Kesey's Letter: Thoughts on Truth and Empathy

Note: This is a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. I'm posting it again now because my last post was about symbolic logic, of all things, and it doesn't get much more dry and analytical than that. I feel like I should restore some balance by posting something a little less cold and mechanical. In fact, I wrote this in part to remind myself not to be too cold and mechanical. But it didn't work. I slipped back into a bit of emotional tone-deafness. It's a failing I have--I get so caught up in thinking that I forget to feel. That's really quite stupid, for reasons I explore below. So I'm going to remind myself again--hanging on to past insights is one of the major purposes of this blog, after all. I thought about tackling this topic all over again, and then I realized I probably won't be able to say it better than I said it here. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy. Anyway, here it is again:

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I just read a letter by Ken Kesey, the '60's wildman famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and for leading a band of pioneer hippies known as the Merry Pranksters on a cross-country trip in a psychedelic school bus--a trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey's life was, oddly, defined by school buses.  In 1984, after Kesey had long since settled down, his son Jed was on another school bus, on his way to a wrestling meet.  The bus started sliding, and went over a cliff.  Jed was comatose when he was pulled from the bus, and died a few days later. Kesey wrote the letter afterward to some of his closest friends, describing his son's last minutes in the hospital, and his touching funeral. It's a heartbreaking, honest, beautiful letter, written by a man bent with grief but still overwhelmed by his love for his friends and family, and for the relentless beauty of a world where birds keep right on singing, no matter who was just buried.

But don't rely on my second-hand account.  By all means, read it yourself (unless now is not a convenient time to shed a tear). I'm going to wait, though, and put the link at the bottom of this post. If you read the letter now, you're not going to want to come back to my anemic, overly-analytical scribblings which it inspired.  At least, I wouldn't if I were you.

My friend who recommended the letter to me said it made her “cry noisily.” It didn't quite do that to me, and that's probably my loss. But it did make me think. Well, that's not quite right. It made me feel, and then think. I'm usually more of a thinker than a feeler.  I'm one of those withdrawn ponderers who is as attracted to ideas as to people (unless they're people who have a lot of interesting things to say).  For years, I've imagined that I prefer facts to feelings, not realizing until today just how silly that statement is. Why it is so silly will take some explaining.

Memo: Editing Jesus

Rick Bachabee
President

Cross and Sword Coalition of America

“Wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”

Brothers and Sisters,

The Religious Right has had some real success in the the last few years. The Tea Party movement has finally brought Christ's message of small government and low taxes to state governments and the halls of Congress. I'm happy to say we're as powerful as we've ever been. 

But, brothers and sisters, I'm troubled by the things I hear from our enemies. No, I'm not talking about the Muslims or the gays. I'm talking about those who call themselves Christians, but turn their backs on far-right politics. Some of these pretenders, and their secular allies, have taken to calling us the H word. You guessed it...hypocrites. They go on and on about how Jesus loved the poor and healed the sick, and they say if we really wanted a Christian government, then we would want that government to help them. They even say that's what our Savior himself would have done! Where do they get this stuff?

Even worse, these pretenders in Christ have taken to quoting scripture, using the Bible--OUR Bible--against us. They're getting that hypocrite stuff right out of the Gospels, using Jesus' own words to call us "false prophets" and "wolves in sheep's clothing." The nerve of some people! 

Just the other day I saw people using these verses from Matthew against us:

 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ 44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ 45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Now, we all know Jesus wasn't really taking up for a bunch of ragged takers looking for handouts. It might seem like he was, but that's a misinterpretation. Some parts of the Bible should be taken literally and some shouldn't. The parts about God creating the Earth in six days, the snake that talked, Noah living 950 years; those are literally true. That's just common sense. 
But some passages require a more subtle interpretation. 

Those words from Matthew are those of Christ himself, and we all know he spoke in parables. He didn't literally mean to give food to hungry people, or invite dirty, half-dressed strangers into our houses and places of worship. I mean really, is that how our Savior would have acted? It's a parable, like the mustard seed or the camel passing through the eye of the needle.

You knew that one would come up didn't you? They love to use that part of Matthew against us. You know the one, where the rich man asks Jesus what he should do to get into heaven:

21 Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 22 When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 23 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Those verses always have been troublesome, haven't they? Personally, I don't think Christ could have really said them. Sell your possessions and give to the poor? That's practically communist! It doesn't fit in with our gospel of prosperity at all. And that stuff about how hard it is for the rich to get into heaven...what is that about? That young man was a job creator!

No, Jesus just wouldn't have said that, and he certainly wouldn't have said it twice for emphasis, like that passage implies. Of all his lessons, why would he pick that one to emphasize? Why not the evils of homosexuality, the dangers of evolution, or the importance of keeping "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? It just doesn't make sense.

Brothers and sisters, there's only one thing to do: We've got to change those verses. That's the only way to keep people from reading them in inconvenient ways. The ones I've been quoting make Jesus out to be some kind of bleeding heart who loved everybody unconditionally. And we can't have that. 

So let me show you what I have in mind. Take the first pairs of “Blessings and Woes” in Luke. We could change those in several different ways to reflect their one true meaning, but here are my suggestions:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God rich, for you are the job creators, and yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now,  for you will be satisfied are well fed now, for that proves you are hard workers. Or at least rich, and therefore blessed (see above).

But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort poor, for you have already received your handouts. 

Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry who hunger now, for we cut your food stamps.

See how easy that is? And speaking of blessings, we can leave "blessed are the peacemakers" alone. That was clearly a prophecy foretelling the coming of the Colt Peacemaker; the gun that would win the west. When Jesus comes back, I'm betting that's the sidearm he'll carry. Try taking that one away, gun-grabbers!

I could do this all day, but I think you get the idea. Give it a try! Grab the Sermon on the Mount and a red pen and get busy. It's time we bring the Bible in line with our actual practices. If we start talking like we've been walking, how can anyone accuse us of being hyp...the H word?

Now, I know some of you will have qualms at first. But what are our other options? As long as we say we want a Christian government, people are going to say, "Well, then, why don't you want it to help the sick and poor?" We could cave in and let them keep church and state separate, but then we'd be taking mandatory prayer out of the schools, teaching unexpurgated science, letting homosexuals marry, and opening liquor stores on Sunday. And we can't have all that. 

The other option is to keep calling for a Christian government, and start following all that stuff about helping the poor, healing the sick, loving our enemies, being merciful, blah blah blah...  I don't know about you, but that one doesn't sound good to me either. 

No, if people keep using the H word on us, there's only one way to have our cake and eat it too, and that's editing the Holy Scriptures themselves. I know it may seem shocking. But if you think about it, we on the far right have been editing Jesus for a long time with our words and deeds. All I'm doing is pointing it out; spelling out what's usually unspoken. What should be shocking is for Christians to act in direct opposition to Jesus' words.

And that's why we have to change those words! Sure, people will give us a hard time at first, even that foolish majority of Christians who think Jesus meant what he said about this stuff. But if we keep repeating the new versions, they'll eventually forget the old ones. Americans have a short attention span these days. Besides, if we finally take over this country, then we'll be the ones calling the shots about how the Bible is read.

Yours in Christ,

Rick Bachabee

Rough Beasts

I have an odd habit. I'm always watching for interesting flowers and insects, taking pictures of them, and posting them on Facebook--as if everybody thought they were just as fascinating as I do. And sometimes they do. The other day, a friend (who, unlike me, actually makes a living as a writer) suggested I write about some of the weird bugs I see. It seemed like a good suggestion. I've let myself get too preachy on this blog anyway, and besides, she's a professional and I should probably listen to her.

The only problem, though, is that if you look closely at the world of insects, what you see tends to be kind of horrifying. As Annie Dillard put it, "Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another."

It's true. Insect behavior can remind nature lovers like me not to romanticize the natural world too much. Nature can be achingly beautiful, but it's also for the most part amoral. It's not cruel--cruelty requires consciousness--it's just blind to things like hope, pleasure and pain. In the poem The Second Coming, Yeats talked about a "rough beast...its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." Most of the time, nature is just such a beast.

Sometimes it seems the like littler nature's beasts are, the rougher they get. For example, the other day I spotted this little drama on a blade of grass. A katydid was in the grip of Sphex nudus, the Katydid Wasp. In the picture it looks like the katydid is about the become the wasp's dinner, but actually...it's worse than that. Digger wasps like Sphex nudus sting their prey to paralyze them, and then bring them back to their nests, which are burrows in the ground. Then they deposit them in one section of the nest, lay an egg, and seal the chamber up. When the egg hatches, the larva will feed on its living larder. The wasps are parasites (parasitoids, technically, but we won't get into that).

This katydid may have escaped that fate, because the wasp got alarmed by my camera and dropped it. I like to think the katydid hadn't been stung yet, and that the wasp didn't come back. But I don't know. I also like to think katydids are absolute automatons, as incapable of conscious experiences like pain and fear as a wind-up toy robot. At least I hope that's true of the ones that run into Katydid Wasps. But I don't know that either, and I suspect it's not entirely true. And evolution doesn't care either way. If evolution is blind to pleasure and pain, then behaviors like this will evolve whether or not the victims are conscious of what's happening to them.

And evolve they do, over and over again. Among the Katydid Wasp's cousins are the similarly thread-waisted Mud Daubers. We called these Dirt Daubers where I grew up in Arkansas, and in my family they were considered the good guys of waspdom, because they almost never sting. Well, they almost never sting people. They do sting spiders, for the same reason Katydid Wasps sting katydids. Mud daubers build their little adobe nests and give each larva its own compartment, well-stocked with several paralyzed spiders for it to dine on. The Blue Mud Dauber's young mostly eat Black Widows. How's that for tough?

I discovered the "good guy" mud dauber's dark secret for myself as a kid, when my mom had me knocking old mud dauber nests off the ceiling of our porch. I broke one open out of curiousity, and dead spiders cascaded down my arm, as I did lively little dance of terror. Maybe is was the Tarantella.

Whatever their secrets, mud daubers have enemies of their own, and some of them are other wasps. I encountered one of these a couple of years ago. I heard a constant buzzing sound at my back door, and when I went outside to look, I found a mud dauber nest on the screen. On it was a little iridescent wasp, so pretty it could have been made by Carl Fabergé, busily chewing its way inside. That seemed a little odd to me, so I went back inside and looked it up. It turned out to be a Cuckoo Wasp, and like its avian namesake, it's a brood parasite--it lays its eggs in the nests of others. When the Cuckoo Wasp larva hatches it proceeds to eat the Mud Dauber larva, as well as its paralyzed guests. Naturally, the mother Mud Dauber doesn't appreciate that, and it will attack the Cuckoo Wasp if it catches it. But the Cuckoo Wasp is ready. Its jewel-like exoskeleton is armored, and it just rolls itself up into a defensive ball like an armadillo. The proprietor of the nest usually can't do much but pick it and bounce it from the nest. Whereupon it simply unrolls and tries again. The Cuckoo Wasp is a tiny little reflection of nature itself: gorgeous and amoral.

Life isn't easy, even for wasps tough enough to feed their babies paralyzed spiders. Sometimes it's downright embarrassing (or would be if wasps had the brains to be embarrassed). Like many insects, spider-hunting wasps can be fooled by an organism with no brain at all--an orchid. Most people have heard how some orchids mimic female bees or wasps. The haplessly horny males try to mate with the orchid, and end up with packets of pollen stuck to their bodies. But they don't learn from their mistake, so they deposit the pollen on the next orchid they try to get cozy with. It's probably a good thing orchid flowers aren't as big as humans, because some guys would probably pollinate them, and just imagine what those flowers would look like.

Moving on...Spider Orchids of the genus Brassia use a slightly different tactic. They really do look like spiders, at least enough to fool certain wasps. The wasps land on the flowers and start stinging them, trying to paralyze the "spider". The only result is that they get a bit of pollen attached to their heads, which they will deposit on the next "spider". The orchids get pollinated, and the wasps get nothing.

But not all plants are so hard on the parasitic wasps. The cabbage plant, for example, is their ally. The caterpillars of the Cabbage White Butterfly, as their name implies, like to eat cabbage. But the cabbage doesn't like--in an unconscious evolutionary sense--to be eaten. When it starts to get munched it releases a chemical that attracts parasitic wasps which attack the caterpillar. But they don't take it back to their nest. Instead, they lay their eggs inside the caterpillar, which goes about its business. The wasp larvae hatch and begin to grow inside it, feeding on its fluids but avoiding its vital organs. Finally, they tunnel out of the caterpillar's side and start spinning cocoons for themselves.

And then, as if this tale weren't perverse enough, things start to really get crazy. The caterpillar's brain has been altered by its ordeal, and it actually helps encase the wasp larvae in a mass cocoon, using its own silk. And then, then it becomes their guard caterpillar. The wasp larvae are vulnerable to attack by other parasitic wasps, which lay their eggs in them. The addled caterpillar lashes out at them when they try, but it's understandably weak by now, and soon dies. Many of its wasp attackers get parasitized themselves by smaller wasps. And get this--those smaller parasites may become the hosts for yet another species of parasitic wasp. This is called hyperparasitism--the parasite gets parasitized. Sometimes this can keep going, for four, five, or more levels, all the way down to bacteria that are attacked by bacteriophage virues. It's like a horror story version of Johnathon Swift's poem:

"So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.
And so proceeds ad infinitum."

Ah, the web of life..it's not all peace and harmony. In fact, it can be pretty dreadful. After all, that famously disturbing scene in the movie Alien was inspired by parasitic wasps. Of the living things that can't make their own food, like plants do, parasites may be the most abundant.

But maybe things aren't as bad as they seem. Maybe none of the players in these little dramas are actually conscious, and they only appear to feel things like pain, fear, or anger. Maybe. But we can be pretty sure that other animals, like birds and mammals, do experience those sensations, and they (and we) can do some pretty awful things to each other, too.

And the thing is, nature doesn't care. It's gorgeous and complex and awe-inspiring, but it doesn't care.

That's where we, and maybe a few other animals, part ways with the rest of nature. That's the silver lining in all this. We can realize that others--both human and animal--have sensations and preferences, and we can alter our behavior to avoid to avoid causing unnecessary pain. Unlike nature, our eyes are not blank and we don't have to be as pitiless as the sun...or a wasp.

In the movie The African Queen, a drunk Humphrey Bogart tells a prim Katherine Hepburn, "A man takes a drop too much every once in a while. It's human nature." She replies, "Nature...is what we are put in this world to rise above." I don't know what we were put in this world for, if anything, and I think she could give nature a good bit more credit. But she's still got a point. As amazing as nature is, when it comes to things like compassion and ethics, we actually can rise above it.

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Enter the Hyperparasite

National Geographic video about the White Cabbabe Butterfly being parasitized. Watch at own risk. No, seriously--it can't be unseen.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / Annie Dillard (possibly the most brilliant book I've ever read)

The Cuckoo Wasp: A Gorgeous Parasite

National Geographic Article Mentioning Spider Orchids

Myths, Morals, and Facts

Once when I was having dinner at a friend's house, he showed me an antique steamer trunk he had just bought. "You know," he said, "The word 'posh' originated as a label on trunks like this. It was an acronym for 'Port Out, Starboard Home'. Wealthy people had P.O.S.H. printed on their trunks to tell the luggage carriers where to put them on the ship, so it turned into a word about wealth and luxury."

I thought that was a great bit of trivia, and I told people about it every time I heard the word "posh." Not long ago, I heard someone talking about a "posh" home. Hearing my cue, I started telling my story about the word's origin. "Wait a minute." he interrupted, "Are you going to tell me about labels on trunks? You know that's just a myth, right?" Sure enough, I consulted a dictionary and it said "Posh" originated as a slang term for a dandy or fastidious dresser, and that the story about steamer trunks is not true. It is indeed a myth, and I had been passing it along.

That kind of myth is all too common in the modern world. A lot of historical "facts" are really just stories or images that get passed on because they're interesting, even though they aren't true. Marie Antoinette, for instance, never said "Let them eat cake." Her opponents made up the story to stir opposition against her. Vikings never wore horned helmets--some artist drew a picture of burly guy with a horned helmet, and the image stuck. Educated people in Columbus' time didn't think the world was flat. Humphry Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam". And of course, we've all heard the urban myths about dogs choking on severed fingers or people getting cooked in tanning beds. What these images and stories have in common is that they strike chords in our imaginations. We find them fascinating for some reason, whether it's shear morbidness in the case of urban myths, or vividness, like the image of blond warriors with horned helmets. Their appeal outweighs the fact that they aren't actually true, so they get passed on.

Looking up the history of the word "posh", with its real and its mythical origin, I started thinking about the word "myth" itself. People often refer to common misconceptions, like the ones above, as myths. This sense of the word--an appealing and common, but false, story or idea--is different than the other sense of the word; of myth as in mythology. Mythology is myth in the sense of powerful stories of heroes, deities, and the creation and destruction of worlds. There are similarities between the two kinds of myth. Both are perpetuated because of their human appeal, and neither are literally true, at least not entirely. But when we talk about myths in the sense of "mythology", we're not focusing on their falsehood.

We don't study mythology to make fun of the misguided notions of ancient or pre-scientific peoples. We study it because of the power of the myths, and the insights they give us into the common themes of the human imagination; themes of heroes, quests, gods and goddesses, monsters, doomed lovers, and natural disasters, all of which show up around the world. Myths reflect the deepest fascinations and concerns of a culture. They aren't often thought about this way, but I think they evolved, in a way that's analogous, though not identical, to biological evolution. Like species, myths evolved through a process of variation and selective retention. Variation occurred when storytellers would forget parts of a story, or add new twists. Selection was based on how well these variations resonated with the people that heard them. If they were found meaningful and appealing they stuck; they were passed on. This is surely one reason mythology can be so powerful. Myths have evolved to reflect people's deepest curiosities, fascinations, and fears.

Mythology is a fascinating part of the history of human ideas, because it represents the most ancient way cultures interpret the world. Originally, people didn't distinguish literal, emotional, ethical, and aesthetic truth. Pre-scientific mythology was an all-purpose worldview. Myths combined explanations of natural phenomena with religious or ethical lessons, in the form of vivid, memorable stories. In the absence of modern scientific instruments, literal truth was often unattainable anyway. So, the more meaningful or vivid the story, the better. For example, theres an ancient Hindu myth about the primal divinity Purusha. Purusha is the first being, and has no gender at the time. Feeling all alone in the universe, Purusha swells up and splits in two, becoming a man and a woman. They desire each other because they had originally been two halves of one being, but the woman fears it would be incestuous for them to mate (incest is a common mythological theme, since mythic first people are usually related). She tries to hide from him by turning herself into a series of animals, but he follows her. When she turns into a cow, he becomes a bull, and they mate and have offspring. He continues to pursue her, and they reproduce as every animal in turn, thus creating all of the animals on earth.

This story clearly serves many purposes. First, it's beautiful and memorable. It also offers explanations for facts about the world, including the existence of men and women, their mutual attraction, and the origin of the animals. It has an ethical component--the taboo against incest. Myths, then, formed the ideological, explanatory, and poetic background by which primal cultures defined themselves. This kind of worldview had its advantages. Because myths combined artistic, explanatory, and ethical ideas, there was little fragmentation of belief. The entire culture shared the same myths, which gave everyone a common understanding of where they came from, who their gods or spirits were, and how they should act. The only problem was that most myths were not literally true.

In the modern world, we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We have access to all kinds of factual truth (if we can track it down amidst all the nonsense). We now know the sun is a giant nuclear fusion reaction, not Apollo racing his chariot across the sky. Today we have theories about the natural world that are demonstrably more coherent and accurate than the old mythological explanations, so myth has come to be equated with falsehood. The problem is that people no longer share a coherent, poetic view of the world. Our beliefs have become fragmented into compartmentalized disciplines and rival camps. We've attained a great deal of literal truth, but we've lost a worldview.

That's a problem, but I think it's is a necessary step toward a better situation. We can no longer, in good conscience, believe things simply because they're poetic or traditional. We know too much. to the extent that ethical, artistic, and scientific ideas don't overlap in the real world, we need to disentangle them. Mythology is good literature, but it isn't good science. Science is good for describing nature, but it leaves many ethical questions unanswered. We need to differentiate these realms of human inquiry because they have different aims and serve different purposes.

But we can't simply pull them apart and leave it at that. These distinct realms of meaning aren't completely separate. Sometimes they do overlap. For example, our idea of factual truth has ethical implications, because believing something that isn't true can cause ethical mistakes. In many myths, including the one about Adam and Eve in the Bible, there's a theme where men were created first, and women were later, almost as an afterthought. Science offers no evidence for this. If we make the factual mistake that men are primary, we're more likely to make the ethical mistake of treating women as secondary. So, we have to perform a balancing act. We have to differentiate the areas of knowledge--mythology should not be mistaken for science--but then we need to integrate them, to see where they do connect, and how they fit together. Ethics, for example, can be informed by science (and vice versa). To move beyond fragmentation, we have to fit the various realms together, without letting them collapse back upon each other.

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I wrote the first version of this about ten years ago. Here's that version in its original context. http://www.knowledgetreeproject.org/treeknowledgechaptview.htm

The Purusha story in the Upanishads

Philosophy is Not Optional

Last night I picked up a book on philosophy written for undergrads. It's a good book, but certainly no late night page-turner. Nevertheless, one of the first lines jumped off the page and slapped me. It said:

Philosophy is not an optional experience in your life.

"Wow," I thought, "That's true." But what struck me about that statement isn't that it's not optional for me. I've never been able to resist pondering the big mysteries in life. What's striking is that it's not optional for anybody. Nobody can go through life without facing some of life's big questions and deciding how they're going to answer them. Consider the idea of economic justice: the question of who deserves what in society. How you vote depends on how you answer that philosophical question. Is it right to tax wealthier people to give poorer people a bigger slice of the pie? Why or why not? To what extent do the wealthy deserve their wealth? Does it matter whether they inherited it or earned it by being smart and hardworking? If it does, to what extent do people deserve credit for being smart? If some people are simply born smarter, do they deserve to be wealthier based on an accident of birth? Why or why not?

These are all tough questions, which is why people still argue about them. And they're just some of the philosophical questions we can't avoid, either individually or as a society. On the individual level, suppose a friend asks what you think about his new, expensive car. You think it might be the ugliest thing on four wheels. Should you be honest, or should you tread lightly on his ego and say it's great, since he can't return it anyway? That's a philosophical issue, but a fairly trivial one. Most of us will have to face far bigger ones someday. For example, we may have to decide whether a dying family member should be taken off life support. That's not idle dorm room philosophy. How you decide that particular philosophical issue is literally a matter of life and death. Even if you believe the right answer is provided by religion, and can be looked up in the Bible, you still have to weigh philosophical issues. How do you decide which interpretation of the Bible is correct, or example? If different Christian denominations have different answers, how do you decide which one is right? If a non-Christian asks you why he should accept what the Bible says, how do you respond? It won't do any good to say, "Because the Bible says so." You need to provide independent reasons. In other words, you're back to philosophy.

Actually, though, maybe it's not philosophy that's not optional. What's really not optional is facing big philosophical questions and making decisions about them. Actually engaging in philosophy--in hard thinking about those questions--might be optional, because some people make decisions without thinking. They may never question their intuitions, or just automatically apply rules from the ideology, culture, or religion they grew up with. We can't avoid facing life's big questions, but we can avoid really thinking about them, if that's what we really want to do. But most people, I hope, don't really want to do that. Most people like to think they can back up their opinions with solid reasons for believing them.

But oftentimes, they can't. They think what they think because they grew up thinking it, or because their friends or family think that way, or because they just feel in their guts that one answer is right. Those clearly aren't adequate reasons, because they can all lead to false beliefs. Some people "just know in their guts" that men are superior to women. Their guts are wrong. Young Vikings grew up believing that Thor caused thunderstorms. They grew up mistaken. Their dear old Viking mamas and daddies were wrong.

This means that if we want to be able to back up our opinions with real reasoning, not just appeals to authority, tradition, or gut feelings, that's when philosophy isn't optional. That's why people need to learn a little about philosophy, because philosophers really have clarified some of these questions. To take a currently contentious example, many people who oppose gay marriage do so based on two arguments 1. God says it's wrong, as shown in certain Bible verses 2. It's not natural (it goes against the laws of nature or God's plan). The first is the Divine Command theory of ethics, and the second is a Natural Law theory. But here's the thing--philosophers have discovered serious logical problems with both of those theories, which have caused most to abandon them. The Divine Command theory runs into the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Natural Law arguments run into many objections, one of which is: Who says what's natural is good? Many male mammals kill babies of their species who aren't theirs. Does that mean infanticide is right?

The fact that philosophers have mostly rejected Divine Command and Natural Law theories of ethics doesn't mean those theories are wrong, but it does mean it's worth taking a critical look at both of them. If you want to defend either one adequately, you need to know what the objections are. They may not be convincing to you, but they certainly aren't trivial. Some of those philosophers were pretty smart people, after all, and some of the big questions they've wrestled with are questions we can't avoid. It might be possible to avoid thinking about those questions--to avoid doing philosophy, in other words--but it certainly isn't wise. If we want to be able to say our beliefs about some of life's most crucial questions are based on solid reasoning, then philosophy just isn't optional.

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The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy / William Lawhead

A Right Good Beating

Earlier today I rode my bicycle up to a four-way stop, let a car cross, and then started to pedal again. But then the truck behind that car roared through the intersection and cut me off. It stopped in front of me, and the guy inside leered at me, like, "What are you going to do about it, bike man?"

Now, I'm not a very aggressive guy. Far below average, I'd say. But I'm a guy for all that, and prone to guy-like thinking. So I did a Walter Mitty as he drove away, mentally dragging him out of that truck and whuppin' his butt (I'm from Arkansas, so that's how I talk when I get mad. Even in my head).

Actually, maybe such fantasies are just human nature, and aren't limited to guys. Humans seem to have an innate sense of justice that says there are few things sweeter than seeing a bullying fool get their comeuppance. No less a philosopher than Immanuel Kant approved of this instinct. In his Critique of Practical Reason--not exactly a chest-thumping sort of book--he says:

When someone who delights in annoying and vexing peace-loving folk receives
at last a right good beating, it is certainly an ill, but everyone approves of it and
considers it as good in itself, even if nothing further results from it. 

Kant brought this up to emphasize his belief that justice requires punishing wrongdoers. He was arguing against the purely utilitarian idea that punishing those who hurt people just adds one evil on top of another, and is therefore a bad thing. Utilitarians might think punishment is still a necessary evil, but only for discouraging criminal acts, or removing criminals from society. They don't see retribution as a good reason for punishment. Kant was no utilitarian. He was all for retribution, and was a firm believer in the death penalty. But his reasoning was a little counter-intuitive. One of his fundamental maxims was that people should be treated as ends in themselves, not as means, because they are rational beings who can make ethical choices. When somebody wrongs another person, then, we should treat him as a rational person and conclude that he's made his choice about how people in general should be treated. Then we should treat him accordingly--just the way he treated the people he wronged. In other words, by punishing people for doing wrong, we are actually respecting them as rational, autonomous beings, and treating them according to the ethical maxims they've followed themselves.

Which is all very interesting (well, to some people), but the ethics of punishment isn't exactly what I want to think about here. What I'm more interested is the ethics of self-help justice--of whether someone who is in the right is justified in using force against someone who isn't. If some bully has been making everyone's life miserable, and some normally-nice person finally thrashes him, has justice been served? Is this what should have happened? Seeing it happen fills most people's hearts with gladness, so it's clear our instincts say it's right. But are our instincts correct in this case, or is this more like our instinct to eat bacon and donuts every morning--powerful, but not a good general rule?

Whatever Kant may have thought about the justice of bully-beating, one thing is clear: he wasn't going to be administering those beatings himself. Immanual Kant was barely five feet tall. He was almost the Platonic form of a 98-pound weakling. Unless he was a trained ninja, if he had tried to beat up that bully, he would have gotten pounded within an inch of his brainy little life.

And that's one reason I'm leery of the instinct that says giving bullies a "right good beating" is the right thing to do. There's no guarantee that the person in the right is the one who will win the fight (poetic, no?). In fact, most bullies spend a lot of time thinking about fighting, if not actually practicing it. Less aggressive people usually don't. Knowledge and practice lead to skill, whether that skill is good or bad. I learned that lesson once at a party, when I got into a playful fencing match with foam swords. My opponent was a woman who had done some fencing in college, and, well...she trounced me. If by some strange twist of fate I ever get in a real sword fight with her, I hope she uses her left hand.

The point is that if the bully's been in more fights, or if he's just bigger, stronger, faster, or tougher, he's probably going to win the fight. That doesn't match our sense of cosmic justice, but when has that sense ever been realistic? I like to imagine I could have beat up the guy in the truck, but there's no guarantee. I'm pretty strong for my size, but I don't know the first thing about fighting. He may be a boxing champ for all I know. In fact, if I had tried to start something with him, he might have just pulled out a gun and shot me. I live in trigger-happy state in a trigger-happy country, so that's not a bit far-fetched.

Of course, all this establishes is that it's a bad idea for people to attack bullies unless they absolutely have to. That doesn't tell us whether it would be a good thing in principle. If you knew that you would win, would you be justified in beating up someone who had hurt many other innocent people? My gut tells me yes, but I think my head tells me no. Might just doesn't make right. There's no necessary correlation between who's right and who's more powerful. I like to think about it this way: Imagine a huge man walking up to you and saying, "Two plus two is five, and if you say different, I'm gonna stomp you". You primly tell him that two plus two is actually four, and then spend the next few days in the hospital. It may not be much consolation, but here's the thing: he didn't prove his point by beating you up. Two plus two isn't five, no matter whose butt you kick to prove otherwise.

Even if he was right and you were wrong, and he beat you up to show he was right, that still wouldn't prove anything. What it comes down to is that there's absolutely no connection between who can win a fight and what is actually right or true. These are completely independent things. It's strange that this isn't obvious to us, but we evolved in a world where conflicts were often settled by force, so in this case, our instincts don't match logic.

If might and right are unconnected, then do we want to say that those in the right can legitimately prove it by a show of force? I don't think so. While I want to think I would have been justified in smacking that guy in the truck around a little, I don't think it's true. For one thing, of course, it would be a disproportionate response--he was being a phenomenal jerk, but he didn't hit me. But the deeper reason is that might doesn't make right, even when you're in the right. Force may be justified if you're defending yourself or someone else--it's certainly justified to stop a bully from hurting someone, by force if that's what it takes. But the force itself has nothing to do with what's right. Force is at best a necessary evil, one that's just as available to bad people as good people--more available, in fact, because they don't feel the need to restrain themselves. Force may be necessary to prevent wrongs, but it can never show who's right. It can only show who's stronger, and that's not the same thing at all.

What's Really Shocking

It's 6:00 in the morning. I don't go to work until 9 most days, so I'm not usually up this early. But I couldn't sleep well. The thing is, I saw people expressing opinions yesterday that are weighing on my mind. First, I saw a picture of a sign in front of a pizza joint in my home state of Arkansas. It said "Leviticus 20:13. Why don't we listen?" Now, here's what that verse actually says.

If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

Well, that seems clear enough. This pizza place, called Heavenly Pizza Pies, seems to be calling for the killing of gay people, or at least gay men.* When there was an outcry, they took the sign down and claimed they were saying no such thing. Maybe they didn't mean it that way. I don't know. Here's the response that they posted on Facebook:

We as a company don't support same sex marriage, but we still care for everyone and would do anything to help. We posted a Bold Verse out of God's word, something that as a nation we have forgotten. As a nation we have taken God out of schools, we have taken prayer out of school and the work place, and now we take another one of God's law and throw it away. We will stand bold in honoring God's word in and out of the work place. If you were upset with this verse, remember its God's word, we will all stand before him in judgement.

What are we to make of people posting a sign like that? Honestly, I doubt they really want to see gay people killed, but you never know with some people. One thing we can conclude with confidence is that they're being extremely selective about which parts of Leviticus to take seriously. I mean, this is a pizza place--I'm pretty sure they put sausage, pepperoni, and ham on their pizzas, and all those things are made from pork. Leviticus 11:7-8 clearly says pigs are unclean and not to be eaten. Their carcasses aren't even to be touched, which, it has been often pointed out, would seem to rule out playing football with an actual pigskin.

When questioned, people say such dietary restrictions are part of the Old Covenant, and that the New Covenant makes them unnecessary. But those same people point to the verses about homosexuality in Leviticus and say they still hold. Why? What are their criteria for deciding which parts of the Bible are still valid and which are no longer applicable? I ask this question all the time, because I would really like to know, but I never get a clear answer. Usually I get no answer at all, even though I think I usually succeed in asking nicely. Apparently the question is gauche.

Seeing the picture of this sign in my home state disturbed me enough, though I can't say it surprised me. But what continued to disturb me were other things I saw people saying on the same topic, or in response to it. One woman, in a thread unrelated to the pizza joint sign, also mentioned the parts of the Old Testament that talk about killing gays. She wasn't exactly stating her approval, but she was mentioning it in support of her contention that the Bible says homosexuality is wrong. In a thread about the sign, a guy told me that homosexuality is clearly wrong according to the Bible, and cited Genesis 2:18, where God decides to create women:

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.

This guy was apparently thinking of a different translation, and used the word "worker" instead of helper. Yes, worker. So, here's someone defending the idea that homosexuality is bad, by citing a verse saying women were created almost as an afterthought, to be "workers" for men. I'll admit, I found this kind of upsetting. What made it worse is that he seemed to be a decent guy, who honestly seemed to be trying to do what is right, based on his religion (he thought the pizza place sign was a bad thing, for example).

So I pointed out that he's deciding to how to judge one fraction of the human race (homosexuals), based on his interpretation of a text that says half the human race were created as helpers for the other half. Deciding how to treat that large a percentage of humankind is a pretty serious step to take, morally speaking. And he's doing it based on Genesis, the same book that tells us a snake talked, that people lived hundreds of years, and that Noah got two of every species on earth onto a boat (did he go to the Andes to get llamas? What about plants?).

Anyway, I asked to consider the possibility that the Bible is a book written by members of an ancient tribe living in a violent, sexist, superstitious time. Yes, it does say homosexuality is wrong, that homosexuals should be killed (along with suspected witches and children who curse their parents), and it also says that women were created to be "helpers". And when it does, it's wrong. And when people base their behavior toward women, gays, and others based on a literal interpretation of those verses, they are wrong, and perpetuate the unbelievable injustice that's characterized most of human history--millions of lives lost and wasted, for thousands of years, based on parts of the Bible that are mostly myth or myth-based ritual.

This suggestion was apparently out of bounds. Though I tried hard to be civil, I was the bad guy for saying such things. The man I was debating got mad, and a woman chimed in to say she felt sorry for me and would pray for me. Neither of them seemed at all shocked by Bible verses talking about killing gays, or describing women as "helpers" by design, even though one of them was a woman. Yet they were shocked by me saying those passages should be rejected as the writings of an ancient people who believed the earth was flat.

What kind of world are we living in when a large percentage of people still look at Iron Age documents about killing people, or treating women as second class citizens (because of a story involving their creation from a man's rib) and they aren't shocked by them? Not only are they not shocked, but they believe them and live their lives by them. What they do find shocking is someone questioning those verses. That strikes me as very, very twisted, especially since many of them really are trying to do the right thing. It's just that they're basing their judgement of what's right on very questionable, hard to interpret sources.

Please don't get me wrong. This may be a screed, but it's not an anti-Christian screed--many of the people I admire most are Christians. It's a screed against discrimination based on Biblical literalism. Taking these writings as straightforward guides to behavior is very, very hurtful. The guy I was debating claimed that the Bible verse about killing gays should be interpreted to mean they would be suffer "eternal death" (Hell) not earthly death. That's also hurtful, but I also think he's wrong about the interpretation. I think that verse means exactly what it says, and that it's surely caused untold numbers of violent deaths. Who knows how many people were stoned to death because of that verse, or others like it? It says what it says, and it's wrong.

Obviously, I have a big problem with this kind of fundamentalism. But I have a far bigger problem when its practitioners try to write their Old Testament views of morality into law. If people want to believe these things, that's their right. I think they're wrong and hurtful beliefs, but I'm not going to try to force them to change. That's not the kind of country we live in. But I am going to keep telling them they don't get to force that view of morality on me or anyone else. They were allowed to do so for millennia, and that needs to end. Soon.

Does that mean laws should never enforce moral codes of any kind? Certainly not. Justice Antonin Scalia once asked, if he shouldn't say homosexuality should be illegal, whether he could still say murder should be illegal. Of course he should! Murder clearly hurts people, and you don't need to appeal to any religious text or supernatural entity to see that. Murder, rape, theft, perjury, and dozens of other things are clearly hurtful for obvious, real-world reasons, and should of course be illegal. But ideas about what is wrong based on religion or the supernatural are very debatable, and therefore shouldn't be written into law, especially if not everyone in the country subscribes to that religion. If you want to follow additional moral rules, based on religion and beyond the proper scope of law, that's your prerogative. But I don't see why you should be able to force anyone else to. If you want to tell gays they don't get to have the same right--to love and marry another adult--that you have, you need to realize that you are denying them something most people consider an essential part of a happy life. You'd better have ironclad proof that homosexuality is wrong and damaging, and for reasons that don't appeal to the supernatural. I've never seen any such proof.

And if you want to go on thinking that homosexuality is bad, or that women are "helpers", then that's your right. If you want to quote Bible verses saying homosexuals should be killed, I guess that's your right too, as much as it makes my lip curl to hear it. But please, please ask yourself this: Which is more shocking? People questioning Bible verses that promote such ideas, or the verses themselves?

______________________________________________________________

* I hate that I feel like I need to mention this, but since I'm 41 and single, people will wonder, and that will distract from the point I'm trying to make. I'm straight. I'm not the bravest guy, but I like to think that if I were gay I would have had the guts to come out years ago. This issue is important to me because I have a lot of gay friends I love, and I hate seeing injustice, especially when it's justified with such dubious reasoning.

Armchair Ethics: A Progress Report

"We are discussing no small matter, but how we ought to live." - Socrates 

The Death of Socrates. Jacques-Louis David

When I started this blog, I thought it would just be a series of posts about weird little facts and ideas that struck my fancy—interesting old songs, strange creatures, odd events in history—that sort of thing. Somehow, though, it turned into something more serious. I started writing a bunch of opinionated posts about things like civil debate, science vs. creationism, rationality, and ethics...especially ethics. I think I got on that topic while debating one issue or another with philosophically sophisticated Catholics who kept talking about people like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. This made me realize I had forgotten what Aristotle had said about ethics, and probably never known what Aquinas said. Not wanting to feel ignorant (or, more accurately, be ignorant), I started reading basic books about the philosophy of ethics. When I say basic, I mean it. I picked up Ethics for Dummies, and, to my enormous chagrin, realized that I didn't know most of what was in it. Same with The Complete Idiots Guide to Ethics. I'll freely admit it—I learned a lot from both of them. I guess I fit squarely into the target audience. (Hint: if you put them on an e-reader, nobody can tell what you're reading).

The reason I was reading such books, besides the fact that they were appropriate to my knowledge level, is that there are hardly any basic books about ethics out there. Apparently they just don't sell like Dan Brown or Deepak Chopra. Unless you want to start reading textbooks, the Dummies and Idiots books are some of the only options.

There's just no demand for books on ethics. And it shows. One of the reasons I've gotten so interested in the topic is that I've realized very few people have a sophisticated way of thinking about ethics. Most of us are just muddling along, and we don't know much about what some of the great minds of history have said on the matter. And that's a shame, because they've had some great ideas, and pointed out a lot of logical pitfalls that people should be more aware of.

That being said, I'm not sure most of history's ethical philosophers really understood the way the average person thinks about morality. Most people base their morality not on careful thought, but on their upbringing, their psychological predispositions, and their gut reactions. Even if they do put careful thought on into a question, they're more likely to rationalize what they want to believe than truly reason their way to conclusions they didn't have in the first place. It's incredibly hard not to rationalize like that, and I'm probably guilty too. But it's worth trying. If there's no chance you'll change your beliefs, there's no point in sitting down and thinking anyway.

Anyway, the average person in the street has an ethical sense that has bears little resemblance to most formal philosophical systems. For religious conservatives in the US, that's likely to be a hodgepodge of ideas based on Christianity (often heavy on the Old Testament and Revelation), classical liberal ideas about economic and personal freedom (emphasizing property rights and self-determination), nationalism, and so on. For liberals, there may be a mix of ideas from liberal interpretations of Christianity (more New Testament than Old), classical liberal ideas of personal freedom (emphasizing freedom of personal conduct and expression more than economic freedom), and (often vague) ideas about the harmony of nature. Probably the majority of people are somewhere in between, with a mix of ideas from both sides.

This vague, hodgepodge approach to ethics would be fine if it didn't include a lot of questionable and downright harmful attitudes; attitudes people act on, with real consequences for real people, now and in the future.

Consider some attitudes you commonly encounter in this country:

• Truth, and right and wrong, are socially constructed and relative to each culture.
• American lives are more valuable than foreign lives.
• Homosexuality is unnatural, therefore it's wrong.
• Might makes right. That's the way nature works--survival of the fittest.
• Greed and self-interest are good. Altruism is bad because it's inefficient, makes people dependent, and doesn't create anything.
• Animals, and the earth as a whole, were created by God for people's use.

Each of these is extremely problematic, if you know something about the insights that ethicists (and scientists) have had over the years. I'm not going to address any of them here, except to note that they are common, and if they are both common and wrong, they can do a lot of harm.

One of the problems is that there's really no clear, simple guide to what's right and wrong that everyone can agree on. Probably the most common guide to morality for Americans is the Bible. But people draw very different conclusions from the Bible. It's just too huge and contradictory to work as a good guide for morality unless there is a standard way of deciding which parts to follow and which to reject. There doesn't seem to be such a standard. Some people will be reading this and thinking you shouldn't reject any part of the Bible. But they don't really really believe that. Everyone who follows the Bible rejects parts of its. Nobody, I hope, believes in the passages that tell us to stone people to death for adultery or marry our daughter to her rapist. That is terrible ethical advice. But there are also parts of the Bible that are great, like “Thou shalt not kill” (though people are amazingly good at ignoring that one). The question is, how do you decide which parts are good and which parts are bad? What criteria do you use to judge? Seriously. If you're a Christian reading this, I'd like to know what your criteria are. If you let me know in the comments, I'd be appreciative.

Of course, intelligent people can and do argue that the Bible is just one religious/moral system out of hundreds the world has known, and it may not be the best one. Plus, nothing in the Bible is much younger than a couple of thousand years.We've learned all kinds of things about the natural world in that time--surely we've learned some useful things about ethics as well?

I've always thought the Bible is just too big, complex, and contradictory to be a reliable guide to ethics. Besides, it might just be plain wrong (if it contradicts itself, clearly some of it is wrong, because two contradictory things can't both be right). So, what is a reliable guide to ethics? Is it possible to come up with a guide to living ethically that is factually and logically defensible, yet simple enough not to be interpreted in wildly different ways by different people? Could you ever make an ethical code that someone, somewhere, couldn't twist to justify killing people? Could you construct such a code short enough to fit on a single page? Or in a document the size of, say, the US Constitution? That's what I've been asking myself the last several months. And the answer, I'm pretty sure, is no. But I do think it's possible to learn more about the many different ways people have thought about ethics, and make a good faith attempt to take the best insights from each of them.

So, what I want to do now is make a lightning survey of some of the ethical approaches I've been reading about, and mention what I think makes sense about them, and what doesn't. It's an entirely inadequate guide to all these ideas, of course, and written by a total amateur. That's why I'm thinking of it as a progress report. Still, I think I can honestly say that after 18 months of reading about ethics I have a better understanding of the issues than probably 98% of the public. Which is kind of the point—I may not know much, but I know more than most people, and that's a problem. This stuff is important. We should know more about it.

Ethical Intuitions

So where do we start? First I want to cover some ethical ideas that aren't formal theories, but common ethical intuitions. People do seem to have an innate moral sense. They have an intrinsic feeling that some things are wrong, and others right. Which is not the same as saying they know what's really right and wrong. In fact, people's moral intuitions can lead to really awful things. Having a sense of morality doesn't mean we're right about morality. 

Still, we do have a moral sense, or really a constellation of moral senses. Where does this come from? The traditional answer, of course, is that it was given to us by God, when he created Adam and Eve. But science has shown--decisively I think--that there was no Adam and Eve. Humans evolved from earlier animals, and there's no clear evidence that we were put here for any particular reason, or given any particular purpose. The most parsimonious explanation of our existence is that we just happened to evolve because there was an ecological niche for brainy, hairless, upright apes, and we filled it. Our ethical intuitions are likely to come from biological factors like the need to care for offspring and family, the need to cooperate in social groups, and so on. But you don't have to agree with me about that. You will probably agree with me about what most of the main ethical intuitions are, even if you don't agree about why we have them. Some of these closely match the moral foundations identified by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and others are just tendencies that seem to me to be morally important to many people.

To keep their pros and cons straight, I put them in a table. Because that's just how geeky I am.

 

Probable Innate Moral Intuitions

 

Name/Description and Basic Ideas	Proponents	Good Points	Bad Points
Caring for Family This is probably the oldest of behaviors leading to moral questions (e.g. how to treat others), because it evolved based on kin selection and parental care. Evolution often favors “altruism” between related organisms, because they share copies of the same genes.	Almost all humans. Confucius emphasized family relations.	Family relations are an fundamental part of being human. Clearly it's a good thing to help your family, especially your immediate family. Parents should take care of their children. Children, in return, should take care of their parents and siblings.	Feelings for family can lead people to favor their family to the exclusion of others, to extreme and unethical degrees, leading to cruelty to people competing with family members, or to ethically problematic things like nepotism.
Reciprocity Another ancient form of cooperative behavior is based on reciprocity—I will help you if you help me. Reciprocal cooperation can arise between unrelated animals, but they have to be able to recognize who is reliable and who cheats, and not cooperate with—and even punish—cheaters. Can be seen in positive form: “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”, and negative form: “An eye for an eye”.	Almost all humans Many philosophers and scientists have thought a lot about reciprocity. Confucius may have seen the Golden Rule in terms of reciprocity as much as compassion.	A whole lot of human progress has been made by people learning to form wider and wider circles of win-win cooperation. This is not exactly an ethical system so much as a beneficial practice. But it's clearly beneficial.	The evolution of reciprocal relationships may be where we get our sense of fairness. However, such relationships aren't always equitable. Sometimes one party gets the much better deal. Is that right or wrong? Opinions vary. Negative reciprocity—punishing those who hurt or don't cooperate with you, is selected by evolution, and may be a basis for ideas about justice, in the sense of rewarding good behaviors and punishing bad behaviors. Detecting cheaters is necessary, but overly harsh ideas of punishment and vengeance can lead to cycles of violence that leave everybody worse off.
In-Group Loyalty Humans seem to have a universal tendency to give preference to their own group, tribe, or nation. They treat insiders better than outsiders, and are predisposed to assume that the ways of their group are better than those of others. How this evolved is controversial.	Most humans seem to be predisposed toward in-group preferences.	Cooperation within groups is necessary, and people within a group may owe each other more than they owe people in outgroups. Some degree of group loyalty is good.	It's common for people in one nation or religion to think the lives of those inside their group are much more valuable than those outside it. Common, but deeply ethically questionable. In-Group/Out-Group “morality” has led to some of the world's worst atrocities. People can lose--or never have--any sense of compassion for outsiders, and are only too happy to kill them if they are scared or feel like they're competing with them. Societies assuming they are God's chosen ones, or that God is on their side, have caused big, big problems. Also leads to ethnocentric biases. We tend to assume the way we do it is better. Maybe it is, but it isn't something that can be assumed without further support.
Respect for Tradition as Morality Closely related to in-group loyalty.	Lots of conservative thinkers.	People like Edmund Burke have argued, correctly, that some traditions may have lasted for very good reasons (which we may not even fully understand) and it's not clear that what we replace them with will be better.	Clearly, many traditions, such as slavery, honor killings and dueling, female genital mutilation, the caste system, and many others, are unjust, and needed to be changed. What's traditional is not necessarily what's right. Many, many people seem to believe what they believe simply because they grew up believing it. This means if they grew up in another culture, they would believe what those people believe. We have to be able to logical justify what we believe, not just accept it passively. Like in-group loyalty, leads to unfounded biases against other cultures and traditions.
Purity and Sanctity as Morality People have a tendency to view morality in terms of what is pure/impure, sacred/profane, or clean/unclean. This may be related to the evolutionary useful emotion of disgust, and its opposite, feelings of sacredness or elevation. Modern westerners, especially liberals, may not realize how important this is to many people around the world, because they tend to think of morality in terms of fairness and not hurting people, not purity and degradation.	Many religious thinkers.	Ideas about purity, sanctity, and cleanliness seem to be connected with morality in the human brain. When cities clean up their streets in the literal sense—picking up trash, etc—they get cleaned up in the metaphorical sense. Crime rates go down. It's hard to argue that it's a good thing to wallow in some things considered morally “dirty”, such as having an extremely foul mouth. It can be good to have a sense of the sacred.	Misplaced ideas of moral purity have lead to a lot of suffering, for example, the idea that menstruating women are unclean, or that some people are “untouchable”. People commonly see outsiders as disgusting or degraded, and it's much easier to hurt and kill those we see in those terms. Intuitions about what is clean and unclean are not enough to decide what is moral or not. If something is bad, we should be able to give a clear reason it's bad.
Protecting One's Honor Many societies around the world have ethical codes where a strong component is protecting one's honor or reputation, violently if necessary. People who have been dishonored may kill themselves or others, as in Japanese ritual suicide, or “honor killing” of sisters or daughters accused of being unchaste. Men may cultivate a reputation for toughness and be ready to fight if they are insulted—seeing it as an ethical obligation. Ties in with nationalism, because many people who don't react violently to personal insults will advocate violence if they think their nation has been insulted.	Many societies through history and around the world. There was a honor-based tradition of blood feuds and dueling in the United States, which lasted longest in the south. Many fights and homicides can be traced to violent responses to petty insults.	While it's good to have a personal sense of honor and integrity, and even shame if you feel you haven't lived up to it, I can't think of very much good to say about the extreme, violent kind of honor. Honor-related violence may be necessary in very lawless or violent societies, where if you don't keep a reputation for toughness you won't make it, but the point is to make those societies less violent so that attitude isn't necessary. Honor-based ethical codes tend to emphasize bravery and duty to one's group or role. These can be good things, when applied to the right things.	Mostly an example of how moral intuitions can be harmful, certainly in modern, civilized societies.
Honesty/Authenticity We probably have an innate intuition that truth, honesty, and authenticity are good things. It's no mystery where this came from—in a species that relies on language for cooperation, people need to trust each other to tell the truth. Which doesn't mean that's always what they do.	Probably a universal intuition.	Sometimes the need to be truthful conflicts with other moral concerns. Kant thought that one should never lie, under any circumstances—even if a murderer is asking where whether your friend is in the house, so they can kill them. Surely lying can be justified in such extreme circumstances?	Respect for truth, and being genuine, are extremely important moral issues. A society where everyone lies is no society at all.

What does this quick and dirty survey show? It shows that people naturally have a moral sense that can be very complex and multifaceted, and may not be explained well by ethical philosophies, which tend to be more cerebral, and less visceral, than what the average person really feels. It's also clear that not all of the "moral" impulses people have actually cause them to do the right thing. They may have a desire to do something, and think of it as moral imperative, and that desire may have been shaped by evolution. But none of that means it's the right thing to do. Many of our intuitions and traditions don't stand up to rational scrutiny. Confining "unclean" women to their tents, killing your sister after she was raped to preserve your family's honor, or seeing members of groups outside your own as less than fully human--those may all have roots in human biology and evolution, but that doesn't make them right. Such things are wrong--terribly wrong--because they hurt others for no good reason. 

On the other hand, some ethical intuitions are good. Taking care of our family, helping our friends, maintaining a basic sense of the sacred, and even having sanctions against cheaters and liars--these are good ideas, and we intuitively think they are right for good reasons. But it's possible to take these things too far. Watching out for your family is good; nepotism is bad. Discouraging cheaters and liars is necessary; cutting their hands or tongues off (as has been common in history) is bad.

Now, what about more formal, philosophical systems of ethics? I'm going to list those below, in the same kind of table, with the pros and cons, as I see them. I'm not remotely doing justice to most of these philosophies--this is just my way of lining them all up and comparing them. I'll start with what I see as the antithesis of ethical thinking: the idea that might makes right.

 

Ethical Theories

Name/Description and Basic Ideas	Proponents	Good Points	Bad Points
Might makes right Ethics is for weaklings. It's a dog eat dog world, and the strong survive. The only good is strength, power, or self-mastery (Nietzsche)	Machiavelli Herbert Spencer (Social Darwinism) Nietzsche (sort of) Legions of thugs and heads of state. While most of us recoil at this idea, most of us are also quite capable of thinking in these terms (see under "Bad Points")	Meekness is not necessarily a virtue. Strength, courage, and power can be virtues (if used for the right things).	Ignores any sense that we should have concern for others. Almost the antithesis of ethics. However, many people still believe in it to some extent. If you see a bully get a righteous butt-kicking, you might think justice has been done. I probably would. But it's only by chance that the one in the right was the stronger person. What if the person behaving badly was the stronger, and won? There's something very suspect about the idea that strength should be the way of deciding justice, even if the better people happen to be the stonger ones. Lots of people who don't think in might-makes-right terms in personal relations might think they are acceptable in international affairs, e.g: "My country right or wrong".
Virtue Ethics Ethics is about cultivating virtues, or good character traits, in order to live a good life. Socrates and Plato believed this was about perceiving and aligning oneself with "the Good" (which has a transcendent reality), through reason. Aristotle didn't believe in "the Good". He believed everything in nature has a “telos” (goal, purpose, or basic nature), and that what is good for each thing is to be good at its telos. The telos of a knife is cutting, so a good knife is one that cuts well. The human telos is our ability to reason, and so we should seek wisdom, the greatest of the virtues. Aristotle believed there were several virtues people should cultivate, and that each was a “Golden Mean” between an two extremes. Bravery, for example, is the mean between cowardice and recklessness.	Socrates Plato Aristotle Aquinas	Identifying and cultivating virtues does seem to be essential to being ethical. It makes sense to cultivate virtues as habits, so they become second nature. Moderation does seem to be a very useful thing. Many situations require the right amount of something—not too much or too little. His idea of eudaemonia—“living well” or “flourishing” as a more sophisticated, less hedonistic version of happiness, is useful. There's more to the good life than pleasure. It's a good point that cultivating character has a lot to do with cultivating habits, which takes practice.	Moderation is not always right. Is pedophilia OK in moderation? No. Aristotle, like many philosophers, was too confident in human reason. Modern psychology has shown that we are extremely biased and often irrational. It's not clear that things do have a telos, and if they do, it's not clear that ours is reason. Doesn't provide many clear ways of deciding what to do in particular ethical situations. Ethics can't just be about cultivating character. We also need ways of deciding which acts are right or wrong, based on things like principles or consequences.
Natural Law Ethical laws are written into the nature of the universe. People may look to God or nature for those laws, but they believe they are “out there” in some sense. People who believe this often think morality is related to being in tune with our true nature, or fulfilling our destiny. Aristotle's virtue ethics was also a natural law theory, based on this kind of thinking. Locke and Jefferson believed in natural law in a different sense: they believed in inalienable rights that are part of the natural order of things.	Socrates, Plato, Aristotle Aquinas Locke Jefferson	It's clear that if we go against nature, or human nature, too much, there will be trouble. We can't stop reproducing or eating living things, for example. Humans do need certain things to be happy, though we are highly variable. Locke and Jefferson recognized that each person deserves equal rights, because they were “created equal”. Today it's clear that people aren't created equal--we aren't born blank slates. But it still makes sense to say people should have equality in basic rights, and equality before the law. People shouldn't have more or less rights based on accidents of birth.	Hard to say what is natural, especially for people, who are constantly pushing the boundaries of nature with our inventions. Is that tendency part of our nature? At the largest scales, isn't everything part of nature, and thus "natural" in some sense? Who says what is natural is necessarily good? It isn't clear how to get “ought” from “is”. Just because something is a certain way doesn't mean it should be that way. Arsenic and infanticide are naturally-ocurring things. It's not clear that natural laws of what is right really exist, outside of human preference and interaction. It's not at all clear that we have a pre-ordained destiny or purpose. If we do, how do we know what it is?
Divine Command (related to natural law) What is right is whatever God commands. Related is the “Be good if you want to go to heaven and not hell” argument. That argument has little to do with ethics, because if the only reason you do good or don't do bad is the promise of heaven and hell, you're not really very ethical.	Lots of people. A few theologians and philosophers, such as Ockham, Martin Luther, and Kierkegaard.	?	Euthyphro Dilemma: Is God commanding things arbitrarily, or is he making commands based on a standard of ethics outside himself? Only the second makes sense, unless you are willing to say that if God said doing something awful was right—e.g. torturing babies—then it is right. If you can't accept that, then you believe there is a standard of what is right external to God. Whether there is a God or not, we still have to figure out what that standard is, and what its logic is. It may still be logical to think that God is commanding certain things because they are good, by an independent standard. But how can anybody be sure what God commands? There are many different ideas, many contradictory. The Bible itself is contradictory. For example, in some places it celebrates killing, and in others it forbids it.
Golden Rule Positive form: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Negative form: Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you. General form: Treat others they way you would want to be treated. Closely related to Jesus’ “love they neighbor as thyself” (originally from Leviticus)	Jesus Hillel Confucius Many others	Most versions of the Golden Rule recognize the importance of empathy and compassion, which are an absolutely vital part of ethics. Very simple to remember and follow compared to most other ethical rules. The Golden Rule recognizes perhaps the most basic reason to be ethical: others have pleasures, pains, and preferences, and they are just as powerful to them as ours are to us. We have no rational reason to think our well being is of more importance than anyone else's.	Others may not want the same things you want. It makes more sense to treat others the way they want to be treated. (If what they want is reasonable and ethical) How does the golden rule apply to people who have done terrible things? Should we treat them as we would want to be treated?
Buddhist Ethics Suffering is caused by desire, attachment, and ignorance; the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate these things, by following the eightfold path: right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration. Buddhist ethics is centered around the Five Precepts--abstain from: harming living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication.	Buddha Many, many Buddhists	Buddha, like Aristotle, emphasized moderation: the “middle way” between extreme ascetism and extreme indulgence. The Buddhist insight that desire is the root of suffering is very valuable. You can't obtain happiness by the endless pursuit of desires. Once you have one thing you wanted, you'll want something else. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. Buddhism puts great emphasis on compassion, and teaches that a good way to cultivate compassion is to let go of selfish desires and cravings. Once we can keep our self-consciousness from taking up too much of our consciousness, we have more room for compassion and clear perception (mindfulness). Like Aristotle and other traditions, Buddhism emphasizes the need for practice. Thinking alone won't do much good. I love the Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva, who attains enlightenment for himself, but holds off on nirvana to help other sentient beings achieve it. Buddhism recognizes that people aren't the only sentient beings deserving of ethical consideration. The Buddha taught that getting obsessed with unanswerable theological/philosophical questions gets in the way of what's important. Sometimes we need to stop thinking and DO something.	Buddhism can lead people to accept their life as it is and not stand up for their rights. Many westerners get confused about Buddhism and other meditative spiritual practices, such as Yoga, thinking that they can somehow achieve enlightenment through self-indulgence. This totally misses the point. The point is self-transcendence. It does involve the individual practice of mindfulness, but if that doesn't lead to compassion and selflessness (as well as greater personal satisfaction), it's not working. I can't help thinking a truly enlightened person wouldn't be found meditating in Sedona, but helping people in Bangladesh or somewhere similar. Note on Mysticism: Buddhism, and many other mystic traditions in other world religions (mystic not in the sense of “magic”, but of being focused on experience instead of words and ideas) have had some great insights. One is that truth can't always be captured in words and mental images. It's too big and subtle. We also have to learn to open our minds to it: to experience it, not describe it. To taste the food instead of reading the menu. This takes practice. What's interesting is that this kind of practice leads to more than just wonder and other good feelings at the individual level. It also seems to result in increased compassion for others, maybe because we stop thinking about ourselves so much.
Taoism Not exactly an ethical tradition, but useful. Emphasizes the need to realize we can't capture the whole truth with words and ideas. Sometimes we have to let go of words and ideas to get a better sense of the world and how it flows and hangs together. Taoism is about opening your mind to see the harmony of nature, and getting into harmony with it. Often you can accomplish more by flowing with nature than by working against it.	Lao Tzu Chuang Tzu	We can certainly learn a lot by expanding our perception, which lets us see the world in wholes. Explicit thought can cause us to have tunnel vision, and to trip over ourselves. If you think too hard about shooting a basketball, for example, you'll miss. Sometimes you have to relax and trust that your body knows what to do better than your conscious mind does. People who can master this kind of thing are likely to be happier and more relaxed, and enjoy life more. Enjoying life is ethically important.	Taoism can be too passive. It doesn't really promote working to make the world a better place, in the sense of finding cures for disease, etc, which are very good things. Sometimes you shouldn't go with the flow, but against it. Taoism also doesn't promote a lot of respect for rights, because it tends to encourage people to be satisfied with what they have—which is good, in moderation. Taoism as a religion is very different from its original, simple form, and is full of silly magic and superstition.
Contractarian (Social Contract) Ethics The basis for ethics and justice can be found by imagining a contract between people to create a system of rules for society (contractarian ethics focus on what kind of government is just)	Hobbes Locke Jefferson Rousseau John Rawls	Some versions, like Locke, recognize that the only real reason to have government is to make life decent, if not better, for the people who create the government. That's the only valid reason for government to exist, and if it doesn't do the job, it is a bad government, and the people have the right to change it. Some versions, like Rawls', offer useful ways of thinking about fairness, which is an important concept, though people disagree on what it should be. Rawls said we could decide what is the most just society by having people imagine that they were going to decide on what the best society would be, without knowing what position they would have in that society--they don't know if they will be rich or poor, talented or not, etc. It's a brilliant idea.	Most people don't ever enter willingly into any contract. A good contract is a fair one, where both parties are equally powerful, and receive equal benefits. Most societies don't seem to be based on any such contract. If a contract is unfair to you, why honor its terms? Contractarian ethics doesn't say much about how to act in personal relationships
Liberty as a moral issue People may have an innate tendency to resist oppression by those in power, at least if they see that power as illegitimate. Of course, what is considered legitimate authority varies from person to person, and society to society. Classical liberals like Locke and Jefferson believed that people had inalienable rights to liberty and property. They saw government as existing to serve protect life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, etc. The purpose of government is to provide basic security and law, to ensure those rights. They saw the only legitimate government as being based on the consent of the governed. They were more interested in liberty, to let people pursue their welfare as they saw fit, than in social safety nets. Modern day libertarians and economic conservatives may see taxation for social welfare programs, or other government programs they see as illegitimate, as robbery.	Locke Jefferson Mill Robert Nozick	Resisting authority is vital, because those in power often act in their own interest, not the interest of those they have power over. Even if they try to act in the best interest of others, they may not be as effective at it as the people who decide for themselves what they want. The idea that government should be based, at some level, on the consent of the governed, is a vital one too. Unless you believe rulers have some kind of “natural” or divine right to be in charge, it's hard to think of any reason government and law is legitimate, except that the people are agreeing to it, because they think society is better with it than without it. The idea that property rights should be protected is a good one, at least up to a point. If people work for what they have, then they have rights to it. Governments should have a very good reason if they are going to take some of it away. But taxation is only robbery if it is illegitimate. The question is what is illegitimate?	Liberty and property rights are important things, but they aren't the only important things. Sometimes liberty clashes with social welfare or justice, and there are points where those things outweigh liberty. Saying people should have the liberty to develop more virulent strains of anthrax in their homes would sacrifice public safety for liberty. Everyone thinks there is a balance point, but people disagree about where it is. It's not clear that it's always right that some people earn vastly larger amounts of money than others. Does Maury Povitch deserve to make far more money than the average nurse or school teacher? Even if people get rich by being intelligent, talented, and hardworking, instead of lucky or unscrupulous, to what extent do they deserve credit for their intelligence or energy? What if they are born with those traits? Does someone born with a low IQ, in a poor family, deserve to stay poor all his life? He didn't choose his birth. What about social inequalities that make the playing field far from level? If one kid is born to a wealthy, educated, loving family, and another is born to a drug-addicted, impoverished single-parent in a housing project, and the wealthy kid goes on to be successful, and the other kid doesn't, can we really say each kid deserved what they got later in life? There are very good arguments for fairness—for leveling the playing field—especially for children, who certainly can't be said to deserve their advantages or disadvantages.
Deontological (Duty-based) Ethics What is right is not determined by consequences, but by intentions. If you do a good thing with bad intentions, you aren't being ethical. If you don't do bad things because you're afraid of getting caught or being punished, you're not being ethical. We should act according to duty. If one person helps another because they like to help people, and another does because they think it's the right thing to do, only the second person is acting in an ethical manner. The first person isn't being unethical, and they are doing a good thing, they just aren't acting according to an ethical rule. When considering any act, we should ask if it would be good if everyone did it. If not, it is not ethical. Treat people as ends in themselves, not means. Part of respecting people as reasoning, autonomous beings is to punish them when they have done wrong,	Kant	Individual rights are important. Consequentialist theories that disregard individual rights, in favor of the common good, are problematic. Should we kill a person and use his organs to save five lives? No. His rights are important. It's an important point that intentions, not just consequences, matter. It's also true that sometimes we have to do things simply out of a sense of duty—because it's the right thing to do--whether we enjoy them or not.	Doesn't recognize the value of enjoying doing the right thing. If we can do the right thing, both out of a sense that it's the right thing, and because we enjoy it, that is better than just doing it out of a sense of duty. Doesn't recognize the problem of ethical dilemmas, where you have to choose between two wrongs. Sometimes it's best to choose the lesser of two evils. Lying to a murderer about the whereabouts of his victim is a lesser evil than letting him murder them. I don't care what Kant said. May take the idea of universal imperatives too far. Sometimes the right thing to do depends on context, and sometimes it's best for different people to act in different ways. Kant's philosophy is so subtle and counterintuitive, it may be unworkable. It may simply be too hard for people to grasp and apply. An ethical system needs to be realistic.
Consequentialism (Utilitarianism is the most common consequentialist philosophy) What is right is whatever gives the best results. Bentham's utilitarianism suggested that we should aim for the greatest happiness for the greatest number, that happiness is basically pleasure, and that all pleasures are equal. John Stuart Mill agreed that happiness is basically pleasure, but he thought some pleasures were higher than others. He also advocated “rule utilitarianism” which says that the greater good often results from following certain established rules, like respecting the rights of individuals.	Bentham Mill Peter Singer	Gives a clear basis for why we should be ethical: because it makes the world better for people and other sentient creatures. For utilitarians, that involves maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Other consequentialists still see ethics as being about making life better, but they may think other things are more important than pleasure, such preferences, or a more sophisticated version of happiness. Doesn’t rely on abstract concepts like social contracts, natural laws, and so on, whose objective existence is hard to establish.	Pure consequentialism wouldn't consider the past, only the future, so it would ignore how people have behaved in the past in deciding how to treat them. There may be some wisdom to that (forgiveness can end cycles of retaliation) but it's still questionable as an absolute rule. But few ethicists would see it as an absolute rule anyway. Can you sensibly compare different kinds of pleasure? How do you compare going to the opera with going fishing? Is one better than the other? Is pleasure really what’s most important in life, anyway? Crude versions of consequentialism suggest that the ends justify the means, and don't give enough respect to individual rights. These ideas would suggest that it would be ok to kill one person, if it would make one hundred people very happy. Few if any real philosophers see consequentialism in such crude terms.
Ethical Relativism What is right depends on the culture. There is no “real” standard of right and wrong, and no culture should judge another based on its own norms.	Lots of people think they think this, but many haven't though it through. Some philosophers, mostly postmodern types.	It's true that unthinking ethnocentricity should be avoided. We shouldn't confuse “how we do it” with “what is right” because we may be doing things wrong.	Logically incoherent: if we say all views are equally valid, what about the views that say they are the only right ones? Doesn't ever give a way of saying some things are just wrong. Should we say slavery in the old south was right, because it was integral to the culture of the time?
Ethical Egoism What is right is whatever is in the best interests of the individual.	Ayn Rand, lots of others, though many of them don't admit it.	It is a good point that individuals matter, and that individuals, not groups, are who feel pleasure and pain. A society or group as a whole doesn't feel anything. The individuals who make it up do. Thinkers like Ayn Rand do make the useful point that altruism can have harmful consequences, when applied unthinkingly. People really can grow dependent on the generosity of others, for example. Benevolence should be thoughtfully applied. Some degree of self-interest is not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly generates a lot of productivity and creativity. Enlightened self-interest, where people enter into win-win relationships of cooperation and trade, can be more efficient and workable than relying on people's altruism, which is pretty unreliable.	Ignores the obvious fact that other individuals have feelings, rights, and preferences, just like we do. How can we logically defend the idea that our interests are more important than anyone elses, from an impartial point of view? Justifies itself by saying it is beneficial to society. But this isn't clear, and besides, wasn't the point that the individual, not society, is the unit of ethical concern?
Feminist Ethics/Ethics of Care Says that traditional ethics has a male bias, and has focused too much on seeking universal rules, and not enough on the importance of empathy and caring, or on the importance of personal relationships, Emphasizes the need to base ethical decisions on context, not universal rules.	Carol Gilligan	Caring and empathy are certainly important. It’s a good point that personal relationships have to be treated differently than relationships with people we are less close to, and shouldn't be viewed in terms of a social contract. For example, we owe more to people who have helped us in the past than we owe to strangers. Does a baby agree to a contract with its parents?	Few clear guidelines for how to behave. “Be caring” is not sufficient advice for some situations. Sometimes compassion for those close to us can cause us to be unethical to those who aren't. The idea that women are naturally more caring or nurturing (on average) is surely true to some extent, but emphasizing it too much could lead to perpetuation of stereotypes and traditional female roles. Taoism, Buddhism, Virtue Ethics, and Care Ethics all emphasize that you can't have explicit rules that cover every aspect of wisdom and behavior. That means it's good to cultivate habits, such as compassion and honesty, which will let us have good intuitions about the right thing to do in different situations. It's a good insight, but thinking things through can also be vital.

So far in this enormous blog post, I've talked about 21 different ways of looking at ethics. Some of them are closely related, but others are very different, and even contradictory. As I said earlier, I've always wondered whether it would be possible to come up with a good, simple, and unambiguous guide to living a good life and doing the right thing. As I look through all these ideas, I see that it's a pretty far-fetched idea. None of these theories stands out as being sufficient all by itself. The Golden Rule is probably the best simple rule of thumb we have, but even it has its limitations. Human life is complicated, and that means deciding what's right and wrong is complicated. It doesn't help that ethics is a metaphysically shaky topic: while we can't do without ethics, it's hard to say in exactly what sense ethics exist. It's not like we can look through a telescope, spot an wild ethic in its natural habitat, and measure it. What all this adds up to is that ethics has a certain amount of irreducible complexity. Most of the theories I've mentioned above make useful points, and a good theory of ethics should take those points into account. 

Still, there is hope. It might be possible to go through the ideas above, with their pros and cons, and come up with something simple enough to be useful. I might even try it myself, just as an intellectual exercise, and a way of getting a little closer to understanding what living well and ethically entails. But that's a task for another time, probably a time when I understand these theories a little better than I do now. I'm still an absolute amateur. But so are most other people, and that's really my main point here. This stuff is almost completely unknown to the person in the street, and it's hard to even find good, unbiased books about ethics. It's rarely taught in school until college, and then it's an elective few kids take. These are big problems. There are some giant ethical issues facing this world right now, so we better learn a little more about how to think about them.

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Besides Ethics for Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ethics, which really are very useful (if painfully corny), I also highly recommend Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do, by Michael Sandel. It focuses more on what is right at the political level than the individual level, but the explanations are great. Peter Singer's book How Are We To Live?: Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest, is also good, but dated and more opinionated. Simon Blackburn's Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics, is OK, but rambling. Jonathan Haidt's books The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis, talk about the evolutionary and psychological bases of ethics. Both great.