I'm really not that versed in ethics, but I think a lot about it and once in a while I take in some professional opinions. I was struck by some kind of realization a few days ago, and I felt that it helped me a lot when thinking about human nature and ethics. I'm not sure if it's an original idea, probably not, so I thought I could describe it and maybe there's someone out there who recognizes it and could point me to other reading on the topic.
My idea centers around the realization of the fluid and somewhat arbitrary and highly subjective nature of our values. This is in contrast with ideas of universal goodness or evil, or other ideas that there's some actual truth or material reality to our values. While this is rarely consciously expressed, I think there is some sort of psychological mechanism where people realize the importance of their values in guiding them through life, and therefore want to cement them somehow as being eternal or discretely defined by some ethical reasons, not to mention money. But I'm going off on a tangent here, let's look at an example.
Let's think about something we don't want to have in the world. Let's go with starvation. Why don't we want starvation? Because we believe it's bad. But then, why is it bad and what is bad about it? You may answer this question by making a case for empathy, or for the sanctity of life, or for the opposition to human suffering, or the hedonistic urge to make ourselves feel good about ourselves by helping others. All of these are however, principles we've invented to cement our values into something definable while I believe the answer to this is that the primary reason we don't want human suffering is because we simply don't want it. This is a value that we have come to embrace, and while the acquisition of this value is an extremely complex thing, which involves ethical analysis through more traditional models, the value is a thing that's completely constructed by our minds.
Let's take an example where this can be implemented. Let's think about destruction of wildlife. Why is the loss of the amazon rain forest bad? When people answer this, they typically answer it from the typical ethical models, often being based on how the destruction of the amazon will lead to human suffering (by some long chain of proposed events), and how the protection of the amazon will lead to the alleviation of human suffering (people sometimes argue for eco-turism, herbal medicine of rare plants, etc.) However, I think the truth here is that we've simply come to value the amazon for whatever reasons. Personally, I simply value nature, not because of any ethical principle, but because the natural beauty, the evolutionary history and the ecology of something like the amazon is far more interesting and appealing to me than wide-spread farmlands and the economic growth that the exploitation of the amazon would undoubtedly generate. I guess the distinction here is that while some people believe you can make a cost-gain calculation of replacing the amazon with pastures, I would point out that the gains such as economic growth and tasty glorious beef are not real values that actually exists, but are just as arbitrary my acquired value of the gains of protecting the amazon.
Here's another example, space travel. Why would we bother with interstellar travel, colonizing other planets etc? Most people say that it's because we need to secure our species survival, or harvest economically valuable minerals which may be abundant on other planets (now that's one heck of a way of solving the semiconductor crisis), or that we humans have a innate urge to explore. The truth here again is that it's simply something we've come to value for many reasons. When we think of our place in the universe, where is it? What do we want to be as a species? Do we want to be a apes wallowing in our own disagreements or do we want to be capable of cooperation and achieve something truly remarkable?
Another reason I like this perspective, and why I think it's useful, is that sometimes when we try to search for what the "right" thing is, we invent principles and use that to make cost-gain analysis on choices. It's a very comforting concept! However, there are many cases where this goes wrong. One example I can think of is a professor in ethics that I heard on some podcast, (sorry I can't remember who) who argued that having a lot of kids was a good act because you were creating life which is something that is good according to this logical ethical framework that this person constructed. This person claimed that the climate impact of reproduction did not outweigh the benefits of creating life. I might be misrepresenting things here but I run into these cases a lot, where people seem to trust too much in their ethical principles and try to use them in situations with really contradictory results. Another example is vegetarianism, or animal suffering. We seem somewhat unable to draw a conclusion on what the costs are of eating meat, because we don't really know how to measure animal suffering. Are cows conscious of their suffering? For me the decision is quite easy and based on quite different reasons (The following sentences are a bit spaced-out and I'm sorry if it's confusing). Domestication is a beautiful and interesting co-evolutionary event, which has been ongoing for thousands of years and has happened for several different species. In the last hundred or so year however, the rise of a new organism has emerged, what we sometimes call corporations. Some of these great cybernetic super-organisms have enslaved the domesticated animals and appropriated them into their system, using them to make what all corporations survive off of, profit. Not only are the animals cramped together, genetically refined so as to maximize profit, but humans fall as slaves to the corporations as well. Poorly paid workers are forced to dedicate their time to do the bidding of the corporation, slaughtering the animals as soon as they are grown enough to produce enough meat. Not only that, they also brain-wash people into preferring their brand of meat, in a massive industry known as marketing. Sorry, this was a rambling section but I think you see my point, it's these kind of arguments that people respond to, not cost-benefit analysis of animal suffering or any of that.
Another reason why I think that this idea is good is because it helps us to focus on how to efficiently make real change in the world. If we realize that people are not going to stop casually doing weekend trans-continental flights, or throwing perfectly functioning electronic equipment out without recycling it, people won't change their behavior because some researcher may find a frog in the amazon that produces the next great anti-cancer drug. In reality, people have fluid and arbitrary values that are not governed by divine or ethical principles, but are something highly fluid that we acquire based on a lot of different experiences. I believe that if someone gets to interact with a gorilla, they are much more likely to want to protect them, simply because they are fascinating and that they realize that it would be a shame to see them go extinct. This principle I'm proposing turns focus away from economic interests, and legitimizes our emotionally based values, while also opening up or emotions to new possibilities and new perspectives. What you value today, you may have completely different opinions on tomorrow, no ethical principles has changes, no other logical argument have been presented to you, you simply felt differently about it for some other reason.
There are more sides of this, and one more thing I've been thinking about is; what happens if we can take away human suffering? What happens when we get so good at genetic engineering that we can completely change the basis for human nature. Traditional ethical models will completely collapse (at least from my understanding) under cases like this, but the way I see it, by arguing from my perspective, nothing has changed. That's a whole discussion in of it self that I will post another time.
