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.”
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.