Mr. Moderate

You ought to read John Dean’s article about impeaching presidents. Dean is best known for telling the truth to Congress right at the point when the consequences of telling the truth were the worst for the President of the United States. But Dean is (was?) an old-style conservative and there were just certain ethical boundary lines he would not cross, even if it meant severe damage to the nation, his President, and the Republican Party. Dean’s article makes clear that most old-style conservatives maintain certain bedrock ethical principles which they would hold to no matter what. Dean ends his story with these words:

Disturbingly, it has been clear for some time that Bush and Cheney did indeed lie – and that their lies fit within a clear, extensive pattern of abuse of power. Yet condemnation from Congressional Republicans has yet to be heard. Sadly, it seems possible that today’s Republicans — unlike Wiggins and the other Nixon apologists who changed their minds when confronted with proven presidential lies — have no moral lines that they will draw.

I wrote yesterday about the “win by any means” archetype, which unfortunately includes lawyers, politicians, cops, military members, and criminals. Dean points out that elder conservatives didn’t use to lack moral boundary lines. It is only the newer conservatives (or “neocons”) that align most perfectly into this archetype. And Dean isn’t the only one noticing this change. In an article dated last Wednesday (7/23/08), Paul Craig Roberts, another “old school” conservative, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and a Contributing Editor to the National Review also wrote that the Republican Party was now the worst enemy of American values. And I consider myself to be among them. Please read my own “Confessions of a Goldwater Republican.”

So, what do all these people (Dean, Roberts, Goldwater and myself) have in common? None of us are willing to see the Constitution of the United States disrespected in any way. We all have an ethical floor which requires respect for the founding principles of our democracy as enunciated by that document.
Continue reading ‘New Conservatives Lack Ethics’ »

I’m involved in a long-running but gentle discussion with another old-style Republican who is uncomfortable enough with the modern Republican Party to strongly consider not voting for McCain. He isn’t to the point where I am yet, voting for Obama, but he clearly recognizes that the Republicans have strayed so far off track that they no longer deserve his vote.

As our discussion of Obama continues, he expressed discomfort with the family history of Obama, particularly the doings of Obama’s own father. Barack Obama Sr. fathered Barack Jr. (the current candidate for President) while messing around in Hawaii with a white woman while Sr. was still married to Kezia Obama back in Kenya. This explains why two of Senator Obama’s half-siblings are older than he is while two others by the same mother are younger. The reference for this discussion was a tabloid newspaper article in The Sun.

The question that my friend raised was whether or not there might be some “criminal gene” which somehow managed to infect Obama, Jr. that was somehow deemed to be present in Obama, Sr. since Sr. was seemingly involved in a number of shady dealings, not the least of which was whatever story he told to Obama, Jr.’s mother about his family in Africa. In reply I pointed out that it really hardly matters since so many politicians are lawyers and since lawyers, cops, criminals, politicians, and military members are all part of a common archetype that believes in “win by any means.” We have a lot less to fear from politicians than we do from other members of the archetype because politicians are so addicted to power and so much in the public eye that they learn to behave better, more often than not, so as to retain the power that the people entrust them with.
Continue reading ‘Hating the “Win By Any Means” Archetype’ »

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. … That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, … That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

From the Declaration of Independence

From the above we can discern that our founding fathers felt it was appropriate to have a government which would:

• Protect the life and safety of its citizens;
• Protect the liberty and freedom of its citizens; and
• Protect the happiness of its citizens and their ability to pursue additional happiness.

All-in-all, those would seem to be pretty good reasons for people to have a government.
Continue reading ‘Why Have A Government?’ »

In the Bible, the Book of John, Chapter 8, verses 31-32 reads (more or less) like this:
8:31 Then Jesus said to those Judeans who had believed him, “If you continue to follow my teaching, you are really my disciples
8:32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

In this essay, I will make the same claim that Jesus made, above. If you believe me, and you follow my teaching, “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Now, Jesus was trying to teach the Jews to be free from sin. But of course, my objective is to teach you to be free of sin too. In my case, you will be free of sin by recognizing it as an incoherent concept which cannot have any hold over you unless you willingly enslave yourself to the idea of sin. Once you reject the idea of sin, you are immediately free of sin, and of coercion by any church which preaches that you must do penance (usually by paying money) repeatedly for your sins, which the church will repeatedly assert you commit almost continuously when you are not at church doing penance (usually by paying money). Thus, this freedom I give you is economically valuable to you, as it gets you out of a lifetime of doing penance (usually by paying money).
Continue reading ‘Know The Truth’ »

When I write about “utility” in this essay, I’m referring to an ethical principle that is usually stated as something like: “the maximum amount of happiness for the maximum number of people.” This ethical system is usually called “utilitarianism.”

Now, I used to believe that utilitarianism was the best form of ethics, but I recognized that it had several problems, and among those problems were a total failure to motivate rather ordinary behavior. Most of us spend most of our time doing things that do not make us very happy. Most of us work, for instance, not because it makes us happy (although some of may be happy as a result of our work), but rather because it produces money for us to use to meet the needs and wants which arise in our lives. In other words, happiness is only a small portion of what we obtain when we work; that portion which allows us to fulfill our “wants.” Our needs are matters of necessity, and if observed strictly, fulfilling them provides little to no happiness. (There may be, of course, blended situations where I need to eat and I want to eat a steak; eating a steak fulfills my need and my want at the same time. The higher we are on the economic ladder of success, the more likely it is that our needs will be fulfilled using wants in this same fashion.)
Continue reading ‘Utility Is Means; Not End’ »

Let us begin with a quote from Bertrand Russell:

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The above is from Russell’s 1912 book The Problems of Philosophy; in fact, those are the last words in the book. I think it is a pretty good ending.
Continue reading ‘The Value of Philosophy’ »

From the standpoint of a born-again Christian, is executed murderess and fellow born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker enjoying full privileges in Heaven? If so, is that in any way “justice” for her victims? On the Christian worldview, it is highly-unlikely that either of her two dead victims, both members of an underworld biker community, were in any Christian sense “saved” before they were killed, so would not Tucker’s acts of murder have sent the victims straight to Hell? And if the murder victims go to Hell and the murderess goes to Heaven, what does that say about God’s idea of Justice?

One of the key concepts in the whole idea of what “justice” means is the idea of proportionality. We do not impose the death penalty, or million dollar fines, upon people convicted of parking tickets because the punishment is not proportional to the crime. “Let the punishment fit the crime is the principle that the severity of penalty for a misdeed or wrongdoing should be reasonable and proportional to the severity of the infraction.” So, on the Christian worldview, why is God so unjust as to have only one possible punishment of the most-extreme sort (an eternity in Hell), with the only other possibility being the most-extreme possible reward of an eternity in Heaven? In fact, it is exactly the concept that God is just, and Hell is an impossibly-extreme punishment that can never be just for any person, which led many Christians to the idea of universal salvation; everybody goes to Heaven when they die, regardless of any sin they might have committed while alive.
Continue reading ‘Justice & Death’ »

Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

There are many barriers that mankind cannot cross and return. Hamlet (above) referred to the barrier between life and death. Billions of years ago, the first living things on Earth arose. Since that time, none have died and returned to life so far as science is concerned; at least none for which a sufficiently-loose definition of the word “died” is applied. True death must mean more than mere sleep or hibernation. Some species plant their seeds and disappear for many years, only to reappear on cue when their time comes around once again. Such life-forms are not truly “dead” in the sense implied by the above verses.
Continue reading ‘The Undiscoverable Country’ »

One of the clear lessons from the Holocaust of the 20th century is that certain types of scientific inquiry are clearly immoral (or unethical) to perform. The infamous Nazi human experiments on prisoners disgusted the entire world, and such activities have been all-but-universally condemned. It is even questionable whether the ethical scientist ought to use or cite to the results of such ethically despicable research. I agree with those who would permit it under extraordinary circumstances and with appropriate condemnation of the unethical basis of the research in question. But few would question that scientific inquiry into medical subjects must be subordinate to considerations of medical ethics, and frankly I would condemn the ethics any who would question such subordination.

As I have written, my ethical hierarchy is grounded in survival. But we are all aware that even animals will sacrifice themselves in some ways to preserve the survival of their species through their own young. So, it does not necessarily follow that ethical scientific inquiry must necessarily avoid death for the organisms under study. To put this in a readily-understandable human context, we are “at war” with certain diseases, and in any war, some soldiers will die even if we do our best to preserve their lives. Since animals are viewed as “property” the ethical concerns with animal experimentation are somewhat different than they are with human experimentation. However, even there, we recognize that owned animals have certain rights to treatment according to recognized ethical standards. Accordingly, most of us would agree that there are limits to what scientific researchers can be allowed to do to owned animals for the purpose of scientific research. However, most of us would disagree with the limits sought to be imposed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The benefit of having an organization which takes such an extreme view of animal rights is that at least we can attempt to have a conversation about the proper limits upon the treatment of animals.
Continue reading ‘Ethical Concerns Limit Scientific Inquiry’ »

Albert Einstein said this about ethics:

I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

I believe exactly as Einstein asserted in the above quote. There are many facts which lead me to conclude, as Einstein does, that ethics is a human invention and that there is no immortality to earn (or lose) through “good” (or “bad”) behavior. Among the facts are:

• The universe is extraordinarily large, and humans are comparatively quite small.
• Humans are just an evolved form of primate who just happen to have an evolved talent for transmitting rapidly evolving memes.
• The base of all ethical codes is survival, of individuals, groups, species, and of life itself.
• Each culture develops its own unique religion, with some elements in common (presumably due to the common ground of needing to prioritize survival) and many elements of difference (presumably due to the “fashion” or “tastes” of the particular populations involved).

Continue reading ‘Ethical Issues Are Basic Human Concerns’ »