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However, it is pretty clear that, pending morality, we are all important to ourselves. It therefore follows that because I am important to myself, every conscious being must be (relatively) important. It is possible for humanity to be important and non-important at the same time, much like it is possible for a marble to be big and small at the same time. The marble is big relative to the atom, while it is small relative to the solar system. Similarly, the human is important to himself, and therefore, to other humans, while it is unimportant in an absolute sense.
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<p>Interesting rebuttal of the oft-said "X and not-X" cannot exist at the same time. Writers have remarked "well maybe X and not-X would exist at the same time in alternative universes," having retained their faith in binary logic. But yet...</p>
<p>It is possible for "humanity to be important and non-important at the same time" and it is not possible for "humanity to be important and non-important at the same time". Y and not-Y (Y = possible for "humanity to be important and non-important at the same time"). Can Y and not-Y exist at the same time? But then we can set Z = (Y & ~Y). So then what of (Z & ~Z)? </p>
<p>Y = (X & ~X)
~Y = ~(X & ~X)</p>
<p>Then Y and ~Y would be relative to the framework of Z and can both be true in the framework of Z, just as X and ~X would both be true relative to the framework of Y, which allows for relativistic logic.</p>
<p>Hm. logic books rely too much on binary logic. ^_^</p>
<p>Gah my mental capacity has been compromised.</p>
<p>==
[quote]
Because every conscious being must be objectively equal, it therefore follows that the sum of many conscious beings is more important that one conscious being alone; in other words, that the majority is more important than the minority, and that "the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people shall determine the moral course of action," which is, in effect, the theory of utilitarianism.
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"Because every conscious being must be objectively equal"
=> unsubstantiated assumption #1!</p>
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in other words, that the majority is more important than the minority, and that "the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people shall determine the moral course of action," which is, in effect, the theory of utilitarianism.
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<p>=> Unmentioned unsubstantiated assumption #1: (it assumes that people's desires cannot be weighted as according to need or as according to type of need). It assumes no diminishing marginal "pleasure" returns with respect to the accumulation of desire, when such is often the case. Such diminishing marginal "pleasure" returns are moreover frequently self-reinforcing in that they cause the person to desire more, so in this case given 3 people, 2 which can gain pleasure only at the expense of the 3rd, the 2 of them will continue to vote in the direction of pleasure at the expense of the 3rd. But no, modern utilitarian theories are not supportive of the tyranny of the masses.</p>
<p>===</p>
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Yet it is quite clear that giving the majority what they want will eventually cause things to become ugly and immoral. Utilitarianism dictates that slavery would have been moral in the 19th century, and that it is morally acceptable to ostracize one person in order to strengthen ties between the others. It is therefore obvious that utilitarianism is subordinate to other moral ideals. It must be below compassion and freedom as well as justice. (It obviously isn't fair---or morally acceptable---to vote the winner of a nine-person race out of first place just to improve the standing of the other eight.) However, utilitarianism is occasionally the principle to be followed. If ten people want to play hide-and-seek, three people want to play house, and all of them want to play together, the kids ought to play hide-and-seek because there's no reason not to benefit the majority (assuming all are in good physical condition).
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<p>You have refuted an awfully simple version of utilitarianism. Yet you present it as refuting the entire philosphipal construct. Your straw man argument fails to work on me. It is intellectual dishonesty.</p>
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Let us first begin with freedom. It is clear that if we put freedom above all else, society shall crumble (unless it's an anarchic society, but anarchism requires the assumption that the majority is anarchist). If we put freedom first, or even above compassion, corporations will be able to exploit people to the best of their ability, poor people will be left to starve to death, and people will be allowed to rape and murder people whenever they want to. Society, in other words, will be governed by force.
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<p>The problem with freedom is that freedom is impossible to precisely define. Yet we all understand what it means. Economic freedom and social freedom are indeed two forces that do come at odds with each other. </p>
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What if we put compassion above all else? Then everyone would be forced to live for everyone else, religion would be banned (it creates too many religious conflicts, thus disrupting the peace), and political activists would be prosecuted. So as you can see, all-out compassion destroys freedom, and all-out freedom destroys compassion. Because there cannot be more of one than the other, the two must be equal in value, or at least close to equal.
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<p>Wow, you jump to conclusions quite fast.</p>
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What if we put justice above compassion and, therefore, above freedom as well? This, of course, depends on what justice is. In this essay, we shall take justice to mean the "an-eye-for-an-eye" principle, the "you-get-exactly-what-you-deserve" law. (Some people use the term "justice" to refer to the sum of all moral ideals, for example "It's just not right.") Needless to say, this makes justice an abominable ideal. Under the law of justice, if one takes a life, he must have his life taken. Under the law of justice, everyone is treated equally regardless of the situation. Under the law of justice, we humans would all have to commit suicide because of all the bacteria we have destroyed by washing our hands. It is therefore fairly clear that we cannot have a society in which justice is more important than all other moral ideals, or even one in which justice is more important than compassion. So this makes justice at most third place.
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<p>Your definition of justice is oversimplified. Of course it is incidental to the main argument, in that the problem is - how do you categorize the moral ideals? Perhaps there is one moral ideal that subsumes all of them. But would this not be the word "moral ideal" per se? No, rather, we must implement all of the moral ideals into our rational system.</p>
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So currently we have established that compassion and freedom are equal and tie for first, that justice comes third, and that utilitarianism comes fourth. What about reason? Let us imagine a society in which reason is of no importance....</p>
<p>A fleet of robots, each specializing in a very specific area, control the earth. When they feel the urge to do so, the humans urinate and defecate in a little tube. This tube leads to machines that make oil from organic compounds. The oil powers the robots, who not only replicate themselves but also serve the humans. All knowledge has been destroyed, for with knowledge, humans would know how to turn off the robots and thus subvert society. Nobody has a job; the robots do everything for the humans. Innovation is not necessary, for humans are content as is. What's wrong with this picture? Absolutely nothing---if one ignores the moral law of reason. We must declare as axiomatic the relevance of the truth, or else we end up with a society that frightens most sane members of the population.</p>
<p>Reason is also necessary because without reason, one cannot pinpoint the path of maximum morality. For this reason, reason is the most important moral law of all. It trumps both compassion and freedom, or at least ties with both.
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<p>Reason consists of the realization that non-omnipotent agents cannot pinpoint the path of maximum morality. Yet we have ill-ly defined reason, for what is reason? What is rational? One can consider freedom reasonable, one can consider compassion reasonable. But this means that reason does not have to compete with compassion or freedom. Rather, compassion and freedom can be described in a reasonable system. One can value compassion over freedom, but one cannot value reason over compassion, for any rule that justifies compassion or freedom invokes reason of some sort. Can compassion and freedom come without a reasonable system? Yes, in fact it can. For an agent who imposes top-down orders must have reason of some sort to impose such top-down orders to develop a system that maximizes compassion and freedom (inasmuch as the agent knows that it does), but the agent could realize that freedom and compassion need not come top-down, but they can also come bottom-up, and that a system that develops bottom-up does not develop through reason, but rather, through its own pattern of self-organization, in the way that an ant colony has no top-down intelligence, but that the bottom-up actions of its individual constituents result in a functioning ant colony. Yet there is no reason in such a system.</p>
<p>You have failed to precisely define reason.</p>
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[quote]
When the subject reached 150 volts, the researcher sitting in the chair asked him to stop the experiment, as it was allegedly becoming increasingly painful and dangerous. However, another researcher told the subject to continue with the experiment; if the subject was hesitant to do so, the researcher would tell him that he was responsible for anything that happened to the other "subject."</p>
<p>Despite the fact that the subjects knew (or thought they knew) the pain they were inflicting upon the researchers and that reason, coupled with the rest of morality, would have likely impelled them to stop had they not been exposed to authority, 65% of them went all the way; i.e., "administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock." This was in stark contrast to what was expected; most people that Milgram had asked beforehand had predicted that very few people would actually do so. And it shows quite well how much impact authority can have upon a person's judgment and actions.</p>
<p>The second reason I have given for my statement above is that when a person has authority, he need not reason, and tends not to do so. This is quite evident in many families; next time you see a parent with a teenager or child, wait for him to say "Because I said so" and threaten the kid with spanking, grounding, or revocation of a privilege in order to force the child to abide by a personal prejudice of the parent's.</p>
<p>It is also evidenced by what is now known as the Stanford prison experiment; in this experiment, which was designed for the purpose of observation of prison behavior, the subjects were divided into two groups of people, one labeled "guards" and the other labeled "prisoners." They were then brought to the basement of the Stanford psychology department, which had been designed to look like a prison, and the guards were told to keep control of the prison in question without resorting to the use of physical force.</p>
<p>After a while, the guards started mistreating and abusing the prisoners; that is, they started acting as if they were somehow superior to them, even though the roles of the subjects had been chosen randomly. This continued to the point where five prisoners had to be released from the experiment before its termination, despite the fact that the experiment itself was terminated eight days before it was supposed to end. As the people chosen to participate in the experiment were the most normal people applying to participate, and as most did not behave in such a monstrous way in real life, it is relatively safe to say that during the experiment, authority had clouded the guards' judgment and had removed them from a sense of moral responsibility.
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<p>The problem with the Stanford Prison Experiment is that there was no INITIAL authority, no guidelines to behave. In ANY social system that begins without the pretense of authority, authority tends to assert itself in some way or another, otherwise people would behave as according to Brownian Motion. Again, this essay suffers from the overgeneralization that authority produces only one result. It concludes that authority is bad. Yet, this is well known. It does not elaborate on whether the "badness" of authority outweighs the "goodness" of authority or not. If the Stanford Prison Experiment shows anything, it's that authority tends to assert itself in the absence of authority. </p>
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Since authority is the arch-nemesis of reason, it therefore follows that the only way to achieve a rational society is through the elimination of all authority. This proposition has some very far-reaching consequences; in order to eliminate authority, we must eliminate government, capitalism, the structure of family, and religion. It's easy to see how the proposition necessitates the elimination of government; as government gives government officials authority over average citizens, or, in some cases, puts the majority above the minority. The religion proposition is also fairly straightforward: religion puts the alleged will of a "God" not proven to exist (note that faith is not subject to reason and is therefore immoral in a way) over all of humanity.
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<p>of course then new authority would start to assert itself. </p>
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Perhaps the worst hierarchical relationship currently visible is the relationship between family members. The father is above the mother (fortunately, this is changing, albeit slowly), who is above the children. I say this is the worst form of authority because it influences children at a very young age. It impresses upon them that might makes right, that life isn't fair, that it's useless to challenge authority because the parents can make you suffer for doing so. The adults have a means of enforcing their will. They're the ones with the whips, so you'd better stay on their good side, even if they're wrong. In effect, the structure of family trains children to tolerate totalitarianism, and in doing so, forces them to accept the patterns of exploitation and dominance exhibited in other hierarchical relationships.
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<p>Yet we can also say that hierarchical relationships always exist, whether they are enforced explicitly or implicitly. If not enforced explicitly, what is to keep them from being enforced implicitly?</p>
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What would a society without these patterns of dominance, that is, a rational society, be like? First of all, government would be replaced by a system in which people resolve issues through discussion and debate, thus allowing the most reasonable solutions to flourish while the oppressive ones die out. (Contrary to the belief of many, voting in most cases would be a bad idea, as it would only serve to put absolute power in the hands of the majority. But of course in situations in which no side is clearly in the moral right or the moral wrong, on in time-sensitive emergencies, it is acceptable to vote, as there's no reason not to appeal to the desires of the majority.) Of course, everyone would be allowed in these debates, as nearly everyone has the potential to have good ideas. (If the meetings become too big, groups of people send delegates to groups of people who send delegates to groups of people who send delegates to the meetings.) Although some people say that the lack of government would cause crime, this would not be the case, as in a rational society, the rational majority would likely form a huge group dedicated to the prevention and termination of crime, owing to the fact that most people desire law and order.
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<p>The assumption is that the most reasonable solutions can actually be resolved through discussion and debate - but we clearly know that this cannot always be the case. </p>
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Of course, this begs the question "How do we know it's going to do that?" This is where the revolt comes in. Unfortunately, this society can only be achieved through majority revolt in the name of such a society. (It's sad, but it's a clear case of the ends justifying the means.) Although this is mainly because revolt is the only way of abolishing a government without creating a new one in its place, the revolt also comes in handy due to the convenient fact that anyone who willingly revolts in the name of a society will probably be dedicated to the creation of that society in question. It also provides a sort of safeguard; if I'm delusional and this idea is far too idiotic to be even worth thinking about, the revolt won't happen, as I probably won't be able to persuade the masses to revolt in the name of a rational society. Of course, someone eloquent and persuasive could attempt to do so, but with rhetoric rather than reason; this, however, would lead to a revolt by the brainwashed rather than a revolt by the consenting majority and would therefore not be the type of revolt necessary for the achievement of a rational society.</p>
<p>Of course, some people claim that any revolt will be squashed by the government before it succeeds in achieving its objective. This is not altogether true, despite the fact that some governments are extremely difficult to assail. Why? Because no leader wants to kill everyone he rules over. It's hard work rising to power, you know. (This is another reason why we need a majority revolt and not a revolt by two or three radicals.)</p>
<p>But in any case, the huge crime-fighting group which I mentioned before would not treat criminals in an immoral and uncompassionate fashion, as its constituents would all be morally righteous, and all practices of the crime-fighting group would be open for debate, just as all other issues would.</p>
<p>This crime-fighting group, by the way, would also have as one of its duties the prevention of totalitarianism; that is, it or some other newly-formed group would prevent any hopeful despot from rising to power. This would be easily accomplished, as the majority would be highly sensitive to tyranny, and would also be relatively skilled in revolting, having revolted before. (This is another reason why the minority cannot liberate the people for them; if some despot decides to take over the world, the majority will be left completely defenseless.) It would also be easily accomplished because in this society the majority would give everyone one standard gun in order to eliminate inherent differences in strength and therefore put power in the hands of the majority (Alex can shoot Betsy as hard as Betsy can shoot Adam, but without guns, Alex would undoubtedly be able to intimidate Betsy as well as Chris) and for the purpose of protection against tyranny. Of course people would be able to make better guns, but those people would be disarmed by the majority.</p>
<p>While guns would ultimately put absolute power in the hands of the majority, ultimately power must lie somewhere, and the rational majority is the safest place to put it. (Unfortunately, no society is perfectly rational, much like how no chemical reaction can give you 100% yield, and although this society is more rational than many, it falls short of perfect rationality. Despite the fact that absolute power, even when placed in the hands of the majority, corrupts absolutely, the majority is far less corruptible than the minority is. Besides, if the majority starts becoming incredibly tyrannical, the minority could always attempt to influence its policy using terrorist tactics.</p>
<p>The economy would be organized in one of two possible ways: it would either be organized in a manner similar to the government, with people resolving economic issues through discussion and debate, or it would operate on a "from each according to ability, to each according to need" basis (sorry for the cliche). The former option would lead to a rational society, while the latter would lead to a compassionate and free one. (Recall that reason may tie with compassion and freedom.) Of course, the people might find a better option (through debate, of course), in which case they would (hopefully) adopt it. But in any case, it would be unacceptable for the economy to be controlled by any small group of people, as that would create a measure of authority in that grouop of people.</p>
<p>What would the family structure be replaced by in a rational society? My guess is that anyone who wanted to take care of children would be able to do so, but that nobody would force any child to do anything. Of course, they would warn them that their actions would have real-life consequences; for example, that playing in the street may result in their getting hit by a car.</p>
<p>Religion hopefully wouldn't be replaced with anything, as religious belief is based on faith rather than on reason and therefore doesn't belong in a rational society. Of course it'd be oppressive to harm someone for his religious beliefs, but religion hopefully wouldn't matter during the rational decision-making process. In other words, there'd hopefully be separation of church and state.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most pressing question of all is whether this society shall ever actually be realized. In the end, what will determine whether this revolt which sets all this stuff in motion happens or not will be whether humans can conquer their own instincts through awareness of their faults. If they can conquer their tendency to be capitalistic, to always look out for themselves, to stay on top of the hierarchy rather than abolishing it altogether, then this revolt may eventually happen. Otherwise, humanity will forever continue to live in illogical misery and despair.
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<p>Unfortunately, nothing is really replaced. Authority still exists, supposedly in the hands of the "rational majority", and you have failed to even elaborate over whether that "majority" can really be "rational" or not. Moreover you have failed to establish that "from each according to ability, to each according to need" can be compassionate and free. The "rational system" is a re-establishment of authority. Your system fails to establish its independence from the former system. It only demands the rejection of authority as is, which will inevitably be replaced with a new authoritarian system, in the hands of the "supposedly" rational. </p>
<p>====</p>
<p>Points: While the essay is coherent, it relies on a swarth of unsubstantiated assertions and straw-man arguments that come in support of it. These unsubstantiated assertions (assertions that "good results come automatically from good desires" are ultimately the case of many failed government initiatives).</p>