A thread inspired by a discussion in the Most prophetic piece of Science fiction - #143 by Turble? thread about “SJW” and equality of education vs. gifted kids. It occurs to me that there are two equally unsupportable positions that can be taken.
On one end of the spectrum, pure pragmatic Social Darwinism: your worth as a human being is what you can actually do; no time for losers and deadweight. Randian objectivism.
At the other end, absolute idealist humanism: all human beings by right of being human have an innate moral claim to their fair share of the common weal. Indeed someone who is struggling has a greater claim to assistance than someone who is okay on their own. Society is judged by how it treats its least, and great disparities of wealth are immoral as long as those in need remain. Even those whose behavior is largely responsible for their predicament (addicts, the neurotic, criminals, etc.) are to be gently admonished and offered every opportunity to reform and improve rather than be written off. Parodied in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in the passage about The Twentieth Century Motor Company; or Mark Twain’s short story Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale
Neither extreme, that humanity counts for nothing in the cold equations of an uncaring physical universe, or that humanity overrides all material concerns is practicable. The question is where one draws the line. Certainly it seems to be the case that it would be a waste of potential to abandon people born into poverty and disprivilege, those who sick and can be helped, or even that we shouldn’t spend some time, cost and effort on the “worthless”. But how far do we take it?
In a deterministic world, “deserve” doesn’t have a lot of inherent meaning. Yet we still evolved to develop the sense of moral desert, which dictates that people have some right to that which they created. Any human system has to give weight to human moral intuition. Even a determinist needs to recognize that.
At the same time, if “deserve” gets thrown out the window on a deeper level, then we might should tackle issues of fairness on that level as well. It’s a balancing act.
All of this implies difficult questions. There are plenty of people, perhaps even a majority of people, who would be content to live off the product of others if they were allowed. Quite possibly including me. In order to extract effort from laze-abouts such as myself, there needs to be some feedback mechanism that makes things difficult for such people so that they take their turn pulling some of the weight. This necessitates some degree of “coercion”, or whatever you want to call it.
We balance these things.
Or more accurately, societal attitudes and behaviors float around on random currents, and whenever shit gets too far out of hand in one direction, we hope there is some feedback mechanism to push things back. Sometimes that feedback mechanism even exists.
You can take trying to improve the situation of people with less (of anything - material wealth, intellectual ability, whatever we’re talking about) as far as you want.
When you start actively harming those of higher skill, denying their humanity/dignity, accusing them of having personality disorders, etc., then you are going too far and not really doing anything to help those who are worse off.
When you start denying that humans have different abilities, interests, etc. then you are making policy based on a war with reality, which is definitionally bad.
When you ignore the fact that there need to be people with the ability to move science and other fields forward, that this group is never going to be 100% of people, and that the people who could never invent an electricity grid or formulate a philosophy of racial equality on their own benefit tremendously from the modern society that the intellectual leaders have built, then you are also departing from reality.
I don’t agree that everyone has intrinsic value by mere virtue of being a human. Instead, I think that your human value is partly based on how you treat other people. For me, the million dollar question is, do you through your willful actions bring happiness or misery to the people around you?
I pride myself on having the capacity to hate my neighbor. My criteria for hating someone are that they are making innocent people miserable. There are people in the world for whom I harbor a mortal hatred and whom I would, if I had the power to do so, assassinate/execute and/or subject to “cruel and unusual punishment” such as no longer occurs in many developing, let alone developed countries. I don’t hate these people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. I hate these people because they have exploited the vulnerable, taken innocent lives, abused those that they should have been nurturing, offended human dignity, and abused their authority over others for personal satisfaction, essentially enslaving people. Society would simply be better off without them. I realize some people can be reformed, but to me that is moot when you have committed particular heinous crimes, nor would I trust the likes of an Anders Breivik or a John Wayne Gacy to ever be reformed. And why should I care about the lives of people who have wrecked the lives of others? That is unfair to the victim. I don’t think it’s fair to spend as much time as many people do today worrying about the rights of those who have vicariously offended the rights of others. IMO, you forefit your rights when you don’t respect the rights of others.
That’s where you and I differ. Don’t get me wrong - if you have to fight someone, you fight them, and if you have to kill someone, you kill them. But hate? All hatred does is cloud your judgement and give your enemy a hold on your emotions. It’s a stupid waste of time.
Do you make exception for minors? Because some of those are utterly parasitic and obnoxious little shits, until they hopefully grow up into human beings (some never do).
I mean, if worth is based on wilful actions.
There’s a big difference between moral/legal worth and practical worth.
Most people would agree that murdering a 90-year old man is homicide, just the same as murdering a 10-year old kid. But if given the “you are in a lifeboat and only one can stay” scenario, I think the near-unanimous opinion would be that the 10-year old should live and the 90-year old should die, since the kid has much more life ahead of him.
Nitpick: In a truly Darwinian world your worth as a human being is your ability to reproduce successfully. That’s it. By this standard the deadbeat dad who fathers eleven children with seven different women is more successful than the entrepreneur who builds up a thriving business and a vast fortune, but never marries.
That, of course, is not what Randian objectivists believe. They measure worth by looking at material productivity. But that is to assign a moral or ethical value to material production that you do not assign to other human attainments, and there is no obvious reason why we should do that. Indeed, you can make a strong argument that material production has no inherent moral value; it’s good only to the extent that it enables us to do other things that are intrinsically worthwhile, like caring for people, promoting human flourishing, etc, etc.
And that, I think, points towards a possible answer to the questin. Material production isn’t an absolute transcendent value, and it isn’t of no value whatsoever; it’s relatively valuable - that is, its value is relative to the extent that it enables us to do things that are intrinsically valuable.
As an aside, I’ve never understood the logic behind that. The vast majority of ants and bees never reproduce - does that mean that ants and bees are an evolutionary failure?
What you describe is commonly referred to as the “study of economics”. Basically how to structure society to utilize limited resources to meet the needs and the wants of the people living in it.
Additional nitpick: It’s been awhile since I read Atlas Shrugged. But as I understand it, her philosophy is that material (as well as intellectual) productivity has value because it enables “other things” like caring for people and promoting human flourishing, etc. I.e. if you want to be “cared for”, the best way is to earn enough money to pay a caregiver.
A big part of Objectionist philosophy is the rejection of an imposed obligation because someone “needs” something.
Or to think of it another way. Just because you “need” medical attention doesn’t make a doctor magically appear. A society needs to have the means, resources, and incentives to create medical professionals (andany other service for that matter),
No. In a Darwinian world your worth as a human being (or a bee or ant) is to reproduce your genes. You can do this directly by having kids, or by helping your relatives who share your genes to reproduce, which is what the ants and bees are doing. In some ways it makes sense to think of a bee hive or ant colony as a single organism. A cell in eg your kidney does not reproduce directly, but it has the same DNA as the cells that do, and supports then to do their job. In the same way a worker bee supports the queen to do the actual egg laying, and they share 75% of their DNA thanks to a quirk of reproduction.
Seeing as all human beings are 99.9% identical in terms of genetic makeup, isn’t helping any human reproduce essentially a way of continuing your own genetic heritage?
No, because it is only the genes that aren’t identical in all humans that are being selected on. If some humans have a gene that encourages them to help strangers reproduce at the expense of reproducing themselves, that gene will be less common in the next generation and will eventually die out. But if some humans have a gene that encourages them to help eg siblings, who have a 50% chance of carrying that same gene, that gene may be more common in the next generation. That’s over-simplified, but hopefully you get the idea.
OK, so siblings count as “your” genes. What about first cousins? Second cousins? Third cousins? Where do you draw the line?
That ignores the fact that if you have a gene that causes you to help people, even people without that gene may feel obligated to help you (assuming they have the “obligation” gene, of course), thus increasing your chance of reproduction. Humans are social animals - different from ants in terms of degree and complexity, but not in terms of our essential nature. Looking at individual genetics is only seeing a small part of the picture.
The question is the whether the actions you take as a result of carrying the gene help to spread the gene. Since you in general can’t tell which of your relatives carry it, it’s a question of probability. A full sibling has a 50% chance of carrying the altruism gene, a first cousin 12.5%, a second cousin only 3.1%. In fact, caring for your own children is the most frequent and obvious example of ‘helping relatives in order to spread your genes’, since they also have a 50% chance of carrying any given gene. If you want to learn more about the concept, google ‘inclusive fitness’.
Yes, certainly there are other reasons for altruism, but in general they rely on you getting something back, creating a net benefit for everyone. There is a difference between humans and bees; ‘altruism’ in a bee hive is solely based on inclusive fitness, whereas in human societies it is mostly based on mutual benefit (and as a result human societies have mechanisms to punish those who try to take advantage without contributing their fair share.)
This is a good point. Material production has improved people’s lives in many many ways, so we tend to forget it is only a good thing inasmuch as it continues to do that.
Evolutionary biologists have actually gone a long way into answering these exact sorts of questions. You should look into the evolution of altruism, or evolutionary theory more generally if you’re interested.
But while such information is essential in helping figure out how people behave, it is not the ultimate arbiter about how we should behave. A fair-eyed view of what we are does not necessarily limit what we could be.
Ants and bees are so collectivized that I think it helps to consider each colony as a single organism. A human’s skin cells, lung cells, liver cells, etc. will never reproduce into a separate organism. That doesn’t necessarily make them evolutionary failures compared to the sperm and eggs. It just means their’s is a support role, just like the worker bees and ants, without which the directly reproductive structures would be unable to successfully reproduce.
I agree. But understanding ourselves is essential to creating good policy: the fact human altruism is not just like bee altruism helps explain eg the failure of collectivism in communist countries. We would be better off knowing what is likely to be effective or workable before trying such human experiments.