The Required Change of Ethics

The Required Change of Ethics
by Manfred F. Schieder

ETHICS, THE THIRD COLUMN OF PHILOSOPHY: WHAT AM I TO DO?

     Ayn Rand explained in an interview that religions and akin beliefs are a type of early philosophy, which tried to explain apparently unexplainable phenomena. The capricious deductions made from impressions received from the surrounding environment that had neither been understood nor been properly analyzed resulted in most fantastic explanations. Starting with a contradiction of which the deducer was unaware, he and his followers through the ages constructed an endless line of such continuously more and more complicated and hair-raising contradictions, each more complex than the foregoing since the brain wanted to solve somehow the newly resulting impossibilities. Where no further possibility existed to harmonize the impossibilities, a dogma, the prohibition to formulate further questions, was set up.

     People adhered to these beliefs out of ignorance, out of tradition, out of fear, all this aided by their stubbornness not to recognize that the thread of contradictions was only moving them ever deeper into the morass of ignorance. This way of conduct, this refusal to reject what had evidently become a entanglement blocking man's connection to the advance of knowledge, could have been excused up to a certain point in the history of the evolution of our civilization, up to the moment when the tools for a better understanding came to be developed. But from there on – and the point lays in the early Greek culture – this way of behavior was no longer sustainable. To keep it was tantamount to committing cultural suicide. Ayn Rand was totally correct when she spoke here of a bankruptcy of our culture, a bankruptcy resulting from the contradiction between faith and knowledge to which we referred to at the beginning of this and the foregoing chapter.

       The tool (Reason), the facts required to ascertain the reality of existence and the concept of what the universe means as such became available, as said already, in ancient Greece. Perhaps we could say today that they existed in a very rudimentary form but anyway they became available and could be used. After all, they were not as elementary as they are sometimes presented[1].

     Of course, neither Parmenides nor Aristotle had the wealth of information available nowadays but many of their deductions were absolutely correct because in many cases they had been able to look through the core of the matter under investigation. They are, with a few others, the founders of our knowledge and in this sense, they are thinkers belonging to our age. This made them revolutionaries, though not in nowadays violent sense of the word. After all, many of the discoveries and inventions made by them and, later on, by the alchemists in their search to produce gold, became the beginnings of the sciences of physics and chemistry of today. At that time, faith could be excused as man's quest for knowledge. To hold to it nowadays is unforgivable. It is truly a crime against mankind.

      Parmenides, Aristotle and many of the alchemists of far-gone days applied reason and a correct interpretation of the data provided by the senses to reach such non-contradictory conclusions as this writing contains from the start of the first chapter. Much of what is said in these pages is not modern at all. It has just been hidden or been prohibited through the ages by men who gained their power by holding their fellowmen in the dungeons of ignorance.
To operate from the basis of reason provides an additional advantage: from here on, we can build the structure of behavior adequate to rational human beings, though saying this is a redundancy since the concept "human" can only be understood by starting from the basis of rationality.

     However, our present condition is yet so topsy-turvy that the rules pertaining to a rational society, as deduced by Ayn Rand, will seem strange, to many exotic even. We have lived up to now from contradiction to contradiction, evading the recognition of truth, always stating that we had to close our eyes and do what was adequate to be able to go on living. Whenever the rules to be followed lead to a swamp, people ignored them and muddled somehow through. To proceed in this way, however, creates feelings of guilt since we noticed that such a behavior is wrong. Now that Ayn Rand deduced from reality the correct way of behavior the time of the great change has started.

     There are many people who perfectly know that the way in which human society operates up to now is wrong and they would adhere to the new way of life as long as they were at the same time allowed to continue to hold the irrational rules from which they think they can obtain some personal benefit. This could be exemplified best by a statement such as: "Well, I adhere to a rational society but not at the cost of giving up my caprices". Such a behavior is, of course, a contradiction in terms. A stolen good is still a stolen good and there is no way in which human society can hope to continue to operate in such an irrational fashion without having to face its doom. Should mankind continue to do so reality will wipe us out, for we will have entered the blind alley we mentioned earlier. Ground between the irrational and the rational mankind will finally have to decide on which side it stands. If it takes the wrong decision, the outcome will be unavoidably final. The time for contradictions is gone.

     Just as an example: the outcome of the Industrial Revolution – whose products are all the result of applying reason to the practical fact of living – is setting the parameters of change. It is simple as that: if we eliminate the products of the Industrial Revolution, as the "environmentalists" would want us to do, we would go back to prehistory. Since the rules of evolution do not allow this (we would be interrupting the long line of evading the blind alleys, which brought us to the present), the result would be our elimination as a species. Surely there are pockets of human beings everywhere in the world living truly like beasts but they are precisely where they are because they managed to move themselves into the blind alleys into which some half beastly-half manlike groups ran during the process of becoming rational beings. They have miserably failed. Many of them are even part of present day civilization (Ayn Rand called them "the missing link" of evolution), living by the grace of the industrial developments produced by rational people.

     On what must the new rules be based? One of Ayn Rand's precise intellectual hammer blows was to set up the question whether man even needs morality. After all, plants and animals below our level of evolution seem to do quite well without any ethical rules. But to accept such a belief is, as she demonstrated and as we shall see, totally false.

     Just as Ayn Rand questioned everything established by tradition, force or sheer inertia, she also did not stop at the question itself but used it to investigate what lay behind and deduced from there on the only possible answer. By doing so, she preceded like the "first man", the man who found out how to use and keep fire, the man who invented the wheel, etc. She entered completely new territory. So to speak, she dared to go into the open.

     The code of values to guide choices and/or actions having the goal of survival of every living being applies correctly to plants and animals alike since the process of evolution set up, automatically, a way of behavior for the various species up to the human one but excepting it. In addition, stated in this way, it is, unfortunately, the fundamental rule of society as we know and apply it up to now. However, the continued application to the human species of the code of morality that rules plants and lower animals has a worse result than if we were continuing to be lower animals, for it establishes a contradiction in terms, since evolution has raised us beyond the state of lower animals. It is a code that requires an adaptation to the environment and, as such, is only suitable to species which can only react when confronted with any given circumstance. The additional rules invented by caprice and established by brutal force imposed by the authorities act in favor of a ruling elite but at the same time against the rest of humanity. Yielding to them, as history has shown, is often the only way to be allowed to continue living but this, of course, does not suffice for our survival as rational beings, as beings who act instead of reacting.

       Repeating this species after species leads to the final blind alley, which was mentioned already. It leads to the end of evolution itself. So to overcome this point and by sheer teleology, evolution evolved to become the end of evolution itself. Its last product was a being whose existence as such brought natural evolution to its own end, a point where the known rules for the evolution of the species continue to be apt only for the lower levels of living beings. Man, on the contrary, the final product of natural evolution, has surpassed it and now takes over evolution himself. This is the automatic result of evolution's way of operating. Man, his tremendous brain and its capacity to think, is the natural evolution grown beyond itself. From there on natural evolution ceases to be of importance for our survival. We must proceed on our own. All this implies a tremendous change for evolution itself.

     We do no longer belong to nature, we are beyond nature. By evolving to the point of having a thinking brain we necessarily have to leave the mindless world of nature behind. If we were to use the symbols of biblical Genesis, we could say that just as Eve, a woman, led man to the road of knowledge and wisdom, a new Eve, a new woman, Ayn Rand, showed us what has to be done now.

       We ourselves are now to lead evolution itself for our own purposes. As we shall see, we have to do so because this is our way of surviving, prosper and prepare the way for the future. There is no turning back, there is no way back to the jungle. Those who intend to oblige us to retrace the way, the environmentalists, clearly show that they still belong to the primeval jungle since their purpose is to eliminate thinking man. They are the most proper representation of the half beast-half man mentioned before. In a very precise way, they belong to what Ayn Rand described as "Missing Link". If we follow their "call of the wild“, we will perish... and justly so, for we will have betrayed our own nature as thinking beings.

     Nature's laws of evolution do no longer apply to us. Malthus teachings, applied on us, were wrong. He thought that what happens in nature also applies to us, i.e. that overpopulation can be controlled and refrained only by starvation, sickness and fight. Through technical inventions, we are getting year after year more food from the same parcels of earth while barren deserts are being changed into fruitful fields. Should need be we could multiply this endlessly. Right now restaurants in New York are growing their own fresh lettuce in hydro tanks illuminated by artificial light. This example suffices for what is meant. Illness does no longer mean immediate or sure death as it signifies for every plant or animal or savage in the jungle. We are creating new defenses against illnesses all the time. We are even applying this to plants and animals that, under natural conditions, would face sure death.

      Some of our wars still contain remnants of the need for superiority, which was the motive for what they were fought for in the past but since many decades the great wars have now a completely different motive. It can be shown historically that they are the last lashes of the dying dinosaur of the communistic way of life, proper to the jungle, where the herd obeys its master. In the meantime a society proper to thinking man is, as we shall see, now slowly but surely emerging. We are in the middle of the last battles towards the establishing of a completely different world, based on a capitalist society where everyone has the right and the duty of defending his own interests and obtaining gains in accordance to his capacity and industriousness while acknowledging these same rights for everybody else. In a way, we are like first men looking at a world completely new.

      Overpopulation is a myth. Century after century more people are being born and yet we are not crowding ourselves to death. Continuously our scientists and technicians invent new procedures to solve and master the upcoming problems. The fear that we could once be living one on top of the other has not materialized. The so often prognosticated condition of overcrowding never came up nor will come up. Skyscrapers have solved the "living one on top of the other" and yet supplying ample space for a comfortable life. This did not reduce our privacy; on the contrary, it enhanced it. We are steadily increasing it even against the yet existing onslaught of the State. Overpopulation is, thus, no problem. The late Julian Simon showed the absence of this problem up to the very point where a foe of overpopulation such as Isaac Asimov had to recognize that he was wrong in his initial assumptions, that the only resource we are lacking is people because to solve the inevitable problems presented by life itself we need more and more geniuses... and there is a better chance of obtaining a genius among 1000 persons than among 100. In addition to this does a capitalistic way of life include a very peculiar way of controlling the birth rate: as continuously less newborn die, humanity does no longer need so many of them. Further on, parents wish, first of all, to enhance their own living standard so as to be able to provide for their descendants a greater chance for a better life and better promotion prospects.

       Our persistent main problem is the continued massacre of others due to their race, color, creed, sexual preferences, etc. Those who use such despicable acts are the worst possible enemies of society. These Stalitlers are beasts on the prowl escaped from the primeval jungle. The least we can do is to teach that theirs is the status of serial killers and they should be treated as such. Every act of racism, in any form whatsoever, is a criminal act and must be dealt with as such. Killers on purpose (which is precisely the contrary to those who defend themselves by an act of self-defense) must be disposed of for the protection of the productive, peaceful individuals. This is also the reason why death penalty must exist, not as retaliation but as sanitary protection, particularly in the humane form of putting the condemned criminal to sleep prior to applying a deadly injection, which is a far more considerate way than how the murderer treated his victim or victims.

       In the case of willful murder the death penalty is the time postponed execution of self-defense by the representatives of the victim or victims which, at the time of the incident and due to the then existing circumstances, were unable to personally defend themselves against the murderous attack.

        Which brings us to the main axiom to be established for the peaceful togetherness in a rational, Objectivist society. Perfectly worded by Ayn Rand it states that "Nobody has a right to INITIATE an act of violence against another person or persons". This also establishes the right to self-defense and to the above mentioned central argument for the death penalty and includes, of course, the right to own and bear arms of all types for the citizen without any criminal antecedent, as established in the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.

      Anyone who has purposefully broken the axiom required for living in a peaceful, productive society, must suffer the penalty for not having respected this, which is basically the only moral rule required for peaceful togetherness.
This leaves untouched, as stated before already, accidental killings, acts of desperation and the like which are to be treated in a completely different way, allowing leniency, mercy and the splendid act of human forgiveness. We must clearly differentiate accidental from purposeful killing. Purposeful killing is also the crime that involves the leaders, politicians and people (whatever their rank may be) of a country which starts a war against another, peaceful, country. Here too, a clear distinction can be made.

     Ayn Rand indicated that when a country lives under tyranny or dictatorship which robs its inhabitants of its freedom, any freer country has the right to start a war against the despotic nation as long as its declared purpose is the establishment of personal liberty for the population subjected to the despot rulings. However, the decision to take that right depends completely from the interests of the freer nation.
Ayn Rand clearly marked the four main characteristics of dictatorships, as follows:
·         One-party rule
·         Executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses
·         The nationalization or expropriation of private property
·         Censorship

     Ayn Rand stated in her article “Collectivized Rights” that any country where the characteristics just mentioned rule lacks any moral rights and, thus, also any claim to sovereignty. Hence, any free nation has a right to invade it if this suits its own interests and as long as it will hold to the purpose of establishing individual freedom in replacement of dictatorship.”
So, evidently, the axiom against the use of violence does not apply when it involves a dictatorship because dictators apply at all times acts of violence against the citizens of the countries where they exist. Where is it then applicable?

     Let us start the answer to this question by looking first again at the axiom itself. Evidently it does not apply to one single person living alone on an island, since it refers to violence done to another person or persons. Further on, it does not involve the right to suicide (as long as same does not involve an act of physical violence against another person or persons) since this, again, is not an act of violence committed against another person or persons. Violence exercised against oneself might be a necessity (certain acts of suicide resulting from, for example, not wanting to endure any longer unbearable pain or the wish to escape from an end point situation); it could also be related to psychological problems or a case for investigators of some sexual conduct as a masochistic behavior is. The prohibition of acts of violence refers only to such acts committed against another person or persons and only whenever tyrants are not involved.

     Now the smallest group of individuals that can be defined by the abstract concept of society are two persons. Therefore, the axiom applies only to where we find at least two human beings having any kind of communication between them. Though the axiom has now an area of validity it still refers to each of the individuals involved for it states that nobody (i.e. no one) has the right to initiate an act of violence against the other, whether it is physical or psychological.

     This reduces the form of society in which the axiom is all-dominant into a very narrow domain and this type of society is the only one where the liberty of the individual is respected. To determine this area we have to look into the fourth column of philosophy: politics.

     This will not only open the question of "Is it right?" but, in addition, "Why is it right?" Both well-substantiated answers will be the main theme of the next chapter where we will also investigate why the code of behavior automatically established by nature for plants and all the lower animals as well as any code of conduct established by force does not satisfy the requirements of human beings for their personal survival.

[1] A proof of this is mentioned already in the Bible, Genesis 2-17, where a prohibition for the humans is established to not eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and bad. This means that the authors of the bible knew already very well that religion can only be sustained in the faculty of reason is forbidden. An additional analysis, extremely profound, is mentioned in Ayn Rand’s „Atlas Shrugged“, Part 3, Chapter 7.

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