Ethics Origins: The Moral Good

So during a recent episode of the partially examined life there was a discussion that circled around a particular philosopher's answer was to the following question:  Is what God commands good because he commands it?  Or does he command it because it is good?  I thought about this, trying to twist it into my world view (which we'll get to again at some point) but I decided to get the opinion from some friends of mine who are deeply Christian but also deeply intellectual and have brains wired up for philosophy.  They had some amazing responses and it helped me shape my own view as well as sparked some reactions and thoughts.  Rather than keeping these locked in the e-mail chain, I'm subjected the internet at large to them.

My friend, we'll call him "Tim", broke the question down in an initially unexpected way.  He started by a semi-rhetorical 'is there anything we can conceive of above God?'.  Because only if you answer 'yes' to that questions can the Good be independent and thus commanded because of its Goodness (I'm going to attempt to distinguish between good acts and the moral Good as a super-structure as much as I can, but remember I don't edit these things, I'm not a writer).  I thought this was interesting because I initially felt intuitively that God commands these things because they are good things, if he can shape what is the Good then there seems to be a little bit of arbitrary judgement there (this would change, don't worry).  This also meant, to Tim, that God would be 'bound' by the Good, and would no longer be a free being.  He then went on to site a concrete example that shows you why I chose to e-mail him about this:

...{T}ake the Greek Pantheon, for instance, they behave in such a way
as to be more or less `good` because they are not bound to be perfect,
just more or less super-human. In {this} case, 'good' is a
moral ideal quite outside of the God(s)...

I just thought that crystallizes his initial point, as well the meaning of the question as a whole really.

Tim then followed with his own counter-point.  If we take the opposite persuasion and say an action or morality is good because God commands it, we have to address the 'arbitrary rules' problem.  The problem was dodged in two ways.  The first was to name that God is 'pre-existent' which is to say he is 'necessary' which is to say, the Universe was never without God and thus this 'other Good' isn't possible.  And the second to simply point out that the discussion on if what we think is evil was good (in the alternate universe) coherent life and society would be pretty unsustainable, and perhaps unattainable.

These responses I can understand, but I don't feel satisfied.  This is perhaps due to the fact that I don't believe God is necessary and pre-existent.  My spirituality is very secular (this is really for a whole different blog post) but in my view conscious life spawned a Force which pushes us forward in a very haphazard and non-focused way.  Very much not judeo-christian God, but they act very similar nowadays it seems.  I feel that if God were to create the Good by commanding it then he had that reason out what they were.  If it was his arbitrary free will and he wanted to create a living thing that was capable of more than self-destruction then reason would guide him to a set of rules.  The problem with that then is that if humans can reasonably further their cause and the greater uplifting of humanity with something that isn't The Good (I don't have a candidate for this thing, but it could possibly happen) then we can apply it because God would see that it is reasonably good.  This type of thought, by the way, is very Jewish in thought.  Rabbinical debate constantly updates their interpretation of God's law because after the commandments were given to the people, they were literally given to the people.  I personally love this idea because to my brain, if I were the 'average' Christian God I'm all Good, all Powerful, all Knowing then I would have to give rules to people in the beginning of robust society that was going to survive, guide, and assist them up to their adventures through the stars.  You better believe the things I'm going to write are supposed to be adapted to modernity.  I don't want to believe in a God that built humans and never wanted us to advance to a state of knowledge where we could have a blog post about the moral good.

Ok anyway this was interesting, but then a second response in the e-mail chain coming from, let's say "Redmond" unlocked a different interpretation that I found myself instantly agreeing with.  He laid out 2 premises, but for the sake of not having a 10 page blogpost I'm only going to really engage with the first one.

1. God's nature is Goodness. God is The Good. (He is also The True, The Beautiful..)

With this premise (which you either buy or you don't depending on your spirituality, so being if you're going "well I don't agree" then philosophy probably isn't for you, because this isn't the part you disagree with yet) we get can see the answer to both questions is actually "yes".  Redmond did make the point that it's both questions without the 'only'.  Namely God commands it because it is Good and it is Good because God commands it.  This is the case because God is the Good.  In other words

God's character is Goodness, so his commands are in keeping with it, and they are good because "The Good" commands it. These arguments also extend to Truth 

I left that bit about the Truth in their because I wanted one or two of you (is that 100% of my readership?) to go "oooOOoooOo".

I really like the approach because it seems to make perfect sense with my world view.  The unified consciousness of all existence has the experience of everything.  We know what is Good because it (S/he) knows what is good and what isn't.  If God is not a corporeal being (no white beard I guess) you can view him as a collection of forces, a collection of Forms to use platonic language.  The Good is one of His forms, for a corporeal analogy it's one of his lungs (why lung? I don't know, stop being picky).  

Ok so premise two was that all these Forms or Forces that are God's being are unified within God.  This is pretty intuitive.  If God is a single entity (we're not in ancient Greece anymore) then... yeah... unity.  What this allows us to do though is totally get rid of the 'arbitrary rules' concern.  You might still be thinking "Ok so God is the Good and the Good is God, I still think that gives us the power to make The Good actually something evil".  Well not really.  God is all forces remember?  Most important he is Truth, which means that this universe is necessarily correct in it's measure of Goodness.  Thus, if the Good were to be evil then it would be less truthful, and violate God's Truth... iness... which cannot happen.

I really felt that in the end, to me, the unity of the Guider (be it God or otherwise) acting AS the Good was personally satisfying.  I bet that it might not be that way for you though, please tell me your thoughts.  

Re-awakening and Re-imagining

So it's been a few years since I attempted a blog of any sort.  I feel like it's time to start it up again if only because re-reading my past things makes me sad that I've spent the intervening time between blogs in a mentally vacuous and intellectually barren landscape of my own creation.  Now, in the past few months I've been listening devotedly to the Partially Examined Life (A podcast by some guys who were at point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it) on my way to and from work and because of that my brain has been fully powered up and I've been thinking ridiculous things and pondering many of life's smaller mysteries.  So much of this blog (hopefully) will be filled with the kinds of musing that were once found here in ages past.

HOWEVER, in an effort to both satisfy myself as well as increase the likelihood of blog longevity I will also be posting things under the tag "gaining perspective", which will be about exactly what you would expect.  Any observation I find particularly striking and eye opening.

These two are likely to often, if not always, cross over.

The first post is going to be hardcore under the "gaining perspective" header.  This tidbit was the main impetus for restarting a blog.  Also it's one of those "we're only a speck of dust in the grand cosmic universe" moments that I think sort of make all your insignificant humans problems seems less troubling.

In an altogether uncouth but to my mind's eye necessary-for-impact move, I'm going to set up the event that cause me to write this blog.  Make you read the paragraph that was previously referred to as "the event" word for word.  And then ruminate for a few paragraphs.  Begin:

So there is a game bored nerds play.  You pick the wikipedia "page of the day" and start reading.  When you get to the first linked word or term that you don't know (and it's not grossly obvious by context) you click on it.  Lather, Rinse, Repeat.  Well today I started on Apex Predator.  And (for those who aren't made out of time AND curiosity) an Apex Predator is essentially the very top of the food chain (A level 5 predator), they eat whatever they want and no one dares eat them.  Apex Predator took me to trophic levels (the levels of predator, with plants being on the bottom).  Trophic levels had a discussion on biomass, the amount of energy each thing must consume to power itself, and then biomass efficiency.  And then this happened:

Generally, each trophic level relates to the one below it by absorbing some of the energy it consumes, and in this way can be regarded as resting on, or supported by the next lower trophic level. Food chains can be diagrammed to illustrate the amount of energy that moves from one feeding level to the next in a food chain. This is called an energy pyramid. The energy transferred between levels can also be thought of as approximating to a transfer in biomass, so energy pyramids can also be viewed as biomass pyramids, picturing the amount of biomass that results at higher levels from biomass consumed at lower levels.

The efficiency with which energy or biomass is transferred from one trophic level to the next is called the ecological efficiency. Consumers at each level convert on average only about 10% of the chemical energy in their food to their own organic tissue. For this reason, food chains rarely extend for more than 5 or 6 levels. At the lowest trophic level (the bottom of the food chain), plants convert about 1% of the sunlight they receive into chemical energy. It follows from this that the total energy originally present in the incident sunlight that is finally embodied in a tertiary consumer is about 0.001%

Ok did you just get a little bit awed?  Or am I just way off base?  Do I need to break down why this is unreal?  Ok fine i'll do it anyway because this is how my brain is wired.

The 'speck of dust' feeling hit me like a pillow case full of batteries on the last line.  The amount of energy humans, lions, bears, and any other 'strong' 'powerful' 'dominating' animal (as tertiary consumers) use that the sun gives us is .001% of the energy originally provided to the system.  The sun; giant fusion reactor that provides the catalyst for ALL life and the "top dog" ends up harnessing .001% to run our very selves?

Now your gut reaction (if you are still pro-us on a biological level... or something) might be "well why not just say 'humans are so efficient we only need .001% to run our bodies'?  Valid question, except we're looking at the efficiency with which we use total sunlight energy as part of the whole system.  Not the efficiency with which our body uses the energy alone.  Subtle but important distinction, let me elaborate.  When we say efficiency with which we use our total sunlight what I mean is this.  A bunch of bacteria and decaying matter absorbs sunlight and breaks down to feed plants.  This plant fertilizer is combined with more sun to create a plant.  Because efficiency is about 10% from this level to level two (herbivores) herbivores have to eat TONS of plants.  You ever seen how much elephants eat?  (hint: a impressively huge amount).  Then we go up again and again and we see things like lions, who in the wild do pretty much two things: eat and sleep, because they don't have the energy for anything else.  Yeah humans do a lot of things, but we have bio-engineered our food to be  pressure packed with nutrients WAY beyond the normal order of nature and we still have to eat pretty large quantities of things in order to sustain ourselves.  Ask any vegan about the volume of nuts they need to eat in order to maintain the protein levels.

If we were saying .001% is the efficiency with which our bodies use the energy than 99.999% of the energy would still be available and namely not used up in making plants, then animals, then other animals, then us.  We aren't some sort of amazing efficient sun users.  We would be the worst sun-energy users if there were things other than dead planets of gas and/or rocks using the energy to compete with.

So it seems that even humans, even with our nature-cheating foods in terms of energy efficiency, are converting a minuscule amount of the energy provided to sustain life up the food chain in order to sustain our own.  It takes obscene amount of sun-energy to provide humans with our very lives.  I can't even fathom some of the calculations for sun-energy it takes to create a rocket ship.  

And I get that we have developed energy from other sources than the sun, I get that humans have engineering, I'm not here telling you that the Sun is actually our Lord and Savior and that we need to start worshiping the almighty power of particle/wave duality.  I'm just saying that life requires an insane amount of energy provided in it's most fundamental form to just barely sustain itself and survive, even without expansion.  

It also strikes me, as I'm typing this, that this sort of 'eye-opener' would be useful in a conversation with an average person where you're trying to convince them that it doesn't matter if global warming is man-made or not.  If a few degree shift kills off some tiny but abundant species of plant, or even bacteria decrease total energy available to our system and thus cause cataclysmic energy (of the most basic sort) shortages why would we not attempt to cancel that?  Sure Earth got cold and warm throughout history, BUT WE WEREN'T ALIVE FOR THAT!  In fact all life has basically been on the brink of being blinked out and totally obliterated a number of times.  But all of this is another debate, or three.  And at the very least something more provocative that I want to be in my first post back.

It seems to me that were our Earth even just physically smaller that humans would have a hard time developing at the rate we did, if we could even develop at all.  Reaching this conclusion isn't hard if you think about the ratios of mass requires for us to develop.  Before humans were able to develop society and our modern conception of life we were hunter-gatherers.  The advent of farming and agriculture, domestication of animals, these things rooted us and demanded we flourish in more than just survival.  But all of that expansion would have been forced stagnant quickly had our earth been too small to support vast ecosystems and HUGE amounts of edible matter to consume.  Sure humans could have evolved on a small planet, however think about the wars humanity has fought over resources.  Can you imagine were we'd be if we lived on a world small enough that we didn't have entire countries that could be dedicated to farming?  Uncounted and likely uncountable square miles of this earth are dedicated solely to the production of food for humans and we still starve all over the planet.  If space was at a premium in the 1600's like it is currently... If humanity survived to 2012 it'd be a miracle.  You may optimistic about mankind's humanity, as it were, but either way we can imagine things would not be pretty if we had less than what Earth happens to have.

In summary; It takes a ridiculous volume of sunlight>plants>small animals>not so small animals to keep the tops of the food chain alive.  And we have obesity problems.  Some single-celled organism on some planet without much atmosphere to allow vegetation to thrive is starving.  And you just threw out those old leftovers.

So I feel this was not a flash-bang start, as I was hoping.  I felt as I was typing this that the impact I first felt might be falling flat due the blunt force nature of my writing and the painfully yet, un-progressing nuanced way I make a point.  But hopefully you got at least some sense of awe from thinking about the ridiculous volume of light energy required to keep living meat going sustained.  And perhaps a bit about how lucky we are to be in an ecosystem vast and dense enough that we can support enough trophic levels to develop humanity.

If you have ideas for things you'd like to discuss or just read some rumination on please let me know.  I'm willing to go on pretty much any topic as long as you're point in suggesting something is just to pick something so boring or outrageous it's not worth thinking about.  Hopefully this first post doesn't ruin your willingness to come back next time.

Not a philosophical post

Words I think are weird and awesome:

Therein

Notwithstanding

Heretofore

wherewithal

therefor

insofar

inasmuch

nevertheless

whosoever

I'm sure there are more but are you getting the picture here? These words seem redundant and bizarre for our language. They are just other words smashed together. Half the

When is where you're from become where you are?

So I was thinking about heritage today, and how people identify themselves and it strikes me that there really is no rule for how people say where they are from.

If someone asks me I almost always say "i'm 50% Italian and 50% bitsa; Bitsa this and Bitsa that"... Because my mother's ancestry is so intertwined.

But really, when you break it down, where am I from? My mom's side of the family can trace the family tree back to before 1776 in this country. On my dad's side I'm 3rd/4th generation Italian depending on whether you look at my grandfather or my grandmother's lineage.

But how far back do you go for "where you're from"? My grandmother recently visited a dermatologist who said "you may not realize this but at some point your family was French. You have French skin." Now assuming this man was right, does that mean my grandmother's family, who lived in Italy for more than 4 generations (we can't trace back further than that) is French and not Italian? That seems a little ridiculous, all our customs, beliefs, etc. are born of Italian culture.

However, what then does that make my mother and half of me? If 'where your from' becomes 'where you're family has been' for the last 150 years as we would argue for my grandmother, than I'm a Native American. 50% of my blood has been born and raised in the United States since before the United States existed!

On the other hand if you go back forever when can you stop? The beginning of humanity? Aside from debate of whether we came from Adam and Eve created directly by God or whether we developed slowly over an extremely long time from chimpanzees the question of "how far back" is still legitimate. At some point we were all from the same stock. At some point our heritage exists in a time where land didn't have definitive borders, written language didn't exist, and humans as a species were just beginning.

So what am I? Italian? French? Native American? 5-10% of various countries spread throughout Europe? And what are you? Even if you are 100% _____, at some point one of your ancestors was NOT born in the geographical region that you claim to be from.

Perhaps it's a sliding scale. I'm 50% Italian because my father's side of the family has identified so strongly with it's Italian heritage that regardless of how long they were in Italy, it is who they are. Perhaps i'm MORE than 50% Italian; my mother's side of the family doesn't have any strong traditions. Perhaps i'm LESS than 50% italian. Many Italian cultural developments were tweaked when they immigrated to the U.S. Perhaps my "italian-american" title means that i'm some un-defined percent above 50 'native american'.

A thought that just popped into my head as i was writing this is that this difficulty is perhaps why many Jews will respond to the "who are you?" question with "I'm Jewish". Religion is often times a much more powerful contributor to social identity then our blood lineage, especially in the modern United States. Is it possible that unconsciously a large percent of the Jewish public understands than ancestry through geographical location is irrelevant when the culture that feeds your tradition is religious and thus not bound to a continent or country.

I don't really have a conclusion for this post... It's largely just a question. I'm not in the midst of some sort of identity crisis. I think largely we define ourselves by how we would like to be viewed, and in this sense I'm and Italian American through and through. But nevertheless (i may write a blog post on words like nevertheless, i think they are awesome and ridiculous) there still exist the question of how can we truly define ancestry without putting someone in a box that doesn't really seem to fit. So much seems to ride on it, we do projects on it grade school, you discuss your world views with new friends/lovers by defining the lens of your lineage... We have family trees and official, government-held documentation on bloodlines across the globe, yet there is really no way to explicitly define how we say "who we are".

Strange.

When did I gain this experience?

Today i was carrying a trash bag and a large cardboard box filled with recyclables. When trying to adjust my grip on a cardboard box i discovered the my pointer and middle finger just refused to listen to my desire to move them. This refusal to act despite my brain's desire to alleviate discomfort and the feeling of a slipping box was due to the fact that those two fingers and my thumb were entirely responsible for keeping the box from falling.

This stuck me as sort of phenomenal; my fingers refused to react to a direct order from my brain because it would compromise the integrity of my grip and the box would have fallen.

This got me thinking, when did my body gain the kind of experience needed to refuse a direct order which most of the time one doesn't think about. Fingers not listening to your brain? How often do you attempt to do something and your body doesn't work? Most of the time people view moving their limbs/fingers/self as practically involuntary. Your body doesn't have a choice to not move when you want to move, it's your body!

So knowing absolutely nothing about the subject, i've decided that we gain this experience at some point before our knowledge of it, and this is why. I was trying to think of when i last dropped something because my brain said something stupid to my body and it listened... and i couldn't remember. In fact the only example i have of people just dropping things is babies, and they don't exactly have great grip...

Do we learn this kind of thing in our infancy but it's just so rarely obvious that it takes a bizarre, out-of-place circumstance to identify it?

Certainly there is an unbelievable amount of experience/knowledge we gain before we are cognizant of it, that is beyond question, but do we really learn things that become so instinctual to our body that it over-rides our ability to move?

In other news I think this blog illustrated the reason twitter doesn't work for me. The only things i really feel like sharing are better suited for a facebook status or are things that get my brain started and then it won't fit... Probably why my twitter account is solely used for out-of-context quotes that only i find funny.

Predicting lifestyles

The other day at Dave and Busters I was in a party for approximately 50 fifth graders. About 3/4 of the way through the party a group of 3 girls walked from the back of the party room towards the exit (which would lead them into the mid-way). There were only a handful of people left in the room. These girls came up to a small bucket filled with tickets. The head girl walked up and said something snarky about someone losing their tickets and then took them.

This simple event may just seem kinda mean but otherwise inconsequential but i think it foreshadows something different:

If you steal as a young child, you are either gonna be a cool kid, or a criminal.

I don't mean steal anything. Little kids occasionally take gum, or their sister's favorite toy, or minor boring things, this is not what i'm talking about. The tickets are something explicitly owned by another, and they have value that is beyond a wispy desire. These tickets are something the kids at dave and busters go nuts over.

So here is why i say this. First let's address the criminal aspect cause i think that's obvious. Someone who steals things of value from their peers or others who is of the criminal variety just doesn't care. They desire the tickets, and thus the tickets will be theirs. Now this mentality is something that you can see carrying over and outward. Stealing from friends, stealing minor things from stores, stealing fun luxury items people desire, and so forth.

But that's not the important part, the thing i wanted to talk about is the cool kid, cause that's what this girl clearly was.

The cool kid steals from their friends because they view themselves as just that great. This girl wasn't worried about the person she was stealing tickets from. She was focused on two things; getting a better prize and, more importantly, being a badass in front of her friends. The combination of showing off and simply thinking her desires were above everyone else's was a trait that i saw continuing into the future and creating a cool kid.

Think of the psychology of "the cool kid" in high school. This person is someone who's parents don't really have control over them. This child doesn't respect teachers or authority. Now these things rarely balloon into intense criminal activity, it's simply a lack of respect, not a desire to disobey. The popular child follows the rules that are convenient to them, but if they want something outside the rules (i.e. getting drunk with all their cool friends while their lack-of parents are out of town) they just do it without really thinking about it. These kids are rarely smart. Now this doesn't mean they are dumb, but cool kids are too focused on "life" to worry about getting A's. However they rarely do poorly, it's almost like high school teachers have some sort of inborn respect social hierarchies and give decent but not great grades.

This update wasn't well written or really thorough, but i felt the need to comment on the development of the "cool kid". It struck me as a direct line for this girl to go from snarky, kinda rude, self-centered pack leader of fifth graders to being the cool girl in high school who all the boys want.

or something.

The curse of the Romantic Comedy

So the internet can be used for many things, but with the invention of blogs and online journals, a new window was opened. Everyday, normal, boring, un-educated and very biased people can jump on the internet and will almost instantly have an audience for their ramblings. Today i have post that is just like that, but is so silly in it's accusation that hopefully we can all laugh at this and go "oh that's funny, but causality is absolute"...

The Romantic comedy comes in a few different forms, all with their own merits and own issues, but only on form is truly detrimental on a societal level. The "puppy love distractor" as we could call it, dwells in many romantic comedy films.

Here is the basic plot:

Boy meets Girl.

Boy learns Girl is marrying Other Man but isn't really happy with him.

They flirt and do cutesy courtship type things together and Boy falls in love with Girl.

Other Guy plots to remove Boy, and makes him look like the bad guy.

Girl is upset and continues with her plan to marry Other Guy.

Boy saves the day in the final moments but coming clean (often during the wedding) Girl is overwhelmed with emotion and leaves her husband.

Now this may not seem like such a horrible thing on the surface. The Girl gets the Boy she's really happy with and leaves the scum that would have been her husband. However this makes no sense to me. I'll start with the lesser of two issues; Why would she be marrying someone she hated? Sure not all marriages are wise decisions, but the movie rarely show Girl getting married to Other Guy as a rash, "we're young and in love" move. It's always a planned out thorough big-time affair... Which implies the two have been dating for a LONG time. If the guy was SO bad that any 'young-at-heart' fool off the road could make you have second thoughts then why have you been with him so long? Sure you may feel nervous about your upcoming wedding, but why would that make you flee to a new man? The archetype makes, a way, women look like weak-willed fools who marry cause it's not womanly to say no, but can't control their emotions and flee at the first new boy... And conversely it makes males either by total pricks cause they are focused on the wedding and the future, or like "dirty history but i'm a secret knight in shining armor"... The middle ground male is lost as a romantic target due to the romantic comedy, and Male's are always afraid of the crazy female who's so in love and then just bails cause she meets a new boy when you go through some troubles...

And that's only the first issue...

The second issue, and really i think the heart of the problem, is that the girl leaves the Other Guy for the Boy who does cutesy games with her, and does silly romantic things. That type of behavior is exhibited by everyone when they fall in like with someone. Name someone you've dated that DIDN'T start out romantically. Or at least try to never experience that in any of your relationships.

But these things change... over time you become more stable, your puppy love turns into something deep and meaningful. The silly puppy love things are rare, not necessarily gone, but rare. This is the course of many relationships, and the successful one's are the one's where they re-discover the spark. Change something in their lives, communicate, share with each-other. The marriages that fail are the one's where either the Girl or the Other Guy starts cheating or having second thoughts due to a new interest.

The romantic comedy is funny, and sometimes makes you say "awww, cute"... but the core messages that seems to be coming forth from the story is the Puppy Love is always better than a long-term commitment, and Marriage is something that you can escape from at any time if you find the right person who makes you giggle in the first month you meet them.

Just a weird thought I had... typed out in 20 minutes and not really proof read, sorry if it's terrible.