Mr. Moderate

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).

From this list we can easily grasp that religion is entirely a concern of humans, with little in common between different groups of humans. As for the question of immortality, science is on the brink of disproving even the possibility of any such thing happening. With the question of rebirth in Heaven, Hell, or a greater or lesser creature “off the table,” the grounding principles of ethics must then be discovered among the living rather than among the dead. This again lends itself to the idea that survival of life itself is the true grounding of our moral thinking.

The laws of nature do nothing to inform human ethics beyond the aforementioned grounding in the survival of life. We can say that exterminating all life naturally exterminates all ethical questions as all ethical questions are a product of only living things. But there is no mechanism within the laws of nature to prevent the extermination of all living things. In fact, life is extremely fragile and could easily be exterminated without notice by an unnoticed asteroid or solar nova, events that are not exactly rare within our universe.

However, as we have always gotten along without any God to lead us down the correct path to ethical behavior, it will always remain at least possible we will agree to discover and adhere to the ethical principles which most promote our founding moral commandments: life must survive. We no longer need to ask why we ought to be traveling through space: life must survive, and the Earth’s ability to sustain life is quite finite, and could be erased at any moment.

There are, unfortunately, some religious adherents out there who believe it is their duty to destroy the Earth in order to bring about a calamity from which their God must rescue them. We must view those people as suicidal people with murder on their minds. After all, if they succeed beyond all their wildest dreams, then all life dies, and that would be the greatest act of immorality in the known history of our universe.

I’m willing to entertain the idea that there is much about our universe that we do not know, and can perhaps never know. But I will not entertain the idea that life must be extinguished to satisfy the requirements of some mythical God! The ethical stance I adopt is that survival of life is the greatest good, and survival of as many different forms of life as is reasonably possible is a good which is nearly as great. Human survival must take something of a back seat to at least those two ethical goals.

Beyond questions of survival, humans are free to set reasonable ethical rules for our dealings with one another. But the measure of reasonableness ought to be how the particular ethical rule, or at least ethical rules of that type, either promote survival or minimize the chance of not surviving. I believe a careful analysis of the ethical rules humanity has adopted within modern memory would largely verify that this is the direction in which human ethical evolution is naturally progressing.

And it should be obvious that I believe this is the ethical direction in which humans ought to continue to progress, even if that means we must band together to fight, or even kill off, the extreme factions which would prefer to exterminate all of life in order to promote their petty religious ideals. In other words, if it is necessary for the greater good of the survival of the masses, we should not hesitate to kill. But that should only be a course we follow when it is truly necessary, and we should be as reluctant as we can be to pursue a course of killing (such as by starting a preemptive war).