Ian Welsh

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

Category: How to think Page 12 of 22

Does Everyone Always Act in Their Self-Interest?

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On April 5, 2017

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The statement that people always act in their self interest is one of the two main axioms at the heart of the modern democratic-capitalist order.

Let’s take a pure form denial by counter-example.

Kamikazee pilots. They volunteer to die for their country by crashing their planes into ships, then do so.

Death is rarely in someone’s interest unless life is worse. This appears to be altruism, or loyalty, or honor or something other than self-interest.

The counter-argument is, “If they do such a thing, it has to be in their perceived self-interest; that Kamikazee pilot couldn’t prefer to die than not be a Kamikazee pilot, therefore it was in his self-interest to die.” Various special explanations may be given, such as social coercion, benefit to his family, identification with Japan so extreme that he made Japan’s self interest his own self-interest, but they all boil down to

“If you do it, you must perceive it as being in your self-interest, and if you perceive it as being in your self-interest, it is.”

Self-interest, so defined, means that you can do something which makes you poorer, less healthy, less happy, and less wealthy–something which makes you worse off in every way, and say, in your defense: “But it was in my self-interest.”

Have you ever done something without thinking, then realized, “Oh shit”?

Have you ever done something you knew would get you in trouble, but you felt it was moral?

Have you ever done something to help someone else at cost to yourself, and told neither them, nor anyone else?

Have you ever… but why bother. In each case, the counter-argument will be something like, “But you did it because you wanted to! You feel you’re a better person now! That’s your reward and your self-interest!”

But it explains nothing.

It means “People don’t do things without a reason,” but even that is only true in the sense that all “events have a cause.” We often do things by habit. We often do things that–even as we do them–we know we will regret, because we cannot control ourselves. We often do things under coercion or fear, and only a fool pretends these are choices in any sense that matters (“Well, I can be beaten or tortured or raped, or do as the big man with a gun says).”

I mean, yes, it’s in your self-interest to do what the gangsters tell you to do.

Sort of. And it’s in your interest to have a shitty job at less-than-minimum wage when the other option is starvation.

But are these most usefully explained as actions in self-interest? Does self-interest mean anything when it explains everything? I think it’s a rare person who refuses to admit to having done things against their own self-interest, and even to having known it as they were doing it.

People have many reasons for doing what they do. Self-interest, if it is so nebulous a concept as to mean “whatever you do is in your self-interest” is actually so nebulous as to have no explanatory power.

If you want to get people to do something due to fear, say so: “We’ll scare them into doing it.”

If you want them to do it due to patriotism, say that. If you intend to coerce them, say that: “If they don’t, we’ll throw them in jail.” If you want them to do it because it’s the kind thing to do, say “We’ll appeal to their kindness.”

Now it’s true that there are lots of category errors. You can think you’re appealing to kindness and really be appealing to self-image, or to social ties (“People will despise me if I don’t and like me if I do,” etc.). You can appeal to reciprocity. You can even appeal to pure altruism or pure tribalism.

And you can admit that there may be a mix of motives, including self-interest, without boiling everything down to self-interest.

The writer Robert A. Heinlein was much affected by the following scene: A woman became trapped in train tracks as a train was barreling down on her. Her husband stayed to help, but a bum also rushed forward to try to help. Neither man fled, and the train killed all three of them.

Only the most specious of explanations can state that the bum was acting in self-interest. He gave up everything for a woman he did not know. Only the happenstance that a future famous author was watching means his sacrifice is remembered, and even so, his name was not known.

Our concepts of human nature predict our policies. Self-interest as a foundation stone of human nature means that we create our societies around self-interest. And that does not work. Doctors who are not paid based on how many tests or procedures they order, order less tests and procedures and that amounts to better care as tests and procedures (especially surgical procedures) are not risk-free–and because cheaper alternatives often give better results.

When you engineer society to emphasize one thing, when you say it is how everyone acts, people hear, “This is how we should act.”

“Greed is good.”

“There is no such thing as society.”

And self-interest is a human motivation. It’s not the only one, but it is powerful. Make it so that treating patients badly will make doctors richer and many of them will do so. This is why, for most of history, it was regarded as scandalous for doctors to have financial interests in, say, how many surgeries their patients had. The Romans and Greeks forbade payment entirely (gifts were given at Saturnalia, in Rome, but that was well-separated from the actual service).

Absent self-interest, people act on other motives and those other motives often get them to do more of the right thing. This is true, by the way, in almost every field.

Assume everyone is motivated by self-interest, and you will work, hard, to make it so, as well as give social allowance for greed and selfishness, two traits almost every society in history has understood as bad ones.

We all need some self-interest, and in moderation it is not a vice. Raising it to the ur-human motivations, the source of all other motivations, however, and it becomes monstrous.

It’s also bullshit.

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Ideology Precedes Policy Which Determines Outcomes

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On March 23, 2017

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Ok, so…

The results are rather worse than that, actually, and anyone who reads this blog regularly is aware that, for example, working class white male wages peaked in 1968, in real terms. It’s not as if every other demographic has gotten off, either. Slowly the scourge has worked its way thru the demographic and socioeconomic classes, till practically everyone but the top 5% or so is being hit to some extent or another, even if they haven’t lost lifespan—yet.

Marcy Wheeler asks:

Which got me wondering: to the extent this is driven by a failure in ideology — by the failure of the American dream — which comes first, the failed ideology or the rising mortality rates?

…

. But as we try to figure it out, we ought to be focusing at least as much on how to roll out life and meaning that can sustain Americans again as we are on blaming Putin for our recent failures to do that.

Ideology tells tells you how the world works, what to do, how to do it and why you’re doing it. For example, NeoLiberal ideology has an axiom that “jobs are created by those who have money.”  On the face of it, this seems obvious: nobody without the ability to pay you has ever given you a job, I’d bet.

The corollary of this is “the more money that rich people have, the more jobs there will be”. So, under Neoliberal ideology, you funnel money to the rich and corporations and they create jobs.

Doesn’t actually work, mind you, but that’s what the ideology says.

The ideology also says “money is earned by people because they fill the needs indicated by the market, which represent what people and society want.”

Which means “if you have a lot of money, you deserve to have it because you got it filling other people’s needs”.  It also then follows that people with a lot of money are the sort of people who are good at providing what other people want, so therefore they should have more money so they can provide even more.

Poor people, by this ideology, do not deserve to have much money, because if they were doing something that other people wanted a lot of they’d have a lot of money.

Etc, etc…

Ideology tells people what policies to pursue. Those policies then create results.  With different ideologies, you get very different results.  FDR’s New Deal and the Keynesian consensus after WWII had as its thesis “the more money ordinary people have, the more they will buy, creating demand for products, which will create more jobs.” It also had “money in the hands of rich people doesn’t create demand and does create political problems which damage markets, therefore we should keep them from having too much money.”

The result of those propositions was the best economy in American (and European history), with growth rates higher in the middle and lower classes than in the upper and the rich classes (rich is not upper class, it is beyond.)

Ideology Determines Policy.

Policy Determines Outcomes.

(One might ask “what determines ideology”. Part of the answer will be in the upcoming “Creation of Inequality booklet” I’m about three-quarters finished.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Basic Psychological Structure of Our Society Does Not Work

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On March 20, 2017

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

Here’s the thing. Our society only works after generational crises which don’t destroy it. After the Napoleonic Wars, the survivors made Europe more or less work. They got a good long run out of it–a surprisingly long one–but it began going south starting around 1870, and it blew up with WWII.

It went south in ways that are recognizable, by the way. For example, the British Empire pushed laissez-faire trade policies which made the rich richer, but gutted the British manufacturing base over time, moving much of it, ironically, to America.

The system went into crisis from 1914 to 1945, and the Americans took it over and ran it basically well up until the early 70s, about 25 years. Then it went into decline. It’s hard to tell exactly when the end-game crisis start(ed) until we can look back, but if we aren’t in it right now, we’re close.

1945 to 2008 is 63 years. If you count up through to today, it’s 71 years. If the crisis isn’t seen to have started for another ten years, it will be 81.

But the core point here is that it’s very hard to create people who can run a system.

A common refrain is that prosperity destroys character. But that’s not quite right: The people who created the good post-war economy were the FDR types, mostly. People who were adults in the 20s and 30s, who saw what went wrong.

People have a hard time learning from other people’s experiences. They have to see it themselves. So, in the early 70s there is an attempt to get rid of the short-sale uptick rule (you can only short a stock on an uptick of the stock) and it dies in the face of massive backlash. A couple decades later, those people are dead, and even more wholesale revisions to the rules are put in place to prevent another Depression. Finally, Clinton kills Glass-Steagall, the main spar, wholesale, something entirely unthinkable in 1960 when the population had lived through and remembered the reasons Glass-Steagall existed in the first place.

But the rot goes deeper than just, “It’s hard to learn what you didn’t experience.” It goes to the core of how we raise ourselves and our children.

School, as we do it, is a terrible way to raise people. What it actually teaches us is to, “Do what you’re told, when you’re told. Wait to be told how to do things, don’t figure out things for yourself, and give the approved answer, not one you came up  with  yourself.”

It trains drones. It trains people who are meant to spend their adult lives under supervision, doing what they are told, when they are told, and giving their bosses the answers their bosses want.

Those people make fine wage slaves, yes, but they don’t make good citizens. They have been failed to be taught how to think for themselves. Even worse, they have been taught that if a thought of their own should come up, they should keep it to themselves.

Meanwhile, school interactions with peers are terrible. When we call something “high school” we mean horrible peer pressure bullshit. A few people remember high school fondly, but most people remember it as one of the worst times of their lives.

Wage slavery, and I use the term slavery very deliberately, is a terrible system if you want a democracy or a Republic. Mass production consumer societies, in which we choose from menus rather than creating anything ourselves, are terrible for democracies or Republics.

The ways we school people, the jobs most people work at, and the methods through which we distribute goods to people (through money gained by sitting down, shutting up, and doing what you are told) are antithetical to free, egalitarian societies. Only a crisis which forces people to think for themselves and where they have to be trusted for a while can briefly create people suited to political freedom.

But we can’t have world wars and depressions all the time, for what I assume are obvious reasons. So we stagger along, brief good periods sliding into shit periods, regularly.

Of course there is more to it than this, such as cycles of destruction of capital and labor and so on, but much of that is manageable–in theory. It isn’t manageable in practice, not because it couldn’t be done, but because our society–we, ourselves–don’t create the people who can do it.

Freedom, democracy, equality: these things are not compatible with how we order our economic affairs, how we raise our children, or how we condition our adults.

We will not reverse course, this cycle; that doesn’t happen and it won’t. It’s too late. But there is always another cycle. If we don’t want the next cycle to be as disastrous as this one, we must figure out a better way to run our economy, to educate our children, and to live as adults. A way suited to people fit to be free.

This doesn’t mean “work or starve” as many libertarian morons would think; it means allowing real choices to be made, which requires an absence of existential fear while still including consequences. It means teaching children to to be something other than “good workers.” It means jobs that aren’t “you’re a kneepad for the boss or you lose everything.” It means a power structure that does not concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few and create a gate around access to the good life, which fosters outside of it a subservience born of the desperate knowledge that the good life comes from good jobs, which are in scarce supply.

All of this is do-able. In some sense, most of it isn’t even all that complicated. But that doesn’t mean any of it is easy, and it is hardest because we have been trained to exist in a poverty of imagination, an inability to imagine worlds that are much better than the one in which we live.

We have the technology. What we don’t have is the people. We aren’t the people who can run a good society (this is obvious, as we haven’t).

But as people, we can re-create ourselves and our descendants. Biology is only half destiny, the rest is in our hands.

So far, we’ve been acting like bacteria in a petri dish, rushing to destroy our environment through unchecked, stupid growth.

Let us hope we can prove ourselves wiser than that. Or, instead of us instructing ourselves, Nature will instruct, and her lessons will be harsh.

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Fixing the World #2: Moral Calculus

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On February 6, 2017

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The first rule of creating and maintaining a good world, or a good society, is living in something approximating the truth. If you are delusional, you cannot make good decisions.

The second rule is that your ethical system must, if applied, create a good world.

This is harder than it seems. Ostensibly, we all agree that murder is bad, theft is bad, fraud is bad, and so on. We say that every human life has value and that all humans were created equal. We say that all life has value.

But in our actual actions we prove that we believe none of these things. We excuse mass murder by our own countries. We prioritize the deaths of people not like us over people like us–generally at very high ratios. We place human life over animal life, to the point where we are genociding multiple species every day. We prioritize property over human life more often than not, refusing to spend small amounts of money that would; easily save lives. We have enough food to feed everyone but don’t. We have enough industrial capacity to give everyone a decent life, but don’t.

We have known for decades that we were killing off animal species and did far too little. We have known about climate change for decades and done essentially nothing.

Our ethics are monstrous. They have led to a great die-off of other animals. They currently cause the death and suffering of hundreds of millions of humans who need do neither.

Until we value everyone’s life, and until we value the life of other animals at least to the point where we aren’t genociding them, we will not and cannot have a good world overall.

It is often said, by the supporters of the current regime, that things have never been so good, but I don’t believe the statistics. Even if they were true, it would not matter, because the reality they describe is not sustainable. If I know I’m doing something which makes me comfortable today but will lead to mass death tomorrow, that isn’t ethical, and that’s what we are doing.

We can have that good world when a Somali’s life matters as much as an American’s and when a both a billionaire and a poor person receive quality health care. We can have a good world when the possibility of a species extinction is considered, and treated as an emergency. We can have a good life when we look at the human footprint in the world and we don’t allow it to destroy multiple other species. We can have a good world when we make sure everyone gets fed, everyone has a decent set of material goods, and everyone is free to do more or less as they choose, so long as their actions are less harmful than the good they do, and don’t lead to the forseeable and preventable suffering and death of others.

It is insane that we are worried about AI and robotics, for example: The idea that machines might be able to do the work that humans do should fill us with joy. It’s insane that we cannot imagine a world in which humans do not have to do mostly meaningless drudge work to survive. That we cannot figure out how to distribute resources to people without making them spend the better part of their waking adult lives doing shit they’d rather not do. (If you’d win the lottery and keep your job, congrats, you are the exception. Most people would not.)

The right thing to do is generally the right thing to do. It is the great tragedy of the human race that we don’t believe that being kind and not hurting other people (or preventing suffering and enabling people to do what they will so they hurt none, and not being mass murderers of other species) is in our self-interest.

It is precisely in our self interest–it is the only way we will ever create a world that is really good to live in for the vast majority of the world’s residents.

The great task, I would suggest, is not “opposing Trump” (though that’s certainly a good thing, as was opposing Obama’s shitty policies, or Bush’s, or Clinton’s) but in trying to figure out a social system that aligns with ethics.

This is where the critics will cry about how human nature is incompatible with doing the right thing.

Perhaps that is so, though I do not believe it. But if it is so, Earth will remain hell for far too many, and we are in some danger of wiping ourselves out, along with all our victims in the non-human world.

But perhaps it is not so, and just as we could not fly until recently, we simply haven’t figured out yet how to be good at scale. And perhaps we should treat this problem as the most important problem in our society, because everything else which seems important from climate change, to war, to Trump, to fascism, is simply a manifestation of the fact that we suck at being ethical; at being kind.

All lives have value. Everyone’s suffering matters. Everyone should have a good life. These are prescriptive statements: statements that to be true, we have to make true. They are truths that will never be absolute, we will never reach 100 percent. But we can get far closer than we are today, and it is on us, as a species, if we do not.

It is a choice. Good and evil are a choice. And the first step towards evil is to say, “The pain of people like me matters more than the pain of people who are not like me.”

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The Control of Parties and the Rise and Fall of Ideologies

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On January 24, 2017

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All political parties have ideological beliefs. If it seems a party does not, it generally means they accept the status quo (invisible as an ideology) or they are a cult of personality, which is still an ideological position.

(Originally published May 19, 2015. Back to the top. This is why the attacks on Sanders are so vicious. – Ian.)

For those who hold an ideological position which does not control the current majority party, the job is to keep a party firmly in an alternative ideology.

In first-past-the-post systems, there are often two or three parties which are viable. In most places with real democracy, parties do not have more than two or three terms, then the public grows tired of them and votes for the second party.

If your ideology controls the second party, odds are strong you will eventually wind up in power, simply due to public fatigue with the current party.

Therefore your job, as a left-winger, right-winger, or whatever, is to keep control of that party. This takes precedence over winning the most immediate election. Winning by becoming a lite version of the other ideology does not serve you. Having the second (or every) party be neo-liberal is not in the interests of anyone but neo-liberals.

If you are the first party, of course, it is your job to make it so that the second party (and however many other parties there are, if possible) accept the postulates of your ideology. As many have noted, Margaret Thatcher was not successful so much because of her policies, but because Labour came to adopt her policies as well, just somewhat watered down.

There is no alternative

– Margaret Thatcher

Now, what was said about second parties is true of third parties and so on, all the way down. The New Democratic Party (socialist, labor-based) came from virtually nowhere in Alberta to win because they still existed. They will be able to raise corporate taxes and so on because they remained true to some socialist principles. Though I have grave disagreements with Syriza, they are in power because they still exist and came out strongly against austerity. They could have watered that down–and they would have been in power sooner.

The Communist Party in Greece, castigated by many for not joining Syriza, was correct not to do so: They did not believe that Syriza would do what was necessary, or what they believed in, so they did not join.

The Liberal Democrats in England killed themselves by joining the Tories as a minority partner. They gave in to almost everything the Conservatives wanted, and, as a result, were seen as “Tory-Lite.” No reason to vote for them.

Let me put this precisely: The job of a political party is either to get a few specific people into power, or it is to offer a clear option to the voters. If it is the latter, then your job is to make sure that this option you offer remains available. In many cases, if you do so, you will get into power fairly soon after two to three terms. In other cases, if you are a minor party, it may take decades.

If you genuinely believe in your policies, in your ideology, or whatever it is, then that is fine. The public has a right to choose, you just make sure they have a real choice and not a menu that lists the same options under different names.

Every ideology fails. Every one. There will always be a point where people are hungry for something else, and you will be there.

Once in power, your job is simply to show that your ideology can work. If you fail to do so, the public is entirely justified in throwing you back out. Of course, an ideology can be badly implemented once, or even twice, but this does not mean it is necessarily flawed. It may just mean it was badly executed or that the circumstances were not right for it to succeed. You will need to evaluate which of these is the case before you dedicate your life to such an ideology and fight to keep your party aligned with that ideology.

An ideology can lose for a long time before it wins. The Greens and the Pirates have won little, but that does not mean they might not be the parties of the future. Old parties can become new parties: Labour was not always neo-liberal; in Canada, the Liberal party under Justin Trudeau is directly opposed to many of the policies of his father in the 70s and early 80s. (The elder Trudeau having introduced the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which Justin had the Liberal party vote to largely abrogate.)

Neo-liberals should fight to keep Labour in England and Liberals in Canada neo-liberal. Those who support other ideologies can fight to change those parties; fight for other parties, or create new parties.

In all cases, again, the job is to provide a clear choice for the population; someone to vote for. (This is why I dislike purely regional parties, though obviously that problem is hard to avoid if your mandate is independence. It is a pity the Scottish Nationalist Party could not have run nationally–perhaps all of Britain should join Scotland.)

Party control, in any case, and in many democracies, and especially one where structures favor having only two or three major parties, is generally more important than winning any individual election. Most anything your opponents do can be undone if you get into power and still believe in undoing it. Again, this is why Thatcher won by changing Labor–because the old Labour party would have just undone virtually everything she did.

What we have had, now, for about 40 years, is a right-ward ratchet: A very right wing party gets in power and does radical things or a moderate neo-liberal party like Labour or the Democrats gets in power and basically accepts the status quo, with very minor rollbacks, and continues the rightward drift in most areas.

Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, pushed through NAFTA, started the no-fly list, and heavily restricted welfare. Obama ramped up the drone program, went after whistle-blowers far more than Bush ever did, and is, in general terms, far worse on civil liberties than even George W. Bush.

Stopping ratchets means keeping control of the party which will be back in power eventually. This is hard to do, after two consecutive losses, a party will begin to believe it needs to become like its opponents to win. This was true of the Republicans in the 40s as much as it is true of Democrats after Reagan and Bush, Sr. or as much as it was true of Labour after Thatcher and Major.

If you have lost the battle for the second party, then (while maintaining an outpost there for a future takeover attempt), you should find a third party to champion your cause. You will not be able to stop the ratchet effect (left, right, totalitarian, permissive, or whatever). But when the ideology fails, as it will (I guarantee this, it is not in question, only matter of time), then you will have another fair shot at power. You may not succeed, new ideologies may arise to supplant you, or other problems may stymy you, but you will have your shot.

Keep control of parties. If you cannot, create them.

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People Are Not of a Piece

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On January 1, 2017

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One of the most difficult things for many to understand is that someone can be wonderful in some parts of their life and truly awful in others. A man can be a rapist, say, and also be genuinely kind to other people. Someone can go into work, make decisions that will impoverish millions, and then make sure they make it to their child’s play, where they agree to help build a facility to help disabled children or a shelter for abused women.

People can be terrible in one part of their life, and good in another.

It’s a relatively minor thing and an unimportant celebrity, but take Mel Gibson, of the infamous anti-semitic rants and terrible temper. Many people came forward to say how wonderful he’d been to them, and many of his friends, like Jodie Foster, didn’t turn on him.

The bad stuff doesn’t cancel the good stuff. The good stuff doesn’t cancel the bad stuff.

This is important in two ways: When someone who is generally good is accused of doing something bad, they may well have, especially if what they’re known for being good about isn’t related.

And if someone who is generally bad does something good, they still deserve credit.

It is also important analytically. If you assume someone is all bad or all good, you rarely actually understand that person, nor can you predict their actions. Terrible people can do good (Genghis Khan), wonderful people can do evil (FDR).

Good in what way? Why? Bad in what way? Why?

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Clio, the Muse of History

Heaven on Earth: The Kindness Maxim

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On December 19, 2016

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In the past, I have noted that kindness is generally the best policy and always the best policy default. If you don’t have an ironclad reason not to be kind, be kind.

Let’s run through this.

People who are treated badly, become bad. The abused grow up to abuse. The sick make others sick and cannot contribute to society. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people can afford your products and services.

Happy, healthy, loving, and prosperous people are the people we want in our societies.

We evolved in bands. Forty to fifty people running around the Savannah. We would have been friendly to some other bands (those with whom we shared ancestors) and we were hostile to most other humans, who were our competitors. The level of hostility varied with carrying capacity; if resources were short because of too many humans, quite hostile, otherwise not very.

We did not evolve to take into consideration the needs of large groups of people. In order to do so, we evolved cultural methods: fictive kinship, culture, story, myth, and religion. These things created fictional identities which went beyond people we knew of or saw every day.

Theses are all hacks for a fundamental evolutionary problem: We’ve evolved to be pretty good to those we see all the time, and not to care much about people we don’t.

This was fine when were just a particularly clever animal. Even when we got to the point of making wholesale changes to the environment (usually through agriculture), the worst we could do is ruin a local ecosystem–we couldn’t mess up the world.

But, today, for good or ill, we live in that “interconnected world” and the “global society” everyone talks about. What happens to someone in Nigeria, Brazil, or China matters to me. Their happiness, their health, their prosperity affects mine.

And how they affect the environment affects me, too. How I, a first-worlder with a huge carbon footprint, affect the environment, affects them.

Their well-being affects mine. It is in my interest for them to be better off.

This isn’t what you’ve been told. Economics treats the world as a zero-sum game, a matter of managing scarcity.

The world has scarcities: resources, dumps for pollution like carbon, etc. But civilization isn’t, usually, a zero sum game. Instead, it’s usually negative sum or positive sum, or both. For some time for Westerners, and a few other developed nations, it has been positive sum, and there have been many other periods of positive-sum games.

My win is everyone else’s win.

Creating a good society requires both managing actual scarcities and understanding that actual scarcities are scarce, and that most things people want to do are positive sum. It requires turning most of what we do into positive-sum games. A good society is one in which “your win is my win” is made true far more often than not.

“We win together” is a prescriptive statement which must be made into a descriptive statement. (It is also a descriptive statement in general, because if my win isn’t your win more often than not, we don’t live in a good world.)

So humans must see beyond their identities, their tribes, and their nations, to treat all humans as people whom we want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, and loving. For their sakes and for our sakes.

But there is an additional step required to create a good society, a good world, a good civilization.

We must care for non-human life.

The mass-death of trees and plankton affects you, it affects me. The mass death of fish affects you, it affects me. The destruction of marshlands causes floods and reduces water quality; it affects you, and it affects me. Ecosystem collapse—well, you get it.

The problem here is that I’ve given you the rational argument.

Rationality is marginal. It’s not that humans can’t be rational, it’s that rationality is the lesser part of why we do things or how we make decisions. We make decisions based on emotions, and those emotions are based on our ideologies and identities.

Rationality, or “reason,” allows us to weasel out of doing the right thing too often. It is a tool for our emotions; emotions which right now scream: “My interests, my ideology, my identity, my people matter MOST!”

For a good world to exist, we must feel that other humans should be treated kindly simply because it is the right thing to do. We should be revolted by anyone going hungry, anyone being tortured, anyone being raped. The moment we think “They had it coming,” we’re on the wrong track. (Punishment is not the point, removing the ability of bad actors to continue to act badly is.)

And this principle needs to be extended to non-human life. We need to feel bad when animals are dying in large numbers and going extinct–bad enough to do something about it. We need to instinctively, by default, move to protect them. We should be as revolted by images of dolphins being slaughtered as we are by humans being slaughtered. If we kill for meat (and I eat meat), we should insist it be done humanely.

This must be based on values, principles, and identity, of feeling that humans and animals and even plants are all alive–and because they are alive, they must be treated with respect.

There are sound, pragmatic reasons for doing so; there are also sound moral reasons for doing so (read the Hidden Life of Trees). Anyone who doesn’t think most animals don’t feel pain, or don’t suffer, is on a profoundly unethical, immoral track.

This is the right thing to do, morally and pragmatically, and if we don’t figure out how to do it, we’re little better than bacteria that grow until they destroy their own environment and experience a great die-off.

Be kind. It creates the world you want to live in, and it may well save your life and the lives of those you claim to care about. By granting life the love you reserve only for a few, you give those few (and yourself, as it happens) their best chance at long life and prosperity–and grant it to your descendants as well.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Basic Reasoning and Reading

By

On December 9, 2016

Comments

Competent and good are not synonyms.

Smart and good are not synonyms.

Evil and competent are not synonyms.

Virtues are not all moral virtues.

Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better, and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless.

Competence is morally neutral. It is how you use your competence that matters.

Next: Human Nature.

It is possible for people to be both good and bad. A politician may do something good, and then do something bad. It is even possible for a person who is evil overall (George Bush, Obama, Putin) to do the right thing, for the right reason. People can murder others one day, and rescue babies the next and rescue those babies out of the milk of human kindness.

If you do not understand any of the above, if you are not capable of disentangling your emotions or your tribal identities enough to reason like this, then you are incapable of rational thought when it matters.

Finally, if you do not like my writing, if it bothers you that I say that Trump is competent, or that Genghis Khan, though evil, was a great man, you do not have to read it. If someone is threatening you to force you read my stuff, please call the police.

Many people do not seem to know how to unsubscribe from the email list. The unsubscribe link is at the bottom of the email.
While, on occasion, I write to comfort people, I do not write to pander to people’s prejudices or tribal identities.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

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