The Law of Ethical Identicality

There is a concept of fairness that seems so basic that it seems like it shouldn’t need stating: that I must apply the same rules to myself that I apply to everyone else. Still, I will be basing a lot on this idea so I will explore the soundness of this idea today. I will be calling this principle the Law of Ethical Identicality for what will become obvious reasons.

First, let us consider what we are trying to create: a system of ethics. This system is to be based, as much as is possible, on reason rather than whim. Also, as it is a system, it must be a set of logical rules which organizes the moral realm.

Now, let us take, as an example, me. Let’s suppose that it is right and just for me to do a thing, say, eat a sandwich. Now, let’s take another being which is, in all respects which are of concern in ethics, identical to me. It must be right and just for this other being to also eat a sandwich. For me to hold otherwise I would have to provide a reason for the difference in application of rules between myself and this other being. As this other being is, by definition, identical to myself, there can be no such reason.

You see, in a logical system, a given input will always give the same output (taking the state of the system as part of the input for anyone who really wants to press the issue). Thus, if I consider a given action, for a given person, in a given situation, and come to a certain conclusion, I must also conclude that my result would hold to any equivalent being in an equivalent situation considering an equivalent action. To claim different results in similar cases is to claim that 1 = 0, or any other logical impossibility you prefer.

Now this actually allows for a lot of room when interpreting the rules. I might hold, for instance, that there are some differences between myself and this other being. For one, I am myself, and this other being is not. For another, let’s suppose this other being has a different hair color than I do. The question then becomes whether or not these differences would be considered ethically relevant.

First, let’s take the hair color. Going back to our basic axioms, a thing cannot be ethically relevant unless it affects the conscious experience of some being in some notable way. This gives us a criterion to judge our differences. Obviously, hair color does not affect the experience of eating a sandwich in any way, therefore this difference is irrelevant, and I must still treat this other being as equivalent to myself.

Now let’s examine the idea that each being other than me is different in the fact that they are not me. That affects the experience of eating the sandwich. When I eat a sandwich, I experience it. When they eat a sandwich, I don’t. In this way my identity as myself seems ethically relevant. What is important to remember is that as a system of ethics, the rules will be applied the same way by each adherent to them. I can conceive situations in which I might think it would be good to eat the sandwich, and bad if this other being eats the sandwich. What I still cannot do, however, is hold that it is good for me to eat the sandwich, but that the other being must believe that it is bad for them to eat it. I must concede that if I think it is good for me to do, other similar beings will also think it is good for them to do. In this way, I must either concede that, as equivalent beings, each of our respective experiences of eating the sandwich have equal weight, or admit of internal contradictions within the logical system. Therefore, to remain internally coherent, I must dismiss my identity as self as an ethical factor, and treat myself equally with other equivalent beings within this ethical system.

Given that I cannot give myself special status within the system of ethics, I cannot distinguish whether I will be the agent or subject in a given ethical scenario. I must approach each dilemma as if all of the involved parties are separate from myself. It may be helpful to suggest that, while the concerned parties are the relevant topics of whether a thing is right or wrong, the actual decision about the rightness or wrongness must be determined by some uninterested third party whom has no knowledge of the identities of those involved. To honestly consider any ethical situation I must consider it as if I were not involved; I must become an impartial judge.

There is one more situation which requires a short statement, and that is the action of one being upon another. It should be fairly obvious by this point that if it is right for one being to take an action on another, it must still be right if the roles are reversed. Since the identities of the concerned cannot be distinguished by the impartial judge of ethics, they are interchangeable, and what applies to one, applies to all.

Epistemology: How We Learn

Epistemology (definition) is closely tied to metaphysics, as metaphysics discusses what is, and epistemology discusses how we know what is. It is the attempt to answer the question ‘what is the best way to learn?’ There are many answers to this question and not all of them useful. We might learn by withdrawing into ourselves and seeking a spirit guide, or by praying to a deity for answers, or by trying things and seeing what happens. People have tried all kinds of ways to find knowledge and had a wide variety of results.

Of course, a primary trouble with this question is that to evaluate a system of learning, we have to have some standard to evaluate it by. The best way that we can evaluate a system of learning is to see how effectively it conveys a clear and correct understanding of the world. Unfortunately, we must have a way to learn about the world in order to know what a clear and correct understanding of the world would look like.

This problem is fundamentally unsolvable, in much the same way that the problem of metaphysics is unsolvable. If we define a system of epistemology and follow it to an understanding of the world, then, according to that picture of the world, that form of epistemology leads to the clearest understanding of that picture. It is only when we allow some outside influence, a different system of learning, to affect our thinking that we can reach a different picture of the world.

For instance, let us say that the best way to learn about the universe is to read a book written by some people considered wise a few thousand years ago. Let’s say that this leads us to believe that if we are ill, we can be cured by beseeching an ultimate power of the universe with a few whispers. If we were then to consider the scientific method of trial and error, we would find it lacking. By the standard of science, we would test this hypothesis and see if such requests to a higher being actually resulted in cured illness. This has been done, and there is no correlation between prayer and recovery.^{1 2} Given this, we might conclude that beseeching an ultimate power is not a good way to cure illness.

Now here is the rub, if a person holds that reading this ancient text is really the best way of gaining a clear picture of the world, then we must conclude that science has made a mistake in saying that prayer doesn’t cure illness. Given that science has made an attempt to gain a clear view of the world, and has come to the wrong conclusions, science must not be a very good way of learning about the world. Contrarily, if a person holds that looking at what happens in the world around you is the best way to learn about the world, then you must conclude that the ancient text made a mistake and that reading that text is not the best way to learn about the world. Each method of epistemology is self supporting, and thus, no method can be tested against another, and we can never truly know what method, if any, provides a clear picture of reality, even if reality is objective as we have allowed.

Fortunately this issue, though as ultimately unsolvable as that of metaphysics, can be essentially resolved the same way. Remember with me again that a being can only be affected insomuch as it experiences that affect. Extending this thought, we see that a system of epistemology provides a clear and accurate picture of the world, only in as much as that view reflects the experiences we have while existing in it. Thus, if a method of learning leads us to a conclusion which is directly at odds with what we have seen, heard, and experienced to be true, then that method must have made a mistake.

Science is the best way we as a species have found to come to a picture of the world which accurately reflects our experiences. This is because science is founded on observing, recording, and reasoning from what we experience of the world. No other method has even come close to the amazing power of science to reveal the universe to the human mind. Some people will argue that science makes mistakes, that it has made many mistakes, and freely admits as much. These people have entirely missed the point. I am not saying that science is infallible; indeed much of what we hold to be true is probably inaccurate in some way. What I am saying is that no one has ever presented any alterative that makes fewer mistakes, that continually improves on itself and purges itself of error, and which leads to a clear understanding of the experience of our existence as well as science does. Not even close.

 So, while science is not perfect, it is the best we have, and if you turn your back on the best available source of knowledge available to you, you abandon knowledge, and thus your ability to reason about the world, and thus you despise your own intelligence and all that makes you more than a talking monkey. Those who question the conclusions of science, and use science to further refine those conclusions actively seek true understanding. Those who refuse the conclusions of science out of hand are willfully ignorant, and choose to limit their own intelligence. I seek truth, here and in all places, and in all times. I am a scientist, an empiricist, and a rational being. I cannot advocate other than science and reason as an adequate epistemology.

Metaphysics: About what IS

Metaphysics (definition) is a word which is used to denote discussion and study of the nature of reality. For instance, some might think that this universe is nothing more than the dream of a galactic slime monster, and that when this creature wakes everything will cease to be. Others may think that they are the only being that exists, and that they are hallucinating their life. Still others may hold that reality only exists as the perceptions of it we each holds, that there is no ‘real reality’ which we all base our perceptions and experiences on.

I don’t hold with these theories. First of all, if reality is an illusion, it is a pretty persistent one. In fact, I have never actually witnessed anything which might make me suspect that this is all a farce. The best available evidence points to an objective reality which exists independently of any of us, which we all share together. It makes no rational sense to imagine a theory of the universe at once arbitrary and un-testable.

The other reason I hold with the theory of objective reality is that, in the end, it won’t really matter, and it is the easiest theory to cope with.  Whether the universe ends due to the Great Slime waking, or from the heat death of the universe, or we are all manifestations of one great mind, or nothing truly existed at all, it doesn’t matter. In the end, we are all dead, everything we have done is erased, and as far as we are concerned, there is nothing. Do I know this for sure? No, but I know it is the correct way to approach life. What I do know is that we are here, now. We as beings have thoughts and feelings and experiences. I do not, and cannot, know anything outside the realm of this physical universe I am presented with, and in this physical universe all things must end.

Does this make everything ultimately futile? I don’t think so. Just because a thing will end, it still happened. We can experience things, and revel in the life we have. Ultimately, all that matters are experiences, because that is all there is. Nothing has value outside its ability to affect the experience of some being. A thing, once experienced, cannot be unexperienced, it has been, and that fact will endure. The being will fade, and take the experience with them, but that is ok. The experience itself is enough, because the experience of life is all we have.

In all of these theories of reality, the experience remains the same. Indeed, they must result in the current experience of reality, because that is what they are trying to explain. If the experience is the same regardless of these theories of reality, and the experience is all that matters, all that is considerable by ethics, then which of these theories you choose is immaterial. I choose the theory of objective reality because it is the simplest theory which fits the evidence, and no evidence has ever been brought against it.

Of course, not all theories of reality are equivalent. A careless reading of the above paragraph may lead the reader to conclude that I see all theories of the universe as equal, which I don’t. Frankly, you have to be completely irrational to accept as true a theory which has no supporting evidence whatsoever and is much less probable than another theory which makes more sense. Additionally, my thoughts above only included such theories of the universe which conclude with our current experience. Any idea of reality which would lead the adherent to expect reality to be different than it is, or which speculates on experiences outside the physical universe are, at best, detrimental to those who hold them. This is where the evils of religion lay, though I will forgo that topic until I have built more of a framework upon which to build my arguments.

Sentience & Free Will

In this section I hope to show definitions for sentience and free will in ethical terms. I will do this by defining and discussing more exact terms and how they relate to the larger concepts of sentience and free will. I will also discuss how and why free will is required to be the agent in an ethical issue, sentience is required to have free will, and that the ability to experience is required both to be an object of ethics and to be sentient.

I will start with a rock. My pet rock named Billy to be exact. Billy is most certainly not sentient, and most certainly does not have free will. These are facts that all but the most tenacious of skeptics will concede to readily. It just seems like common sense. But why is this exactly? That is a little more difficult to articulate.

Well, for one thing, nothing I could do could ever possible matter to Billy. I could sing to him every day, or leave him out in the rain, and it won’t make a bit of difference to him. Sure, some things I can do can change Billy. I can break him into pieces, or melt him, or any number of things. None of these things would affect Billy in any way, however. They would take effect on his physical form, certainly, but they could not affect him subjectively because Billy is incapable of subjective experience.

Since nothing I can do could ever matter to Billy, I cannot do anything ‘good’ or ‘evil’ to him. Thus subjective experience is a requirement for being considered in an ethical discussion. This is not to say that things like global warming cannot be considered ethical questions, only that they are ethical questions only in so much as they affect beings capable of experiencing the change or its effects subjectively.

It is important that this is subjective experience too. It could be said that a weather balloon with all its instruments and recording devices experienced the trip through the atmosphere. After all, it sensed the environment, recorded the data, and perhaps processed it as well. But this type of experience does not lend itself to ethics, only subjective experience falls into the ethical sphere, because things can only be good or bad in a subjective way, as a value judgment.

Not only is subjective experience required for ethical considerations, it is the only thing which is needed to be considered in an ethical matter. You will observe that if there exists a being which can experience the world in a subjective manner (hereafter referred to as an ‘experiential being’), and there is a particular experience which can be properly demonstrated to be a “bad” experience, then it is definitively wrong to take an action with the sole intent and effect of imposing this bad experience on the experiential being. Thus we come to understand that all experiential beings are the consideration of ethical questions.

Are all experiential beings sentient? Consider if you will an experiential being with no memory, capacity for thought, or will. This being may experience the world, but cannot understand, reason, or even feel emotions in the human sense as emotions are based largely in our memory of past occurrences and our understanding of what we experience. This being, while experiential, and an object of ethical considerations, is not sentient. For this, more is required.

Reason is undoubtedly a requirement of sentience. Reason itself is composed of many things, including but not limited to: memory, thought, logic, abstraction, and conceptualization. Reason gives a being the ability to take experiences and learn from them, to think, to ponder, and to grow. Reason is what gives us our mental life. But even reason and the ability to experience subjectively do not make a being wholly sentient, a final tiny bit is required.

That final piece is self-awareness. A science fiction supercomputer may be able to reason logically after the manner of a human, could even be taught to have subjective experiences if advances in neuroscience and computers continue far enough, but until it knew it existed it would not be sentient. The crux of sentience is not that ‘I think’, but that ‘I am’.

Perhaps I am mistaken on the point of self-awareness. Perhaps a sentient being could exist without a sense of self. It is unintuitive to imagine, but that does not make it impossible. In any case, I am not aware of any such being, so I have little need to consider the possibility, and I do not expect to rely on this point in the future; it is merely written to fill out my idea of sentience. If warranted, I could explore this topic at length in another entry, but I doubt I will see a need.

Having ascertained the nature of sentience, it can be clear what relationship sentient beings have with ethics. They are most certainly of consideration in ethical questions, being by definition experiential, but can they be the ethical actors in an ethical question? No; not unless they have more attributes than we have defined, that is.

In addition to sentience, a being requires the abilities to choose and to act before it can be the agent in an ethical scenario. These abilities can be further described in more basic terms: volition and power. Volition, or a will to do something, is required because without it the being could not choose the action. The being must choose the action being performed, because anything that is done that a being does not choose to do is not that beings doing, not the beings responsibility, and does not enter as an ethical consideration (except perhaps in cases of inaction when action was morally required, which will not be considered until later). This is not to say that a being is not responsible for the unintended consequences of its own chosen actions; the important thing is that the being chose the action in question. Power is also a requirement for being a moral agent. If a being has no power, it cannot affect the experiences of any other being; therefore it cannot be a moral agent. Thus we see that a sentient being with volition and power can be an ethical agent.

We seem to be closing in on a definition of free will. It is clear that free will is related to the idea of being a moral agent, but to be clear we must see if there is anything which may be taken away from, or must be added to, the requirements of being an agent in order to form a complete definition of free will. To do this, let’s take a step back and examine the idea of free will separately.

Free will, strictly speaking, is freedom of volition. Thus by nature it requires a being be possessed of volition which can be free, and a means of directing it. Free will also implies the ability to act in such a way as to implement our volition, which requires power. This is all that free will requires.

Power in this context is the ability to act on some choice. It does not imply the ability to achieve the goals in mind, merely to take the action being considered. A lack of power implies a lack of choice to make a given decision, as the being does not actually have the options being considered, and therefore is excluded from ethical considerations on this point. This is merely to say that a being is not ethically accountable to those actions over which it had no choice; see above.

The means of directing will is reason. Without reason the will is nothing more than a manifestation of our physical states, such as hunger, thirst, or pain, which are in turn manifestations of our environment. To break this dependency on environment for directing our will, we must apply reason. We may use reason to consider the environment and the states it reflects in ourselves, and determine how we will choose to respond.

Some might contend that reason itself is deterministic, that it is merely a reflection of the situations we have encountered and our physical states. If this is so, then at root, our decisions are a result of the environment, not of any free direction of volition, and thus, no physical being can truly possess free will, or be the agent in an ethical consideration. With no agents, there can be no ethical considerations, and ethics merely do not exist.

I reject this because there is an overwhelming appearance of free will among individuals, and no evidence for direct causal relationships between environments and chosen actions has been brought to bear. Certainly an environment affects a person, and in turn the choices they make, but by no account do these environs seem to determine the actions, but rather that the person in question acts as an intermediary between the physical states and the choices made. This may be a very persistent illusion, but as most of the evidence lies if favor of a free will model, I will accept it as true.

We can now see that free will requires volition, reason, and power. If a being is deprived of these it loses its free will, and simultaneously loses its ability to be an ethical agent. It is thus clear that free will and the ability to be an ethical agent are closely linked; so much so that I will treat them as synonymous unless I find good reason to do otherwise.

This also shows that people are not ethically responsible for actions they have taken under extreme duress, force, or while drugged against their will, etc. If a persons reason, will, or power are forcibly removed by any means, then their ethical responsibility in the situations which follow are also removed. In practical terms, a person always retains some choices, and some degree of free will while conscious, so practically speaking, a persons ethical responsibility is diminished partially, in accordance with the amount to which their free will was diminished.

It is interesting to note that free will does not, strictly speaking, require a being to be able to experience anything. This results in a situation where a moral agent, or a being possessed of free will, is not necessarily sentient. This is a thorny matter, but since it has little practical considerations in the real world, and since it seems likely that being experiential may be required to possess volition, I will not bother to treat these issues. For the purposes of my work, all moral agents will possess free will, and all beings with free will shall be assumed to be sentient.

I believe that finally, after a great deal of examination, have found the defining factors of sentience and free will. As these are intertwined with the requisites for participating in ethical consideration, I believe that these factors are also defining factors in ethical roles. I believe they will assist greatly in coming to a solid foundation of rational ethics.

Postulates

1) Experiences are all that matter in the universe. My post
2) The Law of Ethical Identicality: If a thing is so for a given being in given circumstances, that thing must be so for all equivalent beings in equivalent circumstances. My Post

Terminology and Axioms

Terminology:

• The words ‘ethic’ and ‘moral’, and their related forms, will be used interchangeably throughout my series. I do not make a distinction between the two.
• Agent: The being or one of the beings who take some intentional action which is of ethical consideration. My post Wikipedia's Definition
• Object: The being or one of the beings who could potentially be affected by an ethical consideration. I will show that this requires the ability to experience. My post
• Free will: Can experience the environment, reason to form understanding, possess volition towards some end, and has some power by to pursue that volition. Note: The implementation does not need to be successful in all cases for the being to be possessed of free will, so long as the power is sufficient to take the action under consideration in the ethical concern. My post Wikipedia's Definition
• Sentience: Possessed of reason and the ability to experience the environment. My post Dictionary Definition Wikipedia's Definition
• The Generic Condition: The Generic Condition is fulfilled when:
1. All people are equal in power, ability, sentience, etc., though they may be different in ways which do not make them unequal. Ie: individuals may think and reason differently, come to different conclusions, and choose different actions.
2. No one involved values anything more than their own survival and there is nothing about the situation which requires one person or another to die.
3. All involved parties are self-interested individuals.

Axioms, Assumptions, those things I take for granted:

1. All ethical concerns have at least two parties, an agent, who is considering a given action or inaction, and an object, who could potentially be affected by the ethical concern. Note: A being can be both agent and object in any consideration.
2. Sentient beings can only be affected insomuch as they experience an affect. My Post.
3. Metaphysics: Objective reality My post Definition
4. Epistemology: Science and reason. My My post Wikipedia article
5. Meta-Ethics: Universal Prescriptivism;
1. Moral statements cannot be objectively true or false; they rely on a value judgment. See Hume’s Guillotine, and the Naturalistic Fallacy. In other words, good is a concept, not a property like mass. Therefore the statement “X is good” is not a description of nature, but a value judgment being applied to an object.
2. Moral laws are universalizable; they apply equally to all similarly situated people.

                                                              i.      The ethical law of identity: If a law must apply to person A in situation 1, and there exists a person B which is identical to person A, and a situation 2 which is identical to situation 1, then the law must apply to person B in situation 2. Therefore the applicability of ethical statements to individual cases is variable only in the amount that the person or the situation varies from that of the stated rule.

                                                            ii.      See Immanuel Kant and R.M. Hare. 

This will be discussed further.

Under Construction

Thanks to everyone who has read and commented so far. I am completely rewriting this from the beginning to improve from all I have learned. Although I know it is hard to wait for the next long, drawn out installment, please be patient, I will have lots of content again soon.

~Liberum Credo