On Universal Ethics
I’ve spent a lot of time studying ethics and trying to drill down into ethical philosophy to discover the simplest, consistent set of universal principles by which we, as human beings, can interact with each other peacefully. What I’ve discovered is there is, in fact, a universal ethic that governs all people.
This will, of course, seem counterintuitive to most people. For decades, the prevailing thought about ethics and morality is that there is no “right” answer; the best policy is to live and let live. Moreover, given that there are plenty of plain examples where individuals will harm other individuals for their own gain, it seems preposterous to propose any universal ethic. If something as simple as “don’t kill another person” isn’t sacrosanct, what is?
In many ways, that policy isn’t wrong, but it’s overly simplistic. By choosing to ignore the possibility that there are situations that are universally wrong, moral relativists have ceded ground to people that would love to have a seemingly ironclad excuse for their behavior; ground that need not be ceded.
While proposing that there is a universal ethic may seem counterintuitive, this is only true if viewed from the perspective of an individual affected by another individual. As stated before, it is entirely reasonable to believe that someone, someday, may kill you, which is the ultimate act of individual violation. However, one need not view ethics from the perspective of the affected individual to deduce a universal ethic. Instead, ethics can be viewed from the perspective of the person affecting another.
Take the murder example I just used. While it is readily apparent that the victim does not consent to being forcibly murdered (indeed, it is impossible to consent to a violation of consent), is the murderer any more apt to want someone else to violate his consent? We can all agree that murderers can do any number of despicable acts, but one thing they cannot do is engage in a logical impossibility. Just like the victim, the murderer also cannot consent to have his consent violated. The murderer is no more interested in having his life terminated, or truly to have his consent violated in any way, than his victim is. What is true for the murderer is true for the victim, and vice versa.
This same dynamic applies across all violations of property, whether external property or the property in one’s own body. Thus, we arrive at a simple, universal ethic: consent is the metric by which actions are judged to be right or wrong, and this judgment is independent of the actors engaged in the act. If consent is freely given (i.e., absent any coercion), an action cannot be said to be wrong. It may offend one’s sensibilities, elicit loathing and disdain, or be met with resounding scorn and derision from all the rest of the world, but it cannot be morally wrong.
This introduces a curious problem, though. If respecting the consent of an individual cannot be morally wrong, is violation of the consent of an individual always wrong? In the murder example, is it wrong to violate the consent of the murderer, even though he has already violated the consent of another? We’ve already established that it is logically impossible to consent to have one’s consent violated, so the logical conclusion is that having one’s consent violated is never right. Written more consistently with our first proposition, having one’s consent violated is always wrong. This apparent dilemma is answered through the application of estoppel. Put simply, estoppel is a legal and logical principle that states that, if an individual either explicitly or demonstrably holds a certain proposition to be true, he cannot then deny that proposition in light of the consequences of holding it. It is, essentially, the application of the law of non-contradiction to human action.
Let us apply that to the murder example. We know that violation of consent is always a moral wrong, as the opposite proposition (respecting consent) is never a moral wrong. However, let us examine the murderer’s actions. Based on his explicit demonstration, we can deduce that he rejects the proposition that violating the consent of an individual is always wrong. Since this proposition is universal, by definition, he must also reject that having his consent violated is always wrong, as well. Since he has held that proposition to be true by his actions, it is no longer immoral to violate his consent through the use of force to stop his actions or seek restitution from him in light of his crimes.
This may seem impossible, given that it is impossible to consent to having one's consent violated, but his demonstrable assertion of the opposite renders this argument moot. After all, if he holds that it is not immoral to violate the consent of an individual, how then can he, or anyone else for that matter, claim it is immoral to violate his consent? He has effectively consented to the same acts he has engaged in by asserting that it is not wrong to engage in them. Estoppel effectively answers and clears this conundrum.
I follow the logic and I agree, in fact this is why I can't really consider myself a pacifist. I agree that if someone thinks it's okay to violate my consent that they are therefore engaging in a set of rules that I don't consent to and the only way to stop them from oppressing me is to remove their ability to give consent as they would do to me. This is the basic grounds of self defense and sovereignty.
The issue that I think we run into is that everything is more or less subjective where humans are involved. Some people don't see killing other people for their own justifiable reasons as murder. Obviously war is a prime example of this logic, but it extends into other areas as well, such as euthanasia.
I suppose that's the biggest hindrance that we face as a society. We can't get everyone to agree to play by the same set of rules and even if/when we do, their understanding and interpretation of those rules is subjective. It's the part that leads me to the conclusion that we can surround ourselves by like-minded people and work together to build a society that we agree with, but we can't force others to agree to live by our rules as that's a violation of their consent. We would all have to agree to recognize and operate on the same understanding and perspective of the same basic operating principals voluntarily and some people are just contrarians if nothing else.
Great post! Resteemed.
That's why I stick to logic as hard as I possibly can and aim for logical consistency above all else. If it can be deduced and it's consistent, then it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of me. Truth is truth. Some people might not want to look at it (a lot of people, actually, I suspect), but when you can write a logical proof for ethics, it becomes far more difficult to discount it as "well that's just your opinion, and mine is equally valid."
I think you're right though. The most we can do is surround ourselves with people that have the same understanding and live by our rules together. Hopefully through our examples, more people will realize that we're onto something.
Bam. Nailed it.
Well thanks! :D That's high praise coming from you.
Great post!
Voted for you as a witness :)
Thank you so much!
Hmm, universal ethics implies a social construct, and the problem I continue to run into in that particular problem, is that if the construct is not empirical, then it is social.
That leads to a problem of what constitutes social objectivity, instead of empirical objectivity. The problem of social objectivity is that there is no such thing as perfect consent of a social construct by everyone all the time.
To make clear, I am assuming you are using universal ethics on the direct meaning of the term. There are frameworks of universal ethics that are more descriptive as 'ethics that should be universally accepted'. But in that resides the 'is-ought problem' which can only typically be resolved in the context of individual choice. (considering for a moment problems in 'confirmation holism', should a public policy ever be crafted?)
Expanding on that, the terms of justice becomes a problem in that Perfect Justice, is almost never a socially attainable thing, as it requires justice to look perfectly just by all involved. It's on this basis that I often consider justice to be a individual construct, instead of a social construct.
I deliberately avoided discussing justice, as what constitutes justice is necessarily subjective. Value is subjective, thus any measurement of what constitutes sufficient restitution for a consent violation must necessarily be subjective as well. However, I think third-party arbitration tends toward the most equitable solution for that issue.
Yeah, I probably shouldn't have included that last paragraph. What are your thoughts on the rest?
When you say social construct vs. empirical construct, could you define those terms a little more clearly? I think I see what you're saying, but I want to make sure I do before I respond at length.
I think the frame work is social objectivity and empirical objectivity.
Empirical objectivity contains empirical 'truth' that something objectively exists. Like there is 'empirical truth' in that gravity exists.
Social objectivity is supposed to contain a 'social truth' that something objectively exists. Like there is 'social truth' in that (some social thingy) exists.
Well in that case, even universal ethics are socially objective, not empirically objective, as their existence is dependent on the existence of sentient creatures who can logically deduce them. That being said, I don't think that is necessarily relevant, as without humans this whole conversation is pointless.
It's correct to state that ethics only apply among human individuals, but among human individuals, there are ethical rules that are universally applicable. That's what I mean by universal; not that they are empirically objective, but that they are socially objective. With regards to the is-ought dilemma, I don't think this is an issue with universal ethics as I've formulated them either. The only prescriptive rule I've alluded to is the final statement: don't do to others what you don't want done to you. While this does prescribe conduct, it does so in a negative way, rather than imposing a positive obligation on anyone. Put simply, it's more of an admonition of what can happen if you choose a particular course of action, rather than declaring what an individual ought to do. You can still be as violent a shitbag as you want to be, but that carries with it the consequences I described, and these consequences are logically valid and sound.
The problem I see arising from 'don't do to others what you don't want done to you', is that the action 'do' will have various measures of what may constitute 'harm'.
(I use harm here, maybe it could be another parameter)
One person may take complete offense by an action while another would take none.
If the metrics are rather internally subjective and varied it becomes difficult to say that an ethic (conduct) is definable externally.
The point of that shorthand is not restricted to harm. For example, if you act like an asshole, you are explicitly broadcasting your consent for asshole behavior against individuals. Thus, you have no leg to stand on when someone acts like an asshole to you. Reciprocity. Also, keep in mind this is a shorthand for the more specific principle I elucidated in the post. It is, by no means, a comprehensive standard, but it does accurately reflect that principle when applied to situations where one may violate the consent of another through their actions.
As far as harm, that is measured by violation of property. This includes external property, in the form of things that are owned, and internal property, such as one's physical person. Whether or not someone takes offense to something has no bearing whatsoever on whether that thing is moral. The deciding factor is whether consent has been violated. Once that is established, the second factor to take into account is whether the party being violated has violated another prior to the aforementioned violation. If yes, then the action is not immoral (though, as stated before about the subjectivity of restitution, it is possible to act immorally even when the initial reciprocity of harm is not immoral). If no, then the action is immoral.
I understand where you are coming from in creating consistent ethical principles as I too strive for consistency.
Where I think we diverge possibly is that I cannot call this consistency "morality" as I think "morality" also speaks to ultimate truth.
So while we could agree that someone who murders but who doesn't want themselves to be murdered would be a hypocrite and engaging in a seeming performative contradiction about consent, this does not settle the question of ultimate truth, i.e.
Etc.
I understand those above topics are essentially null hypotheses which cannot readily be proven nor disproven from a human vantage.
Which is why I stick to ethics (and morality essentially) as a positive ethical adoption: something that is ascribed by the human experience, for the human experience, as best as possible.
This avoids creating "oughts" from "is" and, instead, realizes the nature of human empathy: the ability to show a desire for wholeness and peace for most people if being honest without contradiction i.e. not an ethical lunatic engaging in special pleading.
"As best as possible" does not mean that we cannot arrive at universal ethics or morality. Morality is not some ultimate truth, unless you consider a standard of right and wrong to be ultimate truth.
Moreover, there is no ought here. My analysis is purely descriptive. The only prescriptive statement I've employed is "don't do to others what you don't want done to you." This is, however, deceptive, in that it does not impose any obligation on anyone. Rather, it's an admonition of what can happen if one does act in a certain way; put another way, it illustrates estoppel and how it applies to human action.
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This is a great article, @anarcho-andrei, thanks! :-)
I agree with most you're saying here and want to thank you for the erudite manner in which you dissect The Golden Rule; I've seen it described in many, many ways, but this legal variant is new to me :-)
But, this one rule to rule them all is even biologically encoded in us through mirror-cells or mirror neurons. It's the neurological mechanism by which children learn by mimicking everything they see us adults do, and it's also why men involuntarily make a painful face when they see another man being kicked in the nuts: we don't feel the pain, but act as if we do, all on auto-pilot :-)
Also in all sorts of network-sciences, social studies, heck, all religious books... All through historie we've known this to be true, but our current era is one where not only a universal set of ethics, but all kinds of universality are likely to be rejected without any further consideration. All so called "big ideas", you know the -isms, are rejected because of a deeply ingrained sense of pure individuality where there's simply no place for any shared truths: everyone is entitled to their own truth and that's the road that leads to the defective "live and let live" moral of our times.
You're already a legend in my book for sharing this. I said in in one of my latest posts already: I have a feeling we are close to some kind of shift in consciousness, I see more and more people like you that are trying to point out where we are the same, instead of the modern paradigm of exaggerating our differences. There will always be violence, there will always be dishonesty, but there's no need for wars or marketing campaigns if we all just adhere to this one simpel rule...
Thanks again, @anarcho-andrei, for this valuable and thought-provoking message :-)
First, let me say that your comment is very humbling praise. Thank you.
Second, I think you're right. With the rate and breadth of information exchange across the world, I think messages and observations like the one I posted and ones I've read elsewhere are spreading at a much more rapid pace than ever before. We live in a period of human history where fundamental paradigm shifts are possible within our lifetimes, and I think we're living through one right now.
I say it often, but it bears repeating: what a time to be alive! :D