“i believe”
something i wrote a few days back in 20 mins (fast by my standards), for a deadline… the task was to write an essay on the quote below. i have a little change of opinion since then, at one point. but whatever.
“I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values.” – Albert Einstein
Ethics are usually taken to mean a moral code that helps one decide what is right and what is wrong, and that leads us to the following question. What IS right and wrong? Who decides what is right and wrong? A selfish society usually tells one that what one does for this society at the cost of self sacrifice is right and what one does just for oneself at the cost of harm to the society is wrong. Clearly, society cannot be taken as the judge of right and wrong because it is an interested party. The other relevant and interested party is the person acting. So, where do we go from here? Is there a third person, who can decide unbiasedly? For the theist, yes. God. But how do we know what God thinks? And how do we even know that God exists? How many of us have known him personally, met Him, seen Him, talked to Him? Our scriptures were written by society. How do we know that they are an unbiased account of what God believes? We can’t say, we don’t know. So, we come back to the 2 interested parties- the society and the individual. Since, ultimately, the individual is the entity actually doing the action, he obviously has a greater right to decide right and wrong. And the rest of the society, in itself constituted by individuals, can act in the context provided by others’ actions. We exist because we are selfish as per Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If we hadn’t been selfish and with a sense of self preservation, we would have been wiped away as a species long ago. So, being selfish is natural. And if an individual decides to make selfish decisions, how is it wrong?
I hear you say- ‘oh but that would lead to anarchy! No one would ever have any respect for anybody else’s life. We would all die!’ Exactly! Anarchy would lead to destruction. And because we are selfish, we don’t want to die, and so we don’t want anarchy. So, what an intelligent person would do is set his ethical code in such a way that he would have sufficient scope for progress without resulting in anarchy, whereas a not so intelligent person could easily lead to anarchy if he follows the simple rule of being selfish. This person needs to be brain washed, needs to be told by the society what is good and what is bad, even for his own good. And we, as a society, need to brain wash him, for OUR own good. So, there comes the idea of ‘instilling’ ethics. Half knowledge is dangerous.
So ultimately, a good purely intellectual attitude would lead to stability in the society. There is no good reason to opt for the abstract “ethics”, without a convincing justification, over facts, which we can see and test. And opting for facts is our nature as a species, because if we understand the causes we can manipulate the effects, which would give us greater powers, and a greater ability to ‘fit’- again, natural selection. However, it has to be borne in mind that this kind of attitude takes time to develop. There will always be people who would acquire only half knowledge and would lead to anarchy. So, for these people, and there’ll be many of them, an intellectual attitude would lead to a weak code of ethics, an impairment of good ethical values.
How do we resolve the situation? We cannot go back intellectually, and so there’ll be a continuous increase in the number of people who set their own selfish ethical code. What we can do is try and implement a concurrent socially determined code of ethics, so that when the person does not have a good code of ethics, he’s put into a dilemma by a prevalent and completely different good code of ethics.
I’d say there can be three categories into which a person’s behaviour can be put. Firstly, behaviour well within the ethical limits, wherein a human acts like a true benevolent being. Secondly, behaviour which is condemned universally, like killing a fellow human for selfish ends. These two categories need no real definition; it is only when an act falls on the borderline that the said guidelines come into force.
The problem is, the ’set’ of ethical conduct has a very vague boundary, and this boundary itself keeps changing, with time, and with location. If you would analyze closely, all activities of humans that are an expression of true instinct have been demonified in some way or the other. The society may deem an act as ethical or non-ethical, and the individual in question may rebel against this interference, but it is interesting to note that this very individual would form a part of the society when it comes to criminalizing an ‘unethical’ act committed by someone else.
I would deem an act ethical by replacing myself with a random person, and asking myself what I would feel as a part of the society. Would I condemn that person for an act similar to mine? Or would I simply bend the facts to justify my actions while slinging mud at someone else who did the same thing? In general, we see facts as objective indicators, and one is free to interpret these facts in a way that justifies any act that would defy prevalent ethics. The intellectual attitude has not led to the impairment of ethical values, rather it is used by those who formed these very ethics to come clean with blood on their hands.
Arijit
November 5, 2009 at 12:21 pm
hmm… well yes. but again, that’s the part-intellectual attitude. if one is a true intellectual, then he would realise that inconsistency is not doing very well for him. either that, or it IS doing very well for him, so it isn’t unethical. who said ethics were about consistency? ethics are those which allow you to do your best.
Feizerl
November 9, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Well I guess that’s why people commit crime. Even Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich deemed the Holocaust as an ethical procedure. What did that give? 6 million dead.
Arijit
November 10, 2009 at 6:24 am
well exactly. we dont want to die. and so we as a selfish party, hate him. obviously. we would have loved him if he had died for us. our numbers are bigger, but if that doesn’t bother him, if he really believes that his success does not come from the society that does not follow his ideology, he isn’t unethical, or unmoral. you see, its all relative. for us, he’s the villain. for him, he’s not. but we are not the absolute judges, just relative ones.
for me, my sense of success definitely comes from the society. i want to be the fittest. i dont believe i can be the fittest by killing people, because then everybody would hate me, and i would probably be killed too. i wouldnt be able to handle the lack of support. i wont be fit anymore. so i dont want to kill one. thats my morality. its just different from hitler’s. society would say mine is better. but is it really?
Feizerl
November 10, 2009 at 6:08 pm
See that’s the point. Society plays such a major role in our lives that our very opinions are influenced by it. What will people think, what will people say? Our individuality isn’t really intrinsic to us anymore. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but it does keep society from falling into chaos.
Arijit
November 10, 2009 at 9:14 pm
correct. but you cant call that unethical unless you can show that the alternative would have given the person in question, a more powerful life. and then the critical question comes of deciding the ingredients of power. good ethics is when the person adopts a policy that best helps him acquire HIS kind of power.
good morality for the society, in case the person’s interests clash significantly with the society, would be to destroy this person.
Feizerl
November 11, 2009 at 4:10 am