Coming from my last post, (Determinism in 417 words) I’m taking a quick look at ethics. The thesis here is that the highest ethical goal is awareness. Note that the highest goal is not something that everyone can achieve or that they necessarily should achieve. Simply put, the powers of awareness shouldn’t be given to people who can’t come to understand them on their own.
For example, if Joe Schmoe owns a business and hires Mr. Dude who knows all about how the market works. It’s not necessarily a good idea for Mr. Dude to give that power to Mr. Schmoe. Mr. Schmoe lacks the know-how to be aware of what effects his actions might have on the market and might think too highly of himself to regard Mr. Dude’s warnings. Mr. Schmoe could very easily make some awful mistakes with huge retribution.
The Spiderman motto/cliche is that “with great power comes great responsibility”, which is true enough. There is an unstated condition in this statement- great responsibility requires comprehensive awareness. You can’t simply try to do right with oodles of power, you don’t really know how! So it would seem, then, that our goal should be to know what to do with power. The problem after that (there will always be a greater problem) is keeping power while being ethical with it.
Most people won’t understand the reasoning for your decisions. You may not even be in a position where you can actually explain it to them. It becomes a balancing act of the pressure from those granting you power and the pressure to do the right thing. You may even find that you are forced to make certain decisions based on these and other pressures. (Surprise you still don’t reaaaally have purely free will)
You’ll find it’s hard to have power. If you want easy, then perhaps ignore awareness- life has enough problems. It’s even harder to be ethical with power. As your power increases it becomes increasingly difficult. Humans weren’t designed to be super-powerful. We evolved in tribes of a few hundred and equality was a fairly prominent concept. Of course, there was likely warring between tribes because tribes looked out for their members exclusively. The point is we were not made to ethically consider everyone on the planet, the planet itself, world economies, entire countries (the list is endless).
If you wish to ethically rule anything you need to understand it very well. Otherwise you- like many others- will blindly do what you think seems best on limited information. Awareness is the highest ethical goal.
