Moral Compass
April 2023
Duality, the essence of life and death is a situation that does not spare any discipline. Especially ethics. Those can be approached from a calculating cost benefit analysis, from individual judgement or dogmatic principles that include religion. In order to walk an unbeaten path that leads us out of this labyrinth, we need to look at the issues in front of us and set our moral compass accordingly.
A moral compass works on global principles and is calibrated by two poles: the individual and society. If a person acts purely individualistic with high goals, he is standing on a mountain in the north. The cold weather and isolation leads to a challenging existence. However this struggle to stay alive, both physically and culturally can lead to great contributions in the arts as those people are closer to the divine stars that guide them spiritually.
On the other pole, a person deeply concerned with the issues facing society also stands alone on a mountain. In their case, self-sacrifice is not used for personal expression but the expected betterment of the people. Because the stars are the same for our two pioneers, god has the ability to inspire both a musical symphony as well as a political manifesto. Through travel, those people can cross paths and even switch roles in the course of their life.
Most people live above sea level near the equator, balancing societal obligations and personal interests with an emphasis on doing the right thing. The warm climate and adequate amount of company should not hide the fact that this majority plays an essential part in the creation of homespun culture and the incorporation of abstract ideals into practical use.
Underwater residents with an overriding will to destroy are very rare as this is not the natural habitat of man. This makes matters more dangerous as tyrants act out of principles instead of sadism. The more wisdom one acquires, the easier it becomes to rationalise cognitive dissonance. Without institutional systems the public's sense of justice becomes more personal and transforms into honour versus dishonour.
The zeitgeist in form of weather and technology through its effect on the environment fundamentally shape public sentiment in ethical questions. A light polluted or smog filled metropole offers no view of the stars. Questions such as the afterlife could be scientifically disproven (21th century) or made irrelevant with gruelling workdays (19th century). The benefit of an industry complex may outweigh the burden of an impractical graveyard. Even before science took the center stage, philosopher were able to cloud the vision of their contemporaries, making the divine unseeable through logical reasoning.
However, whereas religion comes with several rights and obligations, spirituality is innate in humans and cannot be turned off materialistically. Therefore, the institutions that replace the organisational role of religion are doomed to also take over their spiritual role. Because of this new fear of death, life extension technology and knowledge enhancing microchips promise to turn us into demigods. In this sense, space travel will appear old fashioned as it comes from an archaic curiosity. Colonising mars is an exploration of the sublime rather than its replacement.
A lot of tech products are made of metal and as such they can disturb the moral compass when we come too close to them. If decisions come from the submission to a more advanced entity like a cyborg, solutions can be detrimental as we loose our ability to make them in the first place. Instead of a tyrant whose rise to power comes from persuasion skills and the free will of the people, changing the biochemical wiring of the human brain could produce a harmonious but enslaved population at best and a self exterminating one at worst.
It seems to be clear that a living organism is ethically preferable to a dead one, provided that its existence does not have destructive potential beyond its survival needs. A killing out of pleasure for no purpose other than the act itself is missing any virtue. While the judgement of the previous example seems to be obvious, maximising pleasure or knowledge is a pursuit that often leads to a fulfilling and therefore virtuous life. As most decisions are not made between life and death although their delayed consequences may lead to such conditions, how should we act with our limited knowledge in the moment? Can ethics be quantified to make those decisions universal?
There is a widening gap between the perceived importance of the natural and the social sciences. An indispensable position of the former, as technology becomes omnipresent, gives them leverage from policy making to publicity. Hard sciences deal with questions that have clear answers yet seem incidental to the moral being that searches for more. The fact that water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celsius and that it falls to the ground due to gravity does not bring us closer to answering how to live an ethical life. Or in the words of Heinz von Förster: "Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems." But maybe even the hard problems can be approached practically.
The unique ability of our brain is to ask questions that our system is incapable of conceptualising. Free will and infinity as well as their opposites can’t be processed because our survival didn't depend on them. Yet still, scientists are able to write these concepts down and find applications across disciplines. Therefore it should be possible to produce parameters for ethical judgements because our very survival depends on them.
A moral compass that is not set to subjective feelings about good and evil but instead takes sentience, knowledge and sufferance about the living being one interacts with into account, might be able to make more beneficial decisions for the individual as well as the collective. Probabilistic models of long term outcomes could expand those decisions on a state and industry level. There is however the risk of being overly reliant on technology for its speed of decision making while loosing the human touch of ambiguity that should remain our defining feature.
