Clarifying Desirability in Ethics

In many of my previous articles on the subject on ethics, I have purposefully avoided speaking about what is actually desirable.  While I have made allusions to it and have stated that we act because we find certain actions desirable, I have rarely said anything about what that might entail.  However, while I have avoided it to this date, this question of desirability is an extremely important one, and trying to consider action without a clear outline of what is desirable is nearly impossible.  Although many methods of actions (such as the decision to use rule-based rather than purely logical action) can be justified without so much as mentioning the particular purpose of a given action, individual actions themselves cannot be.  At the end of the day, answering the question, “Should I act?” with, “Well, if you have the intention to do what you want to do, you should act in this way,” might help someone think about what method they should use when deciding between actions, but it will never help them answer the question of what actions they should actually do.  To have an ethics, we must first figure out a fundamental reason for taking one action as opposed to another, and therefore why one action is “desirable.”

But before we start, I would like to explain why I have been so sheepish about speaking of the actor’s root intention, and through that discussion shed light on the perspective of this article.  The first problem we confront in trying to identify desirability is that of infinite regression.  If we start our questioning by asking ourselves about one of our actions, we can probably identify a reason, but then we must ask ourselves our reason for desiring that reason.  This question repeats itself forever until we reach an impasse, and it seems nonsensical or impossible to answer.  According to some theorists (such as ethical hedonists), having reached this difficulty, we ought to proclaim these difficult to explain reasons for action as our fundamental intentions, since our incapacity to explain our reason for desiring certain ends mixed with our certainty that they are desirable demonstrates that those ends are themselves at the center of what we desire.  However, our incapacity to explain a claim by no means necessarily implies that claim’s centrality.  Indeed, it could be that the question of why we desire a particular end is incoherent, but it also could be that we have simply forgotten our reason, and perhaps through a logic that we once knew but have now forgotten, we find a significantly different reason for our action than the one that we currently cite.  We could have even forgotten that we had ever had a reason.  Further, there is no clear difference between the experience of having a so-called “central” desire from having one taken under false pretenses.  If we ask ourselves, “why should we desire x?” and we find no reason, then we can easily claim that we do not have any reason for this desire but have merely tricked ourselves into thinking that we do.  We often view this as a flaw with our so-called desire, and recognizing such a flaw is the source of all changes of opinion about our desires.  However, the inability to figure out a yet more fundamental reason for a particular desire is also supposedly a trait of the most fundamental reasons for our actions.  (For example, imagine someone is thinking about whether they should drink coffee.  They think to themselves, “Why do I like drinking coffee?”  If they answer with, “I don’t have a reason,” it would be fair to say that they shouldn’t drink coffee because they don’t have a reason to do so.  But it could also be fair to say that the mere experience of drinking coffee is an end in itself, so of course, they don’t have a reason for wanting to drink that coffee.  This example equally applies to all other cases in which we diagnose a particular reason as “the most fundamental” one, as the most fundamental reason for acting could not have a further reason for its desirability, or else it would no longer be the most fundamental reason for our actions.)  How can we ever non-arbitrarily distinguish between incorrect and “central reasons” for action if both have the same characteristics?

My response to the problem of trying to identify the fundamental reasons for acting is to avoid the claim of “central reasons” whatsoever.  I will not be trying to find a complete system of ethics or even the “central reason” for every action.  Rather than fruitlessly trying to figure out our “central reasons” for action, a goal which we can never know if we have reached, I will instead try to figure out a reason for action that can be universally applied to all of our actions.  When I reach this universal reason for action, I will stop inquiring why we desire that particular end and unquestioningly accept that we do.  That is, when we can explain the reason that decides, in all known cases, a reason to act in one way as opposed to another, we will not ask why we believe that or if its bases are correct or incorrect, or even if we should believe it.  Instead of asking what we should base our actions on, we will be arguing a case about what we do base our actions on.  In other words, we will leave the discussion at a descriptive rather than a prescriptive level.  (For instance, if all action is justified by our desire to drink coffee, we do not need to inquire further why we like drinking coffee.  We can simply say that the desire to drink coffee is a universally applicable reason for our actions.)

The second problem with ethical systems is that they seem in theoretical discussions to be quite a bit more subjective than they are in practice.  If we base our ethics on neurological feelings (such as pleasure), this requires our principles to be more idiosyncratic and subjective than they in fact are.  If all action has its basis in pleasure, for instance, then people who feel no or very little pleasure (such as, for instance, depressives) should have a very different ethical calculus for all actions they do, not just the ones related to pleasure.  It should thus be nearly impossible to disagree with them on those issues (unrelated directly to pleasure), for every action’s value would have its basis in that one fundamental sort of experience.  Further, as all individuals have different brains and therefore different understandings of certain neurological states, we would be left without the ability to discuss our bases for action with each other.  The most extreme as well as the most worrying version of this objection would be that a congruent feeling exists in no two experiences, and therefore, no two experiences can be desirable for the same reason.  Indeed, the statement that a particular feeling is desirable does not necessarily entail that other similar feelings are desirable, but rather only that particular one (as no other hypothetical feelings are the same as that one).  Therefore, no general system of ethics could be based on this, and any ethics based on this could only help us in a limited way in a hypothetical world in which we can experience the exact same feeling on multiple occasions. 

This problem would seem to be fixed by a more moderate emotivist subjectivity which says that we may group together similar neurological feelings of our own as ends in themselves.  However, there are two major reasons why this cannot be true.  The first is that such definitions would require clear bases for their adoption, which we cannot provide without a clear logical reason.  If we may group together positive feelings based on similarities, then there is no reason why we may not simply group together all positive traits as well as all negative ones and finish our discussion there, completely (and uselessly) proving that what we think is good is the categories which we think are good and what we think is bad is the categories we think are bad.  A pragmatic argument against this – that it does not help us practically, as we need to identify positive feelings with individual experiences to know which experiences are desirable – would seem to argue for categorizing experiences based (exclusively) on the practical conditions of them happening.  However, if we did so, we would find ourselves incapable of comparing individual experiences any way but arbitrarily, as (all experiences being different) we would be not have a good reason to decide one difference is any better a category than another (for instance, categorizing the positive feeling of drinking milk in the morning as being caused by our tasting something which we have previously seen was white or by the time of day at which we drank it).  Being incapable of distinguishing among these differences would lead us into a completely incompetent ethical system, unable to decide among different experiences, all of which would appear fundamentally different and incomparable.  We would not have any basis for our actions, but rather, we would have as many reasons for acting as there are actions, or as few as one, or as many as we arbitrarily decide.  This may be fine for practical use (as I previously discussed in “Solving the Incoherency of Ethical Calculation”), but it absolutely fails to answer the question of why we should bother to have a practical manner of acting.  If anything, basing our actions on this approach alone would make our actions seem even more arbitrary and unreasonable, as we would be knowingly wrong all the time, and that would leave us with the question of why we should even try to strive for something desirable in the first place.

Even more importantly, while the moderate subjective perspective addresses the most radical criticism of the subjective perspective, that of grouping together similar experiences of our own, it does not do so for others or for ourselves in the past.  But this does not make sense.  When looking at experiences in our distant past, we can generally understand how we made our decisions.  Even if we do not agree with those decisions, we can make value judgements about them and say whether they were right or wrong.  Further, when discussing a particular action with another person, we can agree and disagree about whether something is right to do.  Indeed, the history of ethics has been people convincing each other that one action or another is the right or wrong thing to do.  However, in conversations based on preference, we cannot reach that agreement.  If we are discussing how enjoyable it is to eat a certain kind of food, saying, “You are wrong; you do not like that food” would make no sense.  Instead, we can merely say, “I do not like that food.”  A purely subjectivist perspective should require our decisions about actions to be similar.  Different people have fundamentally different neurology from one another (see “A Preliminary Philosophy of Morals,” paragraphs 23-26), and therefore one’s experiences of neurological phenomena (such as pleasure) are fundamentally different from another’s experience of the same neurological phenomena.  Therefore, if the subjectivist perspective is true, then not only should ethics be subjective, it should be so subjective that it would merely reduce to a matter of preference.  Further, if it were true that the bases for ethics are our subjective emotions, then questions about any non-factual statement should be only answerable by preference and thereby by sensation.  And yet, this is not how actions work.  Our reasons for acting are often explicable and understandable to other people.  We can often agree on the decision to act for the same reason as one another in spite of our very different understandings of our own individual emotive sensations.  Just as important as the factual claim is the meta-ethical one – if we uncover a reason for acting which makes any kind of objective or logical ethical project useless (due to its subjugation to subjective and illogical preferences), then trying to discuss or think about those reasons for acting is also useless.  And if we find that there is nothing in common between us beyond these intangible personal preferences except for one single precept, then that would tell us to analyze that precept, for that is the only thing which we can trust to be the center of any future action.

We should therefore create a requirement for our inquiry to satisfy prior to stopping it so that we can avoid the problems of subjectivism which we have diagnosed.  We should require our reason to be understandable at all times to all people who could engage in a discussion about the ethicality of an individual action.  That does not mean that all people should accept our view or that it would be equally true for everyone, but rather that someone can agree or disagree while understanding what assertion that agreement or disagreement is based on.  By doing so, we can allow ourselves to have an ethics which can actually help us and tell us what we may desire in the future, as well as fixing the problem of the incoherency of ethical disagreements that subjectivity implies.  To find something which is understandable to all, I will require a logical statement of desire of a non-subjective emotion to be the basis of our ethical system.  The reason is that logic is fundamentally present in every single person who may have a logical ethical disagreement; if someone could not have a logical disagreement about what is or is not ethical, then an explanation of why they find a particular thing desirable or undesirable would not be understandable to another person, or even to them at another moment, unless that other person were imagining some reason which was not being said.

Before moving on, however, I would like to quickly clear up a possible objection to this requirement with its basis in my previous article, “Solving the Incoherency of Ethical Calculations.”  In that article, I made an objection to rationalist ethics, arguing that it would be impossible to achieve due to the multivariable nature of ethics.   To solve this problem, I chose an inferentialist approach in which we imperfectly guessed what the ratio of importance would be between these different variables.  Firstly, my previous objection to rationalism does not apply when we are discussing the creation of a desirable world.  It is not the question of “which parts of the world are more desirable,” which would indeed be impossible to calculate rationally.  To put it simply, this objection works as an objection not to the question of what is desirable but rather to what is more or less desirable about the different parts of what is desirable, a question we will not be asking in this article.  Secondly, the inferentialist solution cannot apply to the inquiry which is our focus.  In this article, rather than searching directly for the right action, we are looking for what ends we desire.  Therefore, we have no way of testing what our desired ends might be, no way of saying whether this or that desire is right or wrong.  This is because we cannot measure the desirability of a particular action by using some kind of more central metric (as the desirability of an action is the most important part of why we choose to do that action or not), and thus there is no way of verifying whether that desire’s importance or centrality is true or false.  Therefore, we cannot simply guess our ethics and then change them based on practical results, as the inferentialist approach calls for; our first judgment is our only, untestable judgment, and so all we can do is make that judgment as accurate as possible.

With this explanation of method out of the way, I will now posit my belief about what is actually desirable, the subject of the article.  What we desire in acting is not a particular feeling or sensation but rather the existence and continuation of thought without interruption by some outside force.  That desire is for the self-preservation of the person, who inherently views themselves as being made up of the thoughts they are thinking at a given moment.  Therefore, if that person’s thoughts are terminated, then they are terminated, which is viewed as extremely undesirable by a given thinker.  This termination can happen through multiple different methods.  The first would be the death of the thinker, for obvious reasons.  The second would be overwhelming the thinker’s thoughts with some kind of outside raw feeling, such as pain.  The third would be some kind of statement which contradicts the current thought of a given thinker doggedly overwhelming or objecting to their current thoughts, a similar circumstance to the second but with a prior thought as the objector rather than an outside emotion.

In proving this, as my method tells me to, I will start from some clear intentions we have and try to find a common reason for them.  I will be specifically focusing on a kind of vulgar hedonism which proclaims pleasure as always good and pain as always bad in themselves.  I will first contradict the idea put forth by such a vulgar hedonist.  Next, I will use this analysis to make some observations of pleasure and pain that point towards a middle ground between the original hedonism and my theory.  I will then apply this middle ground to some other problems, such as that of justice, and analyze how they are reducible to requirements that are understandable from the perspective of my theory.  Having found a bunch of individual parts of a theory, I will then analyze the concept of identity and display how this can be reducible to conscious thought.  Having done so, I will then look at how conscious thought can be destroyed or mitigated by different sources and how that can help us apply our theory to the middle ground theories we had posited earlier.  Finally, I will look at the implications and practical uses of such a theory.

But before we put forth our theory, let’s look at one of the most basic concepts of what is desirable, the maximization of pure pleasure and the minimization of pure pain.  By “pure pleasure” and “pure pain,” what I mean is the neurological brain states which accompany instances of pleasure or pain as we describe them.  So, the vulgar hedonist would proclaim, all other things being equal, the creation of more individual instances of felt pleasure of greater magnitude is desirable and the creation of more individual instances of pain of greater magnitude is undesirable.  This would be true in all cases, and it is based not on some kind of logical truth but rather on the empirical fact that people tend to say they enjoy pleasure and do not enjoy pain, and people want more pleasure as well as less pain.  To a vulgar hedonist, all desires have their core in this fundamental truism.  There may be individual cases where people will desire pain or not desire pleasure, but that will always be for a reason other than the desire for that pleasure and pain itself, such as, for instance, wanting to do penance for a crime to get the crime off your conscience (in the case of pain), or avoiding a certain kind of food that gives you pleasure because thinking about its creation causes you to feel sad about the process of creating that food (in the case of pleasure).

I will avoid focusing on the claim that all of desire reduces to one of these two kinds of feeling and instead focus on the claim that any individual desire can be fully explained via one of these two feelings.  The first objection to the hedonistic claim is purely empirical and questions the practical truth of pleasure as in-itself a positive or pain as in-itself a negative.  The second objection is conceptual and focuses on the unusual nature of the claim that one of these two is necessarily good and the other is necessarily bad, not because of their individual traits but rather because of their nature as feelings themselves.  Finally, I will put forth an alternative which aims to address the two problems we previously diagnosed with the hedonist point of view (empirical falsehood and a lack of reason for clear differentiation between pleasure and pain), while explaining our (usual) disposition towards pleasure and away from pain.  My analysis here is not necessarily intent on proving that, in general, pleasure is not a good or pain a bad, but merely that they are not themselves the good or the bad, and that their goodness or badness can only be fully understood or true in the particular circumstance in which they are felt.

First, I will consider empirical reality and try to show the hedonistic claim does not fully explain human action.  In doing so, I will not necessarily try to prove that it is right to act directly contrary to the hedonistic perspective by viewing pleasure as bad in itself or pain as good in itself, but rather that it is sensible to do so and therefore that feelings of pure pleasure or pure pain are not in all cases good or bad.  My first example will be in the realm of science fiction (although it could probably be applied to the human world), while my other examples will be in the ordinary world.

For my first example, imagine a machine that can reproduce pleasure in, say someone’s arm.  So long as it is produces pleasure, it causes a reaction so extreme that it overpowers any thought or feeling which a person may have at a certain time and replaces it with this extreme feeling of pleasure.  However, it cannot be turned on or off but rather acts at random times for random intervals.  It cannot be predicted, it cannot be mitigated, and it cannot be turned off.  There are no rules to when this machine will act, and it is just as likely to act at any individual moment in time as another.  This machine, according to the hedonistic perspective, should be extremely positive.  It does, after all, give the user a gigantic amount of pleasure, which, according to the hedonist, is good in itself.  And yet, it is quite a repulsive concept, and it is doubtful that most people who are not entrenched in some theory or another would argue in its favor.  Indeed, the more pleasure caused by this hypothetical machine, the more of a burden it would likely be seen to be.  Now, perhaps this is because of some other reason than the rejection of pleasure; perhaps it is caused by a fear of, during one of these influxes of pleasure, making a mistake which will cause problems greater than the good produced by the pleasure.  However, to fix that, all we would have to do is make it so that some artificial intelligence would act for you, exactly as you might, while you are feeling your great pleasure.  However, this seems just as frightening as the other option, which is contrary to the hedonistic theory.

Now, let us apply this to actual, real-life examples.  Take a drug, for instance.  According to the hedonistic theory, even if it undesirable due to its medical effects, the state of inebriation which many drugs create should be automatically desirable.  The concept of being incapable of thinking and acting in the same way as normal and instead having a large amount of pleasure without any choice to suspend such pleasure should be, all other things being equal, positive.  Yet, if someone said something to the effect of, “I would prefer to not feel that pleasant inebriation; I do not enjoy it,” that would not be an incoherent sentence, as hedonism would seem to imply it would be.  Indeed, if hedonism were true, no sentence with respect to inebriation other than, “I would like to be pleasantly inebriated now and always,” should make sense.  This is again simply untrue.  It is reasonable to say that one does not want to be inebriated in a given case or even in general, entirely separately from distaste for effects of the drug other than the inebriation.  This implies distaste for the inebriation itself is possible, which makes no sense according to the hedonist’s perspective.

On the pain side of the equation, too, the principle that pain should never be desirable in itself is not true.  For this, we will use the example of spicy food.  Spiciness is simulated pain.  It makes our brain think that we are feeling pain when we are not in the normal state of pain.  Therefore, it is calling upon the neurological state of pain.  And yet, people enjoy it.  The hedonist could say that people enjoy spicy food because of the pleasure accompanying eating it, but this too does not really explain the phenomenon of spiciness.  If we, for instance, imagine two foods, the exact same in every respect except for the amount of pain they stimulate, any person deciding between the two should always choose the one which causes less stimulated pain.  However, this is not the case.  Secondly, there are certain foods that are significantly more notable for the pain they cause when eating them than for any other flavor (a particularly flavorless pepper, for instance).  In these cases, where the pain overpowers all other flavors, the person eating the pepper should always oppose it and find eating it undesirable.  This is, again, empirically false.  People often enjoy, therefore, the simulated pain of spiciness itself, entirely separate from any of the other non-pain conditions of the food.  This also contradicts the hedonist, who proclaims that every action is only reasonable insofar as it relates to whether the actor feels pain or not.

We now find ourselves in a situation where pain is sometimes desirable and sometimes undesirable in itself and where pleasure is sometimes desirable and sometimes undesirable in itself.  This makes no sense to the hedonist, but nor does it make sense to the anti-hedonist who proclaims that pleasure and pain have no value.  Rather, it seems as if different kinds of pleasure or pain have different kinds of value.  This implies that there is some kind of trait about the phenomenon of pleasure or pain that makes each individual experience desirable or undesirable, rather than those phenomena being essentially or constantly desirable or undesirable.  This is where our second, conceptual objection comes into play.

There is very little which seems to separate an individual feeling of pleasure and pain in general.  Both are vague feelings which are created independently of thought (as in, thinking “this is pleasurable,” or “this is painful,” doesn’t suddenly make something pleasurable or painful) which are difficult to describe in words.  They both feel somewhat like a pressure on a part of the body which is external to a particular thought which we are thinking.  The minor differences between them are nearly impossible to explain in the phenomena themselves.  The hedonistic perspective, taking their goodness or badness at face value, fails to tell us why a particular experience of pleasure ought to be experienced again while another experience of pain, nearly impossible to separate from the first, should not be experienced again.  Thus, the whole feeling seems to fall into preference.  This is similar to how pleasure and pain are viewed within the vein of spicy food.  Someone can say, “I like the feeling of eating something spicy,” or “I don’t like the feeling of eating something spicy,” sensibly.  However, there is something different about most normal feelings of pain.  It would be difficult to reasonably say, “I enjoy the feeling of pain in my shins.”  This therefore implies that there is something important about an experience of pain such as being kicked in the shins which does not replicate in the experience of eating spicy food.  The hedonistic perspective, if it takes its source as the mere feeling of pleasure and pain being desirable or undesirable respectively, has little logical or objective value and, if it were true, our relationship to pleasure and pain should be a matter of subjective taste.  As our desire for greater pleasure and lesser pain is not an entirely subjective concept, there must be a more substantial basis behind our desire for pleasure or distaste for pain than simply the basic qualities of both.

There is one thing which we have not so far discussed which is extremely different about most forms of pleasure versus most forms of pain.  It is the conditions under which one feels the pleasure or pain.  When someone feels some kind of pleasure (say, if they eat a food they like), they have chosen to feel pleasure for a certain amount of time.  They can then decide to terminate that pleasurable experience when they desire to so that they do not continue to experience that pleasurable experience (in this case, by eating no more of that food or washing down that food with a glass of water).  It would be entirely reasonable, given their inability to rid themselves of pleasure in the future, for a person to decide not to eat that food.  The assertion that we desire either pleasure or pain because of our ability to control when we can stop feeling that pleasure or pain explains away the difficulty that we have previously diagnosed in our previous examples.  All examples of pleasure as well as pain which I have cited as oppositional to the hedonistic perspective have gone against this general rule.  They have been cases of uncontrollable pleasure – which go directly against one’s intention to feel pleasure or controllable pain, which only exists when we choose to feel it and goes away when we choose not to.  Our ability to terminate the feeling of pleasure or pain when we desire to do so, therefore, seems like the major trait that separates the two concepts of pleasure and pain as desirable or undesirable.

Furthermore, the desirable or undesirable traits of pleasure and pain seem to only exist in relation to their appraisal by thought.  If the feelings of pleasure or pain were good in themselves, the consciousness of the person feeling them would not be a necessary part of their desirability.  And yet, they very well are.  We would prefer to experience a smaller amount of pleasure awake than a great amount of pleasure asleep, and, even more extremely, we would prefer to experience a gigantic amount of pain asleep than awake (as in when people get anesthesia prior to a surgery).  Therefore, we can also say that pleasure and pain are only valuable insofar as they are perceived by a thinking, conscious person.  From this, we can conclude that it is the appraisal of the pleasure or pain which matters, not necessarily the pleasure or pain itself, pointing in the direction of some kind of thought being the centerpiece of the desirability of pleasure or pain rather than the feelings themselves.

These two observations seem to imply a third, that there is some kind of thought with respect to pleasure and pain (that which occurs when we choose to experience pleasure or pain) which is desirable and some level of thought (that which occurs when we do not have control over our ability to feel pleasure or pain) which is not.  But what precisely is this sometimes desirable and sometimes undesirable effect on thought?  Well, let us think back to the sleeping example.  When we are confronted with the opportunity to feel pleasure through eating food, but we are asleep, that is not desirable.  Similarly, when we are confronted with the opportunity to feel pleasure through eating food, but while we are not thinking about that food, then eating that food is similarly not desirable.  However, if we eat that food while thinking about it, then eating it is significantly more desirable, as we can appreciate (thinking analytically and closely about) the taste.  If that food is spicy and therefore makes us think of pain, then we have a similar reaction.  However, if we have a surgery and we do not use anesthetic, we find it quite impossible to focus on the surgery and appreciate it in the same way we can when considering food.  Nor can we even think about anything else, for the surgery puts us in so much pain that we can focus on nothing other than the surgery, and even then, we cannot even appreciate it. 

Thus, the desirable element of the food was our appreciation of it, whereas the undesirability of the surgery was caused by our incapacity to think about it or anything else.  The difference between the two is that the food helps us to think and makes it easier to find a subject to think about, whereas the surgery gets in the way of thought and makes it more difficult to think about anything at all.  Clearly, something is desirable if it gives us content to think about, and it is undesirable if it makes it impossible to think about it or anything else at all.  Consequently, our desire for something can be understood in the ability it gives to thought:  that is, phenomena which give us the ability to think more about a given topic are desirable, whereas ideas which make it difficult for us to think are necessarily negative.  This allows our previous examples to make far more sense.  Both the science fiction example and the drug example do not allow for appreciation (due to the extremity and randomness of the science fiction example and the effects on the rest of the mind of the drug example), and their effects cannot be stopped by the power of will (in both examples, we cannot decide to stop the pleasure whenever we want to).  This then affects our future thoughts in a negative way, causing an overall negative result on our thinking.  On the other hand, spicy food is minor in magnitude, allowing for appreciation, and mitigatable, and it therefore primarily exists during the time when we can appreciate it while giving us the ability to terminate the feeling when we have no use for it.

However, while helpful for an analysis of pure pleasure and pure pain, this approach does not fully address other problems.  If any thought is desirable and any lack of thought is undesirable, then we should desire any thought possible in the same way and for the same reasons that we would desire food in order to appreciate it.  However, this is clearly not true.  If we do something wrong, something unjust, and we then think something to the effect of, “I have done something wrong and unjust,” that result is clearly not desirable.  Further, if we think about our unjust action and its implications on our identity as a person, that result is quite undesirable as well.  Of course, it is thought, and we can terminate it at any point.  Yet, thinking it remains something we prefer to avoid, just as much as aggressive pain.  Another clear example of this problem of valuing all thoughts as equally positive experiences is the distaste we have for contradictions in general.  If something we believe turns out to be wrong according to a new thought, we do not think that it is great because it gives us something to think about, we rather think it is tragic that we previously believed something that was wrong.  This, again, does not make sense if the primary objective is to pursue all thoughts equally.  We should support contradictions in themselves and want more of them, as they allow us to think something while not forcing us to think anything.  We, again, do not think this way.

This thought-centric approach (asserting that a given action is desirable to the extent it is conducive to thinking) is about midway between the satisfactory resolution of our inquiry (which we previously defined as the desire to uphold previous viewpoints and thoughts) and the hedonistic perspective.  If it could apply to every single action, it would be a fine endpoint for our inquiry, as it could have explained the reason for all action.  However, as we have described above, it does not have that broad a reach.  It does not explain very much of anything, other than actions which only involve pure pleasure and pure pain.  It does not apply to our desire to be good, or reasonable, or anything else.  Therefore, according to the method of ethics focused on finding a reason for action universally applicable to all our actions, we must go another layer deeper and try to explain the reason for all of these desires, so that they can all be explained by one fundamental rule describing what we desire.  Otherwise, we would have a variety of ethical rules that would be not just imperfect but nearly useless, as they would give us a group of different variables which we would have no empirical way to test, as there would be nothing more central than an assortment of principles to which we could only assign values randomly.

So, like we did above with ethical hedonism, we must apply our method to our thought-centric value system so that our ethical system can make sense of our desire for goodness and rightness.  To do this, we should think of some kind of reason why the concept of future thought is desirable.  The most fundamental questions about why we care about future thought would be, “How do we view thought, and why would that make thought desirable, and what else would that make desirable?”  We will argue below that thought is the current perspective which the thinker uses to analyze individual situations.  This is desirable for the simple reason of self-preservation, because continuity in our thoughts and assumptions are how we understand our continued existence.  This concept of thought does not just include individual thoughts but also the biases and assumptions which underpin those thoughts. 

When we think about who we are, there are a few fundamental parts that seem obvious to us.  There is our power over our own body (or at least parts of it), there is our ability to perceive in certain ways (like thought and so on), and there is our ability to think.  These are omnipresent in some form or another and help us separate ourselves from other people.  If our body were suddenly uncontrollable (that is, if our thoughts were directly correlated with other people’s actions), if we could no longer perceive out of our own eyes but rather out of another’s, or if we thought someone else’s thoughts, based on their previous thoughts and their understanding of the world, then we would have great difficulty:  what we previously defined as individuality in our consciousness would suddenly disappear, and we would have to ask whether the newly created person is the same person who had suffered the sudden shift in perspective.  However, the first two hypotheticals (loss of power over body and loss of power over senses) are significantly more difficult to imagine than the third (loss of power over our own thoughts).  Indeed, it would be difficult to say that we are the same person in the third example.  In the first two examples, we can say that the hypothetical person is experiencing something very strange; however, we would probably not say that the person in the last example is experiencing anything at all.  An example of this would be if there were an imaginary brain surgery that placed one person’s brain in another person’s body.  The person whose brain is placed into the body would much more reasonably be that person than the person who had previously inhabited the body.  If we take the perspective of the brain who has just been placed in a new body (the thinker of that body), we would almost certainly identify with the brain’s persona rather than the body’s.  This thereby demonstrates that our understanding of ourselves is guided by our understanding of our minds.

So, we must ask, what are these minds of ours, and why are they the source of our personal identity?  Our mind is, quite simply, the source of our thoughts.  If someone (person A)’s brain was surgically changed to exactly replicate another person (person B)’s brain, we would probably consider the newly created person B rather than person A.  But what does that mean, “source of thoughts”?  What are the differences between one person’s thoughts and another’s?  Why should that have anything to do with personal identity?  The basic answer is that the character of a person’s thoughts is the assumptions on which they base their future thoughts.  To take an example of this, imagine someone who is named John.  If they are called John, they will, having previously assumed their name to be John, act as if they have been named correctly.  On the other hand, if they are merely John’s body with another person’s brain, then they will consider the naming inaccurate and will think that the person who named them got it wrong.  However, the person who called not-John by the name John only did so wrongly if it is assumed that this person’s name is not John.  A group of previous assumptions is the only thing which leads us to thinking a given assertion is correct or incorrect; indeed, the concept of most language is merely an assumption about the accuracy of certain names to describe phenomena in the world.  And the differences between different people’s assumptions is quite large.  Any statement, such as “I believe in x,” requires a group of statements about the reasons for x, what x is, what alternatives to x are, what you think belief is, and why the minimum reasons to reach belief are included by x.  These elements are not all shared between people.  Some of them have nothing to do directly with the belief in x.  However, being all intertwined, they create the statement of belief in x for certain reasons, which other people might not agree with.  Further, in most cases, none of these fundamental assumptions will be scrutinized due to many factors, such as time.  We do not think about metaphysics when we ask ourselves if we believe that a certain food is healthy.  Thus, prior to making a given statement, the coherence or accuracy of that statement and all thoughts in the creation of it are made up of previously assumed assertions that create additional assertions only in relation to one another.  The differences between different people’s assumptions is what make them themselves.

This elucidates quite a lot for us.  Previously, we simply posited that any thought might be desirable.  We therefore had no way of distinguishing between desirable and undesirable thoughts.  However, viewing our thoughts from the perspective of their individuality, we have a more specific claim:  Something is desirable if it upholds and supports the creation of thoughts similar to previous thoughts in their assumptions, and it is undesirable if it contradicts or otherwise damages our ability to think according to our assumptions.  This can be reduced down into a similar claim:  Desirability is decided by an action’s ability to uphold thoughts which follow our previous assumptions about the world.  The reason behind this can be seen as simple self-preservation.  If we view ourselves as our thoughts, and our thoughts are individual because of our assumptions, then getting rid of our assumptions would also be getting rid of our thoughts, which would be getting rid of ourselves, which is quite undesirable.  If we get rid of our thoughts by overwhelming them, that would also be getting rid of ourselves.  On the other hand, if we eat food and thereby give ourselves something to appreciate and consider, then we are allowing ourselves future thoughts which will not threaten our understanding of ourselves.  This concept of self-preservation can be easily seen to be the basis for all of our previous values.  Doing something unjust creates the concept that we are bad people – quite contrary to most people’s perspectives of themselves, and thus fundamentally undesirable.  Realizing that we are wrong is the very idea of delegitimizing previous assumptions, thereby threatening ourselves with destruction (as we would understand destruction).

I would like to emphasize, though, that this is not necessarily true for everyone.  We can very well imagine people who do not necessarily prioritize the continued existence of current assumptions.  These people would not necessarily believe that their current thoughts have any particular value and that they therefore need to preserve them.  Perhaps they have no sense of self-preservation, or perhaps they simply view the ability to think rather than the ability to think certain things as being the source of their individual humanity.  For this group, upholding their current assumptions would not be a needed endeavor.  However, this group would remain in need of some thoughts, meaning that they would need to avoid things like an excess of pain, for instance, which deny and erase the ability to think.  These people probably exist, and their disagreement is not necessarily incorrect.  On the other hand, there also might very well be people who do not value any thought at all.  These people would necessarily negate their own existence in favor of whatever could overwhelm their thoughts.  If these people exist, they do not make their views clear.  Indeed, it would make sense that they do not make their views clear, as they are too busy trying to rid themselves of thought to be able to think about and articulate their particular views.  These people, too, are not necessarily wrong.  If we dug deeper, we might be able to find a point at which all these groups agreed.  Perhaps doing so would teach us quite a bit.  However, that is not our mission in this article, so we will not endeavor to do so.  We have done what we have set out to do:  find a reason for action which is understandable to all people, even if they do not necessarily agree with it.  The reason for action, to all these groups, is understandable to all the others and is merely a disagreement based on differences of logical statement (or perhaps assumption).  This is where we will end the theoretical portion of this article in favor of looking at the implications of our theory.

If all we are trying to do is get into a situation where we can think without fear of contradiction or the sudden suspension of thought (due to, for instance, extreme pleasure or pain), then this provides us at least a few clear undesirables for anyone who takes this position.  We would like to avoid things like uncontrolled pain or pleasure, acting in an evil or unjust manner (from our perspective of what evil or unjust means), or being incorrect in general.  This thus gives us the need to mitigate these evils by trying to avoid most types of pain and some types of pleasure and trying to act as we believe we ought to.  However, this third undesirable is an extremely slippery one.  What we mean by “being wrong” is “having internal contradictions in our beliefs,” such that we desire a logical belief system which does not require us to choose between different competing viewpoints.  However, we must ask ourselves how we can do this.  If two beliefs we have contradict one another (say the belief that we should always act in whatever way possible to help others and the belief that we would like to not do anything we might regret), we seem to have little clear way of picking between these values.  If the only reason for choosing between two different ideas were to avoid contradictions, then getting rid of either arbitrarily would be reasonable.  So, we need some kind of way to choose between different belief systems.  My answer to that is to go back to the reason why we desire consistency in the first place, our need to uphold our current thought process.  While all assumptions are important for some actions, some are more important than others.  For instance, nearly all actions rely on logic, but few rely on the way in which we act in a specific situation that rarely occurs.  Therefore, in this situation, upholding logic would be more important to preserve our attitude towards the world than upholding our perspective on the particular, rarely reproducible situation we find ourselves in.  This, therefore, is how we can view all decisions based on consistency, as being led by the need to uphold the most fundamental part of our ethical system.

However, although it has provided us many evils that we must avoid, our ethical system has not granted us a clear good to aim towards.  It does not tell us anything which we desire other than the upholding of our previous understanding of the world.  That does not imply some kind of special, important, or accurate understanding of the world, simply our own.  While this remains a system of ethics which is understandable to others, it is not a system of ethics which is exactly applicable to anyone other than us.  The only time it is applicable is if the other person has some kind of previous assumptions similar to ours which are fundamental in their belief system (logic, for example).  However, even then, differing assumptions can mean that something might be more fundamental than that which can be reasonable disagreed upon, and therefore, while much of ethical conversation is understandable and resolvable among different people, some might very well just be a difference of preference.  This is an accurate description of real-world ethical conversations, which can often lead to agreement but just as often can lead to complete and total disagreement without any clear common ground.  In these cases, the disagreement might very well be impossible to solve or fix, for the assumptions are too different to bridge, and if either party attempted to give up certain assertions to make sense to the other party, their new view would not accurately display the real reasons for their actions.  However, that being said, all current assumptions, being based on previous assumptions, will not be subject to possible shifts caused by changing neurology, as they are based on what beliefs someone has previously assumed rather than some kind of feeling or other neurological phenomenon.

Thirdly and finally, I would like to clarify that the purpose of this article has not been to index all the required elements of an ethical system but merely to explore a few as examples.  There are many imperatives needed to uphold previous thoughts (such as the preservation of life) which have not been addressed; this is not meant to cut them out of our ethical system.  The purpose of the article has been to establish a basis upon which we can figure out all of our ethical priorities, a method for practicing ethics.  There is quite a lot which I have not done in this article which needs to be done to explain exactly what is required for real action.  But such an endeavor would have to actually resemble an index of different things needed for continued thought and for upholding previous views.  That would be a different article from this one.

In conclusion, I would like to recapitulate the main points from this article without any of the lengthy arguments or specific jargon we have been using to base our beliefs on.  Just as important as the arguments we made about ethics was the method which we argued should be used to figure out ethics.  We discussed that first.  To figure out an ethical system, we should start from things which are clearly good and clearly bad.  We should (at first) assume that is the basis for all action.  If we encounter something which we do for a reason other than what we previously assumed to be our basis for action, we should reject that basis and instead try to figure out a basis that also includes the additional desire.  We should continue to do this until we have eliminated all contradictions and unexplained desires in our ethics so that it can be sufficiently broad to explain all of our actions.  Once we have reached this point, we should stop trying to dig deeper and should instead recognize our current ethical system as the correct one (or at least as close as we are going to get).

As for our actual ethics, we started this method with pleasure and pain.  We realized that it was not pleasure and pain which we valued or disvalued but rather whether a feeling could help us think or hinder us from thinking.  If it helped us, we valued it, and if it hindered us, we disvalue it.  As most forms of pain are part of the latter and most forms of pleasure are part of the former, we realized that, while pleasure and pain are not good and bad in themselves, most forms of pleasure are good, and most forms of pain are bad.  However, we realized there was a problem:  our concept of ethics did not explain a wide range of action, like our desire to be good or right.  So, using our method, we figured out a basis that addressed those contradictory desires.  In doing so, we argued that our identity is based on our current thoughts and, further, on what we assume in thinking.  And this was the basis for our desire to think some thoughts rather than others:  that we wanted to preserve our current selves, which means also the assumptions on which we base our thoughts.  I argued that this belief satisfied the need of our method.  While it is based on principles which we cannot prove are not interpersonally subjective, I argued that this ethical system is personally objective and remains the same for someone throughout their life.  I used this argument, however, to prove that while many negatives are objective for all people who uphold this form of morality, most positives are not even that and are based on our different assumptions, therefore making them extremely subjective.

But what does all of this mean in practice?  What it means is a few things.  Firstly, it tells us what we should take into account when we are deciding between things.  We should remember that the reason for our actions is to uphold the current paradigm of our thoughts as well as the ability to think in general, and therefore we should be able to value that directly and look at how an action might affect it.  Secondly, it tells us some of the main values we should have.  We should attempt to mitigate pleasures and pains that are uncontrollable, or which are so extreme as to make thought difficult.  We should also attempt to always act as positively as we can, such that we do not contradict our idea of how we act.  And we should try to decrease the number of contradictory beliefs we hold by finding whatever contradictions we can before they pop up in real life, and by getting rid of whatever rules we have that contradict other, more important rules.  Finally, we should recognize that individual good is extremely subjective and differs depending on the assumptions that one has made about the world.  It is entirely possible for two people not only to grant different import to the same values but also to have completely different values, with both being completely rational and neither being superior to the other’s values.  And, with this in mind, we can do further research to try to understand exactly what values we can and should use to decide between different choices.

But until that future research, we are left with an ethical system of continuity and above all of stability.  We are left with an ethics of tradition.