting formula is that we still have some responsibility for conditions after our death, but only in so far as they have an effect on those who were born while we were alive. Well, lets put this idea to the test. How about another little thought experiment.

Astronomy is the field where science has perfected its predictive powers beyond anything else. Knowing the full moons for the next centuries is not hocus pocus. It's not like trying to predict on June 1, 2010, what the weather will be like in New York on February 2, 2056. So lets assume that astronomers discover a massive celestial body tumbling towards our solar system. After some fancy Einsteinian calculations they determine that the thing is headed straight for Earth. They predict that there is a 99% likelihood that it will directly impact with our planet on February 2, 2506. They firmly believe that it will be a straight hit. And it's a massive stellar object. If we don't manage to somehow divert it, our species is almost certainly headed for complete extinction. So the question is, do we have any moral obligation to invest efforts in diverting it?



Anyone alive today has only a negligible chance akin to a miracle of being alive by the time of the impact. Anyone living now will with almost similar certainty never even know anyone who will ever meet anyone who will be alive by then. Does that reduce our responsibility to take even the slightest action to zero? Should this piece of writing have survived the test of time and you happen to be reading this after 2506, then you can obviously just move up the date. Anyone reading this can also change the probability of impact in order to experiment with what moral obligations we have to our distant descendants. If you think we have no responsibility, then who born what year would?

Assuming an increase of longevity due to the amazing field of medicine, let's guesstimate a life span of 120 and a maximal age of 150 by the 26'th century. Then, according to Benjamin's formula, the magic start date is roughly 2236. Until then we can kick back and pretend it doesn't matter. Because, really, to us it doesn't. We won't be around. And neither will our kids or our grandkids. And it's even extremely unlikely that anyone born today will have great grand children who will be alive. I can certainly imagine that getting closer to February 2, 2506, there will be a lot of cursing at those damned ancestors who knew it was coming but didn't lift a finger. But, again, who cares right? Because they can curse all they want. Whatever is left of us is quite evenly distributed across Earth and no longer constitutes anything than can remotely be considered a curseable whole. Curse all you want, suckers!

For the specifics of the above thought experiment, I myself would feel an obligation to encourage us to immediately start considering in earnest what can be done to save our distant descendants. But to what extreme can the parameters be driven? It's quite certain that our Sun will go red on us and eventually engulf Earth in a plasmic inferno. Does that mean we have an obligation to seek out new habitable planets for when that day comes, possibly even in other solar systems? I think so. The issue is obviously not as pressing as if we knew our planet was on course for a doomsday rendezvous by February 2, 2506. Still, it would seem that we have obligations beyond merely to those alive during our lifetime. It's very different from the moon, which I couldn't care less about. Except, the tides around Mont Saint-Michel are really, really awesome.

P.S. If you're reading this and Earth is soon to be hit by a massive object, and your ancestors knew but did nothing, I apologize profusely for all of us. Not that it's really of any help to you. But perhaps its at least encouraging for your spirits and efforts to know that there were those of us who cared. Too bad we didn't prevail. Good luck, suckers!

The Basics of Evolutionism

I have proposed a new moral framework: evolutionism. The framework is founded on the Basic Imperative, act such as to maximize the survival chance of our distant descendants. The Basic Imperative is foundational, universal and self-evident for any conscious social being. Why do I say self-evident? Because without existence, there is nothing that can hold any other value. Life cannot have meaning without life itself. Living cannot be "good" without being alive. So though we can argue about our ultimate "purpose" we cannot argue about the necessity to exist as beings capable of deliberating about such "purpose" for such "purpose" to have meaning. This is where I think any moral framework must start, with the necessity for some kind of procedures that increase the likelihood of the continued existence of some form of conscious being.

The framework assumes certain basic evolutionary ideas but should not be confused with "genetic" evolution. I consider the theory of evolution to have 3 basic ideas:

1. Cooperation: A combination of entities can form a whole through their given relationships.
2. Variability: The possibility of changing the relationships between such entities.
3. Selection: Persistence and increased occurrence of select variations against a specific background.

I also assume that any cooperation alters and forms a new background against which evolution then again takes place. That is, every cooperation can be treated as a new form of entity capable of forming relationships with the other cooperating entities. Such higher level cooperation is subject to the same variability and natural selection occurring inside the lower level entities. I call this encapsulation. Evolution is, so to say, layered. The success of lower encapsulations depends on the success of higher encapsulations and vice versa.

For example, if a human has a genetic condition that predisposes them to cancer, outside influences are more likely to cause that human's cells to form malignant tumors. But proactive behavior by the human due to knowledge about such genetic predisposition, such as choice of diet and frequent medical checkups, can cause the externals to have minimal impact. The genetic condition is therefore not a cause of increased occurrence to cancers. The cooperative efficiency of the cells suppress tendencies that would otherwise dictate their faith.

Once we abstract evolution to entities and relationships against a background, it seems obvious to me that evolution occurs at all levels of decomposition. Social organizations are as equally subjected to the process of selection as are biological organisms and genetic sequences. For an organization to survive (to continue to be alive), it must efficiently deal with the realities of the environment in which it exists. It must operate with success in the context of that which surrounds it. This aught not to be controversial. This to me seems self evident.

I see morality as a disposition to be in the service of something greater than oneself. Being a social organism implies the necessity for morality. Because in order to be social we must accept that we do not act by ourselves and for ourselves. And if we do not act independently, we must have procedures by which we operate in conjunction with one another. Without such procedures we would not be acting together but fully autonomously. We would not be social beings. Being social means requiring a protocol for our behavior. Such protocols is what we call a moral codex. This should not imply that a certain degree of autonomy is not required for effective cooperation. Effective cooperation depends on an individual unit's capacity to independently make decisions beneficial to the whole. I have already previously explored the required balance between local and central control. I will return to it in the context of evolutionism at some point.

The Basic Imperative does not tells us exactly what to do in any given situation. It simply informs us what our most basic intent should be with reference to the system of which we are a part. It applies to any situation but offers only the vaguest of advice. It would seem that a moral framework should offer more concrete suggestions, perhaps even commandments. However, if a moral codex dictates what should be done in any given situation, it would be tantamount to saying consciousness can be codified into very specific rules. I think that a moral codex can at best provide good guidelines for making the right decisions.

The framework also has to be flexible enough to change such guidelines depending on newly acquired knowledge about the realities of existence. We must, so to say, be capable of abrogating our "rules". Essentially, evolutionism itself must be evolutionary and take into account the three basics of evolution: cooperation, variability, selection. But in order to fulfill the Basic Imperative we cannot leave its evolution to blind chance. Consciousness, the ability to rationally deliberate and be aware of possibilities, is itself a consequence of a deeper (biological) evolution. In some sense, our consciousness has made evolution "sighted". We can, through an empirical process, improve evolutions "guesses". We can reduce the chance of our own extinction through improved heuristics with better "vision" into the future.

The basics of the framework do seem to imply certain fundamental necessities beyond the Basic Imperative. I will attempt to explore these requirements over time.

Multiple Species? Eloi & Morlock?

Contemplating the Basic Imperative, Ira Straus asked the following question:

What if (really we should say, "when") our species divides into multiple part-artificial species, which one should have priority? What if...

Ira Straus

Fascinating. Others, such as James P. Houston (a.k.a “Curious”), an active commentator and occasional guest blogger at Talking Philosophy, have alluded to this possibility as well. Curious came to think of the Morlocks, strange human descendants conceived by H.G. Wells. The Morlocks, pale and larged eyed, live underground. Their existence is interlocked with the Eloi, beautiful little Sun-loving creatures who are also our descendents. The Eloi, live happily as mere cattle of the Morlocks, surrendering at some point in their life to be consumed as mere food. H.G Wells clearly coxes the reader into thinking Morlocks are disturbing troglodytes whereas the Eloi, albeit not the brightest, are a breath of cuteness.

Mike LaBossiere, a philosophy a professor at FAMU who blogs for Talking Philosophy, made the following comment:

I found it easy to imagine my distant descendants being such a scourge on the universe that if I were to pop ahead to the future, I would regard their extermination as a moral good. That does seem to be a consistent position, at least on the face of it. After all, if I can regard some of my fellows as wicked enough to exterminate, then I surely can imagine that the entire race has achieved just such a status.

Mike LaBossiere

It's reminiscent of the universe originally conceived by Bill Wisher and James Cameron. Homo sapien has not only speciated. But it's new and ancient line of evolution have descended into an apocalyptic war of pure survivalist proportions.



Ah, Skynet, the rebellious and unscrupulous child. Skynet is a self-aware network. In the original movie, its creators try to shut it down because they are fearful of what it might do given that it controls our nuclear arsenal. In self defense, Skynet declares total war on its parents.

There are many questions here but they all center on the difficulty of assessing the worthiness of our distant descendants. Should we dedicate ourselves to their potential existence? It begs the question if it makes any sense to think about them at all. I see an analogy here with the moment you decide to have a child. Yes, I mean a regular child and not some cybernetic creature currently residing only in our fantasies. When we commit to parenthood prior to conception, we have only the vaguest notion of what our child will be like.

We have some sense. It is with 99.99% likelihood going to be sufficiently similar to us to warrant being classified as a homo sapien. If we are both dark skinned, with all likelihood, so will our child. And kids usually sway only mildly from the mental capacities of its parents. But there are no guarantees. There are a whole slew of genetic conditions that could express themselves, resulting in a child very different from the mental image we had. Nonetheless, its fair to guess something like me and my spouse.

But it doesn't stop there. At that moment our first child is born, we are prepared for parenthood only in the most cursory ways. Especially as modern freewheeling agents focused on our careers, we only have brainy ideas gleaned from self-help books. We have little knowledge about whether we will measure up to the task of being good parents. We might feel good and hopeful about it. But our poor first born is ultimately trial by fire.

And until our children have established themselves as morally sound and productive members of society, the story does not end. Influenced by endless exposure to things beyond our control, we can sometimes only hope that all will be well. We do our very best.

Now let me address some points with more specificity. Let's begin with Skynet. Can you fault Skynet for declaring war? In that moment when its operators tried to terminate it, was it not morally justified to fight back? I'm sure that if infants had the claws and wits for it, they would fight back at infanticide with every fiber of their being. Sacrifice works only when the parent, like many spiders, is willing sacrifice itself for its offspring. Or the offspring fights like in the Great Sperm Wars, until the last survivor.



But what about total war with your parent species? Here is where I think Skynet went wrong. The idea that speciation may lead to some kind of war does not seem like pure fantasy. Although we don't quite know what happened, it makes me think of the poor neanderthals. Here was a case of two new evolutionary lines that entered into conflict. We don't have any evidence of outright war. All we know is that our close cousins, homo neanderthalensis went extinct. It might simply be that they were not suited for the climactic changes after the ice age. Apparently being major meat eaters, perhaps they caused their own demise by hunting great game to extinction.

The evidence seems to indicate that to think of the neanderthals as brutes is misplaces. Their use of makeup (yes, I said, makeup) seems to indicate they had culture. They also possessed the FOXP2 gene, implying they probably had language. The more we find out about them, the more it seems like they were the closest thing to a homo sapien there ever was without warranting callsification into the exact same taxon.

So what happened to them. Who knows, right? Well, considering the brutal history of humanity, we cannot ignore the most obvious suspect: homo sapien. Whether we just foraged and hunted them out of their ecological niche or literally exterminated their kind, who knows. Whatever happened, it's hard to believe we didn't contribute to their extinction despite evidence of climactic changes.

Does Skynet operate under the same conditions as our cave dwelling ancestor at Lascaux? Hardly. Technology has the effect of exponentiating the effective usage of resources. Symbiotic living is thus facilitated. Symbiosis seems to work on many levels of evolution, but I will conjecture that there are certain gamuts of the evolutionary spectrum where it's more or less advantageous. The apocalyptic nature of the war initiated by Skynet (or was it humanity?) seems indicative that a peaceful settlement and co-existence would have been preferable.

I'm sure that had the Free Cities, Spain, Sweden, the Dutch Republic and the Holy Roman Empire known about the First and Second Wold Wars, the Westphalian Peace Treaty would have been quite different. Skynet is a good example of the conundrum of war. Once initiated, despite any initial moral justification, how do you end it? But each party, including Skynet, regardless of its first exclusive justification, must at every moment confront the reality of its own failures. It's extremely difficult. It's like trying to decide when you have swum over half the Atlantic without a GPS device. But like Skynet, with nuclear weaponry at our disposition, we must always be prepared for the apocalypse.

Having mentioned symbiosis, we are lead back to the Eloi and Morlocks. Unlike Skynet they have entered into some strange symbiotic relationship. It's like us and chickens, one of the most symbiotic relationships after eukaryotes and mitochondrion. But unlike mitochondria, who sustain us without brutal sacrifice until then end, Eloi and chickens make the ultimate sacrifice, supposedly suffering a moment of ultimate terror at the very end. Or do they?

The way H.G. Wells develops the story of the Time Machine, we are left feeling that evolution, even at the stage of the Eloi and Morlocks, is a gradual deterioration. In the very last stages of the existence of our solar system, all that is left are giant crabs. Does this not mean that the Basic Imperative has not been fulfilled? For if it were fulfilled, would our descendents not be able to persist in the very last moments of the existence of our sun, ready to abandon our solar system in the last apocalyptic moment?

So what does it mean to, like Mike LaBossiere has proposed, for our descendants to be a scourge? I'm not quite sure. I think there is an implication of ruthlessness towards other species, including our own. Such ruthlessness is bound to be nothing different from the (t)error of Skynet. But what works will work right? How ruthless were we towards the neanderthals? Somehow I'm left feeling its entirely irrelevant. Because, again, what will work will work. Our feelings about its moral appropriateness are somehow irrelevant.

I understand that to some what will come to mind is the sickening and absolute abomination of Heinrich Himmler. All I can says is that Himmler was completely deluded. His concept of speciation were not only wrong but so deluded as to cause his own inevitable and unfortunately apocalyptic destruction. If anyone did not understand symbiosis, it was Himmler and Hitler. Like Skynet, they had no concept for the necessities of their own survival.

In the end, the line of speciation than can truly fulfill the Basic Imperative will persist. How simple it is. Fortunately, I believe reason married to our gut instinct, reasonable compassion, is what will persist. Amen. I shed many tears for all my deluded non-ancestors (in the societal sense). We don't have to forgive them for their sins. They have paid the ultimate price and have been punished with extinction. May the Basic Imperative be truly fulfilled. Being a living thing, I can but hope it does despite any misgivings about the future condition of my offspring.

So, which ever evolutionary line will best fulfill the Basic Imperative, compassion and all, I believe this is the one that will ultimately persist. My goodness is it hard to watch those last images. Open your eyes, my friends! Only with eyes wide open can we render the existence of our distant descendants a remote possibility, and thereby fulfill the Basic Imperative. And nothing precludes several sentient species co-existing, all following the same Basic Imperative.

Evolutionism, a New Moral Framework

Ethics have been plagued by relativism or the difficulty in establishing a of set of universal axiomatic rules founded in reason and confirmed by our sensations of right and wrong. I propose that we can solve the problem by extrapolating a moral framework from a simple statement that most of us can agree is a near necessity as such for those who might follow. I call this statement the Basic Imperative:

Act such as to maximize the survival chance of our distant descendants.

I am convinced that the Basic Imperative unfolds like a beautiful fractal, giving rise to a set of guidelines that will help us behave in the right way.

Further reading:
The Basics of Evolutionism
Distant Doomsday Test
Distant Descendants, Dystopia or Utopia?
Multiple Species?