How I Became Amoral

When I was 9 years old, I lived in an apartment complex at the edge of a small town. Behind the complex, there were hills covered with bunchgrass, sagebrush and a few old ponderosa pines. In those days, kids ran wild from dawn to dusk. We rode around on our bikes, played games, went exploring in the hills, etc. In the process, we learned about life.

In the summer, there were lots of grasshoppers. They would often lay their eggs in cracks in the road. I would sometimes kneel on the road and watch them pumping their eggs into those cracks, oblivious to my presence. Once a female grasshopper is committed to laying her eggs, she stays there until the job is done.

I have always been close to nature. I spent much of my time as a kid outdoors, exploring the landscape and observing plants and animals. I found those grasshoppers interesting for their own sake. But the other kids in the apartment complex enjoyed killing them. They made a game out of running over the grasshoppers with their bikes, leaving behind little squashed bodies with twitching limbs.

This really bothered me. I was raised to view killing as part of life, but not as a game. It bothered me that they were killing the grasshoppers out of sheer cruelty, just for fun. I thought it was wrong.

I asked them why they did it, and they gave me different answers. One said “Grasshoppers are bad. They are bad for the farmers”. Another said “They’re just grasshoppers, so who cares?”. Some just said “It’s fun”.

They didn’t seem to have given it much thought, but one thing was clear: they did not view grasshoppers as worthy of concern or protection. However, it was also clear that they didn’t see the grasshoppers as just objects, like pebbles. The game was fun because the grasshoppers were alive. They could be hurt. They could be killed. The fun was in the killing.

I wondered why I thought it was wrong to kill the grasshoppers, but they didn’t. I realized that I didn’t have a good justification for my belief either. I had the vague notion that killing for fun or cruelty is wrong, but I couldn’t explain why. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered what made something good or evil.

That’s how I first started thinking about the nature of good and evil. I discovered a moral conflict, and then I discovered that there was no principled way to resolve it. I went looking for the basis of moral judgments, but I couldn’t find it.

This raised two important questions:

  • What are good and evil?
  • How do we know if something is good or evil?

I was surprised that there weren’t clear answers to those questions. Everyone believes in the existence of good and evil. It is taken for granted. But no one can explain what good and evil are, or how we recognize them. That didn’t make sense to me.

The grasshopper-killing game also made me think about human nature. It showed that people can enjoy cruelty as much as kindness. People are not nice.

Fall came and the grasshoppers were gone. I often thought about the problem of good and evil as I was walking to school, doing my paper-route, or roaming in the hills. I didn’t obsess about it, but every now and then I mulled it over.

Winter came and went. In the spring, a baby robin fell out of a nest, and some kids brought it to me, because they knew I liked animals. I made a nest for it in a shoebox lined with an old t-shirt. I fed it sugar-water with an eyedropper and little bits of raw meat. It survived and started to grow. Soon I had to find another food source for it. So, I went out hunting worms.

This bothered me. Worms are living beings. They might not have the same kind of feelings that we do, if they have feelings at all, but they clearly want to live, in some sense. They seek out food, and they avoid predators. The bird also clearly wanted to live. Every day I had to feed it worms. I wondered whether it was good or bad to save the bird’s life. Is a worm’s life worth less than a bird’s life? What about a hundred worms? How do you compare two different kinds of life? Was saving the bird good in an absolute sense? Or was it just good for the bird, and bad for the worms?

After thinking about it some more, I realized that it is actually more complicated. I was doing good for some worms and bad for others, good for one bird and bad for others. The bird would grow up to eat other worms. That is bad for the worms it will eat. The bird will grow up to compete with other birds. That is bad for the birds it will compete with. Worms also compete with each other. By killing some worms, I was helping others.

I knew about the competitive nature of life. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that whatever good I did for one living being would be canceled out by harm to others, and vice versa. An act that is kind from one perspective is cruel from another perspective.

That’s when I first understood the zero-sum nature of life. Ecosystems have finite resources. There is a finite amount of matter in an ecosystem, and a finite flow of energy from the sun. Life is a competition for finite resources, and it tends to use all available resources, especially energy. Killing an organism frees up the resources it was using, and this benefits its competitors. The dead organism will also be a resource to other organisms. Although it’s impossible to know all the effects of an action on other living beings, it is possible to know that the net effect on life is zero.

After dinner, I would often walk across the highway to a hill that was part of an old lava flow. I would scramble up the dusty scree full of broken beer bottles, and then climb up a small cliff to a ledge halfway up. There I would sit on the lichen covered basalt and contemplate existence. One day I was sitting on that ledge, thinking about good and evil, when the following thought experiment came to mind.

Suppose that I am standing above a cliff, and a man is hanging by his fingertips from the edge of the cliff. Should I give him a hand up? Or should I let him fall?

Of course, we all know what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to help the guy up. But why?

He could be a serial killer. He could be a cancer researcher. He could be lots of things. If he lives, that will have consequences that are good for some and bad for others. If he dies, that will also have consequences that are good for some and bad for others. Summed over everyone, those consequences will probably cancel out, because of the competitive nature of life. Even if they didn’t, there’s no way that I could know all the consequences of my action. So, even if good and evil were real, I could not base my decision on trying to do good in the world.

If he were my friend, then of course I would help him up, but that would be selfish. I would be helping him because I care about him and value our friendship, not because I’m trying to do good in the world. If he were a stranger, I might help him up because I want to be a hero, or because he might be grateful and reward me. Again, that would be selfish. Or I might help him because I’m afraid of being punished or hated by other people. That would also be selfish. There would always be an underlying selfish reason for my action. It would never be based on trying to do “good” in some general, universal sense.

Perhaps I should I save him because he is human, like me. If that were true, then it would still be selfish at the level of the species. I would be putting my species ahead of others. But since humans are in competition with each other in nature, it is unlikely that I would want to rescue another human just because he is human too. Humans fight wars all the time. Besides, at any given moment I could be helping other humans, but instead I am almost always pursuing my own interests. I would not help him just because he is human, like me.

If I were to help him, there would be a selfish reason for it. It might be to get praise, to make a new friend, to get a reward or to avoid a punishment. My action would be based on what I want, not on some external, objective standard of value.

I looked across the highway, past the apartment complex, past the brown hills and into the blue sky. At that moment, I understood that everything I do is selfish, regardless of whether it is considered to be good or evil. Everything I do is motivated by my desires, and so everything I do is selfish.

From that moment onward, I no longer believed in good and evil.

Comments

  1. There are degrees of consciousness and mental capacity - your friends would not have had as much fun running over kittens or monkeys or humans. Only creatures that have the mental capacity to conceive of abstract rules can be bound and protected by said rules - and only if they reciprocate. Your entire discussion of cruelty in the primitive animal kingdom is absurd.


    > I wondered why I thought it was wrong and they didn't. I realized that I didn't have a good justification for my belief either. I had different feelings about it than the other kids, but I couldn't justify my feelings any more than they could. I didn't know what those feelings were based on.

    You didn't have a good justification for why this was wrong, because it wasn't, morally speaking. (Morality = universally preferable behavior.) What you felt was simply disgust at the pain (perhaps anthropomorphized/projected pain) caused to those grasshoppers.


    > I knew I was not exempt from [cruelty].

    As a budding kid it might make sense to explore boundaries, but are still cruel today?

    ...

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    1. > "Only creatures that have the mental capacity to conceive of abstract rules can be bound and protected by said rules - and only if they reciprocate."

      That is very arbitrary. By the same logic, a newborn infant or a person with severe dementia may not be protected by the Libertarian NAP if they lack the mentally ability to understand it. Most people would disagree and insist that those humans deserve the same legal protections as more mentally capable humans.

      > "Morality = universally preferable behavior"

      No, Morality is not "universally preferable behavior". You just made that up. Most people in Japan, the United States, and Europe view the assassination of Shinzo Abe to be a "morally bad" thing since they like Japan, but most people in China and Korea view his assassination to be a "morally good" thing because they hate Japan. If it was truly the case that it is "universally preferable" to condemn murder, then why are there hundreds of millions people who applaud the assassination and celebrate the assassin as a hero?

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  2. > How do you compare two different kinds of life?

    In moral terms, the only important criteria is if they're able to understand and reciprocate rules. Moral rules, if they exist, are a subset of these that ought to be universally upheld.


    > I reasoned that whatever good I did for one living being would be canceled out by harm to others

    Dumb reasoning. The second part of that statement doesn't necessarily follow the first.

    > There is a finite amount of energy that can be used by life, and life tends to use all available energy. Thus helping or harming one living being does not affect the total amount of life.

    Hence why thinking about morality merely in terms of energy balances is unproductive and nonsensical.


    > Life is a competition for the energy of the environment, so there can be no act that is universally good for life, only acts that are good for some and bad for others.

    Only if you define "good" in some retarded way like "optimizing, or fairly utilizing, the energy available."

    ...

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    1. > "In moral terms, the only important criteria is if they're able to understand and reciprocate rules. Moral rules, if they exist, are a subset of these that ought to be universally upheld."

      According to who, and why? For starters, this claim doesn't make any sense since your definition of morality has been easily debunked.

      > "The second part of that statement doesn't necessarily follow the first."

      Yes it does. Life is an energy-stealing game, that's what it's all about.

      > "Thinking about morality merely in terms of energy balances is unproductive and nonsensical."

      What? Not only does this claim of yours not make any sense, but you didn't explain why you believe it. Moreover, it makes way more sense to think of morality from a biological perspective than to think about it in terms of a definition that contradicts the nature of biology and game theory, like the definition that you gave.

      > It is retarded to define "good" as "optimizing, or fairly utilizing, the energy available."

      Your reasoning for this is missing. You haven't given any reasons why we should think of morality from a psychological point-of-view, rather than a biological game-theoretic point-of-view. The latter yields a definition of morality that doesn't contradict reality, whereas the former does.

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  3. > The conventional answer is that you help the guy [who is about to fall off a cliff] up. That is the good thing to do. But why?

    Modern moral theory says you aren't obligated to help him. Positive obligations cannot be sustained as universal norms.


    > Should I save him because he is human, like me? If that were true, then it would still be selfish at the level of the species. I would be putting my species ahead of others.

    Not only are other species not subject to the same moral protections as us, since they can neither conceive nor recipricate moral norms, but even so using more energy in the ecosystem doesn't necessarily harm other species. Animals shouldn't breed if there isn't enough energy around to sustain themselves. Just like a mother is being cruel/evil if she has babies that she cannot feed.


    > humans are in competition with each other in nature

    Humans aren't fighting over the last bits of air, land, water, etc. Our competitions are chosen / voluntary. Having one more human born on this planet won't hurt any existing human, nor any cognitively sophisticated animal if that human becomes vegan. The energies in our ecosystems aren't that scarce - it's not like we're all fighting for the last evaporating watering hole in a parched desert.


    > For me to help him, there would have to be some benefit to me as an individual. It might be to get praise or approval, to make a new friend, to get a reward or to avoid a punishment. Those reasons are all selfish. They are based on what I want, not on some external, objective standard of value. Any reason I could have for helping him would ultimately be selfish.

    So? Being selfish is okay. You've been brainwashed to think it's wrong.


    Morality, defined as universal preferable behaviors, does exist. At the very least, it exists among humans who claim they don't want to hurt innocent people, which is the only humans we should care about (right?), and fortunately that's basically everyone (even though people usually contradict themselves). It's a disgrace that our education systems have failed in teaching us such a basic concept (probably for fear of offending their nutty religious populations). Hans Hermann Hoppe (Argumentation Ethics), Stephan Kinsella and Stefan Molyneux have all explained it properly.

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    1. > "Humans aren't fighting over the last bits of air, land, water, etc."

      That's literally what they've done all throughout modern history, with the main exception being the modern era.

      > "Our competitions are chosen / voluntary."

      No, they aren't. If competition was truly voluntary, then there would be no competition at all because everyone would avoid it. One of the most fundamental principles of geopolitics is that selfish players (countries in this case) will compete against each other for scarce resources. And there are no permanent friends, only temporary allies for as long as the right conditions for cooperation hold true.

      > "Having one more human born on this planet won't hurt any existing human."

      If it's exactly *one* human, then probably not. But it isn't. The world population is increasing by several tens of millions of humans every year. Only a fool would say that there's no way this continuing trend could ever go wrong on a planet with finite resources. Unlimited population growth is unsustainable, and that's what we're heading towards.

      > "The energies in our ecosystems aren't that scarce"

      Yes they are, and they always have been. And it will only become more apparent as the world population continues to grow. If that continues, all it will take is another major crisis or two to make the world's food/resource supplies trip up and unable to keep up. Then you'll catch a glimpse of how biological systems have *always* work.

      > "Being selfish is okay. You've been brainwashed to think it's wrong."

      If anybody thinks that being selfish is wrong, then that would be you. You think that it's "evil" to have children that you cannot feed, even if that turns out to be the most successful (and selfish) reproductive strategy. You also deem many so-called "immoral" behaviors to be "universally wrong", even though they're motivated by selfish desires, whereas I don't view them to be universally wrong nor universally right.

      > "Morality, defined as universal preferable behaviors, does exist."

      Since you keep using the descriptor "universally preferable", it seems that you care about what the greatest number of people would consider to be moral or immoral, right? If so, then you should pay your taxes instead of trying to evade it. The vast majority of people consider taxation to be preferable and morally right, and since it's impossible to reach a 100% consensus by everybody anyway, you should be in favor of taxation and paying your taxes too, if you want to be "moral" anyway (according to most people's brains and mirror neurons).

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  4. > "Modern moral theory says you aren't obligated to help him."

    Modern Liberals disagree with you. Who's to say that your beliefs are more correct than theirs, besides yourself?

    > Other species are not subject to the same moral protections as us, since they can neither conceive nor reciprocate moral norms.

    If that's true, then human babies, severely retarded people, and the mentally disabled elderly do not have the same legal protections as everyone else, which contradicts most people's moral intuitions, at least in today's world anyway. Though I am indifferent since I understand that literally nothing is objectively immoral.

    > "but even so using more energy in the ecosystem doesn't necessarily harm other species."

    Yes it does. The Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuels, which fundamentally changed the Earth, caused tons of pollution, and lead to the sixth largest mass extinction event in the Earth's history. As another example, humans have had to breed literally billions of livestock animals inside slaughterhouses in order to generate enough meat to feed the planet, and yet it still isn't enough, in part because the human population won't stop growing.

    > Animals shouldn't breed if there isn't enough energy around to sustain themselves. Just like a mother is being cruel/evil if she has babies that she cannot feed.

    And yet animals will still breed anyway irregardless. If there's a famine and civilization collapses, the most reasonable thing to do from a biological/evolutionary/game-theoretic point-of-view is to take what you can and give nothing back. Because that is what will maximize your reproductive success. And all the organisms that follow that strategy will spread their genes to a greater extent, whereas the most altruistic ones who choose to have fewer offspring will have their kind die out. You don't seem to understand biology or evolutionary theory very well...

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