Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ethics Page 1 of 8

The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

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On December 16, 2024

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I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:

Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.

Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”

Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.

Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.

But that’s not the point I want to make.

It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.

But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.

This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.

And so on.

The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)

And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.

Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.

It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.

It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.

Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.

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The Most Evil Religious Belief

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On July 31, 2024

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Religion is a subset of ideology, and ideology is a set of beliefs about how how the world is and how the world should be. Capitalism is an ideology. Communism is an ideology. Scientism is an ideology. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and so on are religious ideologies.

The boundary between the two is weak. Communism and Scientism make metaphysical statements. Communism and Scientism generally state that there is no soul, there is no afterlife and there are no supernatural beings.

Capitalism believes that people, out of self interest (greed and selfishness), act in ways that create welfare for the majority. This is a radical belief, held by almost no one and no other belief system in history. It also believes in unlimited growth. The combination of these beliefs is going to wind up killing a few billion people.

But the worst religious belief is almost certainly “there is an afterlife, and only thru this religion can you achieve it. If you don’t worship this religion you will be tormented for eternity after death.”

This belief creates monsters. If there is only one way to avoid eternal torment, then ANYTHING is justified. This is one reason why Christianity and Islam have a history of atrocities. Charlemagne, a hero to most in the West, spent much of his life force-converting “pagans.” In one case he forced ten thousand Saxons to accept baptism, then immediately killed them all. Had they lived, after all, they could have gone to their priestly class and un-converted.

The mass burnings in the New World, primarily by Spain, were justified by the belief that burning pagans would let them get into Heaven. Sure, burning alive is one of the most horrible deaths possible, but what’s that compared to an eternity of torment? Burning someone alive to avoid Hell and get them into Heaven isn’t just not evil, it’s a truly good and moral act: to not burn them would be evil. If there’s something you can do to ensure you or someone else avoids eternal torment, it’s always justified.

This is the most extreme of “only my way is the good way” beliefs common in ideology. We’ll discuss this in more general terms later. It isn’t always wrong to say “some actions and beliefs and ideologies are good and others are evil”, it is always wrong to say “only this set of beliefs is right and all other sets of beliefs are wrong.”

The distinction is fine, but important. It’s also one that many moderns reject.

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Will Kamala Harris Be A Worse President Because She Doesn’t Have Children?

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On July 30, 2024

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Here’s the case, put relatively well:

Moral superiority aside, a somewhat general rule of thumb is that if you have children AND they live in the same country, then you have a HIGHER vested interest in the wellbeing of your country.

I’ll take “wellbeing of your country” to mean wellbeing of the residents of your country, though it doesn’t have to mean that.

Now, this argument is one that’s true sometimes. But only sometimes. It also assumes that parents care about the wellbeing of their children, which isn’t always true, but we’ll assume it is for now.

Let’s run thru why it doesn’t work for powerful people, which includes most politicians, certainly anyone with a decent chance of winding up President of the United States.

It is possible to take actions which increase the wellbeing of your children, which also harm the wellbeing of your country. American politicians and oligarchs, for example, sold America’s manufacturing base to China. They become filthy rich as a result and their children will be very well taken care of even if America is in serious decline. It did, however, harm the majority of Americans. (There are thousands of other examples, feel free to add some in comments.)

Your children may live in a worse-off America, but they are better off than if you did not do that harm. (Or, at least, that is your belief.)

If you prioritize the wellbeing of a small group over a larger group it usually possible to hurt the larger group to benefit the smaller group.

In fact, there is a strong argument that people without children are far more likely to prioritize the wellbeing of the residents of their country than those with children: they don’t have to make a choice: “should I make my kids better off OR the everyone else better off?”

Even at the simplest level, of “should I spend more time with my kids OR spend more time doing my job” there is this conflict. Great men and women are often bad parents, because if working an extra hour means helping a thousand of someone else’s children, they do that even if it hurts their own kids.

There is no free lunch. You always have to prioritize.

Harris will be a terrible President, I’m confident of that. But it has nothing to do with whether or not she has kids and, in fact, if she intended to do the right things for ordinary Americans, the fact that she didn’t have children would be a significant plus.

Most cultures have a family worship disease: the idea that you should always put your family first.

NO.

If you are willing to put your family first when doing so means that large numbers of people will suffer, you’re a monster. In fact, one of the necessities of having power over large numbers of people has to be that you don’t put your family first IF doing so will result in harm to others.

If you reach a point where it’s your family or a large number of others, and you can’t choose the “others” then you should step down and give the job to someone who can take care of the others.

Only those without power can, ethically, prioritize their own family without being monsters.

That this has to be explained to people is another sign of our inability to reason clearly about moral and ethical issues.

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Do You Have Any Moral Absolutes?

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On June 5, 2024

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I’m curious as to whether readers have any moral absolutes — actions they believe are never acceptable, or actions they believe must always be taken.

I’ll name two of mine: rape and torture are never justifiable as far as I’m concerned.

Do you have any moral absolutes? If so, what are they?

(Be polite in comments when discussing other people’s moral absolutes.)

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Understanding Morality

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On January 11, 2024

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I have a simple morality:

  1. I like feeling good.
  2. I don’t like feeling bad. (Suffering)
  3. I want other people to feel good.
  4. I don’t want other people to feel bad (to suffer.)

 

Most people have some of this as part of their morality.

How much is a matter of moral transitivity. How many people are part of three and four?

Let’s outline some variations:

The psychopath. Only my suffering and happiness matters.

The Patriarch/Matriarch. Only the suffering and happiness of me and my relatives matter.

The Back Slapper. The suffering and happeiness of me, my relatives, and my friends matters.

The Noble. The suffering and happiness of me, my relatives, my friends and my dependents matters. (Modern version is the good boss.)

The Aristocrat or Oligarch: Only the suffering or happiness of my class matters.

The Neoliberal Politician: Only the suffering of my family, friends and donors matters.

The Patriot. The suffering of my fellow citizens matters.

The Bigot. The suffering and happiness of people like me (my culture, skin color, religion or whatever) matters. I want people who are of inferior or enemy races to suffer and not be happy (reversal of 3 and 4.)

The Zionist: The suffering and happiness of Israeli Jews matters to me. I want Palestinians to be unhappy and suffer (and die.)

The Saint: the suffering and happiness of all humans matters to me.

The Boddhisattva: the suffering and happiness of all creatures capable of suffering or being happy matters to me.

It should be obvious that there are two variables here:

  1. How far your concern emanates.
  2. Who you reverse concern on. Who do you want to see suffer? (A lot of people who think they are good people want to see “criminals” suffer and feel virtuous for doing so.)

A third variable is degree. For most people concern vitiates with “distance.” They care most about themselves, then their family, then their friends, then people they know personally, then people like them (however they define that) and so on. For animals, mammals get a lot of concern, especially good looking ones, and non mammals get less with insects and so on falling into the exterminate them category.

What is your morality? Who does it apply to, and how much?

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Some Acts Are Always Evil

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On April 6, 2023

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This is a post a lot of readers will misunderstand or refuse to understand, because our society requires us to do evil regularly and we want to pretend it isn’t evil.

Some acts are always evil.

To understand this you need to make the correct division between an act and the consequences of that act.

The act and the consequences are two different things.

Let’s take something which is, I hope, universally agreed among my readers. Rape is always evil. It is always an evil act. Even if someone comes up with a convoluted scenario under which some good came as a consequence rape is always an evil act.

We start here to show something simple: that some acts are evil.

This is necessary because our society has gone too far in cultural determinism. “Evil and good are completely social constructs.”

No. They are human, but they are not constructs. We understand that slavery is an evil act. We understand that murder is an evil act. We understand that torture is an evil act.

It may be that on some occasions the results of an evil act are good, but that does not make the act itself good. I don’t believe in torture for getting information, but even if it did work, torturing someone to get information which saves people is still an evil act. The act is evil, even if the consequences are good.

In debt-slavery, common in the ancient world, you would sell yourself into slavery to settle your debts and get money. Let us say you did so and it saved your family from starvation because master now feeds you and your family.

The slavery is still evil, even if some of the consequences of it are not.

This is at the heart of just war theory. All wars are evil. There are no exceptions. Sometimes the consequences of war are better than not fighting the war. That does not, however, make the war itself not evil. (I can think of very few wars which were worth the evil of the war itself. WWII is the only recent major example.)

Some years ago I wrote an article on what the Tao teaches those who want a better world.

I’m going to quote it at length here:

In the Tao Te Ching there is a famous passage, as follows:

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone.
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done.
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds,
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order

Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

What is appropriate isn’t always what is good, but what is good makes up the vast majority of what is appropriate.

When one no longer knows what is appropriate, one devolves to the good and is still doing most of what should be done.

Kindness makes up most of what is good, so when one loses what is good, one devolves to kindness and retains most of what is good.

Losing kindness, one retreats to justice. The loss here is steep. Justice is maybe half of what is kind, because justice without kindness is about balance and tends to not restore people, but punish them: “an eye for an eye” and all that.

And then there is ritual, and ritual, in this context, is without any of the higher virtues, and thus leads to injustice, cruelty and evil, because it has lost almost all of appropriateness: it simply accepts that action A should lead to action B, and that will often be the wrong action, unguided by appropriateness, goodness, kindness or even justice.

I would add that when even ritual is lost; when people no longer obey the rules and are guided by no sense of ethics, that all chances of a good society and good results are lost.

The problem with “ends justify means” is that means are most of what we do. If you do evil acts all day, all week, all year, all life because they are part of how your society runs, then the amount of evil you do usually overwhelms all the “consequences”. This is why only someone who “has the Tao” should ever do evil, and since 99.9999% of us don’t have the Tao and don’t have the judgment to know when evil is justified, we should avoid evil actions like the plague. Certainly our leaders, who are the worst of us, shouldn’t be allowed to do evil.

But that’s consequence talk. You don’t not do evil acts because of the consequences, you don’t do them because they are evil. If you start engaging too much in consequence talk, then pretty soon you’re justifying all sorts of evil action.

Don’t rape. It’s always evil, no matter who does it or why. Don’t mistake whether an act is evil and with the questions “are the consequences of this act evil or good.”

And tamp down your social constructivism and moral relativism. Some things are always wrong.

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Most Zero Sum Games Are Negative Sum & So Are Most Positive-Sum Games

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On August 24, 2022

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In economics there’s the idea of how much a “game” nets, where a game is any economic activity. The ideal is to have positive sum games, where more good comes from the game than bad, and ideally all players of the game win. A classic zero-sum game is if you and I bet $10 on a coin flip: any win is precisely mirrored by loss. And a negative sum game is where people come out worse: a lot of wars are like this, no matter how much plunder, both sides are worse off at the end.

Just because a game is negative sum doesn’t mean it can’t be positive sum for a few people. War, again, is often like this. Masses of people may be killed, huge amounts of wealth destroyed and certain war profiteers may come out much richer and some politicians or generals much more powerful. Some soldiers may loot enough that war was better for them than peace.

The fundamental environmental critique of capitalism and industrialization is that it only looks like a positive sum game: that the damage we are doing to the environment (which includes climate change, but not just that) and to our health, makes it a negative sum game if one uses the proper time horizon (aka. if you won’t die before the bill becomes due) or if you include everyone (aka. being conquered by Britain was not good for Indians; being conquered mostly Europeans was not good for native North Americans, almost all of whom died) and capitalism has not been a marvel for most of the third world. Which is why, by the way, there are all those “best time to be alive ever” books which try to use dubious extreme poverty statistics to claim this is the closest we’ve ever gotten to utopia: they want to argue that capitalism and industrialization are positive sum games, at least for now.

These folks have no real argument against climate change and environmental collapse and tend to hand wave it with “technology will fix it” as if technology can un-extinct half the world’s species.

So in the big picture we’ve been playing a negative sum game for a long time. The destruction of the native civilizations of North America was a negative sum game. The impoverishment of India under the British East India company was a negative sum game (India started out with more industry than England, by a fairly wide margin.) Africa’s exploitation, from the slave trade to colonization was a negative sum game, which is not to deny they didn’t get some railroads and whatnot out of it. (The Belgians were the worst, but the French who are still making African nations pay them for having been conquered are mighty bad. England’s evils are well known.)

But we’re in a lot of local negative sum games. Wall Street types like to brag they “eat what they kill” and it’s accurate in all sorts of way. The entire run-up to 2008 was negative-sum: that’s why it took trillions to bail them out. All their profits came from creating much larger losses than their profits, then having other people pay them off and suffer a long light depression. And Central banks didn’t then go on to print trillions more because value was being produced after 2008, they had to print to keep covering the fact that real economic value was being destroyed.

Your average Wall Street executive is a sort of super-optimized human locust, getting fat by destroying real value. Private Equity as a whole is so clearly massively negative sum that if you try to deny it you live so far in a fantasy world there’s no point in talking. The entire neoliberal movement, with its poster-child policy of austerity was and is about damaging the real economy to make a small number of people richer.

A lot like those war profiteers we discussed earlier: they cause widespread misery, illness and death but they get very rich doing so.

(The military industrial complex is obviously negative sum, which, again, doesn’t mean it doesn’t benefit some people.)

The job of governments is to create positive sum games and to stop negative sum games. In some ways that’s almost their only legitimate function. (Any crime system with high recidivism, or large numbers incarcerated is negative sum, by the way, but boy, a lot of people get rich locking other people up.)

A society with a lot of negative sum games running can be compared to an animal with a lot of ticks attached, a tapeworm, and some nasty diseases. It’s supporting a lot of parasites, but one day it falls over dead after a great deal of suffering, and then the parasite have to try to find a new host. If they can’t, because they’ve infected the entire herd (or destroyed the grazing land), well, then they too die.

Welcome to the fin de siecle of capitalist society.

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You Don’t Have To Be Upset

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On August 18, 2022

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Terrible things are happening all time. Right now, as you read it, people are suffering in monstrous, awful ways. Many, many people.

That’s how it is. That’s how it has always been, and as long as there is life of the type there is on Earth, that’s the way it will be. Human and many animal bodies are built for pain and suffering, and not only are we often astoundingly cruel to each other, but accident, disease and the infirmities of old age will scourge us till we, perhaps, become homo-deus.

One of the wisest things I ever read was a 90+ year old who met their spouse to be at the gym, when they were both in their 90s, who said, “neither my (spouse) nor I spend one second worrying about anything we can’t control.”

And, if you can control something, there’s no reason to worry about that.

Bad things are happening all the time. But if you get upset about them, you aren’t helping: your being upset doesn’t make the situation better.

What it does do is make you suffer. All you’re doing is making the world worse, for yourself.

This is one of the most important things I’ve ever written, so re-read the above two paragraphs and think about them.

Much of our sympathetic suffering is because we think that we should be upset, or angry, or worried. Having the emotion either feels like something a good person would do (and we want to be good people) or it feels like, in itself, it is taking action.

Or both. Read that last paragraph again.

There are absolutely situations where feeling bad is wise: they are almost all where you are with someone else who is feeling bad, and your sympathetic misery lets them know you care.

But even in such situations, staying miserable is rarely helpful to the other person. Getting in sync with them, then helping lift them out sometimes works and sometimes what they need is just your misery with them.

But when you leave their presence, being miserable doesn’t help them, and it hurts you.

You also don’t need to feel bad to take action. You can do something to help people who are suffering without having to suffer yourself.

The best states to help from are usually compassion or love. Those states are good for you and good for the people  you’re helping.

But first don’t make the world worse by suffering when your suffering doesn’t help.

This is a real disease in our society and it is made worse by 24/7 global coverage of bad shit. There’s always something terrible happening and you can always find something to feel terrible about. Our sympathetic mirroring of others emotions arose when we lived in small bands, it is not adapted to an internet world where we identify with people we’ve never met and never will.

But to break this habit, to stop hurting yourself, you have to internalize the logic that not feeling bad when bad things happen, especially bad things when you’re not there, does not mean you’re a bad person and you need to split the idea of “feeling” from taking action to help. (And, after all, most of the time you aren’t going to do anything, and often you effectively can’t do anything: there’s just too much evil.)

To do this, to break these connection is the ethical and moral action, because hurting yourself is not required in most cases to help others, so all you’re doing is increasing the world’s suffering. As the Buddha supposedly said, “your compassion is not complete if it does not include yourself.”

Please stop hurting yourself needlessly.

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