Foundation for a Rational Morality

A. Preface

1. A "New" Rational Foundation for Morality

This essay is a presentation of a "new" rational foundation for ethics/morality (I will treat ethics and morality as being the same for my purposes here). What may be new about it is the formulation and the organization of the ideas. Many of the specific ideas I developed on my own, though I'm sure nearly every one of them could be found somewhere in the literature. However, there is a sense in which these ideas are very old, because they are implicit in human nature (in a way similar to the way in which the basic ideas of arithmetic are implicit in manipulating several objects, even if we are not conscious of them). Humans, in order to survive and prosper, have always had to act in ways consistent with their needs as human beings. This has often meant being "hypocritical," in the sense that people have often had to by-pass, ignore, or override what they have come to accept as correct moral ideas. Without such "hypocrisy," it's possible that we'd have been forced much sooner to consciously adopt rational ethical/moral ideas, but, at least in the short term, often the best things people have done have been those that have been violations of their consciously accepted moral ideas.

That is, in order to live well at all, people have often had to adopt implicit moral ideas that were in serious conflict with their conscious moral ideas. That is, the ideas they actually acted on have been different from the ideas that they accepted consciously, and it is some of these ideas that I have sought to translate into a conceptually coherent and explicit form.

It's not really a good thing to have such major conflicts between one's conscious beliefs and one's actions. While one's actions may in such cases be better than they would have been had they been in accord with what one consciously believes, the situation is still not the best, by quite a margin. The discrepancy alone causes discomfort if it is noted, and other problems if it is not.

Living that way means that one is deprived of the full services of one's conceptual consciousness and one's subconscious in guiding one's actions, because one only thinks in a conceptual way in using what one accepts as moral consciously. This means that, if one's actions are guided by implicit beliefs that one is not conscious of or that one rejects as immoral, one doesn't have the full use of one's conceptual faculty in guiding one's actions according to those implicit beliefs. One's actions tend to be somewhat disconnected from each other, and inconsistent, and sometimes outright destructive even when motivated properly, because one has no clear means of applying implicit principles consistently.

For such reasons, I have spent much of my time working on what amounts to extracting the implicit principles of successful human living and formulating them in conceptual terms that can be applied consciously and consistently. This wasn't how I always thought of it, but that's what it has turned out to be, in its results. Of course, what follows is not a complete "program" for human living, by any means, but it does present some foundational ideas in a way that I think people can relate to and apply in their lives.

B. Introduction

1. Without Imposed Morality, Does "Anything Go"?

There's an odd thing about morality, about ethics. People often assume, despite the evidence to the contrary, that if there was no God or some such external force to impose morality, then "anything goes," and people, realizing this, would all become amoral or immoral monsters. This would seem to imply that, being people themselves, the people who believe this believe that they would become amoral or immoral monsters were they to lose their belief in God. But, despite the immorality of many such people, I don't believe that most of them would become the kinds of monsters their claims would imply. Of course, they may secretly regard themselves as exceptions, as among the few who would resist what they see as the natural tendencies of people to commit evils.

2. Dismal History of Ethical Thought.

Another odd thing is that despite thousands of years of people thinking about the various issues of morality, very few have gotten it right in a way that is essentially provably correct. In nearly all cases, we see a situation in which some of the pre-existing beliefs of the philosopher or ethical thinker are given the status of axioms that are not questioned, or questioned only in superficial ways, or in which the questioning is answered in only the poorest ways. We see assumption after assumption held and advocated in this way.

3. Arbitrary "Answers"

Further, we see a vast range of different concepts of what morality is for, of why we should have morality at all. These range from merely pleasing God, which is the primary Christian argument, to pleasing one's neighbors, to pleasing ancestors, to adhering without justification to some arbitrarily chosen set of standards, to promoting self-interest, to promoting the evolution of one's genes, to restricting self-interest, and so on.

On the other hand, there has been some good work in ethical thought, ranging, in the West, from Aristotle to the present time. However, most of this has been either fragmented, or somewhat vitiated by various defects and problems. I'm not completely sure that my own views do not still have a few problems with them, but I am sure that I have made progress over what I've seen from professional philosophers, but this could be only because I am not as well-read in philosophy as I would like to be.

4. Solutions, not Necessarily Originality

Although I hope to have solved the crucial problems at the foundational level of ethics, I make no particular claims of originality, because it's unimaginable to me that other people have not made and even published essentially the save views, particularly since I have seen so many bits and pieces, and so many good starts. This is because, once you get the right initial questions, the rest more or less follows, if you keep at it long enough, and keep working on eliminating confusions and contradictions and misconceptions.

That the rest more or less follows doesn't mean that it's easy going, of course, because, as some feminists used to say (and perhaps still do), it's hard to fight an enemy that has outposts in your own mind. Since I grew up in this culture, I adopted many of the same preconceptions as did other people, although, one of the few good effects of neglectful parents was that many of these preconceptions were not as deeply ingrained in me as they were in most other people, so I did have an easier time of re-thinking ethics in a basic way than most people would have. But it still was not easy.

5. Why so Many Misconceptions about Morality?

And that brings me to misconceptions. I believe that one of the reasons we don't generally get ethics right is that we normally learn our ethics before we develop the conceptual knowledge and rational thinking skills needed to properly analyze them and re-construct ethical ideas correctly. These preconceptions become lodged in our minds like axioms, and so most ethical philosophers do not even mention their basic preconceptions, do not seem even to be aware that they are thinking only in terms of the context defined by these preconceptions, and not about the preconceptions themselves.

Familiarity breeds stupidity: People who grow up with certain ideas taken for granted. They are taught that certain moral ideas simply are true, period, and they will generally not take well to serious and fundamental questioning of their moral views (and they almost certainly will not initiate such an examination on their own). They will usually regard someone who is skeptical of their views as being terminally stupid, even though they themselves are the ones who have spent their lives not thinking about their moral ideas. The skeptic is regarded as questioning whether the Earth is real, or the reality of language ("Well, if there is no such thing as languag, how are you asking the question?"). But, of course, questioning the fundamental premises of morality is not only necessary as a part of the attempt at determining what the correct premises of morality are, but it is morally required that we question these premises. That is, it is a serious moral mistake (though one is not therefore immoral) to go through life never having seriously questioned these ideas.

This dogmatism is, perhaps surprisingly, true even of many of those who have rejected traditional religious philosophical views as to the nature of ethics.

6. Must Morality be Externally Based?

For example, one preconception commonly held by those who reject conventional moral views is that, whatever morality is, if it is objective, it must be either given by God, or by Platonic ideas that exist independently of us, or by some sort of external and eternal source. The cognitive criterion of objectivity requires none of this, in ethical thinking any more than in mathematics or physics or medicine. All it requires is that true morality not be subject to human choice, any more than are the laws of mathematics, physics, or medicine. And, while it has become fashionable in some circles to argue that the laws of mathematics are subject to human choice, all that is subject to choice in mathematics is which branches or flavors or aspects of it we may want to use. We do not get to choose whether two objects and two other objects is in fact four objects or not.

Similarly, in ethics, all that is required is that the factual basis for our ethical claims be factual, not something we made up, or something we just thought would be nice. It does not require that the basis of morality be external to human nature and human needs any more than objectivity in medicine requires that we base medicine on Platonic ideas of medicine or on Biblical teachings about medicine.

The reader may not have needed the above reminder regarding the nature of objectivity, but there are many, many, many (i.e., perhaps a few billion) people who do need this reminder, because they have arbitrarily isolated morality and ethical thinking in their minds from the real world facts of human nature without wich we could not even have morality. These billions of people are like medical students who are surprised to find that they are actually going to have to learn things about the human body as part of their training. "But, if medicine is to be objective, doesn't it have to be based on facts and principles that are not part of human nature? How do you answer the claim that, if you base medicine on human nature, you will just be opening up the field for an 'anything goes' view of medicine?"

By external is meant not merely external to our whims and wishes and beliefs, but external to human nature entirely. Even the same people who would admit that brain-function is an objective fact about human beings, will often deny that there can be any objective facts about human beings that serve as the basis for morality. Instead, these folks will commonly simply reject all traditional ideas about morality entirely, without further examination of them to see if they might have something of value to offer. They will say things like, "Moral statements are nothing more than statements of the approval or disapproval of the speaker. They necessarily provide no objective information about values at all, but only about the speaker's beliefs or values."

Though this view is not as popular as it was many decades ago, I still come across it frequently, or views very similar to it. For example, certain kinds of multi-culturalism are like this, in that they claim that there not, even in principle, any universal objective moral principles, and that, therefore, we are in no position to judge a culture that imprisons or executes people for rejecting the local gods, as if there were no victims in such executions.

The incredibly lame "Prime Directive" that pops up from time to time in the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV programs is another example. They may come across a culture where thousands of innocent people are being slaughtered, but Captain Pickard will say that they can't do anything because of the Prime Directive against interfering in other cultures, as if the arbitrary rules of a culture were somehow sacred merely because they are the rules of that culture. In this case, we see something even worse than the old positivistic claim that moral statements necessarily have no objective content. In this case we have the contradiction of people claiming that, because there are no objective moral principles, every set of moral principles is sacred and absolute if some group of people accepts it as their own. I am not, of course, using Star Trek as a reference for moral ideas, but only as an example of the kind of irrationality that is so common in popular moral ideas today.

The problems with either the various ethical views themselves or with the arbitrary rejection of all moral views as mere statements of someone's personal idiosyncrasies, etc., are many and often profound and intellectually fatal. Recently, I was debating Don Cameron, who claimed that the ultimate ethical principle was the promotion of the evolutionary survival and enhancement of one's own genes.

He went so far as to say that not having children was a disaster, because that was, in effect, the purpose of human living. He couldn't tell me what the ultimate purpose of having one's genes survive was supposed to be, since, the same claims, if true, would apply to the children themselves when they became able to reproduce, so we would end up with an ever-extending "tree" of descendents, with no point to the whole at all, nothing to be gained at the end, and nothing to be gained along the way to make the whole project worthwhile (in fact, he recently admitted that it seemed to him to be true that there is no ultimate point).

I tried to point out that, while our understanding of how we got where we are evolutionarily could be valuable information about us, in that it could suggest answers to be checked out scientifically, and so on, that such an unending series of means with no end to be achieved could not be a valid ethical principle. His first response to this point was "How could evolution not be relevant?!" -- as if giving a non-answer like that was somehow an answer to my question. Despite reading a lecture he gave purporting to prove his claims, I was not able anywhere in the whole thing to find a point where he related his premises to the conclusion in a logical way.

One thing that the positivists don't reject when they reject the potential objectivity of moral statements is the absurd idea that if moral statements are to be objective, they must be objective in something like the sense claimed for Christian or Platonic moral ideas, in some sense independent of human nature, in some timeless, eternal sense divorced from ordinary reality. Since there are obviously no such independent-of-reality moral absolutes, they reject the objectivity of moral claims in totoHHkkkasdfH, without realizing that in so doing they have accepted one of the worst presuppositions of much of traditional morality, which is precisely this Platonic view of independent-of-reality moral absolutes. In this respect, at least, the positivists are not as sophisticated as they pretend to be; they are still buying into much of the same old intellectual crap, even in the midst of supposedly taking a clear-eyed "modern" view of morality.

I bring up this example to show how people can talk themselves into bizarre ideas without any strain at all, and then think they have somehow proved something fundamental, simply by skipping over the silly business of using logic, or checking to see if the resulting ethical system made any objective sense or if it just seemed true at a casual glance.

This is a cautionary tale, in that it warns us that sound ethical thought requires essentially the same kind of rigor and care that mathematics and good theoretical physics require. We need to determine fundamentals not by merely supposing various ideas that we have learned in early childhood, but by the approach of rational disciplines like physics and logic, where even the supposedly most obvious ideas are subjected to acute logical criticism and potential refutation.

Unfortunately, the ideas I will be presenting here will not have the strict formal rigor of a proof in symbolic logic, but that would be inappropriate to my immediate purpose anyway. What I propose to do is give a "new" concept of morality and its foundations. I put "new" in quote marks because, as I said earlier, I don't think that even one of the ideas I present here is truly original, except in the sense that I came up with many of them independently. But, even so, it is obvious that similar ideas are implicit in much of the morality of ordinary people, even when what they might say about morality is completely different. In this respect, hypocrisy is often the main saving grace of some people, in that the moral ideas they actually live by are far better than their stated moral ideas.

Thus, in a sense, my purpose is not so much the project of creating new ideas as the project of conceptualizing the ideas implicit in human behavior and formulating them in such a way as to make them conceptually coherent, meaningful, applicable by deliberate thought and practice, and thus able to make human life better. If you see a person in rapture over a piece of music, or a mother in grief over the loss of a beloved child, you are not seeing some isolated bits of behavior that are unique only to these two people; you are seeing human nature and values at work; these people are telling us something about what it is to be human.

So does all other human behavior tell us something about human nature, though not necessarily what we might suppose it to be telling us. For example Nazism tells us something about human nature, but not, as some might say, that human nature is inherently evil. In fact, Nazism was driven by the same basic mechanisms that drive all human behavior, but it was driven in the wrong direction by bad ideas that had grown up over many centuries, culminating in Kant, Hegel, and Marx.

Given a suitably different set of ideas held by enough people, Nazi Germany would never have occurred, because the same mechanism in human nature that led to it would have led, under better direction, to something better. Just as a car can be used harmlessly as a means of commuting to work, so it can be used as a weapon as well, as the recent story of a man driving through a crowd of people and killing ten of them indicates. Shall we say that cars have an evil nature merely because sometimes they are driven through crowds of people? No.

But then, neither should we say that human nature is evil merely because people stupidly adopt bad moral ideas that cause them to behave destructively. In fact, I will argue that, in a very deep sense, human nature is good, because it is part of human nature that is the defining basis for the concept of the good, not some external source. Of course, since this is the basis for defining good, we can't say, as we might like to, that human nature is therefore good by some independent standard. But, that's no more a problem, really, than defining roundness by reference to the shape of round things. Since this basis is an objective fact of human nature, defining good this way does not produce or entail arbitrariness or subjectivism, as you'll see.

C. Why Do We Need Morality?

1. What Is Morality For?

Do we need morality at all? How do we know we need morality? What's the point of having a morality of any kind? Suppose one day all morality vanished from every human being on Earth. What would be the problem with such a state? Why would it be something we'd want to change? Why would we, if we had any sense, develop morality in such a case?

The answer is that we would find many things to be highly unsatisfactory if we did not have morality. Life would tend to be "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short." Modern society would collapse, economically, politically, and socially. Individual human life would be range-of-the-moment. Action would be out of context of any overall purpose in one's life. I will develop the reasoning behind this view below, where I show how life would be unsatisfactory, what it is for life to be unsatisfactory.

2. Why Human Nature Is Necessary To Provide The Basis For Morality

Some ethical systems are disconnected from human nature in that what is considered good or proper is not necessarily related to anything that's good or proper for human beings. Instead, it's supposed to be good or proper for God, or for some abstract principle, or for propitiating demons, or for the good of dead ancestors (not actual living human beings).

But, let me ask this: Suppose we were all rational and cognitively sophisticated, and wanted to develop a morality. Would we develop a morality according to the needs of dead people, or of gods or demons, or for abstract principles that don't give a damn? Or would we want to develop a morality that was consonant with our needs, needs determined by the basic facts of human nature?

I suggest that we'd want to do the latter, because, were it not for these needs, and the fact that a morality can help us satisfy them, we wouldn't need morality at all. That is, given that morality is to serve something outside of our needs, how would we ever rationally convince ourselves or anyone else that there was any point to it? In philosophy classes taught by a certain kind of professor, we might become convinced by some kind of argument that such a morality was indeed the correct morality, but we could then still ask, "Well, okay then, I agree that it's correct. But, so what? Why should I bother with it? What would be the point of me being moral in that sense? Why shouldn't I develop an alternative set of principles and values and simply not call them a morality, but go ahead and live by them anyway?

And, you know what? There are no really good answers to this kind of objection to living by such a morality. We might think it was a clever "proof" that had been given to us, perhaps like the old "proofs" that one equals minus one, in that we might not be able to find the flaw in it, but that would not make the resulting morality one that we would find any reason to live by. We would feel, correctly, that we had somehow been tricked, that the "proof" was not a sound proof of anything relevant to us, that it was not a genuinely sound argument.

D. Basic Types Of Morality: Duty Vs. Purpose.

1. Why Conventional Duty-Based Moralities Are False And Harmful.

Conventional explicit moralities are typically a mixture of duty-based and consequentialist moralities. The inclusion of a consequentialist component or aspect allows people to act in some ways that allow them to survive, if not very well. A fully duty-based morality of the conventional sort would kill off its proponents if they practiced it fully because it would not permit people to function well enough in practical terms to survive.

An interesting point about this to consider, though I won't try to prove it here, is that this is largely true even if the particular rules that people are to follow are in fact compatible with human survival. The basic reason for this is that such moralities, even when they require the same overt behavior nevertheless cause damage by breaking the psychological relationship between the moral agent and the consequences of action.

Since people cannot in fact consistently live by such moralities, whenever people accept such moralities, they must distort them or at least largely violate them in order to live.

Is this a problem? If people nevertheless live by more practical principles even when they nominally accept such a morality, then doesn't it make little difference whether they accept it or not? No, it does make a difference, for at least the following reasons:

It divorces morality from life, which leaves the person with no rational, conceptual guidance for actual living.

It makes everyone immoral by the standards of such a morality. If being moral is acting according to such a morality, then one is acting immorally to the extent that he knowingly acts in other ways in order to live. Not only is this a prescription for guilt, but it is also a prescription for moral helplessness and cynicism.

Since people who cannot consistently live by their moral principles tend to come to regard morality as irrelevant, they will normally come to think that the entire category of moral concepts is invalid and thus come to accept the idea that, in reality, "anything goes."

2. Consequentialist Moralities

Consequentialist moralities are moralities that are aimed at guiding actions to produce valuable consequences. This means that their point is not to arbitrarily impose a set of rules or standards but to provide guidance as to what is of value and how to achieve it. For this reason, consequentialist moralities can be made to be consistent with human nature. In fact, human nature is a very important factor in such a morality, because it determines what the ultimate value is and it determines the constraints on action that can lead to that value.

Why human nature matters, and the fallacies of moralities that try to base morality on something outside of human nature.

Human nature matters in morality because it is facts of human nature that lead us to want moralities (or anything) at all. If we were plants, we would not need moralities. Even if we were chimpanzees, we would not need moralities. If we were chimps, we might be such that, if we could make choices based on real moral principles, we would be better off, but chimps can't make choices based on a morality, except in a very primitive sense that is only marginally relevant to actual ethical systems for human beings.

That is, there is something special about human nature that makes morality possible, where it is not possible for our closest genetic cousins. What, specifically, the relevant differences are, I will get to soon. But for now, it's sufficient to notice that we are different from other organisms, even our closest living evolutionary relatives, different in a way that makes it possible for us to have morality even though they cannot.

Further, there is something different about us that makes it necessary (for nearly all practical purposes) to have morality. This, too, I will go into in more detail later, but for now, just consider the fact that, even where morality is very primitive, people do better than they do where there is essentially no morality at all, at least for the most part. It is possible, I suppose, to have a morality that's worse than no morality at all. The morality of the Nazis might be an example. But, in general, even poor moralities are better than none at all.

E. The Two Basic Criteria That Are Relevant To Establishing A Rational Morality

1. It Must Link Values To Action

That is it must be such that a person can be motivated to act according to its principles. That is, a rational morality must link to motivation. It won't matter how "correct" you think a morality is if you find nothing about it to appeal to your motivational mechanism. If you are the sort who is able to act merely on the abstract belief that some idea is correct, then that would be part of the linkage. But then, we can ask why it matters whether an idea is correct or not. Why bother to act on correct ideas rather than on nothing at all or on the basis of ideas you know to be flat out wrong? Motivation is the first requirement for a morality. It is not the only one, obviously. Chimps and other animals are motivated to act in various ways, but they don't have moral systems. What's lacking in chimps and other animals? Why is it that motivation is not enough?

It must provide direction, guidance of action in a principled way. What's lacking in mere motivation is any ability to understand things in a way that makes it possible to function in reference to moral principles. If a chimp can grasp, say, an idea like fairness at all, it would be in a primitive way, not in a way that would match even the average five-year-old's understanding of such a concept.

What humans have that enables us to develop and use a moral system is both a motivational mechanism and a conceptual mind.

I do not mean merely a linguistic mind, though language is a part of it. I mean that we can form concepts of things that enable us to think in general ways about how things relate to each other, about ends and me means, about long-term goals and about ongoing purposes, about explicitly recognized and statable principles, standards, values, and rules. We can form, for example, the concept of a value, and then form ideas about how to achieve it or keep it once we achieve it, and so on. We can think literally about the future thousands or millions of years hence, though, for ethics, it's only really necessary that we understand that we have a lifespan of some sort beyond the moment or the immediate consequences of whatever we may do at any given time.

Further, we can formulate a concept of what kind of being we are and relate that to things we want or value or need and use that to help us choose in cases where choice is possible to us.

And, of course, our conceptual mind gives us a vast range of choices that a chimp cannot even conceive of, literally, because a chimp doesn't have a conceptual mind (except in such a primitive way that it doesn't mean we should send chimps to introductory philosophy classes). We face choices about not only consequences of actions that may extend into the remote future, but also about actions that may depend on a vast amount of conceptually managed information about the world and ourselves that a chimp or other animal cannot hope to understand. Again, it is literally true that a chimp can't hope to understand it, because the chimp doesn't have the conceptual faculty that could make the awareness of such a possibility possible to it and therefore something it could hope for.

F. Definitions, Conventional and Otherwise

1. Why Some Conventional Definitions Are Incompatible With A Rational Approach

Definition of morality itself. The concept of morality has had a checkered history, and in recent decades, it has largely degenerated into vagueness, fog, emptiness, and gross absurdity and self-contradictoriness, or nit-picking over whether moral statements have actual content or are merely expressions of a person's approval or disapproval, etc.

At one time, it was normal to define morality as the set of standards, values, and principles by which a person guides his actions, especially those actions that determine the course of his life, based on ideas of what is properly valuable and not properly valuable for us.

Note that this definition is very general. It refers to all of those general standards, values, principles by which one guides one's actions, not just the ones that apply to some portion or aspect of one's life.

Not especially that it does not refer to the social aspects of one's life. Such aspects of live certainly fall within the purview of morality, but they are not the only thing that can fall within the purview of morality.

And yet, many modern definitions define morality in purely social terms, thus making morality essentially irrelevant to any aspect of life that is not primarily social. For example, if you don't decide that it is a social issue what career you choose, morality by this definition has nothing except evaluations of side-issues to offer you, those side-issues that do involve the social aspects of your life. But, what if your primary potential career interests are, say, the study of bugs on some remote island and the development of a new branch of mathematics, and you realize that you cannot possibly devote your life effectively to both pursuits? What does a purely social morality have to say about such things, especially if, in social terms, the expected benefits to others or to society would be the same regardless of which career you chose?

A purely social morality will be nearly useless to you in such a case, because it simply ignores that whole type of question, except in incidental ways.

What this means is that the more-traditional definition of morality as pertaining basically to the entire range of human living is necessary for rational understanding of the topic. True, we could limit morality to the purely social aspects of life and then devise another discipline for the standards, values, and principles that apply to human life in general, including the social aspects. In this case, we would be devising a larger, more-encompassing discipline into which we would embed morality.

But, for a number of reasons, this does not seem a good idea.

One reason is that, for thousands of years, there has been, in virtually every culture, and for good reasons, a concept of morality that is broader than the purely social one. This is a concept of morality that applies to all of the major values and aspects of our lives, not just the social. If we redefine morality to suit the crippled mentality of so many "modern" philosophers, we do not reduce conceptual confusion, but rather increase it, as has been demonstrated by the nonsense put out by those same modern philosophers (though, to be fair to them, even though they are idiots, these kinds of ideas have been around since very ancient times, usually stated in different ways).

Another reason is that the "modern" definition involves a contradiction. On the one hand, morality is to be a set of principles and values that guide our whole lives, but then it's also supposed to be a set of principles to guide only our socially-related actions. You can see this kind of contradiction in many of the more modern writings on ethics. In one paragraph, the writer will be using the concept of morality or of ethical behavior, in the narrower, modern way, and then, in the next he will use it in the more general way. Thus trying to have his moral cake and eat it tool. He will say that morality is purely social and therefore relativistic (though that in itself does not follow without the help of other assumptions), but then make a moral condemnation of something in which he is clearly using the concept of morality in the more general sense.

2. Definition Of Good, Bad, Value, Etc. What Is The Basis Of These Ideas?

The various special concepts of ethics or moral theory, including the concept of morality and of ethics, are developed in many different ways by different people. The two ways of defining the concept of morality indicated above is just one example of such divergent development.

To provide a proper definition of these concepts, we need to deal with them in terms of fundamentals. We don't define "bird" in terms of having two eyes, because, if a bird did have only one eye, we would still call it a bird. In ethics or morality, we don't want to define ethical concepts in terms of secondary characteristics, because that seriously undermines the usefulness of them and of our ability to apply them correctly. We want to get at the basis for these concepts, not at some ideas that just happen to have grown up around them. For example, one view of morality is that it is simply the rules supposedly handed down by God in the Bible. But, obviously, this is a definition of a particular kind of morality, not morality as such -- even if it were to turn out that only this kind of morality could be correct.

For concepts such as value, goodness, and so on, we need to get at why we need such concepts at all. I will start on the surface, with the concept of goodness in a non-ethical sense. We say that a wrench is good for removing a certain kind of bolt, for example. This means that it is effective and efficient for this purpose, perhaps compared to other means that we might try, such as wishing the bolt out of its seat, or beating on it with our fists, or trying to wrench it out with a pair of tweezers.

When we say that something like a wrench is good for such a purpose, we mean also that it is a value for such a purpose. A value is, in this context, something that contributes to the end we are talking about.

Now, in an ethical sense, we can still use the concept of good to indicate a relationship between something and some purpose for which it is good. That is, an action is good if it helps us achieve some goal or purpose. And it is therefore valuable for that purpose as well.

However, in ethics, we want an ultimate definition of these concepts that is based on some ultimate "stopping" point, a place where we can put up a sign that says, "the philosophical buck stops here."

I will get to the actual basis for values later. But, for now, let me just observe that we do value things. Even animals value things. There is something (to be announced later) that is common to us and all semi-sentient animals, such as chimps and dogs and birds and, I would say, even reptiles and fish, that enables them to have values. These are not philosophical or ethical values, of course, but it's hard to deny that chimps value bananas, and that some dogs value the opportunity to chase cats. This is not sufficient for morality, but it does help us to establish a context for value in an ethical sense.

A value is that for which one acts to gain or keep, to use Ayn Rand's definition. However, even this is not the stopping point. Why do we value some things and not others? Why does the chimp value bananas and not a poke in the eye with a sharp stick? Rand's analysis may have gone further in her own mind, but, as far as I remember, she did not deal with the deeper issue of the state or process or "action" of valuing, of what it is to value, not of what it is to have a value in the sense that she uses. What is it we are doing when we value something?

No, I mean it. What are we really doing? Consciously, of course, we may be just desiring it, which would be at least consistent with Rand's definition, in that, given a genuine desire and a suitable opportunity, we would act to gain or keep the value in question.

But besides the incompleteness of her analysis in this respect, I think it makes sense to say that we can have values that we don't act to gain or to keep. These are values that we don't act on because they are either too far down on our prioritizing of values that we always end up acting for other things instead, or that we don't currently have a means of achieving, and which we may suppose to be such that no such means will ever be available to us personally, or some mixture of both low priority and lack of known means.

Why do I say this? How can there be values that we don't in fact act to gain or keep? Because the state of valuing something is that of seeing it as something that, for some reason, we would like to have, even if we don't think we will or can have it.

Action is motivated by valuing, and all genuine valuing has a motivational force on us, but it does not necessarily have enough motivational force to get us to act for it in the context of our resources and knowledge, because there may be other values that seem (at least) to conflict with them, or they may seem impossible (and some may actually be impossible, but that's a different matter).

Thus, I tie values to valuing. That is, a value is that which one either does act to gain or keep, or for which one would act to gain or keep if circumstances seemed to allow it. At one time, I had the goal of being the world's first billionaire philosopher. So far, all philosophy has gotten me in direct economic terms is a reduction in the cost of the room at a Unitarian Universalist conference, so I have a long way to go. In fact, I no longer really hold that as a goal. However, if a suitable opportunity were to arise, I would act on it, because I still value that result. I just don't see any good means for me to achieve it at present, and other values are of greater importance to me.

But, are we done? No. What about why we value things? Why does the chimp value the banana? Why do we value things? What is it about human nature, and the nature of chimps and other animals, that makes values possible to them, but not, say, to plants or fungi or viruses? What is the one thing that would have to be removed from a chimp's nature to prevent it from having values? Suppose you had two new-born chimps that were identical in every way, and you wanted to modify one of them to prevent it from ever developing values?

Well, what do values do? Or more precisely, what does valuing do? Valuing motivates. Valuing motivates action. It motivates the chimp to try to get the banana, and it motivates the thief to try to get your jewelry, and it motivates the scientist to try to understand the universe, and so on.

Fine, but what causes valuing, then? What is it that causes the chimp to value the banana, or the scientist to value understanding the universe, or the teenage boy to value sex?

And what causes us to disvalue some things? Why does the cow move away from the cattle prod? Why does the thief generally try not to get caught? Why does the teenage boy not try have sex whenever it's physically possible to do so (you may think that that's exactly what they do, but it's not really quite true)?

Now, some philosophers, oddly, have treated desires as unexplained primaries, as having no basis other than, say, some physiological basis that somehow triggers a desire directly. Well, this is not even true at the most basic level, or, at least, it is not true in a way that affects the truth of a deeper and less-obscurantist explanation. Oddly, even philosophical greats such as Bertrand Russell have held this view.

But, it doesn't make any sense. No matter what the desire, it always makes sense to ask why we have that desire, and there must always be an explanation.

The reason it doesn't make sense is that it assumes, in effect, a kind of innate idea of what is desired that has somehow been triggered in us at the time of experiencing the desire, and that, in effect, there is no real explanation that can be of any value to ethics.

But there is an explanation. Consider the chimp. Suppose you took a newborn chimp and gave it bananas, but, every time it touched a banana, you gave it a very painful electric shock. It wouldn't be long before the chimp would no longer even attempt to touch bananas. Can we really say that there is no explanation in psychological terms that tells us why the chimp no longer touches bananas?

I think it's fairly obvious why the chimp no longer desires to touch the bananas, or at least no longer acts on that desire. The explanation is that even a chimpanzee is smart enough to learn to expect pain from touching bananas in such a situation.

That is, it is the painful prospect of the severe pain associated with touching bananas that keeps the chimp from touching the banana.

Similarly, we can teach a chimp to touch and even to eat things that it would not otherwise want to eat, by giving it a pleasurable reward each time it does eat the thing in question (such as say, a nutritional bar made of stuff that is good for the chimp's health but which tastes bad to the chimp). In fact, we could probably teach the chimp to do this virtually every time it came across one of these bars of food.

How do we do this? By means of pleasure. The chimp values pleasure, and thus learns to value things that do not directly give it pleasure.

This same general principle is true of all animals that actually do value things in a recognizably human way. Some things give pleasure directly, and some things give pain directly, but all of the rest are valued or disvalued to the degree that, in the respects that, they are seen, at an emotional level, as being the means of obtaining pleasure and/or of avoiding pain.

3. The "Definitions" Of Pleasure And Pain

But, right away, there is a problem. I mean pleasure and pain, in the most general sense, a sense that includes such things as the pleasure of contemplating beautiful mathematical ideas or of simply imagining a work of art, or of sitting peacefully with a friend on a nice summer evening and watching the sky change as night falls. The problem is that there is an important sense in which there really is no non-circular way of defining either pleasure or pain, especially in such a general sense.

However, that doesn't mean that we cannot characterize pleasure and pain in such a general way, by means of examples (such as those I just gave), other formulations, and descriptions of what it they are not. For example, we can say that pleasure is any state of feeling good, and pain is any state of feeling bad. Or we can say that pleasure is always in some sense satisfying in itself and pain is always dissatisfying in itself. That is, given two possible situations that are identical in every respect except that in one we would experience pleasure and in the other we would not, we would choose the one that gave us pleasure, other things being equal.

Obviously, we might not want to come to associate pleasure with some things, and so we might choose the more painful version of the situation in practice, so we would have to specify that the situations are such as to be otherwise value-neutral to us, but given this kind of neutrality, we would always choose the more pleasurable situation, the one that would feel good, the one that would be more satisfying.

In general, I will use pleasure as a one-word synonym for feeling good or for the state of good-feeling, and pain as a synonym for feeling bad or for the state of bad-feeling.

This is where the buck stops. We can get into more details (and I will), and we can go into the implications of this view (and I will), and we can go into the actual biological processes that are involved, but as far as our purpose here is concerned we can't go any deeper. Pleasure and pain are psychological primaries, that have no deeper psychological explanations. Some particular pleasures and pains have more explanation, but pleasure and pain themselves have no deeper explanation.

However, there are two more important ways to characterize them, or, in a sense, to "define" them.

One is to say that pleasure and pain are the ways in which we experience value and disvalue. That is, pleasure and pain-avoidance are value in a psychological sense, they are the basic form of what it is to experience something as a value.

The other is to point out that this same pair of experiences is also the primary way in which we experience motivation to action or to refrain from action. Pleasure and pain motivate as well as being experiential. To experience pleasure or pain is to be motivated, if only to continue not doing anything (as in the case of some of the effects of some drugs, or so I've heard).

Technically, this is all redundant, because it is all implicit in much of what I've already said earlier. But it's important to bring out these things explicitly, not just by implication or by suggestion, so they can be fully understood and their relevance to ethics can be fully grasped.

In the general sense I have given, pleasure and pain, value and disvalue, motivation toward and motivation away from, are all the exact same thing at the most basic possible level. Experiencing either item of any one of these three pairs is the experience of the other two as well, though we may only be conscious of one or another aspect of the experience at a given time.

Further, they are, in animals that have the pleasure/pain mechanism, the motivation for all consciously chosen or adopted action. They don't directly account for individual actions that are purely habitual, or that are the result of conditioning, or that occur for physiological reasons (such as breathing), but they do account for all action that is value-driven.

Even habitual and conditioned responses would tend to go away if they were no longer motivated by the background of pleasure and pain. Suppose you habitually avoid putting your hand on the hot stove because of the pain that you expect it would cause, but suppose that you discover one day that not only does it not cause pain, but nothing causes either pain or pleasure. You put your hand on the stove by accident, and then your habit kicks in, but you feel no pain, and you look at your severely burned hand, and you don't feel any pain at the prospect of a future with a burned hand, and you don't feel any pain at the prospect of what people might say about your failure to get medical treatment for your hand, and you don't even feel any pain about the prospect of dying of loss of blood or from infection, so you continue on, by habit, to the next room, where there is a TV show that you used to find extremely pleasurable, so much so that you used to plan your week around seeing this TV show. You sit and look at it, but you feel nothing at all, no pleasure at what you are seeing, and no pain at the lack of pleasure in it, nothing at all, emotionally. Your mind is drifting, thinking about nothing in particular. Then your spouse comes and tells you it's bedtime. You start to get up out of habit, but then you lose interest partway to the bedroom and you simply slump to the floor where you are. Your spouse, out of spite, and not realizing that what is wrong, leaves you there, thinking you will learn from sleeping on the hard floor in the cold part of the house to take better care of yourself.

But, as the night wears on, the temperature goes down, the pressure of parts of your body on the hard floor has stopped blood circulation to some parts of your body. But, you feel no pain, no discomfort at all, and, even though your medical training has made you aware that the parts of your body that are no longer getting blood may die and become gangrenous, you don't feel any pain or discomfort about that, either. You feel nothing in the emotional sense. You are aware of purely physical data, such as the pressure of the floor on your body, but it feels neither pleasant nor painful, but completely neutral to you, like learning that a grain of sand on a remote beach was one billionth of an inch away from where you might have thought it would be. Only, unlike the grain of sand example, you are now in a situation in which you would normally feel bad at least about not feeling pain from burning your hand or from the cold hard floor. But you don't even feel the slightest discomfort even about that. Or about the fact that you don't feel any discomfort about the lack of pain, and so on. It would be like the dull state of extremely severe depression, only without even the discomfort of being depressed. If you survived at all, it would be in a hospital bed, being cared for by others.

In short, the loss of pleasure and pain is also the loss of motivation. Similarly, the loss of all motivation would be the loss of all pleasure and pain. And, further, the loss of pleasure and pain would be the loss of all values, of all states of valuing, of all desire to have or to avoid things.

I don't know who first came up with this insight. I'm sure it wasn't me, though I have not seen it or heard it from others. I would be very surprised if it was not to be found somewhere in the philosophical literature, though, oddly, I don't think I've ever come across it, except in a very implicit way, as it was implicit in my much earlier remarks.

However, I do know that it is the key to the relationship between values, valuing, motivation, and ethical principles. It is the nexus where all three meet, where ethics links to experience of value and experience of value links to motivation to act.

However, as I've said earlier, it's not enough by itself. Why not?

Because, by itself, the pleasure/pain mechanism is stupid and blind. It can't find its way out of a paper bag, so to speak. It is an essentially blind reaction. It gives us the experience of value, of motivation, of pleasure, and of disvalue, of motivation away from, and of pain, and we want to act on these experiences, but the mechanism itself does not tell us what causes pleasure or pain, or what actions will produce more pleasure and what actions will produce less pain.

For that, we need cognition. We need some kind of understanding of the situation we are in, some kind of information that we can use to make at least good guesses as to what is causing pleasure or pain, so we can then act to get more, or avoid acting in ways that will cause it to go away. Even the chimp who reaches for the banana does so on the basis of the association in its limited mind between bananas and pleasure. This is not enough to constitute an ethical system, but it illustrates the principle. If the chimp only experienced pleasure at some random moment but had no idea what might be causing it, and didn't even have any idea of what it was doing at the moment, it would never develop the association between eating bananas and pleasure. What would be lacking would be even the very limited understanding of the situation that a chimp can have, and that accounts for its value-oriented behavior.

Humans face a largely different set of choices from those faced by the chimp. We not only want to eat the banana, we want to know how to get more of them, and in our attempts at getting more of them, we often need to learn and use a lot of information about our world and ourselves. This information is largely conceptualized. For example, we may buy bananas at the local supermarket. But this is transaction that a chimp can only just barely understand. And even that understanding does not include the understanding that thousands of other people have had to use to get the bananas initially and get them to the store where you can hand over bits of metal, paper, or plastic to get permission to have the banana.

We face these and so many other issues in our lives because we are conceptual beings, in a way and to a degree that no chimp is. We implicitly understand that there is a relationship between the work we do at the office on one day that enables us to buy the banana a few weeks later, that enables us to send our children to college ten years hence, that enables us to be concerned about life-insurance, that enables us to spend years writing a novel or studying the ins and outs of ethical theory. Although we share much with the chimp's view of the world, we also have a vast world that goes enormously beyond what the chimp can conceive of. We can conceive of the vast expanses of a physical universe that's fourteen billion years old, we can conceive of living in a certain way for a span of many decades, we can conceive of a human population of several billion people, and of technology that goes far beyond what the chimp can understand, even in general terms.

But facing this kind of world, with this kind of potential, also means that we have to make decisions in a way that chimps don't and can't. We need to choose careers, or choose whether we will attempt to send our children to college, or whether to marry the beautiful but dumb and mindless woman or the plainer but smart, witty, creative and thoughtful woman, and so on.

Because we are human, we face the world in a way that other animals don't. Because we are conceptual, we face the world in a way that other animals don't.

For this, we need an ethical system. If we don't have an ethical system, we make mistakes, because we then have a human motivational mechanism that is being guided by mistaken ideas, by whims, by superstition, by accumulated prejudices and random guesses. We make some mistakes anyway, but the point is we will make many more and much worse mistakes without the best ethical system we can get. We will marry the wrong woman or man, take up the wrong career, kill the wrong people, botch our relationships, steal when we shouldn't, eat the wrong foods, adopt screwy religious beliefs, teach creationism as if it were science, let government run our private lives, try to control things best left alone, refrain from controlling things that we could easily and beneficially control, and generally behave in ways that are, to say the least, not exactly optimal for producing satisfaction in life.

And, of course, much the same can be said about having an ethical system that's severely wrong for human beings. The only major difference may be that we will make our mistakes in a more consistent way. But the harm may be just as great. If you kill people because you have no understanding that that's not a good idea (in general) or because you believe that it is a good idea on the basis of your ethics, the result will be that you will kill people and that you will pay for it in various ways (which I may get into later).

What this tells us is that it is not enough to adopt just any morality, because, moralities, like theories of medicine, can be inappropriate to promoting human well-being. That is, not only do we need an ethical system, but we need one that is substantially correct, at least in enough ways that we generally avoid at least the most destructive mistakes.

G. The Standard of Value

Now let's talk about standards of value. Every ethical system has a standard of value. It is not always called that, and some ethical systems don't even regard it as a value, but merely as a rule or set of rules that you are arbitrarily supposed to follow. There may be no value in following the rules, as far as the explicit statements of the ethical system are concerned, but you are still supposed to follow the rules.

But, even in such a case, there is a standard of value of a sort. The standard is how closely you are able to adhere to the rules. The rule might be something like a rule requiring that you run into a wall. If you fail to run into the wall, you have violated not only the rule, but the implicit standard of value as well. For this, you will be required to run into another wall. (Just kidding.)

1. The Criteria Method Of Establishing A Standard Of Values

What it is, why it works, why it avoids the circularity or inconclusiveness of conventional methods of determining and validating the standard of values.

I'm going to describe what I call the "Criteria Method" of establishing the standard of value for ethics. Why do we need this method? Well, in a sense, we don't. However, there is a problem with respect to the standard of value for an ethical system.

This is the problem of deriving an ought from an is. Now, I've already solved this problem earlier, in one sense. But now, I propose to solve it another way. The problem is this. Given any proposed standard of value, if it is a set of facts, even facts of human nature, how can we say that, on that basis, we ought to behave in some way or another?

Well, in a sense that is really irrelevant to ethics, we can't say that we should behave in any particular way. This is in the sense that there is no standard of value "out there" in the world, separate from us, some Platonic Good or Platonic Bad that somehow we are supposed to orient our lives to, no rules that God could somehow lay down that would, in and of themselves, have any moral claim on us, no metaphysical "force" or "whatsit" that somehow is to be satisfied or accepted.

However, this does not mean, despite many claims, that values, ethics, and moral principles generally are necessarily arbitrary or merely subjective. Remember, we wouldn't even have values, we wouldn't even care about the whole issue, if there was not some basic fact of human nature that gives rise to values. This fact is not arbitrary, it is not subjective, it is not something we just imagined into existence, it is not something that depends on our cultures, it is not something that we can simply choose away, it is not something that we can eliminate without eliminating a feature that is essential to being a fully human being.

This is the pleasure/pain mechanism. It is an objective fact of human nature. By "objective fact," I do not, of course, mean that it is like a potato, or even like a photon, something that exists outside of us. I mean something that is real in roughly the same sense that the shape of a rubber ball is real. There is no such thing as the shape of anything independent of any thing, but every such thing as a rubber ball nevertheless does have a shape. The ball's shape is not a thing that exists on its own, but it is nevertheless real, for all that.

Similarly, the pleasure/pain mechanism is objective; it is a real aspect of human nature, not to be denied merely because our way of knowing of it is experiential.

Subjective, in a philosophical sense, can mean either experiential (how something is experienced subjectively) or something arbitrary, as in a person's subjective feeling that his neighbor's dog is sending invisible laser beams into his brain.

Pleasure and pain are subjective in the first sense, in that they are experiential, but the fact that we have these experiences, and the fact that pleasure and pain are the primary experiences of value and disvalue, and the fact that our motivation is pleasure and pain are all objective, and not subject to our whims or choices or beliefs or feelings about them.

In fact, the ability to end up with subjective beliefs about things that don't have an objective basis is itself a consequence of the primacy of the pleasure/pain mechanism as an objective fact of human nature. We would never be motivated to adopt any beliefs at all if we had no such mechanism. Nothing would ever matter to us, and so learning would never matter to us, and no ideas would be more or less attractive to us than any others, and we would not have any pleasure/pain mechanism that our parents could use to instill irrational or rational ideas into us. That is, the attempt to argue that the pleasure/pain mechanism is subjective depends on the fact that its existence as a basic part of our nature is not subjective or arbitrary merely personal. If this objection were true, we could never be bothered to learn anything, including that subjective, non-cognitive beliefs are possible (partly because we wouldn't bother to establish any beliefs at all).

The Criteria Method consists of developing a set of criteria on the basis of a conceptual analysis of the abstract characteristics something must have in order to qualify for a certain status. It differs from typical methods of validating a proposition in that, in this method, we do not deduce in the ordinary way that something is true. And we do not establish it by an inductive process, nor do we establish it necessarily by showing or arguing that it is self-evident.

What I propose is first to present a set of criteria for a standard of value for an ethical system. Then, we consider various candidates for this status, and select those that meet all the criteria. If we end up with multiple candidates that meet all of the criteria, we may need to consider adding a further criterion, or, if they are complementary rather than contradictory, we could just accept all of them. Now, the method is very general, even though I'm sure that, by now, you have a pretty good idea of at least the general direction I'm headed in (though I can almost guarantee that there will be some surprises in store for you, even if you do have a pretty good idea of the general direction). In presenting the list, I will try to go lightly on the parts that I've already touched on.

In the list that follows, several of the criteria are technically redundant or dependent on others, but I have found some value in formulating things in a large number of different ways, so I have included them all. Also, some are not strictly needed, or they are not strictly criteria, but they give insight into what a proper standard of value must be, so I have included them. Here are the criteria:

1. The standard of value cannot be justified in terms of anything deeper. If it could be, then that would either be the standard of value, or it would at least be one step closer to the true standard of value.

2. It is an absolute end-in-itself in a very strict sense, in that it is valued for itself alone. If you experience it, you value it, or rather, it is the experience of value (and of valuing, actually).

3. It is psychologically axiomatic, in that it is psychologically self-evident, even if we have failed to conceptualize it clearly and coherently.

4. It is logically axiomatic in that is the actual value-basis for all of our other values, and even an attempt to adopt an alternate standard of value is ultimately based on it.

5. It is the basic form of the experience of value, and the motivation to achieve or sustain values. Notice that I do not say that it is pleasure and pain here, because, as far as the criteria are concerned, this is yet to be determined.

6. It is effectively logically contradictory to deny it, because, while we may conceptually believe in some other standard of value, its status as a basic part of human motivational nature means that we effectively "believe" that it is the standard of value at the same time. This means that, in a sense, we both accept that it is the standard of value and deny that it is the standard of value at the same time, thus yielding a contradiction. This is not a formal contradiction because the two senses of "belief" are different, but, in practice, this difference is irrelevant to the contradictoriness of the two ideas. I'm not advocating true innate ideas here, but only that our nature as human beings forces us to effectively accept the standard of value as a belief, even if we do not consciously conceptualize that fact in our ethical system.

7. It is the de facto standard of value in human action, even if we do not knowingly accept it as such. That is, since it is the motivational basis of all action, including the action of accepting a conceptual standard of value, it motivates even that. This is possible because of the difference between what we are motivated by and what we may be conscious of, and of what we may think or believe based on whatever thinking processes we may have developed.

Children, for example, can be taught almost anything as the standard of value, such as God's will, ancestor-pleasing, the good of Nature, service to kings and queens, mindless pursuit of wealth by theft, and so on. But teaching them such things requires the use of the standard of value that they act on by nature, and if that de facto standard of value were to go away, they would soon give up the patterns of behavior demanded by whatever ethical system they have officially adopted.

8. Another way of saying this is that it implicitly underlies all other attempted standards of value. But any standard of value that does this must be the standard of value. If it were not, then there could be a standard of value that it did not underlie, that it did not provide the primary support for, even in an indirect psychological sense.

9. It cannot be supplanted or overridden. You can "put on" an alternate standard of value, but, at your core, you will be doing so on the basis of the real standard of value. It will be, roughly, analogous to acting like a British upper-class gentleman when you are in fact a peasant with some training in how to behave like an upper-class British gentleman, except that, in the case of the standard of value, the difference in depth of the real standard of value in relation to the "put on" one will be much more fundamental, in that, in this case, the real standard of value is inherent in you by biological nature, not merely by virtue of being raised as a peasant.

10. It is not subject to choice at the deepest level. It is part of human nature, and so not subject to choice. This is implicit in all that I've said about it above, but it's worth while to make this point explicitly and separately. Other points depend on it, as we will see later.

11. On the other hand, it is subject to choice in a different sense and at a shallower level. If it were not, we would never eve have the question of what standard of value we should adopt for our ethical system. That is, while we can't choose it at a biological level, we do (or can) choose it at the level of deciding what to put at the base of our conceptually explicit ethical system. It's very important to keep these two levels distinct, because all sorts of problems arise if they are confused.

12. It is bipolar, in that it must provide both for values and disvalues, for motivation toward and away from things. Technically, I think we could leave this one out, and for many years, I did. But, I will include it here because I think any standard of value that did not provide both the negative and the positive in such a way would be, at best, highly implausible. Even religious moralities typically include the use of it in both a positive sense (i.e., going to heaven, receiving God's love, etc.) and a negative sense (going to Hell forever). [Note the use, in this religious case, of a standard outside of religion itself to get people to accept what is supposed to be the ultimate standard of value. If following God's will were truly the ultimate standard, this would not be necessary or even possible, because there wouldn't be anything else that could be used to entice people away from God's will. All that would be needed would be a clear and coherent exposition of the facts.]

13. It is quantitative. It is quantitative not in the sense of "units" of value, as monetary value is, but in the sense that some values are greater than others, some disvalues are worse than others, and so values and disvalues can be arranged in an order from the severest disvalues to the highest values, even if we cannot calculate with them the way we can with monetary values.

14. It can be used as a conceptual standard of value without contradiction or absurdity. Though some have grossly misrepresented it so as to make it seem to the naïve and/or unthinking that there are fundamental problems with it, these problems are either outright fallacious or they depend on severe misconceptions and unexamined premises. I bring up the consistency issue because a standard of value that could not be so used would hardly be useful, except as a means of manipulating people by making them feel inadequate for being unable to live up (or down) to the standards they have mistakenly accepted. A rational standard of value is ultimately univocal on any issue or it leaves the issue open to non-moral choice (as in the case of choosing ice-cream flavors at a restaurant, for example), or it is simply irrelevant (again, on non-moral issues).

15. Not only can't it be justified in terms of deeper premises, but it doesn't need justification in terms of deeper premises, because, ethically, it is the justification for any other value premises. Our job at this juncture is only to determine what it is, not to justify it in the sense of deriving it by deduction from some other value (or factual) premises.

16. It is not external to human nature and objective human needs. This is already implied in earlier remarks, but the point here is that, not only is it a part of human nature, which I've already said, but to make it explicit that it is not based in anything outside of human nature, such as the will of God or the good of society. [This does not mean, of course, that there may not be extreme value in promoting the good of society, but it does mean that we can't even define the good of society without a standard of value that is not itself merely social, and not external to the values of individual human beings by their nature as human beings. Let me explicitly note here also that there is nothing anti-social about a rational standard of value that's based in human nature, but it's too early to try to prove that with what we've covered so far, so I'll do it later.]

17. It accepts the reality of human nature, of primary facts of human nature, and does not try to subvert them or try to force people to live according to standards that are incompatible with what they objectively, genuinely need.

18. It leads to action. That is, it leads to changes in our behavior. Normally, this is some kind of action, but it can also cause us to stop acting in cases where we are already acting and determine that any action at the moment would be negative in terms of the maximizing value according to the standard.

19. Consciously conceptualizing it and learning about it and developing an ethical system based on it makes a difference in our behavior. If it did not, there would be no point in developing ethical systems at all. [Well, that might not be quite true, since it could, in principle, make a difference in our emotional or psychological state without necessarily changing our overt behavior, at least in some cases. But you get the idea; most of the point of having an ethical system would be lost if our ethical system made no difference at all to our behavior, not even our mental or emotional behavior.]

20. It must not be primarily social. This, too, is a point made above, but not as a separate criterion. The reason it can't be primarily social is that, if it were, there would be no motivational link between it and our actions. We'd see it, or whatever, and say, "Ho hum. There's that standard of value again. I think I'll sleep right here in the middle of the freeway."

21. It must make for a consistent hierarchy of values. This is implicit in the principle of ordering of values described above. But the point here is that it cannot demand that we value A more than B and B more than C and C more than A. We can't have two or more values that are each more valuable than the others, all at the same time, and by the same scale of values. Any ethical system or standard of value that has this sort of thing as an implication is invalid. It may be repairable, but as it stands, as long as such a circularity exists, it is invalid. Some ethical systems do require just such paradoxical implications, so please don't think I'm just being silly in including this principle of hierarchical consistency.

22. To put the above consideration in more general terms: It must not contain or entail the paradoxes or contradictions that other attempted standards of value entail. That is, if we found that a proposed standard of value was the only one that did not involve such paradoxes and contradictions, we would have to accept it on the basis of this criteria alone, because all of the others would, by hypothesis, have been invalidated by that one flaw.

23. It must not have the rampant arbitrariness of so many traditional proposed standards of value. That is, when we get right down to the nubbin of it, it must make sense, and not turn out to be a floating abstraction that sounds nice but which ends up, on critical analysis, not to have a real basis in facts as a standard of value. That is, if we had grown up with no ethical system at all, and yet we were, miraculously, psychologically healthy and cognitively rational (including free of superstition and misconceptions about the world and Existence), if someone proposed the real standard of value, it would make sense to us, and the false alternatives would seem as arbitrary as the mostly in fact are.

24. It must, in principle, enable us to define ahead of time what to do in any well-defined situation where it applies. That is, given a good description of the situation, it must, in principle, enable us to determine what the proper response to that situation is, in such a way that everyone who understands the system and the situation will, if they use ordinary rules of logic, arrive at the same conclusion as to what the person in that situation should do, given that person's knowledge and understanding of himself and his needs (not the knowledge of the person who is trying to decide what that person should do, but the knowledge of the person in the situation).

25. It must enable us to develop a set of principles to guide our actions. That is, it must effectively "compress" a vast amount of analysis into principles that a human being can actually apply in the real world. A potential informal example might be: "Treat people benevolently unless special circumstances require otherwise -- and be careful about how easily you conclude that such special circumstances are present." In general, any standard of value that leads to an ethical system that cannot actually be applied because of a lack of systematic principles is hardly worth the effort. If we must do as much thinking in a situation as we would if we didn't have the ethical system at all, what would be the point?

26. It must not be something we learn, like the specific rules of an ethical system. The standard of value could be, in principle, acquired by a natural developmental process, as breasts and underarm hair are, but it cannot be something which we merely learn from someone else, or even by experience. Of course, this is in the de facto sense, not in the sense of what goes into our explicit conceptualized ethical system. In that respect, we do of course, need to learn it, we need to develop the concepts that enable us to talk about it, and to adopt it as the official standard of value for our conscious ethical system.

27. This last brings up the point that it must be either inherent in human nature at birth, or occur by developmental processes. In fact, it is present at birth, but, in principle, there could be a species in which it was not yet present at birth, a species that would be effectively vegetative at birth and gradually developed awareness and motivation and so on.

28. It must provide the main motivational link between understanding and motivation. That is, without it, we might, in principle, have an understanding of a situation as being theoretically good or bad for us, but that understanding would not motivate us to act or modify our actions accordingly. For that, we need the actual standard of value.

29. It must be the ultimate basis for the concepts of moral good and bad, of moral right and wrong, of moral value and disvalue. It must be such that, if that one aspect of our nature were removed at birth and we were somehow kept alive, we would not spontaneously develop anything like a moral system or moral concepts of the sort mentioned here.

30. In other words, it must be the ultimate psychological basis for the fact that we care one way or another about anything. If it was removed from us, we would simply become unable to care about anything because nothing that we encountered would make any valuational difference at all, no matter how wonderful or how horrible we normal people might think it would be. A person without the built-in standard of value might think, out of habit, that he should find it wonderful or horrible, but that would just be an abstract thought passing through his mind, with no more significance in value terms than the important issue of whether a faint rustling sound coming from a tree was made by leaves A and B rubbing together or by leaves B and C rubbing together.

2. Applying the Criteria

Now we come to the application of these criteria. This could take a week to do if we gathered up all of the things that people have said were the standard of value and tested them against all of the criteria listed above. Fortunately, we don't have to do that, because we can test some large categories of them against just a few of the criteria and eliminate them quickly. Only a few out of all candidates that we can think of will be serious candidates, and once we eliminate all the invalid ones, we can eliminate all of the variations on them that still have the attributes that caused the first ones of that type to be eliminated.

For example, we can eliminate all of the standards of value that are supposed to be based on some form of deity. If a deity existed and if said deity were actually to impose rules on us, we'd probably have to follow them or else, but that would not effect the issue of the standard of value, nor would it affect the basic principles of the ethical system based on those principles. What it would affect would be the situations in which we applied those principles, and which ones would be most commonly relevant. This is similar to the fact that we sometimes must behave in certain ways overtly to avoid being punished, but we don't change our principles for that reason. Instead we take into account the actual nature of the situation and apply the same overall set of principles to get different results as to what specific actions to take.

We can also eliminate all standards of value that depend on any facts that are not in evidence. This would be all of the theistic ethical systems, which depend on the existence of some sort of God, and all of the systems that depend on claims of the existence of a special "moral sense" that no one has ever been able to find any evidence of as apart from normal human cognition.

And, we can eliminate all the standards that depend on ancestors and other such external factors, or on the whims of some king or ruler or religious guru, or that come from a book without independent cognitive validation (since the writer of a book can simply say anything, we do need independent validation for any moral claim made in a book, regardless of whether the book is supposed to have been written by a Christian God or by a Muslim God, or by the gods of someone else). We can also eliminate these as being external to human nature, and therefore not inherently motivational.

We can eliminate relativism and subjectivism because there is no strong correlation over a wide range of prospective values between such ideas and what is in fact good for us or bad for us. One of the reasons we need an explicit, rationally developed, conceptualized ethical system is precisely that such accidental values are accidental, in that they depend on the accidents of history, or the accidents of one's upbringing or personal psychology, or the accidents of whatever one has been eating, and so on. They do not form a coherent ethical system that we can apply systematically. They do not allow us to objectively specify, even for fairly simple and well-defined situations, what the right thing to do is.

One person from one culture will say one thing, and someone else may say the opposite, and neither will be able to offer any rational basis for their claims. Eventually, if things go from bad to worse and from worse to worst, one of them will very likely have to try to kill or imprison or enslave the other, also on the basis of whatever their culture or their own personal psychology requires. Multiply this by millions or billions of people and you can easily understand why the world is in a state that almost everyone agrees is not very good, and yet it goes on and on.

We can also eliminate a fairly large herd of variants on hedonism, or the idea that pleasure or happiness is the ultimate purpose. I don't claim we can eliminate all forms of hedonism. Hedonism is simply the view that pleasure and pain, or happiness, are/is the standard of value. It is, as such, completely neutral about any actual patterns of behavior.

However, there is a type that says, in effect, "Do whatever you feel like doing," or "Do whatever you feel would give you pleasure," or "If it feels good, do it," and so on. All of these effectively assume either that it doesn't and shouldn't matter to us what the actual and/or long-range consequences of an action are, or that we have some reliable method of automatically just happening to want to do exactly the right thing without thought or study or practice or training or education or anything more than bare consciousness of the current situation we find ourselves in. All such ethical theories fall prey to the same errors as simple subjectivism.

Ayn Rand even made the claim that all forms of hedonism were like this. However that's not true; there is nothing inherent in the basic principle of hedonism's standard of value that says, "Don't think; just act blindly." But it is true that most forms of hedonism have been of this sort, at least in modern times. Oddly, the Epicureans were not like this, despite the common modern use of the term "Epicurean" to mean just such a short-range view of ethical behavior. The Epicureans were in fact verging on asceticism, so strong were their views to the effect that such a way of behaving and thinking was contrary to the maximizing of happiness.

We can also eliminate the Utilitarian standard of value, and all of its major variants. This is not because of the general impossibility of maximizing two independent variables at the same time ("the greatest good for the greatest number"), but mainly because it is a social standard of value. Now, let me emphasize that a rational morality must deal with social issues; they are extremely important.

But, social factors and social goods are not all of, or even part of the standard of value. A rational ethics has to be compatible with and promote peaceful, benevolent, civilized social living, that is true, but that's because of the standard of value, not the other way around. We don't choose an ethical standard of value on the basis of how it affects our social behavior, or how it affects the principles we apply in social settings, but, rather, we only care about social factors of life because of the standard of value. That is, if the standard of value were in fact such that it would be better for us to live alone (for example), then that's what we would have to do if we wanted to maximize ethical value in our lives.

That isn't the case at all, however. In fact, the real reason we do value other people and social living (aside from purely economic or practical factors) is because of the objective value of other people as people, as human beings. We are a social species, and so that not only must be taken into account, it is a major part of what ethics is about. My only point here is that it is not the standard of value, and it is not the primary in ethics, and it is not definitional of ethics as such. That is, when I say that social factors are not, and do not, as such, determine or define the standard of value, I am, at the moment, not denying the importance of having an ethical system that makes sensible standards, values, and principles that apply to social situations and that promote the maximization of value in our lives by the standard of whatever turns out to be the standard.

I'm only saying that such social factors are not absolutely primary, that the value of social aspects of life depends on a standard that is not itself ultimately social but more biological. Of course, it can be argued that we evolved that way because of the survival value of social living, but that's a scientific, not an ethical issue. It gives us insight into how we got the way we are, and that's all well and good, but it is not an answer to the basic philosophical question of the standard of value for a rational ethical system.

We can also eliminate a large variety of forms of egoism. In fact, since many forms of egoism have the same problems as many forms of hedonism, we can use essentially the same arguments against them.

Ethical systems that say, "Do whatever you like as long as its for you, and screw everyone else," for example, don't make it past our criteria because, like similar forms of hedonism, they effectively deny the objectivity of self-interest, or claim at least by implication that our objective self-interest is simply whatever we just happen to want.

This is absurd. Human nature is objective, reality is objective. Therefore our needs are objective. Further, our needs may be quite different from whatever we just happen to want at any given time. What we may happen to want may be something that will kill us, or that will cause us to lose our jobs, or whatever. What we need is an ethical system that provides an objective set of standards, values, and principles so that we can make good decisions even when our emotions and desires of the moment happen to be messed up for some reason, or when we simply don't have the time to sort through the many dozens of facts that may be relevant.

Finally (unless I think of another category later) we can eliminate a large class of "abstract" standards of value. Some people claim, for example, that knowledge is a standard of value, that it is a true end in itself. But, let's consider what would happen if we took such a person and somehow magically removed all associations of knowledge with pleasure in his mind, and all associations of ignorance with discomfort, so that he would no longer see the prospect of gaining knowledge as pleasurable, and so he would not in fact experience gaining knowledge or having it as pleasurable, and so on. How long would it take before he would start saying things like, "Well, I know that knowledge is a primary value in and of itself, but, today, I just don't feel like pursuing it"? My suspicion is that this would not take very long, even if we made no other adjustments to him at all. The problem with knowledge as a standard of value is simply that it is not itself an experience of value, and it does not itself directly motivate us to action, and so on. It is not in fact a standard of value in any ethically primary sense.

Okay, let's see. I've eliminated Gods, books, gurus, ancestors, abstract values like knowledge, a fairly wide range of forms of hedonism and egoism, relativism, subjectivism, the good of society, and probably several other things. I recommend that you do two things in future days and weeks:

1. Examine all of my criteria for the standard of value and verify that they are in fact legitimate criteria that a standard of value for an ethical system must meet.

2. Examine any prospective standards of value you come across in terms of these criteria, going through them one by one in some cases, just for practice.

For now, however, I'm going to leap on ahead, in order to make progress as rapidly as possible, to my own conclusions regarding the applications of these criteria. I trust you all not to accept what I say on faith.

Basically, at this point we have developed a set of criteria and shown that a number of proposed standards of value don't meet the criteria. What I will show now is what does meet the criteria.

3. And The Winner Is: The Pleasure/Pain Mechanism.

2. As suggested in the first part of this essay, the basic standard of value in all human deliberate value-driven action is pleasure and pain, usually together. If you go through the list of criteria given earlier, you will find that this standard, properly understood, meets all thirty of the criteria given. This is not as impressive as it might seem, because of the overlap and technical redundancy of some of the criteria. Nevertheless, nothing else comes even really close.

However, you may have some questions, based on my own earlier remarks about things we can eliminate.

For example, you might ask, "But, didn't you say that hedonism was invalid? That just doing what you felt would give you pleasure was not a valid way to go?"

My answer is that I said that many forms of hedonism were invalid because of this flaw in their conception of the standard of value and the nature of ethics. I didn't say that all forms of hedonism were thereby invalidated.

Why do I make any exceptions? Because human nature and the standard of value are objective facts of human nature, as are all facts of human nature, and so it makes a difference in the results whether we choose actions by carefully worked-out standards, values, and principles, or just blindly "wing it" and hope to get by.

The flaw in these ethical systems is the claim that, in effect, the standard of value is the principle that we should seek whatever we happen to feel like having, etc. The flaw is not in the isolated idea that pleasure and pain are the driving forces of human action, but in the idea that human nature is such that it doesn't matter what we do as long as we feel that it will give us pleasure.

Another question you may have is about egoism. You may ask, "But, didn't you say similar negative things about egoism?"

Again, my answer is that I said negative things about many forms of egoism, not egoism per se. Just as the standard of value is only directly effective in each individual human being, so value is ultimately individual.

Thus, egoism is, in a sense, almost axiomatic. What is not axiomatic is that this implies a kind of mindless pursuit of whatever you happen to want, just because you happen to want it.

That is no way to achieve happiness or satisfaction in life. Egoism, like hedonism, requires the utmost respect for the objective facts and the objective needs of human beings. There is no room for arbitrariness or subjectivism in a rational egoism any more than there is in a rational hedonism.

In fact rational hedonism and rational egoism are the same thing, just described in somewhat different terms. This is because we only directly experience our own pleasure and pain, our own happiness.

Of course, this does not mean that we should disregard the happiness (or the suffering) of other people.

I'm only saying that it is not directly a value or disvalue to us, but only a value or disvalue by virtue of our association with people. It is a consequence of sympathy and empathy, not a direct biological response to their happiness or suffering as such.

This is easy to prove, since we will feel the same about a person who is merely acting like he feels good or is suffering, if he does a good enough job of acting. It's the outward signs of his state that affects us, not any direct experience of what is going on in his mind. Egoism doesn't change any facts of human nature.

But it should make us realize that the potential and actual value of other people to us is not mysterious or merely subjective, but is rather based on our need for social relations of certain kinds, need that leads us naturally to have deep feelings about other people. It is easy to understand why people might regard these feelings and associated ideas as primary, but that is not the same as proof that they are primary.

In the past, and even to some extent today, there is occasional mention of something called "enlightened self-interest." What I'm advocating is not what usually goes by such a designation.

Why? Because such egoism makes little or no acknowledgement of the objectivity of the standard of value. The "enlightenment" of this kind of self-interest is almost exclusively merely "prudential" or practical, and does not require, for example, that the egoist of this type must take very seriously and rationally the issue of just what things are objectively in his interests. It is still assumed that, while the moral agent must act rationally in pursuing his goals, the goals themselves need not be chosen by rational means. It assumes that rigorous reason has nothing to say about what ultimate goals and purposes we should seek to achieve in our lives. Thus, in such a view, a person who is secretly robbing his neighbors blind might be regarded as an "enlightened" egoist as long as he was very careful not to get caught and punished for it, and as long as he put on a good show of being civilized when he was around other people.

But, in my view, and for reasons I've already given, this is not nearly enough for a rational egoistic ethical system.

For example, such a person effectively rejects the value of other people as people, and lives in a psychologically alienated way, even if he spends much of his time with other people. He regards other people as "fodder" for his purposes, to be used however he happens to see fit as long as he does so in a way that protects him from retaliation.

Thus, he denies himself the far deeper and longer-lasting satisfactions of human relationships for nothing more than the money he can steal, money that cannot make up for the loss of, or the foregoing of happiness caused by his irrational view of human nature and human relationships. I don't see how a person could possibly get enough satisfaction out of stolen money to make up for the failure to satisfy deep emotional needs that can only be satisfied in honest, benevolent, and respectful relationships, not in relationships between thief and victim.

For these reasons, I reject ordinary "enlightened self-interest." I don't really know what to call my form of egoism, beyond "rational egoism" or even "hyper-egoism" by which I mean to emphasize that it must be genuinely self-interested in every respect, including in determining human nature and human needs, not just in how "enlightened" one must be in seeking to achieve whatever long-term goals one happens to have developed.

That is, I regard such crippled forms of egoism as being, in a sense, non-egoistic, in that the person doesn't take his actual needs seriously enough to determine by rational means what they are, but instead simply adopts whatever he probably already wants as his long-range goals. In short, his flaw is not that he is too egoistic, as some would claim, but that he is not egoistic enough, in that he is willing to let such absolutely crucial issues go without being dealt with by rational means, and just takes it for granted that whatever he wants is objectively what he should seek to get.

4. The Role Of The Conceptual Faculty

I showed earlier that the standard of value is not sufficient to define a rational morality by itself, because it is valuational and motivational but, because the pleasure/pain mechanism does not "understand" causation, it does not have a built-in facility for making correct choices of means in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

But the function of the conceptual faculty of the mind is to understand and direct the motivational force of the pleasure/pain mechanism. Since this is necessary even just to have an ethics or morality, there is a sense in which the conceptual faculty is just as foundational to ethics as is the pleasure/pain mechanism. However, while it is foundational, it does not determine the standard of value. It determines many of our specific values, the things we try to do or have as means to maximizing value, but it does not itself set the standard.

However, there is a sense in which this faculty is more important to understand than even the pleasure/pain mechanism, because the pleasure/pain mechanism works automatically, whether we want it to or not. But the conceptual mind is largely volitional. We have to make some kind of directed effort to develop objective knowledge, to understand reality, including ourselves. Thus, while I have talked at length about the pleasure/pain mechanism, the point of doing so is to give your conceptual faculty information it can use to understand how to direct your actions more satisfactorily, and to stimulate you to further conceptual thought and further development of your ideas about morality.

We don't need to learn how to respond in pleasure-and-pain terms to things, but we do need to learn how to think rationally, how to delve deeper into our premises, how to search for, detect, and eliminate contradictions in ways that are not arbitrary and ad hoc. This takes effort and time and practice. Learning how to think in an adult way is not automatic and guaranteed.

Therefore, once you fully understand how the pleasure/pain mechanism works, you do not need to put as much thought into it as you do into the vastly larger project of formulating it in fully conceptual terms and developing a fully rational ethical system, one that will help you satisfy your objective self-interests, as determined by your nature as a human being, including your needs for the kinds of human values I spoke of at the beginning, when I referred to a joyous child playing and a woman in deep grief over the loss of a loved one.

Acknowledgements

Intellectually, the one person to whom I owe the most for getting me going in ethics was Ayn Rand. My views are not hers, but there is much to be said for her views, and for the fact that she asked some of the right questions. Many people dislike Rand's views even though they don't know what they are, because they have been given all sorts of nonsense by her opponents. While Rand had some problems, and not all of what she said turns out to be correct, and her attitudes about certain issues have lost her many potential supporters, without improving the rationality of her position, if you isolate her explicitly philosophical writings and views from these other factors, there is not nearly as much to criticize as Right-wing Christians and others will have you believe there is.

However, the views expressed in this essay are not Rand's for the most part. For one thing, what she gave as the standard of value was something called "man's life," or the life of man qua man, of man as man, rather than, say, man as mere animal, or man as barbarian. However, since, in her view, the standard of value was the ultimate basis for making choices, she could not very well justify it in terms of a deeper value, because then that would be the standard of value. So, what she did was say that the standard of value was "man's life" and that the purpose of living according to this standard was one's own happiness.

Oddly, she did this even though she recognized a point that I have emphasized, which is that happiness is an objective thing and that there are objective causal relations necessary in achieving and sustaining happiness. Thus, her position is really inconsistent in that the real standard of value that she offers is happiness, since that's the only reason we would care to live the life of man qua man, but her explicit standard of value was man's life.

I want to acknowledge my wife, Susan Cogan, who dragged me by the scruff of my neck from California to Oklahoma merely because I had gotten here pregnant over the Internet. Part of the purpose of essay for me is to put me in position of getting enough of my ideas written down in an organized form so that I can give her a copy of it to help her understand my views.

Further, I must thank Bill Dwyer and Perry Beeson, both in the San Francisco Bay Area, for many, many hours of discussion on ethical and philosophical topics during the nearly thirty-five years that I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I have also profited from many, many, many hours of debate via e-mail on Internet forums on moral issues, particularly foundational ones, the alleged objectivity and absolutism of Christian morality, and so on, though, in most cases, I don't feel exactly thankful for the excruciatingly bad arguments and rabid irrationalism I had to put up with from many of these people in the process. Nevertheless, these debates did help me focus my thoughts, and clarify issues that I had been letting slide, since I have not been working primarily in ethics in recent years.

For example, there is the new formulation of the relationship between the experience of value, motivation, and pleasure as being essentially the same thing viewed from different conceptual perspectives (in which one is valuational or ethical, one pertains to the causes of action, and the other pertains to psychological states considered in themselves, simply as psychological states). I consider his formulation important, even though perhaps obvious. Nevertheless, I had previously not actually combined all three together in that way before I started working on this project. I had grasped each possible pairing in the process of thinking about other things, but had not thought long enough on these pairings to think about them by themselves, rather than merely in the process of getting from one set of ideas to another. I could give other examples where resistance by others has led to better work on my part, but this should be enough to give you the idea.

Then there have been all of the philosophy books and essays I've read or read parts of, including such books as The Moral Point of View, by Kurt Baier; Why Be Moral? By Kai Nielsen, The Foundations of Ethics, by Henry Hazlitt; nonsense about what it is for something to be ethically good, by G. E. Moore; and many essays or readings trapped in many college philosophy texts and other works of philosophy. I also recommend, for a less-philosophical book, How We Choose To Be Happy, by Greg Hicks and Rick Foster, and Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I wish I could whole-heartedly recommend some books on morality and ethics, but all the ones I know of have some serious problems with them, in content and/or other respects. I do not know of even one single text or general book on ethics/morality that I would be comfortable with recommending without lots of caveats and reservations. For examples, I offer the typical range of humanist ethical writings. I usually agree with much of what they have to say, but find their ideas, overall, to be confused, wishy-washy, sloppily conceptualized, and poorly-argued for. Such work may be of some value to one in providing some insight into some particular issues, but the lack of a coherent and structurally sound system of ideas based on a strong foundation seriously undermines them and reduces their value enormously.

H. Appendices

Following is additional material that is not part of the essay proper, but which I thought might be of value to the reader, and it might answer some questions and help give the reader a better "feel" for what I'm trying to say.

Appendix 1. "Problems" With Egoism

Introduction. In this appendix, I will deal with various "problems" associated with egoism in the history of philosophy and in popular ideas of egoism. These issues are not included in the body of the essay because they are not truly foundational.

The Problems

Problem 1. "Each person's interests conflict in fundamental ways with the interests of other people."

Do the interests of one person conflict in important ways with the interests of others? Historically, with few exceptions (such as William Butler), the answer has always been at least an implicit yes. Since the idea that people's interests conflict implies that, if they are taken as basic, human social living will necessarily be full of conflict, and since this is a very unattractive idea to reasonable people, the apparent implication that egoism would result in a war of all against all (or some variant of this) is taken as a fatal flaw in egoism. Therefore, if this issue is not dealt with at least in a general way, people will tend to reject egoism out-of-hand.

But certain facts come to mind that make this view implausible:

1. This conclusion is always drawn on the basis of the premise that our interests are simply whatever we want, not on any considered analysis to determine what is objectively in our interests. It is obvious that what a person feels or even believes is

2. If it were true, the human race would long since have vanished from the face of the Earth, or it would be a species of isolated people living like animals, without language, and with people meeting lonely long enough to ensure reproduction.

3. We are well aware of many very basic ways in which human interests coincide in one way or another. For example, there is simple division of labor and trade. We also find great psychological benefit in living with other people. Sharing knowledge, working together to defend ourselves against predators, and so on, are all ways in which our interests are common, or coincide. Psychologically, we would not do well at all if we were to live as isolated people, with only occasional human contact and interaction.

4. Further, though we very much need to learn independent thought, it is no secret that the kind of conceptual thought we are capable of is largely a result of our development among other humans who have already learned conceptual thinking. If each of us had to truly develop conceptual thinking on our own, we'd never make it to the probable level of cave dwellers. Most of what we know about the world would be impossible to us because we would simply not live long enough to be able to learn the highly sophisticated thinking habits that we do now learn. Even if we lived for hundreds of years, it is unlikely that we would be able to develop the knowledge of mathematics that even illiterate hillbillies learn, or the knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, mechanics, and so on that we are able to learn fairly easily given the massive head start provided by other people, especially those who have gone before us and who have done all the really hard stuff. This need for conceptual understanding is shared with all of our fellow human beings, and so even if we don't like some aspects of social living, there is a lot of potential value in living in societies with other people. That is, it is in our objective interests to live in societies, even aside from the more-immediate benefits of teamwork and relationships.

5. Further, whether we like it or not, we share the same basic human nature with all other human beings. We are physical organisms driven by a pleasure/pain mechanism and we all have a conceptual mind, and we all have at least largely similar physical and psychological needs.

6. And none of these objective needs are such that it is to our objective interest to obtain what we need by harming other people. Harming other people in order to get what we need means serving some of our needs at the cost of depriving ourselves of the satisfaction of other and deeper needs.

There is no basic conflict of interests among human beings. We share the same kind of value base, and we share the same general mechanism for properly determining how to achieve our values. In the deepest ways, you do not harm others by serving your own needs because other people are part of your needs, are part of your interests, and not just in economic or other practical ways, but because of their humanness. Can anyone honestly believe, after thinking about it, that a woman who is grieving over the loss of her child had no personal interest in the child? That it would not be in her objective interests still to have the child to love and care for and watch grow up? That she lost nothing when she lost the child?

I doubt it. But such is the common view of human nature and therefore of human self-interest, that any such response to the loss of another person is regarded as being non-self-interested, as if there were no possibility of deep personal connections between people, connections of profound importance and value. There are no basic conflicts between humans in objective terms, because we are inherently social beings, because we benefit, in very deep ways, from associating with other people in personal ways. The person who is typically described as "selfish" and as "seeking only what is good for himself," etc., is severely mis-described, because that kind of person, the kind to whom that kind of description is commonly applied, is a person who ignores his objective needs, and acts, instead, on whim, or range-of-the-moment goals, disregarding his need to view and treat others benevolently as human beings, not merely insofar as they seem to be "useful" to him at the moment. Yet, the view that such behavior really is in our interests lives on, along with the false implicit view of human nature that supports it.

Once you understand that our objective needs as human beings are either common or complementary, the whole issue of conflicts of interests between people becomes marginal as far as ethics is concerned. Yes, of course people do get into major conflicts, but not because their objective interests conflict, but because their imagined interests conflict. The Muslim terrorist has an imagined interest in serving Allah, and so is willing to kill people. But there is no such objective interest implied in his nature as a human being or in his situation. The interest in killing non-Muslims arises because of a set of beliefs he as adopted, not because of basic facts of his nature as a human being operating in isolation. There is no guarantee that people will know what their objective interests are, but there is a guarantee that if they don't know what their objective interests are, they will adopt some set of interests, and they will most likely include many that are not objective, that do not have a solid basis in human nature.

Ironically, while this is one of the most important areas for the application of rigorous thought, analysis, and re-conceptualization, it is also one of the areas of human life that has been least subjected to such thought.

This is true even though, historically, we have not generally liked the results of such a thoughtless approach to such questions. People manage, usually, to "learn" the wrong things from the disastrous experiences, if they learn anything at all. Instead of questioning their ethical preconceptions, they will argue that these disasters were caused by misunderstanding the "true" version of their ethics, or that human nature is inherently evil, and so on.

Recently, someone pointed out that the Catholic Church preserved many books during the Dark and Middle ages, but neglected to point out that the Dark and Middle ages might not have been so dark and miserable had not the Catholic Church been so successful. This person picked one isolated fact out of the mass of historical facts about those times and held that up as a shining example of the wonders of conventional religion, while ignoring the mountain of facts that make Catholicism of those times into an example of the horrors of religion. What this person learned from the disaster of the Dark and Middle ages was not that the ethical views of the Church should have been questioned, but only that it preserved a few books (while burning many others that it didn't approve of, including most of the huge library at Alexandria).

Problem 2. "Egoism must be kept secret"

One of the many claims made about egoism is that an egoist would not, of course, try to get others to become egoists, because that would be contrary to his interests. This claim rests on the notion that the interests of the egoist are fundamentally contrary to the interests of others, and that, if they were egoists too, they would try to do things that would be harmful to him.

But, since it is not true that our interests conflict in any fundamental way, there is no reason why a rational egoist, in dealing with rational people, would want to keep his egoism a secret. Indeed, if other people were aware that he was a dedicated rational egoist, it would mean that he would be less likely than others to act contrary to their interests because of the essential commonality and complementary nature of his interests and theirs.

Appendix 2. What's Wrong with My Theory?

It could be argued that the reason so little of common ethical thinking is systematically the same as mine in all essential respects is that there is something wrong with my views. Of course, within limits, this could be true; I do not have the kind of arguments that a mathematician might have for a theorem, and I tend to distrust ordinary reasoning beyond a certain point, at least in topics that tend to be elusive. But, for a number of reasons, I don't think my views are defective in any major respect.

For one thing, I've been much more careful and diligent about foundational issues than nearly all of the authors of the books I speak of have been. The human race, as a species, is still at a pre-Euclidean level in the development of ethics. The "Euclid of Ethics" has not yet arisen and published his/her work, as far as I know (although Ayn Rand, despite some problems with her views and her personality, came close to establishing a base on which such a systematic and rational ethics could be built).

For another thing, defects in conventional ethical views have been known for many centuries. This hasn't stopped people from holding such views, of course, but there is no lack of awareness among professionals of the sad state of ethics as a branch of philosophy. A major problem with many, if not all, of the proposed solutions has been that, instead of going back to fundamental issues and re-constructing, people, including professional philosophers, have generally just adopted one or another of the alternative views of ethics that are dominant, that seem to each such person individually, to have the best chance of being right or of having the fewest or least severe problems. At one time, similar approaches were tried in set theory and formal logic when it was found that the axioms then commonly accepted led to paradoxes and contradictions. This approach eventually had to be abandoned, with new foundational ideas being developed that didn't just paint over the problem areas (though there are still, sad to say, several different "schools" with respect to the foundations of mathematics).

The problem has been far worse in ethics because a), people are much more likely to have a vested interest in some set of "basic" ethical ideas, a set of ideas that they are not going to give up regardless of the problems they have, and even those who are willing to make such a radical change if needed are rarely able to adequately set aside a life-time of pre-established conventional ideas, and, b) ethics starts at such a high level (on the basis of ideas about Existence, human nature, theory of knowledge, and so on) that its foundational issues are not nearly so "clean" or as easy to isolate, pin down, and correctly formulate as they are in mathematics.

In a sense, I have regarded my "job" as the gradual clearing away of centuries of accumulated error and fuzziness and confusion and logical fog out of my own mind. It's hard to combat an enemy when it has outposts in our own minds, as the mistakes of past generations often do, but this is part of what we must do to get a rational view of things, or at least to make much progress toward such a view. Just as we must eventually give up belief in the real existence of Zeus and Thor and Quetzalcoatl and so many other gods, and so many other superstitions, we must also give up destructive or incorrect ethical ideas, even when we've been taught all of our lives that these ideas are ideas of benevolence and good living. Many of them, despite having such associations in our minds, are not ideas that are benevolent or beneficial in practice.

One thing I have done is more or less systematically avoid the methodological mistakes of most others on foundational issues. For example, the issue of egoism is almost universally discussed on the unvalidated assumption that human self-interests conflict in fundamental ways.

The closest I have seen to an argument for this view is a passage in William K. Frankena's Ethics (second edition), where he says (p 19):

As Kant would put it, one cannot will the egoistic maxim to be a universal law. This argument, however, does not show that ethical egoism is contradictory, for it is in no difficulty if what is to one person's advantage coincides with what is to that of all others. If this is so, one can consistently will the egoistic maxim to be universally acted on. But, of course [sic], this is empirically a very dubious assumption, since it postulates a kind of pre-established harmony in the world; and, if it is not true, then the position of the ethical egoist does seem to involve one in a conflict of will and thus seems to be a difficult position to maintain as a moral theory.

Notice the use of the word "coincides," without qualification. Apparently, the assumption is that each person's interests have to coincide in every way for egoism to be universalizable. Actually, this is nearly true, in one sense, because, even where our interests differ in some respects, it is generally in our interests that other people be allowed or encouraged to pursue their interests in these respects (assuming that there really is such a difference, of course), and it's generally in their interests to allow or encourage us to pursue our genuine interests.

Notice also that the only "pre-established harmony" it requires is the same type of harmony of interests that applies typically to the members of a family. All it requires is that we have enough in common, enough to gain by benevolent social interaction that it makes it worthwhile to give up whatever interests we might satisfy by anti-social means, if there be any interests. In fact, of course, if human interests did not coincide to such a degree, societies would not exist. There is nothing bizarre or even especially remarkable about this kind of "harmony." It does not require any weird metaphysical assumptions or anything of that sort. And, it certainly does not require, as Frankena says it does, that there must be some sort of pre-established harmony in the world.

Frankena has apparently never considered the possibility that humans may have an interest in other humans as such, and that the species may have evolved in such a way because of the immense advantages that social living and benevolent interaction provide. In short, Frankena's position is nothing more than a restatement of the common superstitions about human nature, superstitions which he raises to the level of a metaphysical given (or he would have referred merely to the natural mutual values we might all gain by social living, without the blather about "pre-established harmony in the world"). Does he think each member of the human race is a completely different species at some fundamental level? I don't know, but it's obvious that his remark is a pretty poor argument for the fundamental incompatibility of people's interests.

Of course, like most writers on this topic, he is blindly assuming that human interests are necessarily subjective, that there is no such thing as objective self-interest, even though I imagine that he himself would admit that there is a significant basis of common human nature in all of us, such as the conceptual mind, the pleasure/pain mechanism, the need for physical sustenance, and so on. Why does he completely ignore all of this? I don't know. There is much else wrong with Frankena's criticisms of egoism, but this should be enough to give you the general idea of how even supposedly professional philosophers have failed to deal with the topic with even a modicum of intellectual rigor (though this is actually a general problem with most philosophers, unfortunately).

But, let's talk about universalization for a moment.

Universalization is the formulation of a moral principle in such a way that it can be adopted by everyone in a consistent way. If someone claims that the moral standard of value for everyone is to serve his particular interests, this would not be consistently universalizable because (among other problems) it could not be made applicable to people who lived before he was born. Universalization is the idea behind the Golden Rule, though the Golden Rule is a weak expression of it. A better version is: Act according the same ultimate principles that you would want others to act according to in relation to you and to each other. It is a very general moral principle for living with other people, a moral principle about other moral principles.

Let me note that the principle of universalization is only rationally possible if it is the case that human self-interest is sufficiently "coincidental" that peaceful human living is possible. That is, if it makes sense to universalize in this way, that's because our interests at least overlap sufficiently to make such universalization better than the lack of it. If our interests were genuinely and fundamentally at odds, universalization would be more destructive to us than the lack of it; we'd live (or, rather, die) in "societies" in which there would be uniform destruction, or we'd live as single, isolated human beings, with little or no interaction with others.

Although the principle of universalization is true, it is not a moral primary, it is not the categorical imperative that Kant would have us believe it is. It is based on the fact that other people's interests coincide with or complement our interests in such deep and general ways that other people are in our interests as much as many other things are. If the facts upon which it is based were not actual, the principle would be baseless (as it is in Kant's theory, effectively).

Notice further that the principle of universalization is only meaningfully applicable to the social aspects of morality. It gives no guidance at all in cases where one needs to make a moral decision between two things that have, as far as one can tell, no social implications at all. As a basis for morality, the universalization principle simply ignores much of what morality is needed for.

Notice also the assumption that empirical data of the sort Frankena presumably has in mind has any relevance to the basic issue. I'm guessing that he is referring to the human race's history of bloody conflict.

But is this evidence of a conflict of the objective interests of one person and the objective interests of another person? Or is it evidence for something else?

It's evidence that people held and hold conflicting beliefs about their interests, or conflicting desires, but it is not, without some very strong additional argument and facts, evidence for the claim that our objective interests conflict. In any randomly chosen such conflict, it may well be the case that neither side is pursuing its objective interests, but that they are instead both acting on the basis of superstition or mindless prejudice and irrational fear, without even an attempt at rationality.

Thus, the issue of universalization favors a theory of non-conflict of interests, since it's really only possible if there is sufficient commonality of interests to make it worth our while to forgo any interests that fall outside the area of compatibility, even if they would otherwise be objective interests. I would argue that the reason the Golden Rule and other such universalization ideas are attractive to people is precisely that, at some level, they are aware of the commonality of interests, and they understand that this implies that mistreating others has costs that outweigh any supposed benefits. They sense that there is something deeper wrong with harming other people than merely that it's not in the interests of the victims. Unfortunately, this understanding is vague, "intuitive," ill-defined, all too easy to ignore. But, if harming other people were really in our interests, we'd very likely not even come up with the idea of the Golden Rule or its variations.

And, of course, humans would all live essentially alone, or seeking others only to prey on them. Human civilization as we know it would not exist.

Once we establish even just the basic idea of objective self-interest, the whole way of looking at the situation changes. We are all human beings, with common needs and therefore with common objective interests, including our interests in deep human relationships. Further, unlike many other animals, we have the ability to work out mutually beneficial agreements. Where, in all of this, is there basis for the idea that the real interests of some people seriously conflict with the real interests of other people?

It's not there. The idea that human self-interests conflict in the way normally assumed is based on the assumption not of objective interests reflecting actual human needs, but on the idea that our interests are subjective and necessarily essentially arbitrary. But that's no more rational than arguing that all theories about how to treat illnesses are necessarily arbitrary, and without basis in fact, even if one consistently works and another consistently kills the patients.

This brings up another reason for thinking that my approach is at least essentially right: It strongly (though not completely) parallels the ideas upon which medicine, engineering, and other sciences of method are based on. In these sciences, goals are chosen, and then means of achieving those goals are worked out in a way that is essentially rational (in the long run, at least). Ethics differs in that we don't chose the standard of value for it in the same way as we choose health as the standard of value in medicine, because, where there is a context of values in those sciences, the selection of the standard of value is, if done correctly, only the determination and official adoption of the actual standard of value in human action, and then the development of a set of values, principles, standards and such that enable us to greatly improve our ability to apply that standard consistently and effectively, rather than blindly and often incorrectly.

Except for the foundational issues, ethics has much in common with all other such sciences or disciplines. There is a goal or purpose, and a set of methodological rules and such to guide our actions in achieving that goal or purpose. The goal effectively defines the science in question, by determining, in the context of what is known about the goal and possible means of achieving it, what the methodological rules are to be. In mathematics, for example, we want a "correct" mathematical result, and the rules of calculation tell us at least some of what we need to do if we are to arrive at that result. Similarly, in ethics, given the purpose, given a correct theory of the basic relevant facts of human nature, we can establish a set of methodological rules that will help us achieve or sustain that purpose.

Of course, progressively more details of human nature and details of each individual become relevant as we get further from the foundational issues, and more into applying them to the specifics of human living, but far from invalidating the methodological approach of, say, medicine, ethical action begins to look more and more like the methods of medicine. More and more, the specifics of each person's case become relevant, not just to determining the general principles, but to the specifics of their application. Some people shouldn't eat certain foods that others may eat freely, just as some medications are okay for some people and fatal for others. Of course, neither which food to eat nor which medication to use is a basic ethical or medical issue; these are issues of application of the deeper principles of each discipline, based on more detailed knowledge in particular cases.

But, just as some things are never good for the patient (rolling him to a thickness of 1/16th of an inch with a steam roller comes to mind), some things are also never good in an ethical sense, but here we are almost entirely at the level of very general principles and standards, not specific actions. For example, killing is not normally justified, but if some rabid crazed idiot is about to shoot you and all your family, and you are able to kill him, then killing would normally not only be permitted, but morally required.

In summary for this point: The fact that my views have this quality of being comparable to other normative/methodological sciences does not prove that they are right, of course, but it is a point in their favor as opposed to any theory that offers, say, rigid rules that are supposedly handed down from some God without explanation, rules that you are simply supposed to follow regardless of context and consequences. Such systems of rules would be like an arbitrary set of "medical" rules that might require, for example, that a patient's arms be removed to cure a nose-bleed (this would actually work, but that doesn't make it medically the treatment of choice).

Another reason is that my views are based on facts of human nature, and such basic facts of human nature, that it's hard to see how one might successfully argue that they are not relevant and correct for the foundation.

The two basic facts that I have used are the pleasure/pain mechanism and the human conceptual mind that can guide action. Since all ethical systems must implicitly use these facts as their basis (in a twisted or conceptually "perverted" way, usually), it can hardly be wrong for me to use them explicitly as well unless I found some way to avoid their use even implicitly.

Their use is, however, not avoidable. Ethical systems are inherently conceptual, at least in the sense of having vague "rules" or standards and such, even if they are not identified as such. Absolutely pure subjectivism doesn't, of course, but pure subjectivism can't be developed into an ethical system; it is a rejection of the whole enterprise of ethics and morality.

The two basic facts that I rely on are not the only basic facts of human nature, of course, and other facts are relevant to developing a fully rational, and fully comprehensive ethical system, but these two are the keys. Other important facts include our need for physical sustenance; our need for rest, relaxation, play; our need for knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us; our need to human relationships; our need to develop and effectively use our conceptual faculty in the guidance of our actions (because of the lack of a reliable automatic, built-in means of knowing what will objectively contribute most to our happiness, our satisfaction in life), our need for a future-oriented view of human life (that is, rationally, part of "being here now" has to be the honest consideration of the future, of what might be best for us, of what we should avoid, of alternatives in case our main practical plan is invalidated by circumstances, and so on).

Thus, while my theory of the foundations of ethics does not rest on these other universal facts of human nature, they are relevant in non-foundational ways to ethical principles and ethical action. For example, human needs are essentially unlimited in a certain way, so there is always at least some scarcity of some things we need, some things that would benefit us if we had them. Therefore, some kind of productivity is a general human moral virtue, though it is not as basic as rationality. That is, human life depends on productive work of some kind, so it becomes a virtue to do productive work. This does not mean that the person who is paralyzed in a hospital bed should regard himself as immoral because of his inability to do anything productive other than look at the inside of his eyelids, but it does mean that it is a value to be able to do productive work and to do it when it will help satisfy one's actual needs.

Appendix 3. Happiness vs. Life

A question that may arise is over the differences between my views and those of Ayn Rand on ethics.

I think the main one is that she regards the purpose of ethics as being, effectively, outside of ethics itself. So, in her view, there's the purpose of ethics, and then there's the system that a person adopts to achieve that purpose. Thus, for her ethics, the adoption of life as the standard of value makes a certain kind of sense. Living properly is, in effect, the main virtue, and happiness is the reward of practicing that virtue. In her view, we can't meaningfully ask, "Why should I live?" because the standard of value is life.

In my view, the standard of value is the ultimate value that everything is done for, and it properly determines, indirectly and with the addition of knowledge of the specifics of human nature and life, everything else we do. In my view, it does make sense to ask, "Why should I live?" because the answer is, "To achieve happiness." In her view, you can't give a moral answer to this question because her morality stops at life as the standard of value.

Part of the difference in the resulting views of ethics is that hers is smaller than mine, it encompasses less, and leaves, as being outside the scope of morality one of the most important questions that morality should answer, namely, why live at all? My view encompasses everything hers does, and this question of why bother to live at all. The inability of her morality to deal with perhaps the most important moral question there is is a serious weakness of her theory, even though her morality is (largely) a subset of my own. Implicitly, of course, all of us who continue living already have some kind of answer to the question of why to continue living, but it should not be excluded from having an explicit moral answer, especially since many people give wrong answers, or answers that are in principle like picking a grain of sand up from a beach and saying that the universe exists for that grain of sand (while ignoring all the other grains of sand -- I exaggerate, but you get the idea).

One example or thought-experiment that has been used to support Rand's view is the idea of an unharmable robot. Since the robot cannot be harmed in any way, its continued existence is unconditional. Therefore, it has no need of an ethics; any action it takes is exactly as "good" (or as "bad") as any other.

But, while this tells us something about the standard of value issue, it's not the whole story. What if the robot could not be harmed in any physical way, but could be made to feel pleasure and pain in the same way as we humans can? I think it's clear that our "robot" at this point, would definitely have values. When its hand was placed on a red-hot kitchen-range element (say), it would experience pain exactly the way an ordinary human would, except for having thoughts about how long it's going to take to heal and so forth. Physically, it would be completely unharmed, but the intense desire to remove the hand from the element would be nearly as overwhelming for it as for a human, with the one difference that it would know that it would not experience the pain of the prospect of a long healing period or loss of the hand entirely, etc.

What this shows is that being such that one cannot be harmed in a biological sense does not mean that one could not experience being hurt in the sense of experiencing pain. Is this example extremely artificial? No. As it happens, some people who have lost a limb sometimes experience excruciating pain "in" the missing limb, even though there is not the slightest possibility of damaging it any further because it is not there at all. Would anyone believe that a person who experienced such pain would not normally seek out some means of alleviating it if he believed such alleviation at all feasible (and if he was not trying to punish himself or prove how much of a "man" he was, etc.)? I don't think so.

Going the other way, suppose a person can be harmed biologically very easily, but suppose also that nothing ever makes a pleasure/pain difference to him, in any sense of pleasure and pain. What then? Actually, I've more or less covered this in the body of the essay, but basically, such a person would cease to have values, at least once his habitual responses to things died out from lack of pleasure/pain reinforcement. He would be like the robot, in the sense that he could not be hurt in a sense that he would experience as being hurt, even though, biologically, he might be just as easily damaged as anyone else. That is, his continued existence would be as conditional as Rand says human life is, but such a person still would not have values.

What this shows, in combination with the other remarks above, is that it is the ability to experience pain or pleasure, not the ability to be biologically or physically hurt, that is crucial to values. It means that the pleasure/pain mechanism is the basis of values, not the mere conditionality of living as such. The argument above eliminates the possibility that it is merely being biologically or physically damageable that is the basis of values. In Randian terminology, but contrary to Rand's conclusion, it is not the conditionality of our existence that makes for values (except in an indirect sense), but the fact of the conditionality of our experience of value (pleasure) and our experience of disvalue (pain).

Because Rand's ethics is effectively a subset of mine (with a few minor differences), most of the argumentation that supports her views can be converted to support mine, but not the other way around. That is, while her standard of value is not a primary in my ethics, it is an important secondary.

As we develop the concept of Man's Life, of the life proper to a human being, we develop an understanding of much of the objectively proper means of achieving happiness.

For just one example, the person who makes shoes for a living may not have any direct use for so many shoes himself, but (in this respect, at least), he is living the life proper to a human being, because Man's Life requires physical support and protection, and because man has an esthetic sensibility, and so on. Making shoes for a living can therefore easily be a major aspect of living Man's Life for that person.

Selling highly addictive crack cocaine to children, however, does not fall into the category of Man's Life because it is destructive to human life. It cannot be part of Man's Life to be destructive to other human beings.

In a sense, this is the point where something similar to what is commonly called "altruism" enters a fully rational egoist morality, because the general idea of Man's Life serves as an integrating principle that integrates our own individual life into the system of lives of others in a mutually beneficial way.

But, this is not sufficient to make it the standard of value for an ethical system, even though it is clearly important. In my view, Man's Life is a secondary standard that provides much, but not all, of the basis for specific action in life. By itself, it cannot answer the question of why choose to live at all, to repeat the example given above.

Another problem with Rand's standard is that while the argument for it starts out on the obviously true premise of the conditionality of human survival, it ends up with a vast system of abstractions called "Man's Life" as the final standard. But the conditionality of human life will only support survival as the standard of value, not Man's Life. A whole additional argument is required to show that Man's Life is the proper standard of value. But this argument is missing, or only very weak. There is no convenient line of argument from survival to the "life proper to Man qua Man," because these are radically different concepts, and the latter concept is much more inclusive than the former. That is, there is no strong argument to be made to the effect that living according to the standard of Man's Life will be the best means of promoting one's survival, unless Man's Life is redefined in such a narrow way that neither Rand nor many others would find it acceptable.

When you understand that survival is only a means of achieving happiness, a condition of it, then the problem goes away. Man's Life becomes a proper means of maximizing one's satisfaction in life, even if this might, in some case, mean committing suicide. Obviously, suicide is incompatible with survival, but compatible with maximizing happiness (via minimizing pain, if that is the best that's available).

Further, we no longer need the very strange arguments needed to justify Man's Life, since Man's Life simply becomes the main general means of applying the standard of happiness to living. We define Man's Life as the life proper to a human being for the maximization of his happiness, and then fill in the specifics based on our general knowledge of human nature and needs, and on any special empirical facts that may be established by scientific means. We no longer have to relate everything to survival in order to justify its inclusion within the idea of Man's Life. Survival is obviously important as a general condition of achieving other values, but it is not an end in itself.

While we are at it, let's consider the general issue of conditions for values vs. the values themselves. Rand argues that the conditionality of human life makes survival the standard of value. But survival is only one condition for values in human life. The existence of an external universe is also a condition, though admittedly not one that we have control over. The conditionality of something that's of value to us only means that it is a value of some sort for us. It is not sufficient to make it a standard of value. It makes it a means of achieving values, in the a way similar to the way that having air is a means to the achievement of our values. Consider this: IF we could experience happiness without being alive, it would still be a value to us, but survival might not be of any importance at all. Obviously, such a situation is impossible, but my only point in bringing it up was to make it clear that it is not an end in itself as happiness or satisfaction or pleasure is. This doesn't make it unimportant, but only gives it a different status from the one Rand gives it.

Appendix 4. The Virtues: Some Examples

This is not a full or systematic discussion by any means, but it may be of some use. A moral virtue is a way of acting that one's moral premises determine as proper. In a rational morality, virtues are ways of acting that are ultimately aimed at promoting one's happiness, one's satisfaction in life. The "way of acting" involved may be primarily mental, or it may be mainly overt action, or it may involve major amounts of both mental and overt action. The sampling below is meant to give an idea of the range of virtues by giving some that are "orthogonal" to others rather than very similar to others in most respects.

Rationality is, in a sense, the basic virtue. It is also the most general one, encompassing all of the others. I define reason, roughly, as the application of logic to the data of experience (primarily sensory experience, but experiences pertaining to one's own mental states, too). Reason is no isolated mechanism or tool to be brought out occasionally like a pair of pliers. It is not the "Reason" of the Rationalists, who hoped to discover the nature of the universe by sitting in a dark closet and "reasoning" it out. Nor is reason merely the tool of logic, of relating abstract ideas to each other, or the tool of scientific thought. Reason is the application of logic to every significant aspect of life, including not merely how to achieve goals but a deep consideration of whether they are the best goals, and so on.

The West has been accused of being overly rational, overly conceptual. This is an odd accusation, because if there is anything that has not uniformly charactersized the West, it is reason. If a bunch of Jesuits or Scholastics sit around working out the implications of some notion about God or angels, this would only be rational if they had first established that God or angels existed by some rational means. No, pretty much the opposite has in fact been true of the West; blind faith has tended to dominate our lives, whether we, as individuals, want it to or not, because we live almost entirely surrounded and neck-deep in societies of irrationality, of people who mindlessly accept a belief in God, or belief in astrology or racist ideologies or medical quackery or bizarre economic and political theories -- and, of course, grotesquely irrational moral beliefs. It may be true that the West has had better luck, over all, in the degree of rationality exhibited, but it is absolutely absurd and beyond ridiculous to try to argue that the West has been overly rational, when, in fact, the entire Western hemisphere has had to share a teaspoon of rationality split a billion or two ways.

What we have seen too much of in the West as well as the rest of the world is the kind of pseudo-rationality of Mr. Spock and Commander Data, or of people who merely manipulate words and pretend that the result is rational thought. What we have seen too much of is the sort of pseudo-rationality where a person gets caught up in arbitrarily defined abstract ideas, and systematically works out a whole pointless system based on these ideas; pointless because the initial premises had no more cognitive basis than the premises of a surrealistic fantasy might have. Immanuel Kant's philosophy, and the philosophy of Descartes, and the elaborate monstrous pseudo-systems of Hegel and Marx are examples of this sort of thing, as are the writings of many modern-day academics.

But this sort of stuff has about the same relationship to reason that a con-man's spiel has to honesty. It may present itself as reason, but that's no reason to think it is reason. Merely because someone puts the trappings of reason over his nonsense, it doesn't thereby become reason. I've never quite understood why so many people are so eager to equate things with their diametrical opposites. Apparently, the absolute surface details are all the person sees, so the "reason" of some mindless academic manipulating words is indistinguishable to him from the work of people like Einstein or Charles Darwin. To them, because abstract language may be involved, they see only one category, and they identify reason with the manipulations of the academic, not the work of Charles Darwin or Einstein (they may even not honestly be able to tell the difference between them and a postmodern crackpot, I suppose). But, in any case, such a gross mischaracterization of reason as merely some method of manipulating meaningless pseudo-concepts is misleading to the confused and the naïve, and it has little to do with the kind of rationality that I am arguing is the most general moral virtue. Reason divorced from, or indifferent to, reality is not a moral virtue.

Rationality is the virtue of using reason in all aspects of one's live in the most fundamental ways one can. This is why it encompasses all the other virtues. They are all aspects of rationality. Why? Because they are things one does because one rationally understands them to be good things to do. Reason is the method, rationality is the virtue of consistently applying this method. It is the virtue of applying logic consistently to the data of one's experience so as to understand oneself, one's world, and what one needs, and the actions one needs to take to obtain what one needs. This will involve abstract thought at times, but it never requires thought based on ideas that themselves have no basis in the data of experience.

Just in case the question arises: No, this doesn't mean that you should be engaged in abstract thought during lovemaking. That would, very likely, be irrational. This is the difference between genuine rationality in all aspects of one's life and merely being trapped inside one's head.

Maintaining a constant, but not intrusive mental background of seeking to do what is ultimately best for oneself is another virtue, but one has to be careful about how one practices this virtue because it can degenerate into a state of always seeking some advantage over other people, and therefore at one's own expense in terms of the depth and quality of human relationships. Such an attitude is not compatible with genuine respect for other people, and it should be avoided, as should the implicit beliefs that give rise to such an attitude.

Integrity is also a significant virtue. Integrity is the virtue of attempting to practice the other virtues as consistently as one can, of progressively correcting mistakes in one's behavior, of holding to one's principles even when it may seem expedient to ditch them under some conditions. This presupposes, of course, that one has adopted correct principles to begin with, since integrity can be destructive if one consistently practices destructive "virtues." But, assuming that you are not in any rational doubt about your principles, and that you understand them properly, then integrity is a friend, not a threat. It protects you from the consequences that you have already determined come from failure to live up to your principles, if you are able to practice this virtue consistently.

Honesty is another virtue, but the honesty I speak of is self-honesty, honesty with yourself, not necessarily "honestly" telling a mugger where you have hidden your money. This virtue is, as Ayn Rand points out, on the full recognition of the fact that even if you deceive yourself, reality will not be changed. If there is a piano falling from a window above you, telling yourself that is not happening will not change the piano, the path of the piano, or what happens if the piano impacts your head. As Rand would put it, you can't fake reality. As I would put it: Reality will blithely ignore any lies you tell yourself about it.

Because the deepest and most satisfying human relationships are possible, and because the most satisfying social living in general is possible only if people are honest with each other, and because our respect for others requires it, we should generally be honest with others, at least about anything that they have a legitimate interest in. However, if someone presents a real threat to you, such as by costing you your job as a policeperson if you tell him that you are a homosexual, then that's a different matter because he has no legitimate interest in whether you are a homosexual or not, especially insofar as it relates to your work. Even in cases like this, lying may not be the best thing. It could depend on such factors as whether you are thinking of taking up another line of work, or if you have decided to make a stand for allowing homosexuals on the police force, or what kind of support for yourself you would have if you did lose your job, and so on. My point here is that being honest with oneself does not automatically translate into telling others the truth about oneself if they ask direct questions that you can't just avoid answering.

Honesty is also involved in economic and other dealings with other people. If you "buy" a diamond with money you know to be counterfeit, you are committing fraud. There's a reason why people attach negative connotations to the word "fraud." People rationally do not like to be defrauded, and neither does the person who commits fraud. He knows this, but does it anyway. Such dishonesty with regard to economic values is worse, in important ways, than dishonesty about things like whether you agree that Tall Paul is the world's best basketball player, because, while lying about such issues is harmful in a way, and it does increase your psychological "distance" from people in general (not just the person you lie to), it doesn't actually harm the person in a material way; If he knows you are lying about such an issue, he can discount you and go on with his life as if nothing had happened. But if you give him counterfeit money, and he knows it's counterfeit, he can't do this because the value of what you took from him is gone from his life. It's somewhat like the difference between, on the one hand, saying you dislike a painting and, on the other hand, taking a knife to it and slicing out a piece of it. If the painting is yours, this may be okay, but it's still a different thing in that the slicing of a piece out of the painting directly changes it. If it's someone else's painting, saying that you dislike the painting may only confirm in the owner's mind that you don't know painting, but attacking it with a knife actually changes the state of the person's life against his will.

Similar considerations apply in cases of violence, or direct force, or using threats of force. In all such cases, you put the person in a situation where he is not rationally free to merely go on living his life as he had been. If he is rational, and if your violence is effective, or your threats plausible, he must modify his life to accommodate your behavior in some way. He may only have to set up a better burglar alarm, but you have imposed this cost on him.

For this reason, the alienation you create between yourself and others when you begin stealing, defrauding, threatening, or using actual violence is a deeper form of alienation than that of merely being obnoxious or dishonest about mere factual issues. The biggest source of the pain of murdering someone may not be the remorse or the guilt, the pains caused by alienation, psychological self-exile from the human race.

Let's start with the consequences of the awareness that one has done it to oneself. A person may blame others for his stint in prison after he murdered three children for the fun of it, but he can only fool himself on the surface. Underneath that surface, he is well aware that he brought the situation on himself, by his own actions, and that other people very likely had little rational choice but to respond as they did. If a person is unjustly exiled, he at least can rest at peace with the fact that it was not a result of his irrational actions. But, if a person commits a genuine crime against others, he knows he brought on the consequences by his own actions.

This alienation of such dishonesty and force not only leads to loneliness, but to the isolation of the mind from the kinds of feedback and interaction that is possible between benevolent and honest people will leave your mind with disturbed motivation, a tendency to misjudge things, and a weakened (at least relatively) capacity for clear thought and cognition. The conceptual mind does not work very well in prolonged isolation from the subtle kinds of communication that are possible between benevolent and honest people, even if the people involved never talk about abstract ideas. This is because the conceptual mind "feeds" off of the data gathered in such relationships, and uses it to correct itself in many subtle ways that would not be available otherwise. Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth, but the mind does not automatically know what is true or automatically think with optimum clarity, and situations involving judgment calls are the most susceptible to the consequences of such psychological isolation. Interactions with other people are sometimes the only practical way of protecting our sanity (sometimes others are possible, but very costly in terms of time and effort and unpleasantness). This is a very elusive point, and I don't know of a fully detailed and rigorous analysis of it, but I think it would be hard to deny that the effect is real, that isolation is not only bad for us emotionally, but bad for us intellectually as well, in the long run, even if we have access to good books and such. Books and such are conceptual, true, but the conceptual mind needs a pre-conceptual form of stabilization that is possible (or at least generally practical) only through actual interaction with other people.

Although I don't want to put too much weight or importance on it, I strongly suspect that one of the reasons isolated people so often go nuts is that they've lost the subtle stabilization and correction that comes from good relationships with other people. Of course, the isolation may be a result of having already been nuts to begin with, but I think the isolation allows the loss of sanity to proceed more rapidly because of the lack of this stabilization. And, of course, loneliness can put a lot of disruptive pressure on the mind, as well. But it seems likely that the pain of loneliness is connected with some genuine need other than the need of people to work together to protect themselves against saber-tooth tigers and such. The need for the perceptual-level stabilization of the conceptual mind is likely one of the reasons we feel a need for human interaction.

One way to think of it is as preventive maintenance, or prophylaxis. The satisfaction that we can get from relationships is probably partly from the sense of our conceptual minds having been helped to remain on keel, as well as from the fact that it helps us feel that our "world" is a human place to live, that human life is possible and worth struggling for if need be.

Self-recognition is another virtue. Rand calls this virtue pride, and in the context where she does this, that's not a bad designation. But pride suggests egotism, not merely awareness and appreciation of one's achievements. Many people fail to practice this virtue when they do good or great things by then discounting the moral qualities that it took to do them, the effort it took, the diligence and thought and dedication. The result is that an achievement that should give them great satisfaction is shunted aside in their minds as if it was no more than the "achievement" of reaching out and pressing the snooze button on the clock radio (although that can take quite an effort). If you write a really good novel, you should recognize the work and qualities that went into it, and you should open yourself as much as possible to an emotional appreciating of those qualities, even if you never say a word about it to others. There are at least two good reasons for this:

The satisfaction itself is a value. Satisfaction in genuine achievement is earned satisfaction. Don't let yourself be convinced that you are an egotist merely because you succeeded in achieving a major goal. (But, don't let your satisfaction blind you to any faults your achievement may ultimately have, either; remember, you can't fake reality, and you need this information to help improve your future work).

It helps sustain your motivation and your integrity. The more you can achieve genuine values, the easier it gets to work to achieve more of such values. If your career goal is to be a writer, then you need to appreciate your work as much as it and you deserve, to help you face future work with the sense that you can do it, that you do have some ability, and so on.

Justice is the virtue of evaluating the behavior of others with respect to the context of their actions and according to objective standards of evaluation. Obviously, there are limitations on how much we can apply such principles, because we cannot generally say with precision what another person's context is (because this includes their knowledge and understanding of the situation they are in, as well as the observable facts of the situation). Nevertheless, in general, we can at least establish, over time, whether the person we are hanging out with is a decent person or a conniving sociopath, and we can make suitable adjustments in how we spend our time, and we can also say that, in general, someone who goes around killing everyone he has taken a disliking to in the past few months is a few nickels short of a dime in the moral department (or severely mentally ill).

One point that Rand makes that I think is worth passing on is that, if there is an occasion to applaud or laud some achievement or action of someone, then failure to do so is an injustice as much as is allowing a person who has committed a serious misdeed to go unremarked.

The ultimate basis for justice is, of course, your own self-interest. Not only is it in your interests to view others honestly, but it is in your interests that people in general be rewarded for achievement, unrewarded for moral failures, and punished (in some sense) for actual crimes. Why? Because it is in your interests to live in a civilized society of rational people, where, for example, you don't have to turn your home into a fortress and walk around armed in order to have some hope of surviving, and because a society of people who recognize and support genuine positive achievement is going to have more such achievements than one that regards all achievement with the cynicism of college-student nihilism.

But, it's also just better for you, even if the person who is applauded or lauded for his achievement ignores you. You have done your part; you have been honest and have made available a connection between you. If the person involved does not care, that's his flaw, not yours.

If you don't give him or her the recognition she deserves, and you don't already know that it will be badly received, you increase the psychological "distance" between yourself and other people (not just the particular person immediately involved).

Many of us, myself included, often hesitate to say good things about people to them (or even to others) because of long-standing fears about what the response may be, but this is a tendency that we need to overcome.

Benevolence. This is the virtue of treating others benevolently, of being open to friendly and satisfying interaction that is beneficial to all involved (or at least not harmful to anyone), and so on. It rests on recognition that we are all essentially the same kind of beings, that we are "rational" animals, that we all seek happiness, and that we need many values that we cannot achieve at all or only poorly in isolation. It rests on the recognition that other people are, as a matter of general principle, good for us, and on the recognition that we need to see in the world the expression in other people of our deeper values. Benevolence is the virtue of sustaining this awareness and the general way of acting in relation to others that it implies, and of consistently acting in that way. Lest anyone be misled, it does not, of course, imply that one must give one's house to any common criminal who wants it, or anything of that sort. Benevolence is the counter to such silliness as the notion that one should live as a "rugged individualist," in splendid isolation from and disregard of other people, and a counter to the idea that our interests necessarily conflict in fundamental ways with the interests of others, and that, therefore we may do whatever we may wish to other people.

Other virtues include persistence, temperance, prudence, coping well with change, handling losses and setbacks well, fortitude, patience, courage, maintaining one's health, and so on, but I don't plan to go into them here. The discussion of virtues that I've already given has been mainly to show how virtues relate to the foundations of morality, because they all contribute to one's chances for happiness, and the corresponding vices will definitely contribute to one's unhappiness or dissatisfaction.

Appendix 5: Unitarian Universalism's Seven Principles and Humane Egoism

To help give an idea of how humane egoism works, let's consider all seven Unitarian Universalist principles:

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote

Principle1. The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

See above. I would only repeat here that this does not require the abject surrender to every criminal who comes along, or every person who begs us to provide him with what he would provide for himself were he unable to con it out of someone else. Inherent worth is not a blank check on everyone's life; it is only a "baseline" of positive worth and dignity.

Principle 2. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

No problem; justice is in our interests for a number of reasons (see remarks in the appendix on virtues, above).

Equity can mean different things, but I'm assuming that it means something like an equitable claim on the right to live as a free citizen, not subject to subjugation or enslavement or forced "second-class" status without having "earned" it by true criminality (not merely something illegal, but something that actually harms people).

Compassion is natural to humans in the sense that it arises naturally during our development if we are treated fairly and benevolently and given the opportunity to learn the value of other people as people to ourselves. It is therefore, obviously, supported by a rational value system.

However, compassion is not a totally unconditional virtue, at least in terms of overt actions; being compassionate to a serial murderer and giving him your gun because he "needs" it to kill more people is not a justifiable application of the virtue of compassion. Acting on out-of-context compassion can be destructive, and it tends to give legitimate compassion a bad name.

Principle 3. Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

No problem; aside from needing to protect ourselves from behavior that's destructive to others, we should generally encourage any kind of genuine human psychological growth. Acceptance doesn't mean we have to move in with someone; it means we allow people to live their own lives, we don't try to exclude people from things for such reasons as race, gender, age, and so on.

And, encouragement to spiritual growth may mean gently suggesting that a person stop doing one thing and start doing something else. Acceptance means accepting that a person who does not live the way we do still deserves respect as a human being, it does not require the dishonesty of suggesting support for ideas or methods we honestly think are poor or harmful. For example, if a person is using some highly damaging drug for spiritual reasons, we do not have to pretend that we think this is a good thing for that person to do, even if the drug is legal. It means we respect the person's right to seek spiritual growth by their own paths. We fail people if we attack them as immoral merely because they don't follow our "way," but we also fail people if we support them in doing self-destructive things if there is any plausible hope of persuading them to change their ways by respectful means.

Principle 4. A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

This is inherent in the requirement of rationality and respect for reason, and in the need for truth in order to determine meaning, and in the need for knowing the truth in order to guide our choices and actions in the best way available. It also means we don't try to prevent others from searching for truth and meaning in their own way, except by honest and rational persuasion, not by psychological manipulation or propaganda or threats.

I'm not sure what an irresponsible search for truth and meaning could be, other than, I suppose, abusing others just to find out things (such as has occasionally been done by our own governments and sometimes by universities). But this does not seem to have a lot of significance in the context of spiritual beliefs, and is already covered by 1, 2, and 3 above. Nevertheless, if this is what is meant, then, obviously, responsibility would be required. It cannot be in our interests to allow people to be abused, even for the alleged "greater good" of society.

It could mean an honest and diligent search for truth and meaning, since it would be irresponsible merely to "go through the motions," or to get involved in mere fads and lie to ourselves that we are on a quest for truth and meaning, etc.

Principle 5. The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

Again, like the need for justice, there are several reasons to support this right. We cannot deny it without holding a double standard, since we ourselves claim the right. Humane egoism, as a system of morality to be practiced by people generally, rests on the fact that moral principles are universalizable, and this in turn rests on the fact that our interests and the interests of others do coincide in the only respects in which this issue is important.

My only caveats would be with respect to the term "democratic process," because this term is dangerously vague and/or misleading, though, in the context of the other principles, it should be more or less acceptable, as long as it doesn't mean that the majority should have the right to do whatever it wants with a minority (which would put a real crimp in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6). Of course, the right of conscience should imply that democratic processes will not be abused to violate that right.

The important thing here is that humane egoism denies any net objective value for mechanisms within society at large that do not respect the rights of everyone in the determination of policies, and that it is certainly reasonable for a UU organization to use a democratic process to determine the specifics of procedures and their applications, rather than mere autocratic decisions of some leader.

The right of conscience follows from the need for rationality and freedom, and the need to respect the lives (in the fullest sense) of other people. Obviously, denying people the right of conscience (in any genuinely meaningful sense of such a vague term) is disrespecting them, and thereby harming our own objective values. I interpret "right of conscience" to mean the right to believe what one thinks is true without pressure or threats from others to change one's views, without threats of ostracism merely for holding unpopular views (harmful actions are a different matter, of course).

Principle 7. The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Duh. How could a world of small isolated, warring, unfree, and unjust communities be in anyone's objective interests? A truly peaceful, free, and just world community could only be good for us all (though, especially for those who now live in the least peaceful, free, and just societies, of course).

The caveat, as usual, is that it must be genuine community of peace, liberty, and justice, not a "world community" of slaves who get to hear the words "peace, liberty, and justice for all" from their government-owned media but with the meanings all translated into Orwellian NewSpeak terms, and not a "world community" of mindless zombies who all get along only because they've never had a thought of their own. One of the problems of the world today is all the people who repeat phrases like "peace, liberty, and justice for all" while proposing policies and laws and programs that are in absolute, flat-out contradiction to any conceivable coherent meaning for such phrases in English. Where is the liberty, for example, in allowing people to vote each others' rights away, as we routinely allow them to do?

Principle 7. Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Since there can be no significant interdependence where there is not conditionality, and since a rock (say) does not exist in any significantly conditional way, this "principle" must be mainly referring to living things. It would hardly make sense to be have respect for the interdependence of the hydrogen atom's electron, neutron, and proton, except in a sense that would hardly be worth formulating a principle about for a religion. This is another example of the unfortunate wooziness of much Unitarian Universalist thinking and writing. Such foggy formulation might be a virtue in some kinds of poetry, but it's a problem in a statement of principles, because they aren't principles if they have no definite objectively determinable meaning but only a "sorta-kinda" meaning, or a "Rorschach" meaning created at subjective whim by each reader.

However, insofar as it is true, it is in the interests of humans to respect it as a fact, and to understand that changing things in Nature will bring unintended and possibly very harmful consequences. Living organisms are interdependent in a number of ways, and we should respect that, and not destroy or change things wantonly or pointlessly.

But there's a tendency among some "environmentalists" to regard this principle as applying to everything except humans, so that, for example, when a species of yew tree was found to provide a very effective cancer treatment, "environmentalists" claimed that we should basically allow people to die of the cancer until we found an effective alternative rather than use these trees to save their lives. One possible intended meaning of the seventh principle often degenerates into a demand that human beings be sacrificed for the "god" of the environment, as an end in itself, regardless of the consequences to humans.

The common degeneration of the idea of the seventh principle amounts to a negation of it, because respecting the interdependence in the web of Nature would mean that we recognize our dependence on things in nature, which would mean recognizing that we need things from nature or we die, and that, therefore we have a right to make judicious use of natural things for our own well-being.

Respect for the "interdependent web of existence" should not be taken to mean that we must never "tamper" with nature.

Nature is not God. Rationality requires respect, understanding, and a non-rapacious attitude, but not abject unwillingness ever to do anything that might change some of the interdependencies.

After all, the "web of existence" would change constantly anyway, even if we didn't exist. Nature is not some static "entity" that never changes on its own. If it were, we would never have evolved, and neither would anything else. The Earth would not even exist if this were true.

There is no a priori reason to suppose that the way things are is somehow intrinsically the way things are supposed to be, and that there is therefore something inherently immoral about changing them to suit our needs.

If we as a species had taken that attitude originally, we would have gone extinct before becoming an established species. (That we survived and prospered is exactly what some "environmentalists" decry, of course, but, oddly, very few of them offer to help us "return" the Earth to a pre-human state by committing suicide; they want other people to pay the price of their beliefs.)

There is no inherently correct way for Nature to be.

There's no such thing as intrinsic value. There is only value to some living thing and for some purpose (unless it's directly a value to the person, as pleasure would be, which, even so, is not an intrinsic value in the sense that is relevant here).

I bring this up to counter the absurd notion that the environment is somehow intrinsically valuable, regardless of its value to us. Intrinsicism is the general principle behind deontological (duty-based) ethics, the idea that there are rules you should follow regardless of the consequences); it's the idea that value is non-relational but that we are somehow bound to value such "values" anyway.

Humans must change the environment in order to live at all, just as every other species must change the environment in order to live at all.

The question is whether we do so with understanding and with the awareness that there will be unintended consequences, and that there will be costs involved, so we can maximize the overall value of nature to us by minimizing mindless destruction of aspects of nature that are of value to us for reasons other than immediate economic gain, etc.

Rationality implies thoughtfulness about such issues as it does about any other significant issues in life, but it does not require an attitude of simply accepting everything that happens in nature as a kind of metaphysical primary.

Appendix 6. Why Call It Egoism?

If my "Humane Egoism" is so much like "altruism" in some respects, why do I call it egoism at all?

First, the two are not completely coincident in practice, because not every act that is designated as "altruistic" is egoistically acceptable even to the most benevolent form of egoism.

And, when people are convinced that they are acting altruistically in a fundamental way, and that this is a duty, they become susceptible to manipulation into doing things that are self-destructive for the supposed benefit of others. For example, it typically becomes possible to make such people feel guilty over not sacrificing "enough" for others.

Also, the psychology is different. It is important to be aware that one is doing things ultimately for oneself. If you are aware that you are doing it for yourself, then you can make an informed decision as to whether to keep on working on it or try something else. If you have fooled yourself into thinking that you are only doing things for others, you have lost important information that would be needed to make a wise decision. You may still make the right decision, but the likelihood of it is considerably less.

"Altruism," as an ethical primary, assumes that other people require that one make sacrifices for them, that one give up important values for lesser values or disvalues in order to be "moral."

Altruistic ethical systems confuse benevolence with duty, and they will condemn you for not being benevolent when in fact you are only making reasonable limits on what you will do for others, limits that, if others are actually benevolent, they wouldn't want you to exceed anyway.

The foundation is objective and real: Facts of human nature and human needs. Altruistic ethical systems have to deny or ignore or never notice important facts about human nature (while acknowledging these facts in an implicit way). Such ethical require that people lie to themselves in order to be willing to adopt them. You have to tell yourself that you have no right to your life but that, mysteriously, other people do have a right to your life (but, if altruism is applied to then, that they don't have any rights, either). This means denying facts about yourself and others, and it means assuming that your objective interests are incompatible with their objective interests, thus setting yourself up not for a life of benevolence, but a life of resentment and even hatred, resentment of the existence and "needs" of others that prevent you from having a life of your own.

True altruism would be possible only on the basis of an objective theory of human interests, of human needs. But, one of the first things that such a study reveals is that other people, in general, don't need one to sacrifice one's own life for them. Life does not have to be win/lose, where your only basic choice is to decide whether you'd rather be the "winner" (at the expense of others) or the loser (rather than harm others to be a "winner").

Altruism grants moral "credit" only for serving others, not for diligently working to serve one's own needs well. If other people don't "need" you to serve them, you won't have opportunities for being moral. Therefore, to continue to give yourself moral credit as an altruist, you must ensure that other people continue to need your services. This means you have a vested interest in their continued suffering, regardless of the supposed "benevolence" of your moral creed. If everyone were healthy, wealthy, happy, and long-lived, you would be in extremely deep moral doodoo, because there would be nothing you could do that people would "need." Rational egoists are perfectly comfortable with general social prosperity because, as long as they are able to satisfy their own actual needs, they are happy. They don't require that others suffer in order to give them a way of being moral.

The most "altruistic" thing you can do is to teach people to be fully rational egoists. If the goal of altruism is to make people's lives better, what could possibly make their lives better than for them to be genuinely able to act wisely and intelligently to serve their actual needs?

Appendix 7. Miscellaneous Remarks

We are a rational animal, not in the sense that we always behave rationally, but in the sense that this is a basic capacity of us as a species, and in the sense that we do behave rationally to some extent or we would not survive at all. It is our rational faculty, our conceptual mind, that enables us to achieve all of the great things that people have achieved, and it is the corruption, or the misuse, or the failure to use, this faculty that has given us all of the worst things that people have "achieved."

We can't, and shouldn't, rid ourselves of the rational use of our minds merely because some people fail in their use of their minds. Instead, we should follow the examples of the greatest achievements, and teach people to use their conceptual faculty properly and to be able to think well enough to determine what they need in an objective way, instead of merely accepting -- or blindly rejecting -- the conventional ideas that they grew up with.

For this and other reasons of a similar nature, while I have tried to give a clear idea of the standard of value in human nature, and this may be the most nearly novel part of what I've covered, the most important part has been the emphasis on the objectivity and conceptual rationality required for a proper understanding of what morality is for, why we need it, what our nature as human beings is, and so on. The real goal is only partly to promote the understanding of the standard of value idea. The more important goal is to encourage the understanding of reason and its application, to encourage the development of rational thinking, partly by showing how it can be applied in solving long-standing questions about the foundations of a rational morality.

I'm talking about morality as it should be, in objective terms, not morality as it happens to be. People can believe almost any irrational thing they can think of at all. The distinction I'm making here is like the distinction between common mistaken ideas about medicine and the actual scientific facts of medicine. Just as a book on the rational foundations of medical science would not be a book attempting to justify any crackpot or quack idea of medicine, so my work on ethics is not about attempting to justify any crackpot or quack ideas of ethics. I bring this up because many people assume that the moralities that people just happen to believe are all there is to morality, all there is to ethical thought, or something of this sort, and that, therefore, an attempt at providing a rational basis for morality must be an attempt at justifying at least some popular moral system.

I should emphasize that, while I have not made much of the distinction between what people believe about morality and what is objectively moral, this distinction is fundamental to my position. I have not been saying anything to the effect that the particular moral beliefs we have ended up with are in any sense directly determined by our nature. When I say I am providing a rational basis for morality, I am not saying that the moralities that people do in fact claim to hold are rational moralities and that they can be supported by rational means.

What I have tried to present is a humane egoism that does not do violence to ordinary benevolent human behavior but which does argue against the idea that a person does not have a moral right to his own life, that he is somehow fundamentally obligated to dedicate or sacrifice his own chances at happiness for the sake of others out of a sense of duty. Conventional ethical systems that require such sacrifice of self with no basis, even in principle, even in the long run, for wanting to do so, are vicious attacks on the principle that everyone has inherent worth and dignity. Obviously, the person who is expected to simply abandon his life to the demands or needs of others is not being regarded as having inherent worth and dignity; he is being viewed morally as less than a slave might be; his only value is in what he can provide to others.

Fully altruistic ethical systems cannot acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of everyone because the only basis for a person's having any worth or dignity is in the extrinsic factors of what he can provide for others, not in anything inherent.

I am not happy with the way the Unitarian Universalist first principle is formulated, but the general idea of it seems okay, aside from the usual Unitarian Universalist fog surrounding its attempt at pleasing everyone by not saying much of any significance at all. Nevertheless, if it can be said to have a genuine and true meaning, it can't possibly mean that a person has worth only if he's giving up his life for the sake of the needs (even real needs) of others. It means, among other things, that it it is not just other people who have value, but that we, too, have value.

Besides the fog, what I don't like about it is the implicit Platonistic premise that there is some sort of standard of value that is just "out there" in the world somewhere that determines that people have worth in some way disconnected objective human needs. Inherent worth to whom, and for what? To themselves? To God? To other people? In what sense, for example, can we honestly and truthfully say that Hitler had inherent worth and dignity? I think there is a sense in which this is true, but without qualifications, there is no way to determine what the first principle really is, and since it is clearly false if it's Platonic, and possibly true only in some non-Platonic sense(s), we are left to decide for ourselves what it actually says, so that the result is that some people, taking it Platonically and others, taking it non-Platonically, may both say that they agree with it even though they are really accepting quite different ideas.

The rivers of blood in human history that have flowed largely from Platonism suggest that the Platonic version of the principle is not only not true, but actually harmful.

But, if it is not true in a Platonic sense, then, in what sense might it be true? It is not obvious that there is such a sense, though I think there is one: A person's beliefs are not all there is to the person, and so, if we could remove Hitler's beliefs from him and, in effect, start him over with a different set of beliefs being adopted, the result could easily be a decent human being. What has "inherent" worth and dignity is that human core that was so twisted in its expression in Hitler. But, it is not at all clear from the formulation of the principle that this is what it means.

Further, it is likely that it is not so much intended to be taken as a statement of objective fact as it is a statement of how people should relate to each other as much as possible, somewhat along the lines of the idea that, in law, people are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty; people are presumed to have worth and dignity until their behavior proves otherwise.