Ethics assumes ...

Page last modified April 4, 2018.

Ethics, Rationality, Liberty

by Dr. Marek A. Suchenek

April 4, 2018

This article is posted here for in-class use only. No other use or uses is/are allowed.

Quote from Sara Baase's The Gift of Fire:

"[Ethics] assumes people are rational and make free choices."

Without freedom of choice, ethics is irrelevant. For how can it impact actions of an individual if the individual is bound to do what is dictated to him and not to do what is prohibited to him? So, ethics is a characteristics of free people, or at least, some of them, that distinguishes them from bondsmen, slaves, and serfs.

Without rationality, ethics loses its purpose. Irrational people, even if they desire to be ethical, are going to make wrong choices that are detrimental or outright hurtful to their group survival strategy. So, ethics becomes maladaptive, a less desirable quality of the irrational. Hence, societies of irrational individuals are unlikely to be ethical, simply because if they are ethical then they have small chances to survive. (The latter is a consequence of ethics being maladaptive when professed by the irrational.)

The above explains the quote "Ethics assumes ...".

One can also note that the converse implication, although not necessarily true, is likely to hold. Free and rational people are likely to discover (our ancestors did) that being ethical is an adaptive behavior. As soon as this becomes a common knowledge, ethics emerges naturally, as those who follow it have higher chances of spawning offspring that will survive to their reproductive age, and those who do not follow it have lesser chances of the same. This process is responsible for creation of today's free civilized societies. Remove that process, and ethics is going to be driven to extinction.

Thus,

Ethics, given enough time, is likely to become a defining feature of free and rational individuals.

In particular, unethical societies are unlikely to be free or rational.

There is much more to the relationship between ethics, liberty, and rationality.

Liberty, in order to be desirable as a social state of affairs, requires ethics. It also requires rationality.

If unethical people are free to make their choices, they may undermine the group survival strategy. In particular, they may harm others. The same may be said of irrational people.

You don't want unethical and irrational people to freely exercise their liberties in the society that you are a member of simply because they pose a danger to themselves and to others. In particular, you don't want the lawbreakers and the insane to be able to keep and bear arms. (As a matter of fact, you don't want them to belong to the same society that you do.) This undesirability of liberty for the said group of people is a driving force behind infringements of individual liberty; in particular, it is a driving force behind gun control. (There are other forces that drive the latter, too. For instance, submitting armed citizenry to governmental control, or redistributing the fruits of their work among others, is more difficult than doing the same to an unarmed populace.)

Now, here is some sobering conclusion from the above discussion.

Turning our prevailingly ethical and rational society into unethical and irrational one makes individual liberty a socially undesirable feature. This may be used as a blueprint by those who want to submit us, free people, to their control. If they manage to make us abandon our ethics and to act irrationally (for instance, emotionally) then we are likely to give up our liberty, eventually, in order to be safe from this kind of acts.

As a matter of fact, such a process may be noticed in today's America.

Ethics and morality are being gradually eliminated from our collective life. Rationality is being replaced with feelings. We are being told to not judge those who are unethical or irrational, even in the extreme cases when they break the law of exhibit sociopathological behavior. We are being coerced to include them in our society and to help them and their offspring avoid gradual extinction by turning their socially undesirable behavior into adaptive. At the same time, our individual freedoms are being chipped away, ostensibly, for the necessity of making us all safer.

This is a direct road to serfdom. Are you excited to take that road?

If you are not, if you would rather remain free, then remember to be ethical, always act rationally, and insist that others do the same.

1. Adaptive act (or behavior) is an act (or behavior) that increases actor's chances of having offspring that will survive to their reproductive age.

2. Maladaptive act (or behavior) is an act (or behavior) that decreases actor's chances of having offspring that will survive to their reproductive age.