It gets better

People hate people. People love people. The happiness in the world is made by the balance of one over the other. Recently there has been a lot of hate directed at a small group of people. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids are bullied and hated and despised in schools and workplaces and law courts and armies and shops and offices and parks all over the world. This is always terrible, sometimes disastrously so.

Love

... I'm honestly not sure if I should write this. Firstly because it's very far from the normal fare of this blog. Secondly because it's not a subject I have even average knowledge of. And thirdly because angsty-white-teen-blogs-about-love is the single least interesting thing on the internet. But non the less:

Philosophy - states and power

I've given a definition of should, now a definition is all well and good, but if it doesn't fit some useful purpose then there's no point having it. So I'm going to test this idea with a few questions, first, the most important and grandest of questions, the nature, extent and existence of the state. If you dont like my answer to these questions then there are 3 possible responses, you must disagree with my facts by showing that a belief I have about the world is false, you must disagree with my analysis by saying that I draw unfair conclusions or you can say that good reasoning lead to a bad result, in which case you must reject my definition of should. So then, the issue:

Morality part 2

Ok, after delaying for far too long I feel I need to respond to these questions with something more substantial than a comment, so here we go.

Philosophy - Morality

And now finally, the point. The entire purpose of philosophy, of thought in general, is to determine what we should do. The key problem is the famous is-ought gap. Thus far I have talked about what is, firstly my perceptions, then theories about them. And then the world reviled by these theories. So now we have to find a way to talk about “ought”. No amount of statements about what is can tell us what we should do. This is because the word “should” is not yet defined. So we need some way to jump the is-ought gap. I'm going to try this by defining the word “should”. This is a definition so cannot be wrong in a logical sense. The only question is if other people agree with me. Other people choose different definitions for should, others will choose to define ought statements in other ways. Many choose not to define ought statements at all, saying the is-ought gap exists so we cannot jump it at all and must live in a haze of intuitive notions when talking about moral ideas.

So far I have talked about the world in almost exclusively physical terms. I've talked about humans and people in terms of objects. But it's important to recognise an aspect of my perceptions. Happiness. For me perceiving the taste of a ham sandwich is fundamentally different from the taste of porridge, far more different than the foods themselves. I enjoy ham sandwiches far more than porridge, this is a definite observed perception, it's not something I'm just saying to myself. How do I know it's not just a thought with no real significance? My actions. ⁶

I have never actively sought out porridge. I dont put effort into going to find it, I do however put effort into making a nice ham sandwich. We act to achieve those perceptions that bring us most happiness, this is the definition of happiness. Endless tomes can and have been written on happiness so I'll just point out a few obvious features.

• More than one kind of happiness exists. Different things make us happy at one and the same time. So being happy that I am at a fine university doesn't stop me being happy that I am eating a cheese sandwich.
• Happiness is not the same as physical pleasure. It is said that rats can be wired to electrodes that stimulate the orgasm section of the brain, it is also said that if given a button to activate this they will stave themselves to death pushing it. If this is true human happiness and rat happiness is different. There are many examples of so-called sex addicted people, but I have yet to encounter a story of people starving themselves to death from sex-induced neglect. So people at some point stop having sex (or masturbating), the do this to gain some other kind of happiness. This cannot be physical pleasure, no higher or stronger form of physical pleasure exists than orgasm. So we can conclude that non-pleasure forms of happiness, (self preservation, loyalty, friendship, knowledge, art, appreciation, the happiness of others, accomplishment etc etc etc) can overpower physical pleasure, so happiness and pleasure are not the same.
• We benefit others and this makes us happy. I dont give money to Africa to help them. Well, I do, but if I'm a little more honest with myself, the reason that I do this is that I like to think of myself as a charitable person, and donating whatever nominal sum I give will have a much greater effect on boosting my own self image (or my image in the eyes of others) than it will actually helping people. This is not to say that donating money to Africa is bad or that we should stop doing it, or that we should change ourselves so we dont act on these selfish motives. I simply note that the concept of acting on our desires only is not always the same as the idea of selfishness as normally understood.
• We often do things that make us unhappy in the short term but happy in the long term, or vice versa. We balance the strength of our desires to conclude which of the two happinesses is more important to us.
• You can be happy in awful situations, the history of martyrs tells of countless people who have voluntarily withstood unimaginable physical and emotional suffering. People exist who have actively chosen torture. These people choose their principle or friends or religion or whatever else over relief from pain. The principles that drive them obviously make them more happy than would freedom from pain.
• We can, with a lot of effort, change what makes us happy. Ask any ex-addict, the drug used to make them happy, no longer. It's a hard process but it can be done. Of course there are a number of short cuts, sudden road-to-demascus type conversion from one thing making you happy to a fundamentally different form of happiness exists, often it's religious in nature, but similar things can happen in the context of animal welfare or their world aid say.

There is one big observation though. Theory of mind, I said above, is a scientific theory that suggests that others have a mind (ie all those perceptions that aren't sense data, thinking, feeling etc), and this includes desire. So we conclude others have desires, the question is what are they? This we have to work out by a slightly more complex route than simply asking them. I say this because people have an astonishingly strong tendency to deceive themselves and others. But it can be done.

We can notice a number of things in common with people's desires. Almost all people have basic desires, the act to preserve their own life, their family, they desire sex, a fulfilled life, the praise of their peers, full Maslow's hierarchy of needs stuff. We can then have a fairly good guess at what a random stranger would be like. For instance, they would be happy if you complimented their dress, unhappy if you stabbed them, happy if you gave them money, unhappy if you suggested their momma was so fat that something improbable resulted.

Of course, there are going to be exceptions to this because what we are asking here is scientific in nature. The question is “what kinds of things will this organism seek to bring about using its knowledge of cause and effect?”. And please note I said organism, but that isn't the most general thing. Humans have desires clearly, they act in a purposeful way, but so do all animals, they act in a way that their knowledge of cause and effect leads them to suspect will make them happy. But plants also can be said to act in some very very limited sense, turning to face the sun, growing roots towards better soil etc. This idea of desire is so general we can talk of robots or computer programs having desires. The problem with these last two examples is that their determinism is far more clear to us, our best scientific theory of how animals act is not neurological, it's behavioural, we understand animals best as minds with bodies rather than just as bodies with brains. This is either fundamentally correct or will eventually be overturned by far better neurology. Either way the question is of our best theory.⁷

So I would like to suggest a definition of the word should. “An individual should perform an action to the extant that it fulfils all desires that exist”. Things to note are:

• This is continuous. Should and should not are spectral, it's not the case that you can put things that should be done in one self contained set.
• This is consequentialist, virtue, duty, commands, intents etc matter in this theory, but only as tools. You should (as I have defined it) desire the happiness of others, but this is only a tool to making them happy, simply desiring it is not enough. Likewise rules can be (and will be) proposed that aim to make people do what they should, and these should be obeyed if and only if they achieve that. Just laws should be obeyed because they are just, not because they are laws.
• I've not said how we compare desires. This is something (like the problem of time) that is key to my philosophy that needs vastly more care and good thinking than I have the ability to give it. For now as a patch to allow this to continue I will use the idea of the veil of ignorance. In this theory an action that prevents one desire while allowing another should be done to the extent that one would prefer one desire over another if one didn't know which of the effected people one was going to be. I'm not convinced this is satisfactory, if anyone has suggestions please offer them.

Notes

6)My body acts, for the sake of not having to do linguistic acrobatics I'm going to say it's because I choose to do something using free will, but this is a metaphysical idea nothing more.


7)See my point about speaking in terms of free will? You can say all that in deterministic terms, but it's clumsy and unclear.

Human life is not infinitely valuable

Hi, thought I'd spark some life into the blog, been slow to update recently because I'm working on something rather large. (That's what he said, I know, way to raise the tone). But I thought I'd just jot out this idea.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of ethical maxims that are taken as read by all civilised people (including me) that are just flat wrong. I'm going to take a couple of quick examples.

• Human life is infinitely valuable.

• As long as you've got your heath nothing else matters.

These ideas are accepted without thought by almost everyone, I cant imagine anyone would say they disagree. The problem is nobody at all believes them. You dont for a start. You're reading this on the internet, so I assume you have access to at least a small amount of cash above the level at which you would literally starve to death.

If this is true, then by no means do you believe human life is of infinite value. Or even of particularly great value. At least in a concrete sense you dont. If it was true that you really acted like every life was worth more than any other thing, then you would not have any money. Consider the UN vaccination program going on right now across Africa to eliminate malaria. This will finish at some point due to lack of funding, and at the point where it does there will be that one last child who could have been helped if they had had just a little more money, the money that you didn't donate. I'm not trying to guilt trip you here, I'm simply stating a contradiction.

This isn't a situation where a really believed maxim isn't really followed through with. We dont, on the whole, feel guilty about not giving all our money to charities. We feel we should give something, but if pressed we would say frankly that we dont think it's reasonable to expect that we would give up even a slight level of comfort. It's not true that we feel we have to donate but it's only a temporary failing on our part that makes us not, we really dont feel ourselves as having committed the infinite moral failing that the maxim suggests.

As for health. Quite apart from how selfish this maxim seems on the most natural interpretation it is not true. None of us look after our health as if it was the only thing that matters. Because at a fundamental level it isn't. We all of us eat food that isn't good for us, we dont work out as much as we feel we ought to, we dont go to the doctor for every single little thing. Some of us go very far down this line, but nobody totally commits, everyone thinks about something else as well. We all have things that we enjoy doing in the time we dont spend working on our health.

Why do I point this out? Firstly because these maxims are annoying. In a discussion you can easily win points by connecting your thesis to some such rule and win the argument on the basis of a moral idea that nobody accepts. Secondly, it's important I feel to appreciate the gulf between theoretical moralities and how people actually make decisions. I'm not pointing out that people fail to live up to their own ethical standards, this much is obvious, everyone feels guilty about something. I'm pointing out something else, that people's real intuition about what they should do, what makes them feel guilty or satisfied, is very very far from what they claim to believe.

And this is important I feel. If we're arguing with a friend about some moral issue, the aim (at least in theory) should be to make the world better, (if we let “world” include the entire universe of moral relevance, including gods, afterlives, karma, the universal life force or whatever else). Each side in a moral dispute must by definition think the other is damaging the world with their immorality. If we really think our choices matter then, we should work hard in the field of morals, it's really important what point wins the argument. And I want to argue that as part of this we should be honest with ourselves. If we're arguing about Kantianism verses Aristotelianism we're not having a discussion about the moral decisions that change people's lives, we're engaged in what Dawkins might colourfully call “intellectual masturbation”, not that there's anything wrong with masturbation, it's great fun. But it's important not to confuse it for the real thing. There are moral debates about vaccination in Africa, about torture and the war on terror, about war and peace, good and evil, life and death. And we owe it to ourselves as a species to actually make progress in those debates. To get better answers to what things will make the world better and how we make people do them once we've worked that out. And ideas that nobody believes dont help forward these discussions.

The bomb

Nuclear defence and nuclear deterrence is an interesting concept. I'd like to argue that there's an element to it that is commonly missed.

The common view, one I had till not long ago, is that we only have nuclear weapons so that we can threaten to use it against anyone who threatens us. The idea being that threatening the total destruction that nuclear weapons imply will force others to do what we want or at least to not destroy us in return. This is of course a huge part of the strategic point of such weapons, but there is another element that I think is important.

There was a concept before 1945 of total war. In wars of great seriousness the only acceptable solution was the total destruction of one side or the other. In the American Civil war it was made clear that no accommodation or peace treaty would be brokered with the South, the aim was to force total and unconditional surrender. In the Second World War both sides bombed civilians and sank the ships carrying their food, the aim was to utterly destroy the other nation as a military power by terrorising its population. I want to argue that this has changed.

Now, wars are very much different now for a lot of different reasons, cultural and economic none the least. To borrow a line from Robert Wright "Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van." There are many reasons why total war now seems undesirable, but mostly these apply only to rich nations, or nations we really care about. Sure, we're not going to go to war with Japan, we buy all their stuff, but can the same reasoning really explain why we wouldn't wage total war against Yemen? Is there anyone with real power in the developed world who cares about Yemen? If Britain were to wage unrestricted to-the-death war with a small country like Yemen, the only thing it costs us is the army, and the cost of the army didn't stop us in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The change I would like to suggest is that with nuclear weapons every leader of a nuclear power has to make a choice before any armed conflict: Do I want to physically wipe this nation off the map. It is now literally within the power of the heads of 8 countries to stop their enemy existing. And yet they choose not to, because of MAD, because of nuclear fall out and for many other reasons, not greatest of which is morality and not least of which is fear. It is defiantly and permanently the case that no nuclear weapon will ever by used by one state on another. It cannot happen for all the self-interested and noble reasons that the world has come up with for the last half century. This changes things.

If we had gone into Iraq or Argentina or anywhere else and sought to genuinely wipe the other side out we could have. We chose not to and this changes the dynamic. No longer can hot headed generals shout “we must win at all costs”, no, not true, if we wanted to win at all costs we would have gone for total war. No longer can we say that the priority is to smash the enemy, it isn't. In modern wars we chose to only attack the government, or the rebels, or the violent faction, whichever, but we go into the conflict with the rule in mind that civilians are off limits. Much more than international law we are bound by consistency. If you wanted to take the fight to the Argentines then you should have gone nuclear, if you wanted to simply wipe out the Vietnamese you could have done it easily. There's still room to attack civilians, as Vietnam made clear, but that is never now the aim. Now when civilians are put in harm's way it is a side effect, when it happens there's a clear military argument against it rather than just a humanitarian one.

A world with nuclear weapons is one where fights are small and partial. Wars now must have sophisticated aims, generally to change the government from one faction to another. So tactics are much more refined and much less bloody. There's no justification for macho posturing, and so hopefully far fewer casualties. We should, I would tend to suggest, keep the ability to destroy our opponents, if only to prove to ourselves we dont want to.

The foundation of morality

A question was raised on a video I was watching today, and has been raised endlessly in religious debates for time immemorial. “Without god, on what basis can you criticise another's morals?” This question and variants are as old as the sea, “without god all is permitted”, “the ten commandments are the only true basis for morality”, “morality is only an opinion, it's not valid to criticise anyone else” etc. This is such a common idea I think it warrants a look at.

Let us start by dismissing the religious part of this question, then we can think about the far more interesting question lying under it. The religious aspect of this is removed by unpacking the question, it runs like this: my religion provides objective moral values, without such objective morals there is no absolute truth in any moral statement, and without that people could do any immoral thing they liked. The problem is in the first premise, no religion gives objective standards for morality to a person approaching that religion for the first time. If someone who has never done so before reads the bible and produces a moral code from it they have a problem. Do they go with a a literal interpretation of all commands as morally valid and so condemn tattoos (Leviticus 19:28), throw Derek Acorah out of town (Deuteronomy 18:10-11), destroy entire towns if there are people advocating other religions (Deuteronomy 13:12-18), reject forward planning (Matthew 6:34) etc. or do they pick and choose which parts of the bible are relevant or which are metaphorical. I cant of course judge any of these things before I have a basis for doing so (and am personally fine with the Derek Acorah thing =p ) the point is simply that almost none of the people who make questions of this kind would accept as objectively morally true all of these things.

We conclude from these examples then, that people do not accept as totally valid all statements that come from a religion or from a teacher of any other kind. They use some sort of standard to judge what commands they accept and which they reject, not the religion itself. This is a factual not a moral observation so without having yet any basis for morals I feel happy in removing mention of god from the original question as an irrelevance. (Feel free to oppose this in comments below). So we now have a new more general question: “what is the basis for moral criticism?”

A few observations: there is, in any one culture and time, a widely accepted moral opinion on a large number of basic things. The number of people in the 21^st century west who when pressed would not say they believe “what Joseph Fritzel did was wrong” to be 'true' could probably be counted without having to take your socks off. The are a number of arguments near these obvious basic things where there is little to no consensus (is it right to eat meat, what is the appropriate way to treat groups of historically oppressed people etc). We also notice that these things are not fixed. Many centuries ago many things which are now in the latter category were once in the former and vice versa, and things that were firmly decided one way or the other are now decided in the contrary way. It was widely acknowledged in the ancient world that slavery is not only acceptable but the only way to make a successful society work, today there is a very real debate over the morality of abortion, in classical Greece it was universally accepted that not only was abortion moral, infanticide was quite acceptable.

Moving away from the community for a moment and onto the person. How does the individual develop his moral opinions? I fear some may turn away in disgust at this but: we have to start in evolutionary biology. It is inevitable that any creature with a nervous system that can detect things closely related to it will act to the benefit of those things, this gets its genes into the next generation. There are countless examples of altruism in just about any class of animal (and even some plants) that you may care to think of. So we should expect humans to be fundamentally kind to those closely related. We should also expect children to follow commands from their parents, be they “dont touch that it's hot” or “dont eat that it's unclean”, not following these puts the baby at a risk of death and so is selected out of the gene-pool. (For a far better and more detailed analysis of this please see the truly excellent and badly-titled book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins). So we have an instinctive morality of clan loyalty, looking out for your own, sacrificing yourself to save two brothers etc. Notice that these rules are fairly constant, the many genes responsible for all this stuff will probably not have altered significantly in the million years people have been people. So we should expect these things to be roughly the same in all times and places.

Overlaid on that we have cultural morality, re-enforced by peer-pressure, this gives us what a lot of people mean by the “true moral message” of one religion or another, this is why people feel they should eat their greens and get some education, people aren't born feeling this, but at a later age they feel this like it's an instinct. In this category comes moral messages in common expressions, nobody can argue with “forgive and forget”, it is a moral axiom of our culture, not so in another time or in another place. Notice that these change with the society, I know the morals my parents and others gave me are different from the morals of someone from a deeply conservative family in the middle east, or from a Spartan. I could go on about this for hours but your political view is a real factor here (Take the test at http://www.yourmorals.org - then watch the TEDTalk that explains why: http://on.ted.com/255P it's a really interesting phenomenon). This changes and evolves, it will change in a way that convinces the most people in the next generation to stick with the same moral framework as the last (I vote labour because my father did etc).

Later we become sophisticated and think about these basic impressions. We develop the vague impression of happiness when animals are cared for into vegetarianism or supporting dog's trust. We take a feeling of unhappiness at domineering and unfair people we encounter in our early life and become trade unionists or members of amnesty international. This is where the criticism enters discussion at last. Levels below this we can analyse where the impressions come from, much like trying to work out where a fear of spiders comes from, but the impression itself isn't based on any argument so no argument is going to change that. However arguments and reasoning do produce these later sophistications. So arguments and reasoning can change them.

Assertion moral criticism is based not on absolutes, but on the best way to enact in practice an approximately equal basic moral assumptions, moral criticism of those outside ones own culture can either be based how to enact on their basic moral assumptions or to appeal that their higher level culture based instincts are not compatible with deeper biological instincts.

What we observe from our considerations of society is that if there are moral absolutes to be had anywhere then societies aren't good at finding them, morals change too much to have included anything like a truth of objective reality. We note that revelation or commandments from some outside source are arguments for ones own moral opinions only after they have been formed and are in no sense an objective moral framework. The holy books are not where religious people get their morality any more than people get it from leaders of personality cults or from superstars. Moral codes come first, then arguments from outside back them up. One always has the choice to reject or accept any command written in stone, one does this because of ones own pre-existing morals.

The sophistications I talked about before (I mean that word in the most positive way, not with the slightly sneering tone it has acquired) are quite literally rules or rather sets of rules about how to act. We follow these rules because they help us to satisfy those desires which our instincts give us. One can argue about these very effectively and with a strong basis. If you have a friend raised in the same time and place then generally his instincts will be much the same as yours. So when one argues about his sophistications as opposed to yours, one is not arguing which is more pleasing to god, or which accords better with the absolute morals that are stored somewhere. I argue with my friend about whether it is moral for such and such a law to be passed, we aren't arguing as to whether it fits into an external moral framework (as we would if we were asking “is it constitutional”) but whether the moral instincts that we both share fit well with it. If I argue with a Kantian about the problem of lying (see footnote*) the question is not whether the ban on lying is really a logical part of Kant's system (it is) but whether that fits with our shared instincts.

Outside of our culture here means outside of those people who we should expect to have the same instincts as us. Notice this is only a change in the learnt part of our instinctive morality, all humans at all times have approximately the same level of altruism etc at birth because it's genetic and not very variable (again see selfish gene). What does change over time and place is the stuff your parents and others around you re-enforce in your behaviour. So for me today in the classic Oxford Union debate “this house would never fight for queen and country” my instinct is to agree, because my loyalties are to myself, my close friends and to the whole of humanity, and are really not attached to queen or country. A Spartan would have immense loyalty to his country. How can the two of us argue?

I can argue that fighting for his country is not the best way to be loyal to it, that supporting your country means sacrificing your own glory and working for peace and prosperity. He can argue that the best way to protect my friends and those I am loyal to is to fight. We are arguing here not that the other's intuition is wrong, but that we have not chosen the right way to promote it. This seems to me to be a valid way of arguing that might actually change people's minds. This is the same sort of reasoning that gives us “would you like it if everyone did that?” and arguments about logical consistency of ones morals. Here we can have real logical discussions that get us places, this is the most firm ground for a discussion of someone else's morals.

We have a second way of arguing outside our own culture: our genetic instincts are obviously more deep-rooted than our cultural ones. (This does not of course mean stronger, ask anyone who has committed suicide in the name of honour). It is sometimes possible to argue that the instincts a person's culture has given them do not fit well with itself or the other instincts they have. People can be shocked by the things they have been lead to believe, ask anyone who's been freed from a cult, we can argue that the morals that such societies deeply ingrain into people are bad simply because when they are properly thought about they disagree with a much deeper form of morality. This idea of really coming to grips with your morals and understanding what it is you really think is the point of many reconciliation panels after terrible conflicts and atrocities. This is harder to make rigorous, the basis is our genetic predispositions towards some particular kind of morality. Whilst it is true that we will all share that predisposition it is often weak compared to some ingrained cultural belief.

I am a scientist and a mathematician, so I am pre-disposed to think about morals in terms of maximising the function happiness. This leads inevitably to utilitarianism (the idea that the best thing to do is to add up all the happiness that results from a given action and go with the action that gives you the biggest number). However inevitable this idea is given my upbringing and culture it can be killed outright (along with my belief in democracy) by the classic example of the terrorist's son. There is a bomb about to go off and kill a thousand people, the terrorist is under arrest, and his son is there, you know the only way to save those thousand people is to torture that young child. Simply adding up happiness and suffering will tell you that torturing that boy is moral, but our deeper genetic instincts tell us this is a really bad idea. One can have an argument based on this moral code or that and get a good resolution, or one can appeal far less logically to our genetic inheritance. This is not guaranteed to get us a resolution or to even be accepted as an argument and is by far the weakest form of moral criticism, but it does get resolution enough of the time to be worthwhile. Nazis such as Speer have said sorry, people have rejected barbaric cults they have been brainwashed into.

It's not much of a basis for morality, but it is enough I think for me to criticise Hitler without having relativists jumping up and down at me. I dont claim to have objective truths, but I do claim that dispute is possible and that it can be resolved one way or the other. As with science things cannot ever be decided one way or the other, but a consensus can be reached and discussion is not futile.

*basically Kant sets out a great long incomprehensible framework for all of morality and one of the logical consequences of this is that it is never right to lie, even if a murderer is at the door who wants to know where your mother is so he can kill her. This is obviously regarded as a flaw in Kant's system by many people.

Comments as ever wanted, this one especially, I'm sure it's half drivel.

Relativism: morals, facts, truth

Terminology: as ever philosophy is beset by confusions caused by bad words, many concepts of truth and fact have emerged over the centuries and so I'm going to let truth cover as wide a range of these ideas as you care to think of, mathematical, physical, moral, metaphysical, poetic, whatever. But questions of observation I will call facts, these are unambiguous statements of what a suitably placed observer with the right equipment would observe about the physical world. Housekeeping done, on with the post.

A very good quote I like (I'm sorry, it was written by that horseman of the apocalypse Richard Dawkins, but I like it so there) which goes “there are no cultural relativists at 30,000 ft”. What is meant by that is that there are many people who contend that truth is relative and that we shouldn't follow what science has to say because there are other cultures with their own ideas. However when you do something where there is real risk, like flying in a plane, then suddenly the fact that the Puain people of Peru or whoever believe that flying will make the sun god angry is much less of a worry. This post is about different sorts of claims to truth and how we should react to them.

First question, why do people want to know things anyway? This depends on the sort of truth. We want to know maths and poetry and art and other things like that because it's beautiful, we want to know truths about morals to guide us in how we should live, we want to know truths about the world because it is the world that we live in as bodies and it can cause us pain if we misunderstand it, we want to know metaphysics for philosophic reasons etc.

The important things for this is why we want to know facts, we want to know facts because if we get facts wrong then all the direction that our lives get from all the other sorts of truth, all the beauty and spirituality you like counts for almost nothing. We as people may well be spiritual beings, but we interact with others and we learn about many forms of truth through our bodies. Our bodies are physical things, they act according to facts. It may well be a truth that “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone”, but it is a fact that a body thrown out of an upstairs window will hit the earth with great velocity. So if not hitting the Earth at great velocity is part of your plans then you can keep the truth of the first, but the fact should guide your action.

I see morality in two parts. First, we use all the truths we can do decide on moral principles, to decide what we want to see happen. Some people want to make others happy, some want to obey the ten commandments, some want to achieve a higher level of conciousness. Then comes actions, if your aim is purely metaphysical, then you have no facts to guide you and should use more truths to guide you, you are not influenced by the world and will not take it into account, this is totally acceptable, others may have to step around you if you are meditating in the middle of a path or something, but you do not concern yourself with such things and are irrelevant for the rest of this post.

If however, your aim involves, no matter how slightly, the physical world. You may want to make people happy or to obey the ten commandments or eat the worlds largest hot dog or something. In this case you must use facts, if you dont then you are failing to follow through your own moral code. If we aim to bring some physician set of circumstances into being then we must act in a way that is likely to make that happen. We dont say that a suicidal person who refuses to kill themselves when presented with the means to do it is following their own route to their aim, we say that they're not sincere or that they're dont want to follow the aim they set for themselves at all. You owe it to your own morals to do the things that they demand, to do the things that make it most likely they will come about.

Many people believe that something should happen, but frustrate it happening in practice because they dont follow facts. For instance people who want more prisons to be built, but who oppose the planning application for a new one near them, or people who demand public services and then vote against a referendum to implement them. As with all things there are complexities, one part of your aims may conflict with another in some small case or you may simply make a misjudgement, or equally be unlucky, follow the course the facts point you too and have it smack you in the face. But besides these cases there are many people who follow truth not facts.

When we want some situation to happen, we must seek and action of our own that makes this happen. We must take into account the way the physical universe works. To try and put the lid on a teapot by throwing it at the wall and hoping it bounces off is not a way of proceeding that is likely to work. The systematic study of what things work to achieve particular outcomes is science. The scientific method purely and simply is observing many events, spotting that one action mostly leads to some outcome, testing this hypothesis by doing the same action many times, and then for the time being doing that action whenever you want that outcome. This is not infallible. The universe is complex and we do not understand it. If I observe that some action results in some outcome I can never say totally and for all time that will work. But I can say that it is my best bet, that if I want that outcome then the way that will make it happen most of the time is to do that action. Likewise reading scientific articles or textbooks, scientists are not gods or popes, they make mistakes, all the time. But they do better than chance, a lot better than chance. In a simple problem of a block on a plane bouncing off another say: Newtonian mechanics will be right within 10% over 80% of the time if you're a good experimenter, randomly guessing will be right within 10% 10% of the time if you guess in the right ball park. Science is not a font of all knowledge, but there is no better way to find facts, if there were the scientific method would add as a theory that the result of this other process is correct, and so would induce all the predictions of this new method.

The quote at the top is sadly not universal. There are many people who use facts and truth in another way. In a recent UK case the home secretary had as a truth that cannabis and ecstasy are very bad, he had as a truth that there should be harsh penalties to prevent thier use and this lead him, I believe, to commit a moral error. His aim (that he decided with truth and consideration and all that other stuff) was that the policy of the UK should be to minimise the harm caused by drugs, he has never claimed any other aim and fervently believes that is what he wants. And yet, when facts are presented to him by a group of independent scientists that cannabis and ecstasy are not as harmful as he thought and that the best way to reduce harm is in fact not to put harsh penalties on it, I argue that he should, to be honest to his aims, have followed what these facts suggested. Instead he took the childish option of denying the facts. When facts contradict truths they often get pushed under the carpet.

And this is a failing that all of us experience. In year 9 we did and experiment in physics, to find the angle that you shine light into in a semi-circular prism so it just gets reflected out. I had at that time a well formed truth of the elegance of the laws of physics. So I did the experiment and got 43 degrees. My truth told me this was simply wrong, it must be a much neater number, 45 degrees. My aim in this was to learn the real nature of things, to uncover facts. I failed morally and fudged the results to get 45, the fact was there all along, but I chose my truth. I was told immediately that this was factuality incorrect and that 43 was right. This was a failing that I try very hard to guard against repeating.

Other people who want to educate children and make them most able to get jobs and to be moral and upright citizens of the community have truths. One such truth is that the theory of evolution is untrue, and if it were true that is is evil. The facts tell such people clearly and repeatedly that evolution is true and that knowing it does not make you immoral or lead to the breakdown of society. In reality the facts tell them the exact opposite. But once again we see a moral failing, truth wins out over inconvenient facts and the aim that is publicly declared is betrayed. The children are not educated, dont get good jobs and produce a society with more social problems.

The same happens with sex education people aim to protect children physically and emotionally from the effects of sex. Truth tells them that this should be done by not telling them about sex, or telling them it is evil, fact tells them it should be done by talking intelligently about the realities of sex and handing out condoms like they're going out of fashion. Which do you think wins, truth or fact? A moral failing once again and surprise surprise a chlamydia epidemic.

I suggest that a similar question exists over alternative medicine. There is no discussion of fact to be had, alternative medicine is by definition that stuff that has not been shown to work in physical tests. Those treatments where the facts say “this will not make you better”. There are people who aim to make themselves, or even worse their child, well, to physically improve their health. In some people their truth tells them that natural remedies* or homoeopathy or any other made up treatment, that factually does not work and has been shown not to work in endless double blind tests, will work for them. Often this is not a moral failing, often people here believe the facts to be on their side, they try an alternative treatment and they find that it works. In this case I suggest it is not a moral failing for you to not know about the placebo effect or regression to the mean or the malleable nature of experience, it is not a moral failing for you to be taken in by the liar in the lab coat who swears blind that tap water will cure you of cancer. It may be an intellectual failing or a failing in your education, but honest ignorance is not immoral. However, people who do know about it, people who have read up on the subject and seen the faked reports put out by quacks, seen the endless tests and meta-analysis that show exactly no effect, people who have been trained in critical thinking skills, then that is a moral failing. Same for people whose truth tells them that MMR is a conspiracy to spread autism, endless facts tell them that if they do not give their child MMR it is at a much higher risk of dying young and painfully. Ignorance is fine, it can be cured by seeing a real doctor who knows the literature or even reading it yourself, the totally independent http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/ has summaries of research written in plain English for the lay person to read without having to go through any representatives of government or big phrama these can tell you simply and clearly which treatments (including herbal and traditional treatments) work, how well, for what sort of person and to cure what. To look at this and ignore it is, I argue, a moral failing IF, this is key, you claim that your aim is to become healthy, if you want to remain spiritually pure, or support the herbal remedy industry then no error has occurred at all. But dont please pretend to want something and then act in such a way as to frustrate it.

I failed in year 9, we all fail, all the time, it's no shame to have failed, but it is important to learn from the failure and to put mental processes in place to prevent it. To condemn me for my actions in year 9, or to condemn the school board for pushing intelligent design, is unfair. People making errors of this kind are normally the last person to spot that it is an error. We all fail, we need to be shown our error, clearly and sternly yes, but in the way one corrects a child who has made an error, shouting doesn't help, it makes you defensive. (Personal note, this is something I'm very bad at, I shout at people for things a lot because I have a low tolerance for bad science, I need a lot more work on this because I fail at this stuff all the time). But I do think people should be called out on it. You really do owe it to that part of your morals that deal with the physical world to follow the course of action that is most likely to get the right result.

*I must admit confusion as to why people who like natural remedies for things so rarely use the natural remedies that have actually been shown to work. Eating an extract of ground willow bark will make your heart healthier and cure most pains, it's been shown to work and has almost no side effects, and you can buy a bottle of the stuff for about a quid, it's called aspirin.

Any comments, arguments, counter-examples, better ways of thinking about this, as ever welcomed below.

Just a quick thing

Question on any questions this week about new proposals to get rid of a parent's opt out for sex education after the age of 15. As the law stands parents can get their child out of sex ed lessons up to 19 and the child can get themselves out after that, if indeed any such lessons are provided at that age. I've had a think and I'm going to write this and then post in a few hours later to make sure i'm not ameking a rash assesment here so here goes:

Any group or person, be it the child, be it the school, the parent, the government etc who seek to deny sex ed lessons to children:

• Is putting that child at risk of STIs, early pregnancy etc
• Is putting that child at risk of being abused emotionally and physically by people who know more than them
• Is leading to that child being less able to form a healthy emotional understanding of sex, especially sex as a factor of a meaningful long-term relationship
• Is likely to lead to that child having many difficulties with understanding their sexuality in later life
  
• Is thus indirectly harming that child in many many ways
• Is not acting in the best interest of that child
  
• Should seriously consider their role caring for children.

So should parents have a right to pull their kid out of sex ed? Fuck off, no you cant. Just like you cant pull them out of Maths or English, you're stunting their development and storing up all kinds of shit for later on.