Ethics and Material Positivism
The question at hand is how to determine if an action is good, or bad. We speak of moral good and moral bad, the latter often called evil. Do we like it because it is good? Is it good just because we like it? Can we pick and choose good things because we like them, or is there an absolute measure of whether something is, from a universe perspective good or not?
It is easiest to start at the extreme, because the line is so clear for exaggerated occasions. We might then hone in on the more and more subtly divided actions, and see if we can gain enough focus to discern where ordinary daily actions fall.
Case in point: genocide is bad
Why? Because thousands, maybe millions, of people are killed for an apparently arbitrary reason. In 1916 the Turks decided to exterminate the Armenian simply because they wanted the territory they occupied. The target of this violence was guilty of two things: simply of being born on a piece of land and not being descendant from a Turk.
Not so fast. Who says that death is bad? Certainly I don’t want to die. And presumably you don’t want to die. But isn’t that just our preference? In the big universal picture, everybody is going to die, so why does it matter if it is now or later? Aren’t you just saying that your personal subjective experience of not wanting to die is then being conflated with calling it morally evil? For you it is bad, but is it bad in reality?
The moral relativist will say that the Turk’s find the Armenian Genocide to be a good action, while the Armenians call it a bad action. It is all subjective. Good actions are merely actions that you want to happen. The Turks wanted the genocide, so it was good. It is all relative to your subjective experience, and that is all there is to good and bad. You can pick your morals as easily as you pick your friends.
I disagree. There are action that really are bad, because on the net, they are bad for everyone. There is an objective morality, and genocide is objectively bad. It is bad for the same reason that killing a person is bad. Once again we face the question: why is death objectively bad? What if the earth would be a better place without any human being on it? The wildlife would certainly thrive without people, and so might that not be good? How can we say that increasing (or maintaining) the number of humans is necessarily good?
Utilitarians asses the moral valence of an action as good depending upon whether the outcome is better than if the action had not been taken. Thus giving the right medicine to a patient is a good action because their health improves. And better health is better, right? Why? Again, other than just personal opinion, how do we get to the point that health is good. And life is good? Couldn’t you simply decide that death is good, and then satisfy your utilitarian goals by killing everyone for the ultimate good action?
Purpose of the Universe
The utilitarian game can be played as long as you have agreement on what outcome is better/worse. Material positivism gives us a basis for this game. It is best summarized by this universal claim:
“Existence is greater than oblivion”
This is a general principle, inherent in the universe, that applies to all thing, living or nonliving, conscious or unconscious. The universe exhibits self-organizing behavior. That is, things get more complex on their own. This increasing complexity causes things to come into existence. Material positivism says simply that the increase in complexity, the bringing of new things into existence is good. The maintaining of existing things is good.
Understand that this claim depends inherent on being able to distinguish an entity from everything else. For example, a star forms all by itself. The material that the star is made from existed long before the star. Still, once that material has fallen together, we recognize that there exists a star where there was no star before. We can draw the line between the star and everything else, even though the star is really just a reconfiguration of matter that was there before the star formed. The presence of the star is better than no star.
We recognize living things as being distinct patterns that form out of the material that surrounds them. Even though all the material in a tree existed long before the tree, we still see a new entity in the tree itself which was created at the tree grew from a seed. The growing of a tree is on the whole good, and the killing of a tree would be — in absence of any other consideration — bad.
Order and organization is sacred. Entities do form at various levels in the universe, and that formation is inherently good. In a sense, you could say that the purpose of the universe is to form new things that never existed before. I don’t mean purpose in the sense that something sat down and thought through the consequences and decided to make increasing organization a purpose for action. I mean simply that the universe inherently tends to increase organization and the purpose is a description of this tendency.
The history of the universe has been one of giving more and more opportunities for greater forms of entities. We know that for the first 4 billion years there can not possibly have been complex life, because the elements necessary for the kind of life that we see were not available until a generation of stars produced them and then went nova.
There is no reason to assume that the universe is done with creating new forms of existence. These new forms are “good” because that is the arrow of the universe. Material Positivism simply accepts this as an axiom.
Evaluation and Utilitarianism
Let’s get back to the morals. Now we can assess the outcome of an action: if it preserves or increases complex entities it is good. If it decreases the number of things that exist, or sets a path to decrease them, then it is bad. We need to always consider the entire population.
A society that endorsed genocide to be “good” as a practice would ultimately wipe themselves out. Exactly like the culture that considers murder to be good: it would be quickly wiped out. In abstract, nobody wants to be subject to genocide, but this is more than simply a preference to avoid genocide. A general practice of genocide harms more than just the subjects: it would harm all humans by decreasing variety, increasing violence in general, and endangering all of humanity just a bit.
Material Positivism leads us directly to the conclusion that “preserving human life is generally better than killing.” Outlawing murder is good not only for the victim, but for humanity as a whole. Damaging someone’s health is always bad (by itself) because it decreases their chances for surviving. Poisoning the water for a city is always bad because it decreases the chance of surviving, and survival is a basic element of Material Positivism.
Material Positivism gets us from “is” to “aught.”
Material positivism gives us then a value framework to judge whether the result is assessed better or worse than others. Existence is greater than oblivion.
Q&A
Should we starve to preserve other life? No action exists in a vacuum and must be considered together with other consequences. Killing livestock is bad in isolation, while providing food is likely a greater good that justifies it. Utilitarianism must consider the big picture: ideally the whole universe.
Won’t this lead to overpopulation? One might think this leads to a population explosion because more is better. But there are limits. There is a point where increasing the population will endanger the population as a whole. In any give system, there is a maximum number of any entity that is optimal. Attempting to increase beyond that actually has the effect of decreasing the total. Material positivism does not drive to infinite numbers of thing, but simply to the maximum carrying capacity of the environment.