When we bump into one another, from time to time, when we can affect each another, make
each other’s lives better or worse, we’re going to have expectations and opinions for
what we think they should be doing or what we should be doing.
How do we sort that out?
How do we find what’s right and wrong?
When we’re reasoning or thinking about what we ought to be doing, we can reason in terms
of, if A happens, it will cause B to happen.
We don’t want B to happen, so A ought not to happen.
Or it’s wrong for A to happen.
This would be consequential moral reasoning.
Thinking of the consequences as being wanted or unwanted.
An example of this reasoning: marijuana may be relatively safe, but being comfortable
smoking marijuana can be some sort of slippery slope that can lead to doing drugs that are
addictive and harmful.
We don’t want that to happen so marijuana ought not to happen.
We also reason categorically.
We don’t want A to happen.
So A ought not to happen.
A is wrong.
An example of this reasoning: Homosexual behaviour is unwanted, it ought not to happen.
An easy demonstration of how they will conflict is the trolley problem.
Trolley going down the tracks, 5 people in the way.
They will definitely die.
But you are positioned somewhere where you can pull one of those levers like what in
the movies that makes the car go onto the other tracks.
Unfortunately there’s one person over there who will definitely die.
You can’t do anything unrealistic like yell to them.
You can only interact with this lever.
Is it OK to pull it making the trolley change tracks?
When asked most of us, say yes.
If asked to rationalize we may call upon the consequences, 1 person dying, is unwanted,
but preferable to 5 people dying.
Different situation, trolley going down tracks, 5 people in the way, they’re definitely
going to die.
But we’re standing next to a person on another set of tracks, if we push them in front of
the trolley, their guts and bones will surely gum up the works and make the trolley stop
before it can hit the 5.
Is it OK to push them?
When asked this many people don’t feel it’s OK.
The consequences are the same.
With your inaction 5 people are going to die.
You can “do a thing” that will make 1 person die instead.
Even though our intentions and the effects might be the same, our answers are not the
same.
Because the cause is different.
When we imagine ourselves or imagining people watching us, we feel that pushing someone
to their death is murder and it’s bad.
We don’t want it.
For many of us our feelings about what the act, are strong enough to take precedence
over our feelings about the consequences of the act.
We can have difficulty contending the good and bad and the different aspects that come
with certain activities.
The pain of exercise and the fitness results.
The pleasure of sex and the terrors of venereal infections like pregnancy.
The entertainment of a reality TV show and the opportunity cost.
The benefit that could be gained from literally anything else.
Is it OK to use a deadly and effective but painful biological weapon on an enemy we’re
trying to kill?
And who are trying to kill us?
It may not be intuitive why we like or dislike something or whether we will like or dislike
something.
Like the way it actually feels good giving to or helping others especially friends.
Or the way some people in some environments enjoy being slapped, choked, tied up or demeaned.
We can otherwise be wrong about which actions will have what consequences.
What we want and like can change.
It can be strongly influenced by environmental factors.
And we can be taught things are right or wrong, and then adopt those feelings without ever
really thinking about it.
Just seeing what someone else has, can make us change what we think is good and bad.
We often go for instant gratification, over long term benefits.
We may not know how to compare the different experiences of different people or just within
ourselves.
And people are going to have different ideas about who’s going to factor in how much.
It can be hard to find an optimal place.
It can be hard to define an optimal or goal with all the different people and experiences
and our ignorance.
Many of us feel that this difficulty is why we need something greater.
Some sort of God or prophet to light the way with the rules they present.
Or maybe we feel that these rules would be the definitions of good and bad and right
and wrong and that our interpretations and our experiences.
Don’t matter.
Maybe they’re even superficial and misleading.
But what would it be about a God, or its rules that makes them so important or so much better?
Seriously Frank, Frank’s got some good ideas about right and wrong.
(to Frank) Hey Frank, tell them what you were saying about….
oh… (to you) He went out for falafel.
That boy loves falafel.
But if there are God prescribed right and wrong behaviours, why should we care about
those rules in particular?
What’s the motivation?
What’s being fulfilled there that’s greater than what we want?
There’s lots of Gods and religions of course.
But here’s some Bible stories that might help.
God says to Abraham, “see your son over there, I want you to kill him for me”.
And Abraham says “Yeah sure ok”.
Just before he makes the sacrifice.
God says.
“Stop.
It was a test.
It was all test.
And you passed.
Here’s what I’m gon… oh look at a sheep over there…
Get it and kill it for me.
Here’s what I’m going to do for you.
I’m going to bless you.
You’re going to have lots of descendants.
And they’re all going to be blessed.
All your enemies’ cities, nations and stuff is going to belong to your descendants one
day.”
Regardless of your feelings about the characters in this story, the story has a simple moral.
Do what God says and you will be rewarded.
Another story, God didn’t like these towns, he thought it was full of assholes.
So he decided destroy them with a miracle.
There were some people he thought were alright though so they were given warning.
“It’s not so much a make them die sort of miracle, as it is a scorched earth sort
of miracle, you don’t want to be here when it happens.
Schedules been set, it’s probably going to happen while you’re leaving….
Just run forwards and don’t look at it.
Don’t you look at it!”
While running away, the wife looked at it.
And because of that she was turned into a pillar of salt.
Which was a weird thing to happen, but nobody brought it up.
Again, the moral is: be like God wants, do what God says, or bad stuff will happen or
be punished.
And otherwise, many religions hold ideas of heaven and hell.
Follow the rules and you will go to heaven.
Oh and heaven’s a paradise.
Sit back, it’s peace and relaxation for all eternity.
They’ve got a blissful garden on white fluffy clouds.
They’ve got all your ancestors if you’re into that sort of thing.
God’s there.
Say here they’ve got virgins!
Everybody likes virgins.
Oh, maybe this says raisins.
They’ve probably got both?
Really, whatever you want.
Don’t follow the rules and you will go to hell.
Hell is the worst.
It’s got spikes and weird demons, everyone’s a downer.
Pain and suffering for all eternity.
Let’s say we empathized with the gays.
We think those people loving and expressing their love like us breeders do, is good.
Or at least preferable to them not doing so.
And we’re unaware of any other significant consequences.
If a committed legal monogamy can, at the very least, help foster that love, then we
think they should be allowed to marry.
In the real world some people are going to be grossed out by and have a hatred for homosexuality,
but for here, let’s say we all agree that gay marriage is good.
We all think that this makes things better.
How might a God affect this reasoning?
Let’s say this god has explicitly condemned homosexuality.
Gayness leads to hell, and possibly bad stuff happening in the cities and countries where
they reside, above the background level of bad stuff happening.
Be a normal person, and your chances of heaven are increased.
We’re still us, still looking for which actions will lead to the best outcomes for
us or those we care about.
But now when we think about it, we know Hell is bad.
Very bad!
We do not want hell.
Thus things that lead to it, we ought not to do, and they ought to be prohibited.
And even when it’s not this explicit, when we’re just trying to please god, live in
God image, be loving and giving, it’s about gaining the favor and avoiding the wrath of
this creature that rewards and punishes, believing an after-life is a part of that and hoping
it’s not just going to be like… the end of Cloud Atlas…. or like The Island….
or Logan’s Run.
Now we can want for, the rules of a God to be fulfilled.
We can take the position that it’s not about the consequences.
These rules are what we want, because these rules define right and wrong.
But what if these incentives were switched , for example homosexuality is still called
wrong, this God still condemns it.
But you will be punished with heaven and that was the accepted reality.
Would we still want to follow the so called right rules as much?
Would we still do what’s right, fulfill what’s right so we can say, we’re right?
The idea is sort of deeply confusing.
Surely they know we don’t want hell, so if they want us to do it, why are they punishing
us?
We’re probably not going to do what’s right, so we can get eternal suffering.
The fact that it’s labelled right doesn’t matter to us so much.
If there were no after lives, and no punishment or rewards, there would be no argument and
nothing stopping us from just going with what we consider better and worse, what we consider
right and wrong.
If a God’s rules were meant to be better for us in this life, like these rules lead
to better things that we’re just too stupid to understand.
Then again, it’s just coming down to what we value.
It’s what we consider better or worse or is leading towards better or worse, that is
motivating us.
Including what a God would want because a God can create better and worse for us.
The point is, what we think ought to be, follows what we consider to be better and worse.
To us, right actions are what we want or lead to what we want, wrong actions are what we
don’t want or they’re leading to what we don’t want.
Religious moral systems seem to be the most dramatic and illustrative examples of this.
They crystalize the idea.
Right and wrong actions? are quite literally meant to be leading to…, an eternity of
bliss or suffering, the good life or the bad life.
Doesn’t taking what people feels to be good, as being what is good to them, make right
and wrong completely relative, flimsy, and impossible to sort out?
If there’s a person who genuinely feels pleasure when they break other people’s
legs.
Hooked up to a brain scanning machine we can see they enjoy it, they find it fun and they
seem incapable of empathizing with their victims.
Do we have to say, it’s good to them?
Maybe.
But it’s not good to us, and it gets in the way of what we want.
So we put them in crazy person prison or execute them or try teach them when they’re young
or change their brain or something.
If we out power them, we’ll make them stop.
But it’s not that this is what’s ultimately good, except in a “we all agree” sort
of way.
There’s a conflict between what these people want and consider good.
If we all got pleasure from breaking legs, what we would feel in our core to be good
and bad, and our relationships to one another, would be different.
But I suspect these sorts of differences play a small role in our moral conflicts.
When we put aside stuff like that, it’s not all so impossible to sort out.
Heaven and hell either exist, or they don’t.
Doing the marijuana can either lead to dangerous drugs or it can’t . Smoking either helps
soothe the lungs or it doesn’t.
There is a reality to the way the world is.
And although it can be changing, difficult and situational, there’s the complications
we talked about before, there is a reality to what each of us like and don’t like.
You know, we either enjoy getting our legs broken or we don’t.
The universe is either a certain way, or… proof, observation and learning are useless
and have always been.
It’s not just often difficult, it’s impossible to learn anything about the way the world
is or what we like and dislike.
There would no way for me to know whether I would prefer to be strapped down and have
angry scorpions loose on my eyeballs, or prefer to ride a walrus to the rainbow factory.
What’s the difference?
Both of these people are chasing after what they feel to be better, one of them has to
be wrong about what’s actually leading towards better.
One of these people think they’re making it better but they’re actually making it
worse.
It’s not a matter of the differences between these people.
It’s a matter of knowledge.
And while we can be stubborn and not let new ideas in, if we fully believed as a matter
of fact whether heaven and hell exist or not, what we’re going to think ought to be here,
is going to come pretty much automatically.
We may not care about other societies, other communities, or be in a position to affect
them.
They are them we are us.
We may even just try to kill them to take their resources.
But there’s no need to imagine that both of these people’s visions for what ought
to be are equally preferable.
Assuming the non existence of after lives.
Is homosexuality largely genetic or learned?
It is simple or traumatizing to change?
The disgust and hatred felt about homosexuality, is that genetic or learned, is that simple
or difficult to change?
Should we teach kids not to tease or bully homosexuals or anyone different?
What are the effective ways of doing that?
If we succeed do we lose something, are there other consequences to trying to prevent conflicts?
Which situation would be more preferable?
The answers to these questions matter for what we’re going to think we ought to be
doing, and we should seek out those answers.
Because unless if we know everything there is to know, and have experienced everything
there is to experience, and are correct, or at least the very least have tried to consider
all ideas without any bias.
Then it’s definitely us who don’t know what’s out there and don’t know what we’re
missing.
And it’s almost definitely us who think we’re making it better when we’re actually
making it worse.
So if we want things to be better we should be hunting for what this place is really like.
We may not get some sort of perfect list of better and worse.
Sometimes we might want what’s best for the group, and sometimes we’ll defend the
rights of the individual even if at the expense of the group.
We may always prefer and uphold different ideologies at different times for different
reasons.
But understanding it all would help inform our decisions and help us get towards the
better.
Unfortunately everything we know and experience comes down to this squishy flimsy brain.
And everything we know and experience is going to be as squishy and flimsy as this thing.
All of our feelings and values, ideas and memories, certainty and doubt.
Can go away from a bump a little too hard to the head.
This episode is brought to you in part by, Catholic brand unlubricated condoms.
They’re “holy”!
That is to say, “holed”.
For God’s pleasure.