Common sense in Ethics

What makes "common sense" ideas in ethics common sense? Consider the following examples:

• Example: Owner of a Pizza place, advertising his store with the following message: "Big chain of Pizzerias cannot produce the same quality of food as our small cozy store. come taste the difference".
  Then, after a few years he becomes so successful that he opens up a chain of Pizzerias. If he were to advertise it as "Best Pizza ever, we treat every pizza as if it came from our personal home oven" he would be regarded as a phony by people, because he previously claimed it is impossible to produce high quality food in mass production.
  
  Why would he be regarded as a phony? Because people realize in a common sense way, that if a principle is true a certain point in time, it should also be true for a later point in time. [An abstraction is true regardless of time]

• An example showing another aspect: A principle in ethics cannot be true for one man but not for another - it is true as an abstraction for every man. Every kid knows that if it is wrong for others to cheat in a game, it is wrong to cheat in a game, period. For others and for himself. Or if one kid accuses another kid for doing X (like talking during an important class), then it would be hypocritical for the blamer to do X and at the same time preach to someone else that doing X is wrong. A typical response a kid would give to such accusation under the circumstances is: "But you do it too!"

The two examples show that it is common sense that an evaluation of an action (as good or bad, just or unjust) cannot be isolated to a single instance - it must be a principle.

What makes it "common sense"?

To understand it, let's look at how human cognition works in regards to inanimate objects. If one object falls down when you release it from a height, and this happens with every object, then one concludes that objects fall down when released from a height. People would consider a lunatic a person who would go "this objects fall" "and this object falls" "and this object falls" "But what happens with this object? I don't know". In other words, our cognition functions seeking abstractions, generalizations, principles. This is how even the least intelligent (yet still rational) man thinks. Even if all he knows is how to grow oranges, he would still know that all orange trees needs water to grow, that this is the nature of an orange tree as a principle.

Deciding on shoulds, on right and wrongs in human behavior, is different than learning that objects fall and more complicated, but nonetheless, it remains the same that if a principle applies to one man, it applies to all men. If it is bad to murder, then it is bad to murder for everyone at every time. What makes this common sense, something that every kid understands, is the fact that our consciousness functions as an abstracting mechanism - this is the way we comprehend reality.

Therefore a thieve cannot feel guiltless and still hold that if someone steals his property he's bad. In the back of his mind he knows and feels that if he condemns someone for doing X, then he is bad as well for doing it. A thief therefore has to develop a different view of ethics that would make stealing alright. For example "it's a dog eat dog world. One must steal and kill to survive, it's just a question of who does it better". Such a view makes a justification as a principle for stealing. [as a side note, notice the destructive role this conclusion plays in his life. He will regard thieves as virtuous and seek their company, even though they are the most untrustworthy people out there, he will not have the moral ammunition to blame someone for stealing from him. He basically strips himself off a central principle for survival]

He may try to say that other people are bad if they steal from him, yet he is not bad for stealing from others - but then he would go against the very essence of his thinking, of how his mind grasps everything in the world. If X is wrong for men but not for him, even though he's a man, then generalizations as such cannot be trusted. If it is good for others to be happy, why would this mean that it is good for him as well? If a certain medicine is good to cure something for all men, who is to say that it is good for him as well? If it is wrong to grow orange trees without water, who is to say that this applies to any particular orange tree? He says in essence that generalizations about human nature and human behavior are illegitimate. But he cannot escape the fact that his consciousness acts seeking unity of his knowledge. If generaliazing about stealing is wrong, then generalizing as such should be doubted in other cases as well.

He will no longer be able to say with conviction "well of course it's good for people to be happy, that is human nature". And since he rejects his ability to form principles in ethics, he is left helpless to survive. He can no longer hope to find a reliable guide for action. How could he? What's good for humanity, what man should do to live a good life can no longer logically apply to him as well.

I think most people struggle to explain why things like murder, theft, dishonesty, etc' are bad on principle. The difficulty here is to comprehend that principles are equally valid to human actions as they are for the behavior of any other object or phenomenon.

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Conclusion from all the above: Moral people are those who stay loyal to the understanding that a principle of human action is a principle. In other words, practice what you preach.

They may not know why this is right, they may only experience it as a strong emotional conviction, but the fact remains that they stay loyal to the proper method of making conclusions. And the strength of the conviction comes from the fact that they realize that if they desert this method of thinking about ethics, they desert their method of thinking about everything.

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Seemingly, the man who acts regardless of a principle because he cannot think of a rational explanation why it should be otherwise is the one acting on reason, not on emotions. But this is not true.

He acts regardless of his implicit knowledge, which he did not insist on understanding. It would be the equivalent of dismissing the feeling of strong conviction that orange trees need water to grow because he is not yet sure what is the source of the feeling.

By far, the more difficult thing to grasp in ethics is why things like stealing, killing, etc' are experienced as bad as common sense. Why these things and not others?

The common sense behind that is that without those things life is not possible. If life is not possible, game over, there is nothing more to talk about.

If someone came to you and said "Why do you need your house? this is nonsense, I'm taking it away from you", you'd smack the bastard on the head. It would be clear to you that you need your house to survive, and that something that goes against your survival is bad. "Why do you need to be alive? What do you care if I cut your throat?" Such a question would be a sign of lunacy. It is clear to one that living is important, it is important, because without that there is nothing else to experience or regard as important.

So in these extreme cases which are easily observable to one, like a fist quickly approaching one's face, one understands implicitly that life is the standard of value - of regarding something as good or bad.

The difficulty is in generalizing cases like that to the rest of one's life. Something like lack of a law against stealing seems much further away and less tangible than a knife in proximity to one's throat.

This is why, in my opinion, people have a problem explaining why stealing and killing are wrong, even though they are experienced as a common sense thing.

A: "Why do we need laws against stealing and killing?"

B: "Because that is the only way we can survive as a society"

A: "And why is that significant in any way?"

B: "Because if it wasn't, you wouldn't be standing here, punk."

The last answer of B is the recognition that life is an ultimate value, one that makes all others possible. A question "why is living of any importance?" bypasses the fact that anything that is important is within one's life. No life, nothing to regard as important or non-important. It's like asking "why are questions important?" bypassing the fact that the questioner is asking a question.

The Role of Emotions in life

1. Positive emotions are the reward for living.
2. Emotions motivate us to act to gain or keep values.
3. Emotions are a mechanism whose goal is to safeguard our life.
4. Emotions are crucial cognitive aids.
   
   

1. First and foremost: Emotions, positive emotions - are the reward for living. They are the reward for every action, every effort we put in to achieve something.
   Falling in love, enjoying some activity, person or object, Feeling relaxed, joyous, entertained and the rest of the pleasant emotions are the reward for living - they are what make life worth maintaining. Psychologically - there is no escape from the fact that enjoyment is the fuel life requires. The only purpose of life compatible with the human nature is happiness.
   To quote Ayn Rand: "It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it."
   
   
   
2. Emotions are motivators for action. Pleasure motivates us to gain values and unpleasant emotions motivates us to protect values from danger. Without emotions we would not even care if a danger was staring us in the face. Without holding in mind the enjoyment promised by having money, or the fear of being homeless - there would be no motivation to work.
   
   
   
3. Emotions are mechanisms aimed at helping our survival (helping to achieve and keep values).
   
   "In psychological terms, the issue of man’s survival does not confront his consciousness as an issue of “life or death,” but as an issue of “happiness or suffering.” Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death." (Ayn Rand, The virtue of selfishness)
   
   Emotional pain (such as sorrow, fear, anger) by its nature, indicates a danger to a value; such as fear of losing our wallet or anger at having a piece of property taken away from us.
   Because emotional pain is experienced as unpleasant it motivates us to avoid that feeling, which in action is achieved by protecting our values and trying to regain what is lost or threatened.
   Emotional pleasure is a result of achieving a value; such as enjoying a stack of money, a comedy act or Relaxing at the safety of your home.
   Since these emotions are experienced as pleasurable, we are motivated to achieve them by achieving values: Earning money, going to see a comedy act or building a home.
   Happiness results from achieving values, and therefore indicates a successful state of being - a success in living.
   
   Overall emotions as a mechanism safeguard our values. Values are things which our life require - and therefore emotions safeguard our lives.
   
   [One important note to add here is that values still need to be chosen by every person. Wanting a house or money is not automatic. But once a person chooses to live, these other values are what is required to sustain that choice. If a person thinks correctly he will end up holding these things as values].
   
   
   
4. Emotions are cognitive aids in several ways:
   
   
   • They provide a quick summary of your subconscious evaluation of something based on vast amount of knowledge. Emotions are experienced as an emotion, but what the feeling is based on is some intellectual calculation. For example: when you feel fear at reading a piece of news that may affect your stock value negatively, Like a person for holding certain fundamental ideas you agree with, or enjoy a new cellphone.
     In all these cases there is a lot of knowledge that you are not directly aware of when you experience the emotion which is involved in generating the emotion.
     In the first example I gave: you subconsciously understand how the piece of news will affect your stock value, how much money you put into that stock, other assets in your life that may be in danger if you loose a certain amount of money, or the threat to your dream vacation you were planing to pay for with the money. The threat to these values is what triggers the fear - even though you are only directly aware of the newspaper article (at least at the first moment of grasping the issue).
     Unlike reason - which is a more precise tool, but is much slower than emotions, which are lightning quick calculations of how something relates to you, based on all of your knowledge.
     Because of that they provide very important input for you to consider and can help make a thinking process faster and based on more of your knowledge.
     
     
   • Certain class of emotions are devoted to the value of knowledge, and they help our thinking by providing feedback about our process of conscious thinking. This class includes: Confusion, clarity, unclarity, certainty, doubt, surprise, suspicion, boredom, curiosity.
     To see the significance of these emotions to your thinking, try to imagine how the process of learning a new subject would go if you didn't have the emotions of confusion or unclarity. You would not know when to ask questions because nothing would indicate to you the need to ask, because you would never feel that something is unclear or confusing. Furthermore, the motivation to avoid an intellectual state of confusion will be gone. Confusion is an unpleasant emotion which motivates us to straighten out the facts so that we are clear on a subject.
     
   
   
   • Emotions help keep concepts concretized (This idea is taken from Leonard Peikoff's audio course "Understanding Objectivism" ). A concept like "life" or "rights" when accompanied by the right emotions helps keep in mind what these words mean in reality: "life" is not merely a definition of biological function, but it means your life, the existence of people you love, the difference between the fun you had with a pet when it was alive vs. lack of it after it is gone. "Life" then means something real. Similarly "justice" means the difference between wasting one's life in jail because of injustice and not merely a dictionary definition. One can stay indifferent about a dry intellectual definition of the word justice, but one cannot stay indifferent about spending time in jail while being innocent.
     A great example of that would be something I heard in sociology class long time ago: After extensive research, two sociology researchers found that a clear connection exists between feelings of distress and suicide.
     For a normal person, the idea of suicide is concretized by an understanding of the negative emotions involved. Nobody thinks that a man takes his life without feeling some emotional distress. But for the researchers, it was a purely statistical intellectual matter - which is why they saw the need to conduct a research for what every idiot on the street could tell them right away.

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This has been a rather condense discussion of the role of emotions in life because it was connecting the topic of emotions to many different subjects.
I'd appreciate your feedback if something was left unclear and whether or not it was too condense to keep all the conclusions in mind.

Thoughts about death and life

Fear of death is a powerful and helpful motivator to take actions to keep us alive, such as treating a medical problem or fighting efficiently in a physical battle.

However, in this post I want to analyze the fear of death as an abstract idea (not as a fear of some immediate, concrete threat). Just the fear that someday you will die.

I'll start with some analysis of scary thoughts about death, and whether they are rightfully scary or not:

• Dying as a painful experience and as "the end of me".
  Death is just your consciousness ceasing to exist. When you die you do not experience "yourself" as not existing - you simply experience nothing.
  Worst possible option is some pain before death, but it's not a big deal - it lasts a short while - no more big of a deal than the pain felt under injury or some disease after which you get better. Sure, it hurts, but we can all take some amount of pain (even if severe) bravely. So strike out pain as a big issue regarding death.
  
  
• The disgusting idea of your body turning into a rotting corpse: Well, you're not there to witness that. The whole process takes place after you are no longer conscious. the disgusting physical aspect is only a problem for you regarding other people's death - but usually in today's society you can easily avoid the view of the dead body, let someone else take care of the funeral arrangements, and just keep in your mind the memory of the person as he was when he was alive - and this is what other people you know will experience in regard to you - so really us humans only experience one another in the nice clean form of moving, thinking, living people - and we have very little touch with the ugly side (except for undertakers). Seeing that this is the case, there is no point thinking of the ugly side, since you won't deal with it anyway - and just act like for you it doesn't exist (because it is actually true for your life - unless you're an undertaker/grave robber).
  
  
• Fearing the thoughts before death - about whether or not your life has been good.
  My answer to this is: Why fear that time? This will be a feeling that could last, say, I don't know, a few moments or a few days. You have numerous days to have all the other variety of feelings. It is senseless to spend all those days now preparing yourself for a single short moment in the future.
  

So given that these three options are struck out - what else is left to fear about death? All it is, is just your consciousness stopping, like what happens when you're under full anesthesia (or sleeping). Suppose you don't wake up from either one - no pain will be involved. There will simply be nothing but the cessation of life. Death is meaningless - it is simply the absence of everything. Life is what counts.
And when you realize that this is all death is - all that is left is to focus on living - on the enjoyment you can achieve while alive. Wasting time thinking of death is utterly useless (other than the time required to understand this fact) - all it accomplishes is wasting the time you do have on negative feelings. It will be the equivalent of going on vacation and spending all of it worrying and crying about the time when it will end.

Practical point to consider: what do you do if you DO have thoughts about death? Answer: you act to eliminate them by repeatedly reminding yourself the uselessness of thinking about it, followed by shifting your focus to something else. After enough time of repeating this your subconscious automatizes this correct approach and such thoughts don't appear anymore.

[As a general rule of maximizing the enjoyment from your life: Only allow negative emotions in your life to the extent they can be used to better your life (by motivating you or helping you to correct a problem) - but do not dwell on them when they arise from a situation you can do nothing about. ]

The only legitimate scary thought about death (which is actually a scary thought about life) is to live an unhappy life without the option of anything better in the future (since death eliminates the option of having a future).
So long as you are alive and think you will remain so for a long time, feeling bad can be tolerable, because you can always keep in mind that in the future more good things await. This is why in times of feeling bad thoughts of death become more scary - because death in this case means no hope for anything better. But if your life is good, and if you know you used your time in a satisfactory way - the end of the "vacation" is easier to accept.

What this scary thought of death comes down to - is fear of unexploited life, of life without the highest enjoyment you could achieve.

It all comes down to one conclusion: Live your life the best way you can to maximize your enjoyment, and stay focused on this goal.