Stardate 20020930.1439

(On Screen): Steven Leeds asks:

But what I'd like is for someone, anyone, to explain to me why, without resorting to arguments about "God" or "self- evident principles," our culture is "better" than, say, Saudi Arabia's.

Or we can get more specific. Explain to me why Saudi Arabia's penal system is inferior to ours. Or why their treatment of women is inferior.

Don't get me wrong. I'm appalled by many things about Saudi culture - I'm just not sure we can get much beyond the faith-based assertion that ours is simply better - end of story. We are all so certain of our cultural and moral superiority. The interesting thing is we cannot prove why. The certainty we feel simply cannot be attained through purely rational processes.

I think that the main source of his confusion is that his question is internally contradictory.

There's a classic question, of the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin sort, which has consumed many a drunken hour of discussion: What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object?

Actually, the question is nonsense. An "irresistible force" is defined as being a force such that no object in the universe in which that force exists can avoid being moved by it. An "immovable object" is an object such that no force in the universe containing that object can make it change position.

By definition both can't exist in the same universe. If either exists, the other does not. Therefore they cannot meet. They may exist in different universes, but they cannot exist in the same one.

Steven's question includes a similar problem. Without referring to any specific definition of what "good" means, explain why we're better than they are. It can't be done, because without a definition of "good" to which to refer, it ceases to be possible to evaluate "better", and the question becomes "a meaningless noise". (Better means closer to being absolutely good. Without some standard for good, it isn't meaningful to discuss better.)

You cannot avoid referring to some standard for what good means in order to discuss which system is better. Which means that if someone else has a different definition of good then they may come to a different conclusion of which system is better. It is impossible to create an argument for why one system is better than another which all will accept as being persuasive.

And it turns out that when you analyze it, for any given person or group, the definition of good is always axiomatic. An axiom is presumed to be self-evident, and it is stipulated that it cannot be proved or justified. Either you accept a given axiom or you don't, but it isn't possible to make any argument comparing two axioms to prove that one is right and the other wrong, unless you can prove that one of them is actually empirically false. When defining good such a proof isn't possible, so two contradictory axioms about good cannot be evaluated on a logical basis. Good by its nature is not subject to empirical test.

My own axiomatic definition of "good" is fuzzy but it more or less correlates to the extent to which people are happy. In general, if more people are happy, that's better. If fewer people are happy, that's worse. On that basis I can easily determine that the Saudi system is worse than ours. I can certainly judge their treatment of women to be worse because there's every reason to believe that our women average much happier than their women do.

But if your axiomatic definition of "good" is "following the word of the Prophet", then any system which is closer to doing so is better than one which does not, and being happy has nothing to do with that. From their point of view, they are better than us because they're living a life closer to what the Prophet says they should live (which includes subjugation of their women).

And for those of us who value reason over faith, it is a disconcerting result.

Being reasonable doesn't require you to abandon value judgments. Rather, it requires you to understand where and when you're making them, and to understand why you are doing so, and to understand the axioms on which you're basing them, and to try to understand where you got those axioms. (And to make a conscious decision to accept them. The difference between being reasonable and judgmental, and being prejudiced, is that a person who is prejudiced hasn't done that analysis and doesn't truly understand the source and nature of their axioms.)

But it isn't possible to abandon such axioms, or to abandon any formal standard for "good" without spiraling down into an ethical swamp of complete moral relativism. All absolute value judgments are based on axioms, but that doesn't mean that they are worthless.

I consider myself to be a reasonable man, and I feel no hesitation in claiming that their system is evil and cruel. By my standards, that makes our system better. And I don't care about their standards, because I feel that their standards are part of why their system is evil and cruel.

I'm also not particularly interested in the fact that they may make a similar evaluation of me and my system based on their axioms. That doesn't affect my reasoning in any way. I do not grant their axioms equal standing to my own, except on a strictly technical level.

Update 200210