At any point in time, there’s a variety of ideas incubating in my mind. My head is like a botanical garden, a series of different plants growing at different speeds and in different directions. Most of it happens subconsciously. I’m sure you can relate: slowly, over time, you begin to notice ideas that, once you think about it, must have been there a long time, but only recently evolved into conscious, tangible form. When you realize that this subconscious spore has grown into a logically forceful, but emotionally unacceptable thought, or an emotionally compelling but logically vapid one, cognitive dissonance follows.
I keep thinking that if I want to live a moral life, I should live as if I had never lived at all. This line of thought has some logical force behind it, but seems impossible to accept emotionally.
The logical force of this argument relies on a simple fact of epistemology: we can’t foresee every effect our actions will have. History is riddled with seemingly innocuous acts with enormous consequences. It’s entirely possible to think of an infinite series of small acts that, through ripple effects, could dramatically alter the course of history. A man stubs his toe and then gets into a car, his pain making him somewhat slower to hit the breaks, thereby swerving into a young Adolf Hitler… We may think that butterfly effects are the province of fiction, but history is a huge repository of small things leading to big changes; this is another fact that holds logical force but seems emotionally hard to accept.
In short, everything we do can and will alter the course of history. Most things we do probably won’t alter history dramatically, but we can never know for sure until after the fact. It follows that we can’t know whether or not we will ultimately contribute to lessen or increase the amount of evil and suffering in the world, because even the purest of intentions and the most well-meaning actions can lead to states of affairs that, through unforeseen side effects, increase the amount of suffering. Road to hell, pavement, etc.
Further, the logical consequence seems to be that the only way we can be sure not to leave the world worse off than it was when we entered it is by not entering it at all. Only when the sum of my actions is nil can the sum of their effects be nil, which, admittedly, does not actually improve the world, but more importantly, guarantees that the state of the world doesn’t degrade. Since I can’t go back in time and unbirth myself, my best bet is to work to (1) minimize the effects of my ongoing actions while (2) undoing or neutralizing the effects of my previous actions. A saint becomes a person who makes the least of himself in every way imaginable. This seems logically compelling, but emotionally devastating.
This argument also has another upside: we can never seem to agree on what’s actually good and bad; we don’t disagree only about the means of attaining a Good society, but also about the ends, i.e., what values and particulars actually constitute Goodness and moral prosperity. What seems obviously immoral in one century becomes a virtue in the next; what seemed moral and proper then is now strongly condemned. So long as we agree that there is some definite answer to this question—a premise I’m willing to entertain, but not necessarily agree with—the only way we can be sure not to contribute to evil is not to contribute at all.
Of course, there exists a logical counterargument: that it’s impossible to neutralize all my actions. That “the world as it would be if I were never born” is an impossible ideal once I’m born. There’s no guarantee that edging ever closer to that unattainable limit will improve anything: there will always be some details we can’t neutralize, and by the same epistemological laws that underpin the argument, we can counter-argue that we can never know which details are the most important. The counterargument seems every bit as lacking in emotional force as did the argument, however.
Even if I can poke holes in this argument, I like it because it’s interesting. It’s a radically different idea of what it means to be good that seems, at least on the surface, to be every bit as valid as the traditional idea it opposes. Traditionally, saints, as moral examplars, are people who do things that bring about a preponderance of the good: they’re people who make big ripples in history, in a good way. This line of thought suggests the opposite.
My favorite candidate for a modern, nonreligious saint is Norman Borlaug. Borlaug brought modern agricultural methods to India, Pakistan and Mexico, thereby saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation. It seems almost blasphemous to deny that this was a good thing: how can one honestly stand up straight and say that the death of hundreds of millions of innocent people would be preferrable? But with hundreds of millions making millions of choices, it’s impossible to foreesee exactly what the really long term effects of their survival will be. It’s conceivable—although I won’t say likely—that these millions and their billions of descendants, collectively, will contribute to future starvation and pollution on such a broad scale that the overall suffering their actions cause will be far worse than the suffering associated with their dying.
I don’t believe that we should let billions starve to death. I am not a man to put himself in the role of judge over life and death. But I can see many lines of reasoning a devil’s advocate might take.
This is an idea that’s been germinating for some time. Almost exactly two years ago, I started a short-lived microfiction project. I couldn’t keep up with the schedule I’d set for myself once the initial excitement ran out. Sometime after I’d admitted to myself that the project was dead, I collected the 33 stories I wrote here. And lo! what do we find?
He realized that he was in a story as he stood before the book in which he was written, holding its pen, and, now omnipotent, understood: he must write the last sentence, and it was this one.
This little piece of meta-micro-fiction was based on the idea that the most benevolent thing a deity could do would be to destroy the universe, or at least put it on hold indefinitely. It seems obvious that, even if we accept for the sake of argument that there exists a creator god, he can’t be both good and omniscient. The rhetoric force lies with choosing to assume that God is cruel: this is what many atheists like to do when arguing about the problem of evil, because a cruel god seems harder for theists to accept than an incompetent one. But in the piece above, I chose the other option: I imagined a creator god—here, an author, or more specifically, a character in a story elevated to an author, like a dreamer who suddenly becomes lucid and capable of shaping the dream—who isn’t omniscient, and recognizes this fact, and therefore reasons that, since he doesn’t know the right course of action, the most reasonable thing is to do is to end the universe. That way, no one will suffer more than they’ve already suffered.
Then there is this piece written a few months later. In it, I use the fictional device of “Jorge Luis Borges’s only novel” (Borges never wrote a novel) to discuss an idea of mine:
Tormented by his conscience as he subjects humanity to disaster after disaster, one worse than the other despite his good intentions, Moses realizes that there is an infinity of worlds worse than ours, just like there is an infinity of worlds better, and it would take an infinite amount of time to try them all in order to find a world that is significantly better; in the process, he would have to subject an infinity of people to an infinite amount of suffering. … No one is equipped to play the role of god, so God decides his best course of action is to cease to exist. In this way, the entirety of the Jewish and Christian canon is inverted. Every action becomes its opposite.
The entire chain of reasoning laid out in this post, however, didn’t occur to me until recently. I can’t wait to find out what the little idea-seeds currently growing in my head will turn out to be.
Dec 4, 2011