Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Let’s take a particular moral theory, utilitarianism. Its essence is the extent of one’s love and prudence. In Moral Minds Marc D. Hauser has been trying for 400 pages to convince us that many animals have prudence. I have no doubt of that. What animals do not have is love for each other, such that brings union, mutual indwelling, and all that. Animals cannot love, because they have no will and no speculative intellect. When a chimp cares for her young, she does not have any feelings of love toward the child. At most, there is some pleasurable tingling of the senses. Regardless, there is care only to maximize one’s reproductive fitness. There is no love that cannot be reduced to pursuing successful survival and reproduction strategies.

The reason for man’s civilizational success is the recognition of higher productivity of divided labor and therefore of the usefulness of association even on the global scale. Hauser says that dolphins also have some rudimentary division of labor during cooperative hunts. Of course, human social bonds and their specializations are permanent, unlike, I assume, those of dolphins. Is it the case that a particular dolphin would always be a driver, having developed the right skills, and others would always be barriers? If so, then division of labor is, though understood as causing prosperity by humans, would still exist in an instinctive form in dolphins, though Hauser does not tell us.

I think, therefore, that, though human prudence is enlightened by the speculative intellect and therefore far exceeds the capacities of animal prudence, the difference is one of degree not kind. What separates man from the animals with respect to morality is love not prudence, though the fact that all other people in the world can be loved at least for their usefulness to the agent is due to understanding of the basics of social cooperation. The clue is that this understanding is fairly sublime, as is realizing the long-term harmony of interests of all human beings, and people do easily hate the foreigners, in the US from the Chinese to the Mexicans. In other words, it is the capacity to love not love’s reach, intensity, or even that natural love can be upgraded to charity that makes man unique and makes morality apply to him.

Therefore, animals can never be utilitarians, because they can’t be disinterestedly benevolent impartial spectators over some group of people which is the form of love required by utilitarianism.

Here is a talk.origins reply to the claim that evolution is tautological.

“According to Popper, any situation where species exist is compatible with Darwinian explanation, because if those species were not adapted, they would not exist. That is, Popper says, we define adaptation as that which is sufficient for existence in a given environment. Therefore, since nothing is ruled out, the theory has no explanatory power, for everything is ruled in.”

In other words, in the actual world people say that all creatures are what they are because they have “evolved.” In any possible world, say, in the world in which lions had horns and chipmunks sang songs, the conclusion would be the same: these creatures, too, must have evolved. Is there any world in which the claim that things presently existing have arrived there by means of evolution cannot be made?

A certain species of birds produces two offspring. If the year is good and rich with food, then both survive. If the year is bad, then the firstborn sibling will kill the secondborn. Now this is very interesting, to be sure. We can see how this strategy may increase reproductive fitness over an alternative strategy in which infanticide is not condoned, and the birds wait until the first chick is fully weaned. But first, we don’t know if this strategy is globally efficient: perhaps if the birds produced three offspring or had more sophisticated powers of foresight, such that they could determine how good the coming year would be, then their fitness would increase still more. Second, how do you jump from this observed behavior to the idea that this behavior has “evolved”? Well, “obviously,” these birds were not specially created. More important, however, is that they are not human and are therefore stupid. They could not have reasoned their way toward efficiency but could only have arrived at this somewhat efficient reproductive strategy by millions of years of blind trial-and-error.

This already presupposes that trial-and-error is powerful enough to solve even inventive technological problems. This is evolutionary theory’s worst presumption.

So, it may be true that evolution “rules out the existence of inefficient organisms when more efficient organisms are about.” Also, if 3,000 years ago the world was teeming with life but today most of the world was barren, then this would support the hypothesis that living things were created and in addition by an incompetent creator. But that still leaves a huge number of possible worlds whose emergence is “explained” by evolution with a glib “evolution did it.”

Genes “will tend to be more often transmitted insofar as what they deliver is better ‘engineered’ to the needs of the organisms in the environment in which they live. And you can determine that, within limits, by ‘reverse engineering’ the traits to see how they work.” But this is the very research program of intelligent design! By all means, study these biological systems, such as chemical robots within cells, and how they enable the organism to work and reproduce. All that’s missing is the proper interpretation (is this structure evolved or was it ID’ed?) of the common project.

Again, evolution is not a “science” in a double sense. First, all science looks for regularities, causal laws. Evolutionary theory is merely history, dealing with unique non-repeatable events. Second, almost nothing is known about these events, be they mutations or occurrences of design. I fully realize that what I am asking of evolutionary biologists is impossible for them to produce. But then this is a dead discipline. Quit your jobs and become economists or something.

The parable (Mt 25:1-13) ends with “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” People keep looking for signs of the end of the world, even in the Bible. They fail to grasp that all the alleged references to the “Second Coming,” the “Armageddon,” and so on are in fact to each man’s own personal end of the world, namely, his death. “Keep watch,” therefore, because you can almost never predict when you will die or at least when you will acquire a disease (such as cancer) that will allow to predict when you will die with some certainty. The point is not to postpone things you can do now, because you may end up never doing them, if tomorrow you are swimming in the ocean, and everything seems irie, mon, and then a shark bites off your head.

What is the meaning of the following?

“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. (Mt 6:1-4)

It might be argued that Jesus is saying that it is better to be honored by God than by men. But, it can be objected, surely it is even better to be honored by both. Would not Jesus command “men” to honor those who give to the needy? Why the denial of nature: I naturally want to be honored but should hide my good deeds; society naturally does not care to honor me but should try to do so nevertheless?

Perhaps the idea is that being honored by men is completely irrelevant. Say, Smith writes a useful blog post, and some lurker reads it profitably without Smith’s knowledge. Jesus may be assuring Smith that his contribution to society will not be unnoticed and left unrewarded by God. Perhaps, but surely it is incumbent upon the lurker at least to thank Smith in his heart. St. Thomas writes that honor is the greatest thing a man can receive from other human beings. And therefore the person who is honored should be pleased. It’s OK to enjoy it and therefore to desire it. Surely, honor matters, even before men.

Another and more general interpretation is that the right hand represents costs and the left hand, revenues. Jesus is telling the reader not to be perpetually calculating profits. Now far be from Jesus to despise prudence, a cardinal virtue on par with justice. The parable of the talents (Mt 25) is striking for its emphasis on business calculations and profitable investments. Thou shalt not fail in business (or in obtaining your “human capital” gains, i.e., return on your natural gifts)! Here, first, Jesus is referring to the circle of family and friends. For within a family calculations are rough and imprecise. A husband does not at the end of every month give his wife a bill saying, “Here’s what I have done for you; here’s what you have done for me; and you still owe me $150.” Now of course if a relationship is one way, such that one person just gives and the other just takes, then this is a recipe for disaster. But Jesus’ point, second, is to bring up familial love: if you love, then give without further thought: the profit to the beloved is your profit. And if you are loved, then take without fearing that you will need to repay the favor: your profit is the profit of the lover, as well.

Elsewhere Jesus reveals the ultimate need to love even strangers. But here out of the three moral states <beginning, proficient, perfect> Jesus is dealing with the proficient state. A beginner would want honor among men and receives that reward in this life; a man perfect in virtue gives out of charity in his heart, feels acutely the joy of those to whom he gives, and is again rewarded by that even in this life. But someone in between, a man whose virtue is considerable but imperfect, may find his motivation in the thought of presenting his deeds to God and being honored for them. There is nothing shameful in this but perhaps such ideas still fall short of true love for one’s fellow men.

So, there is this guy, Roy, a middle-aged machinist of above-average intelligence whom I befriended at the coffee shop. We’ve discussed economics to some extent, and, though I tried to hint on the idea that the reasons for our economic maladies are not free market but rather government interventionism, especially government and the Fed’s control over money supply, messed-up incentives, overregulation, and like deviations from laissez-faire, he persisted in denouncing “greed,” fraud on the part of corporations, lying and corrupt business executives, and so on. He thought exactly the way Mises described: the rich got their money in underhanded ways, but he, Roy, was too moral and upright to do the same; the reason he enjoyed only modest income was that his moral scruples did not permit him to rob other people.

If that were all, then it would scarcely be interesting. But, hoping to see an improvement in Roy’s thinking, I gave him a copy of Mises’ Anticapitalistic Mentality. It’s a short work and probably the easiest of Mises’ contributions to science. Since he read it, he underwent a remarkable change. No longer did he claim to be morally superior to his more successful fellows. He said to me: “If I could rob people, I surely would; I just don’t have the balls.” He was now as allegedly evil as the rich are; but unfortunately too cowardly and stupid to be able to commit similar crimes. Roy has become malicious, stupid, and weak.

It seems that knowledge can corrupt as well as enlighten.

The Democrats hate themselves; the Republicans hate everyone else, including the Democrats. The Rs think the American government is morally perfect; the Ds think the American people are all morally corrupt. The Ds believe in socialism; the Rs believe in nothing. The Ds love socialism for the poor; the Rs love socialism for the rich.

Did you know that this famous phrase uttered by Paul (1 Cor 2:9, also Isa 64:4) was also written down by the Greek Empedocles?

“Week and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the life in death through which they toil. Then are they borne away; like smoke they vanish into air; and what they dream they know is but the little that each hath stumbled upon in wandering about the world. Yet boast they all that they have learned the whole. Vain fools! For what that is, no eye hath seen, no ear hath heard, nor can it be conceived by the mind of man.” (quoted in Will Durant, “The Life of Greece,” 357)

This is one of my favorite movie quotes, and it describes politics, whether electoral or bureaucratic, perfectly. Or one can invoke the great George Carlin: “I look at war a little bit differently. To me, war is a lot of prick-waving! OK? Simple thing. That’s all it is. War is a whole lot of men standing out on a field, waving their pricks at one another.” Well, one might say, if only it ended there.

This is an attractive concept: we fight to bring universal peace. That was the message of the recent wars, World War I, and even the Roman conquests as portrayed in the movie Gladiator:

“In the winter of 180 A.D., Emperor Marcus Aurelius’ twelve-year campaign against the barbarian tribes in Germania was drawing to an end.”

“Just one final stronghold stands in the way of Roman victory and the promise of peace throughout the empire.”

Oh yeah, sure, the Roman killing and destroying and taxing were all in the name of peace. But only division of labor and trade bring peace. When someone tells you that he wants to go to war in order to ensure peace or prevent other wars, sneer at this person with contempt: he is lying to you.

I used to suffer from heartburn almost every night; I’d wake up in the middle of the night several times, often feeling nauseous — sometimes I couldn’t swallow my saliva; I had to spit out, lest I’d throw up. What worked for me was Nexium. Since I started taking it a year or so ago — one pill before going to bed — I have not had a single case of heartburn. Not a single failure! Even if I had pizza in the evening! And no side effects either. For me it was a miracle drug. Check it out.

So, I am watching Life on the Discovery Channel on my HDTV, and it’s so cool. Sometimes the narrator slips into saying things likes “this plant evolved such-and-such behavior” which of course is a mere homage to the dull Darwinian orthodoxy. I mean, suppose you replace “evolved” with “were created 6,000 years ago with” or simply something meaningless like “cleepsed their behavior.” Would that explain anything? I mean, come on, if you say that the plant has evolved, then you must be prepared to supply the relevant details: when it obtained its present nature; from what it evolved; through what intermediate stages; how long each evolutionary thrust took; which genetic mutations occurred when and in what sequence; how each feature of the plant evolved; what happened on each level of the plant from organs (roots, leaves) to biochemical and physical events within cells in all their mechanical specified complexity; and a hundred other things. No such explanation is even attempted. So, who cares? I suggest that a far more fascinating and, yes, fruitful approach is to treat these life forms as divine engineering. Were I a biologist, I’d think of the objects of my studies as exactly that.

P.S. Oh yeah, Sam’s Club has just lowered my TV’s price by $200. Uh oh. It’s probably the best deal on the market right now.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the errors in John Cassidy’s “How Markets Fail.” I mean, making Hayek a member of the Chicago school is stupid, but that neoclassicals are both supporters of laissez-faire and moreover the only school supporting laissez-faire is a little too much. Anyway, Cassidy considers “global warming” to be a market failure, because it is a negative externality. First, he considers the externalities problem to be some kind of new discovery. I dare him to find a single economist, no matter how otherwise sterile and confined to some God-forsaken university, who does not know about externalities, the Coase theorem, and all that. Second, pollution and global warming are not market failures; they are failures of the market to arise due to transaction costs of bargaining and difficulty defining and enforcing property rights. This is perhaps a semantic point, but let’s keep it clear: in these cases there exists no market in first place which can fail. Third, the problem is not “Pigovian taxes versus cap and trade.” It is much more fundamental. One can engage in economic calculation of costs and benefits, profits and losses only within the market. There is no such thing as “environmental economics,” precisely because one cannot calculate the “social costs” or social benefits and “correct the divergence between private costs and social costs.” One cannot economize when he can’t quantify benefits and costs. My choosing my HDTV was the result of careful and time-consuming balancing of price and value. Cassidy cannot do the same for global warming! It is no surprise that “There remains little consensus on how far to restrict future greenhouse gas emissions, or — and this comes to the same thing — how high to set the carbon tax.” Any such decision is going to be entirely arbitrary and politically determined. Global warming is not an economic problem, because (1) different people will be affected differently, in fact, each in a unique way, by global warming, and (2) one cannot determine the “social cost.”

Hey guys, check out my new TV: Vizio XVT472SV. It’s great! After about a week of researching, I bought it over the Web at Sam’s Club which seemed to have the lowest price. The first movie I watched on it was Sherlock Holmes on Blu-ray DVD. Simply put, it’s a movie theater experience.

And who said that Sherlock Holmes had gay “undercurrents”? That’s ridiculous. The Holmes / Watson duo was probably the first superhero / sidekick team in literature. Well, there was, for example, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before, but they were real knight and sidekick, and Quixote was an idiot not a superhero. Anyway, that can be claimed about any such pair of heroes. Remember the 80s Disney Darkwing Duck cartoons? Some web page I recall cast them as “gay,” as well. It’s yet another nasty effect of the political gay movement: men are now afraid to show affection to each other. When David lamented, “I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women,” (2 Sam 1:26) was he being “gay”? Beam me up, Mr. Speaker.

G.E. Moore stuns me. He spends the first 150 pages in Principia Ethica trying to prove that what might be termed “strong Hedonism” or the view that pleasure is the sole good to be wrong. He is right about that, but, as I began to realize with ever greater amazement toward the end of the book, he was not going to offer us an account of things other than happiness that he himself considered to be good. He does say that consciousness of pleasure or of beauty is a good distinct from pleasure and also seems to be a good thing. First, this is beside the point: happiness is not merely pleasure understood as contentment of the will. Moore is fighting a straw man. But secondly, he can’t really believe that “pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” exhaust the number of good things.

Yet Moore does the strong Hedonists one better. In Chapter 5 he proposes to test the rule “Do not murder.” And this is what he says: “In order to prove that murder, if it were so universally adopted as to cause the speedy extermination of the race, would not be good as a means, we should have to disprove the main contention of pessimism – namely that the existence of human life in on the whole an evil. And the view of pessimism, however strongly we may be convinced of its truth or falsehood, is one which never has been either proved or refuted conclusively.” (156) Moore takes individual preferences so seriously that he must claim that if I wanted to die, it would be good for a society to offer free handguns so that I could off myself with as much efficiency as possible. I am sure that even Mill would recoil from that conclusion of utilitarianism. Indeed, this is precisely one of the dilemmas of pure utilitarianism (of which there are 4 kinds overall), namely, conflicts between virtue and narrow happiness (defined as satisfactions of desires, whatever they are). That Moore does not realize that this is even a problem indicates that he does not have a clue about ethics.

But wait, there is more! “Our ‘duty’ is merely that which will be a means to the best possible, and the expedient, if it is really expedient, must be just the same.” (167) Another kind of utilitarian dilemmas, namely, conflicts between act and rule utilitarianism, is with glazed eyes passed over by Moore in favor of act utilitarianism. In a paradoxical self-contradiction, just a few pages earlier Moore defends the idea that “the individual can therefore be confidently recommended always to conform to rules which are both generally useful and generally practiced,” (164) in which the conflict is resolved 100% in favor of rule utilitarianism. Does Moore remember what he writes from one moment to the next?

Hedonism comes back with a vengeance on p. 172. “If it could be shown of any particular disposition, commonly considered virtuous, that it was generally harmful, we should at once say: Then it is not really virtuous.” For Moore then, the virtuous man is he who does the most convenient to him thing as any given moment; “virtues have, in general, no intrinsic value whatsoever.” The essential distinction between virtue and narrow happiness that, if made, makes, and if not made, breaks, ethics is not made.

You think Moore is done? Far from it. “‘My own good’ only denotes some event affecting me, which is good absolutely and objectively; it is the thing, and not its goodness, which is mine; everything else must be either ‘a part of universal good’ or else not good at all; there is no third alternative conception ‘good for me.’” (170) This is wrong through and through. First, the value “good” or “bad” / “evil” is a result of a judgment. It is human beings who judge by themselves and for themselves what is and is not good. Precisely for that reason all goods are relativized to individuals. Moore assumes the position of an impartial spectator, but that is also a relativization to the spectator whose happiness consists of the greatest happiness of all. Absolute good exists; for example, an object which satisfies all human desires is an absolute good, or the thing than which no greater can be thought is an absolute good, but there is no “absolute good” in the sense that Moore attaches to it. There is metaphysical good, but it, too, obtains its character of goodness in relation to the wisdom and will of a rational being. Second, the third out of four sources of utilitarian dilemmas, namely, the need to privilege oneself and one’s loved ones in many situations which violates the utilitarian impartiality, is totally ignored. If I am playing a game of chess, then I am trying to win and to harm my opponent. I cannot be a spectator watching myself play. I must be in the game, in the moment, giving it all I’ve got. If I watch myself play, I will most definitely lose, yet from the utilitarian perspective it does not matter whether the utility of victory goes to me or to the other player.

Moore’s book is of limited utility.

Ah yes, and the fourth kind of utilitarian dilemmas consists of two parts. First, how one ought to distribute happiness among people if he is in a position to do so, and second, whether we take total or average happiness as our mark.

In deciding one’s vocation there are three things to consider. First, what you want to do for a living right now. Second, what you think you ought to do. Third, what you are meant to do and what you in fact have been meant to do since you were born but don’t yet know what it is.

That has relation to God’s will. If you pray and talk to God, you might ask, “What is your will that I do?” And if you get an answer, you may at first think that you are not sure you want to do it. But coercion is the last thing on God’s mind. God wants you to realize not what you “ought” to do by his decree but what you were born to do, what you will eventually enjoy every second of, and what will make you a great man or woman. What God may do by calling you to a vocation is impose a bit of discipline, inasmuch as, according to the old saying, fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant. That’s it! God has no will for your life other than to make you virtuous and happy; He hates involuntary servitude as much as anyone. The discipline is to help you discover yourself and that one thing on which you will with joy focus your life.

1. I was a bit of a fan of RPG games, until I realized that life is a far grander adventure than any game. Anyway, here is a link to the soundtrack of the recent Dragon Age: Origins, a fairly entertaining game. Now of particular note are songs #1 (Intro) and #13 (Lelianna’s Song). My question is, why isn’t music like that produced commonly and not just for computer games? I mean, it’s stirring and beautiful and engages you. I’ve already complained about the trivial rhymes of most popular music, but why in addition the trivial tunes?

2. I was at the KSU bar last night, and there was a band playing. I was astounded how awful they were. They violated every rule I could think of that might’ve caused them to succeed. First, their music had no pattern to it. It was just arbitrary noise. Second, their songs had no refrain. Third, I couldn’t make out a single word of what the girl was singing, because the music was so loud. Finally, I am sure that if I could discern the words, they most likely wouldn’t rhyme. Were these guys serious? At the same time, while pop culture is mostly awful, there is so much of it that pretty often something really wonderful is created. I mean, the amount of culture produced in a single day today in the US is surely greater than the amount produced in ancient Greece in a dozen years. Potential musicians, heed my words: (1) Tell a story in your song; (2) Make sure the story rhymes interestingly; (3) Have a refrain and moderately complex pattern to both the music and song; (4) Sing so that the lyrics could be easily heard and understood; (5) As an ideal, try your hand at making complex songs, such as featuring a dialog between a male and female (e.g., “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”).

It is the essence of every physical object to be able to move and actually to move, because for every object there exists another object somewhere in the universe, relative to which it is moving. But if something is moving relative to something else, then it has relative to that object kinetic energy. So, every object by essence has energy.

Thus, any object is at the same time essentially matter and essentially energy.

Sometimes an object presents itself to us in its aspect of matter, in which case it behaves like a particle; and sometimes it presents itself in its aspect of energy, in which case it behaves like a wave. Hence the particle-wave duality of all physical objects.

I tell you, Aquinas is a gift that keeps on giving. Here I was thinking it it was a nice insight to write in my notes something like this, verbatim:

shame vs. guilt:
shame if your ideal is low or bad. e.g., if you felt that wallowing in filth like a pig (or drinking yourself into stupor) was a nice way to enjoy yourself, and then you realize that it is not, you feel shame at demeaning yourself this way
guilt if your ideal is good and you know it but you fail to conform to it.
thus,

an intemperate man will feel shame and
an incontinent man will feel guilt

but shame is more directly opposed to glory than guilt, hence intemperance is worse than incontinence.

And during an unrelated search on newadvent.org, I stumble on this very subtle and instructive discussion of incontinence vs intemperance: II-II, 156, 3. I say it again, the guy’s a miracle.

The Noble Red Man: Mark Twain on the Indians.

I wish I knew where I read this, but a long time ago there was a web page which posed to the readers a puzzle, something along the following lines. Imagine that a doctor suddenly received an apparently divine gift of healing, such that simply by touching another person, he would cure him of any illness. The author then pointed out that if this idea were to be picked up for a plot in a movie, there could be dozens of scripts written that incorporated this idea that ended tragically for all concerned. The movie would then “deliver a message” about evil, etc. For example, the doctor would feel it was his duty to heal as many people as possible. Then he’d work 20 hours a day and die from exhaustion. Or the American Medical Association would poison him in order to keep its customers. Or the Catholic Church would accuse him of consorting with the devil. Or a billionaire would kidnap him to keep him for himself hoping that he could live forever. Or the doctor would charge enormous amounts of money, catering only to the rich; then he’d get proud and somehow doom himself for his “greed.” Or… You get the point. Then the article challenged the reader to write a story in which everyone ended up happy. The puzzle was to come up with a technological solution for every potential problem. As far as I recall, a part of a proposed solution was to have the doctor sit near a moving conveyor belt which would carry a line of people to him. It would take 5 or so seconds for the doctor to touch each person that the belt or escalator would deliver to him. Then he could work 2 hours per day, seeing 1,440 people. If he charged on average a paltry $100 per person per illness, he would make at least $144,000 per day or over $50 million per year (yes, rationing would remain a problem, but still his productivity would be enormous; no one could accuse him of not using his gift). This would be enough to build a fortified mansion and hire guards to prevent anybody from kidnapping him and what have you. He could offer to cure the Pope of whatever ailed him and say, reasonably: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?” and “By my fruit you will recognize me. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.” Stuff like that.

We see that numerous technical problems admit solutions. Where storytellers give us drama and tragedy, engineers and scientists grant us stuff that works and thus harmony and mutual profit. Avatar is, again, a movie made with utter disregard of the real world. It’s a ridiculous, if beautiful looking, fantasy, and there might have been a bunch of ways in which the war in it could have been avoided under more realistic circumstances.