Stardate 20021102.1331

(Captain's log): I've mentioned here before that I'm an "ethical cynic". That's a technical term from philosophy which is not commonly known, and it doesn't quite mean what most people would assume.

It's not that I think that "right" and "wrong" have no meaning. It doesn't mean that I'm amoral. What it rather means is that I think that it is not possible to codify a precise and eternal description of what each word actually means, which can henceforth be used to make ethical decisions.

I've studied many of the world's great ethical systems, and what I finally concluded was that they all ended up failing in various ways. Any ethical system which was based on a reference to divine authority was logically flawed, and after I became an atheist I struggled with various non-religious ethical systems and ultimately found all of them to be less than perfect.

Oh, most of them give the right answer most of the time, but what I found was that they tended to not be, shall we say, robust (in the sense that an engineer uses the term, of being able to deal gracefully with unforeseen challenges). When facing all new ethical problems which do not bear any resemblance to previous issues (e.g., at what point do computers cease to be tools and become slaves?), most of them either yield no answer at all or else they yield answers which are clearly wrong (e.g., computers have no souls, thus they are not alive and can never be slaves).

On balance I've found that Rule Utilitarianism is better than any other system I've studied, but I have problems with it, too. For one thing, in practical application it is much too susceptible to rationalization.

So I've come to the conclusion that all existing ethical systems are at least somewhat flawed, and more importantly I believe (and cannot prove) that all conceivable attempts to formulate complete and consistent and acceptable ethical systems are doomed to failure. It's not that the results will be totally useless, as much as that they're all going to eventually fail under load.

Which is disturbing, because it means that I actually have some sort of ethical system, somewhere, which is telling me that all these formally constructed ones are wrong by telling me what the right answer is that contradicts what they say. I suspect it's a combination of parental indoctrination and biological instinct combined with years of introspection, but whatever it is, I can't even be sure that it is always giving me the right answer (if, indeed, that even makes sense to discuss).

So I'm forced to muddle through life trying to do the ethically correct thing, trying to make do with ethical choices which are good enough, but which I can never be certain are correct. (It's all part of the larger problem with my atheism, which is that I accept that unpleasant truths are better than pleasing lies. I'd love for there to be a complete ethical system I could rely on, but I don't believe such a thing can exist, and to try to pretend that there is one would lead me to do evil.)

One of the ethical problems I've struggled with is selfishness. Is it invariably wrong to be selfish? Is it invariably wrong to value some people more than others, simply because they're familiar or near or because I have some sort of affection for them? Well, let's try a reductio ad absurdum and see what it gets us. Consider the following

The principle of selflessness: All humans are ethically equal in value. It is invariably wrong to arbitrarily prefer any person or group, and to place a higher value on their wellbeing than that of any other person or group.

This is a principle which appears in many guises in many popular ethical systems, and shows up variously in popular wisdom. "No man is an island..." "Ask not for whom the bell tolls..." "All men are brothers..." "Think globally, act locally..." "I am a citizen of the world..." "Love thy neighbor as thyself..." Problem is, it's wrong and a strict application of it leads to terribly evil acts.

Joe has a 4 year old daughter named Jill who he loves deeply. While out shopping he sees a toy and buys it, which he gives to her when he gets home. She is delighted, gives him a big hug and says, "I love you, Daddy!" and then goes away to play with it, leaving him standing there glowing.

According to the principle of selflessness, Joe just committed a deeply immoral act. Suppose that Joe had taken the grocery money and bought a toy with it, which he gave to a strange child, leaving Jill to go hungry because there was no money left for food. That would clearly be wrong.

But the principle of selflessness says that Joe may not place a higher valuation on Jill than he does on any other child, and as long as any child anywhere in the world has less than the necessities of life, then buying luxuries for Jill means depriving that other child of the wherewithal to buy necessities. Joe was ethically obligated to give that money to charity to buy food for starving children in Somalia, rather than spending it on making Jill happy.

In fact, a strict application of the principle of selflessness would require that Joe dress Jill in rags, house her in a hovel, feed her the cheapest possible subsistence diet, and in general spend as little money on her as possible that would keep her healthy (though not necessarily happy) so as to permit Joe to give the highest possible proportion of his income to charity to help other