Yay for Christmas! Christmas, Christmas, Christmas! The
birth of Christ, presents, and an old man who makes Big Brother look like Jim
Hacker*. Christmas!
Yeah, Christmas is kinda boring to talk about. What else is
there? I was interviewed by a reporter a few days ago, and that’s interesting
(at least to me). But I would like to talk about something a bit lighter, since
it’s Christmas, and since I suspect that my last post may have been a little
hard to get through… I was going to sacrifice ‘light’ to have an argument on
gun control, but on consideration, no. Not only am I not going to, I’m not even
explaining why I’m not going to.
So, what else is going on? Fiscal cliff? My prediction has
been ‘they’ll make a deal some time just after
the absolute last moment, but before too
much damage is done’ for several months. I currently see no reason to
change that prediction. Seriously, people complain about the Eurozone, but…
Gay marriage? That’s a top issue in the UK at the moment.
Except that I tried having one of the dialogues between the two philosophers I
have locked in my basement about it, and ended up with this:
Ben James: I’m in favour of gay marriage.
Finn Carter: Yup. Me too.
Unfortunately, that one’s a little short. I wish there were
some actual arguments against the bloody idea.
Well, I’m getting through topics fast. What’s next?
Oh yes, one of my favourite ones – absolutely idiotic things
that come out of coherent logical ethical systems. People being happy is great,
yeah? And a hundred happy people must be better than just one, yes? Which means
that there must be a theoretical number of less happy people who are just as
good as one happier person. And so, if you can increase the population enough,
it doesn’t matter that the lives of the entire population are unending slogs of
misery and despair, as long their lives are better than death, as long as it
wouldn’t have been better for them if they’d never been born, this population is better than what we have.
So what does this mean? Well… Rape! Rape is bad – I’m not going to try and
justify that statement. If you disagree... Just… just go with it for the
moment, OK? The question is, is rape really a fate worse than death. I have it
as something of a base assumption that it isn’t. The justice system agrees with
me, and… well, with a knife to their throat, everything I know about suggests
that most people won’t choose the knife. OK, I now feel somewhat dirty, so onto
the point – if we accept that rape is better than death, we have a situation
where consent is irrelevant. Seriously. The increase in population will, if
mankind survives long enough, cancel out the massive drop in quality of life.
Which reminds me that we really need to have camera on every street corner – or
we would, if letting people out wasn’t far too dangerous. The capitalist system
is rubbish, since some people have more than what they need, which is
sub-optimal, so have anything necessary to survive distributed by quota for
maximum efficiency. Non-essential luxury goods can be used for incentivising,
and unhealthy goods banned. It sounds like I’m describing dystopia, but it’s a
far better society than we have now. The main issue is keeping the human
population as high as possible for as long as possible, and the higher the
population now, the more breeding population we have to increase the population
for later. Eventually, everything will be better. Also, contraception is
morally wrong.
So how can we avoid this? We could deny that rape was better
than death, but that only deals with one problem. There are still a lot of
unpleasant things we can do to make sure that there are as many people around
as possible. So what if we say that some things are wrong regardless of the end
result, so we can’t do all those horrible things, even that would be better.
But lying is wrong. And so so is lying to the nice man with the six foot steel
axe and a particular hatred for that guy who told you to ‘hide him’ not five
minutes ago, and who is currently in the house behind you.
What about saying that it’s not better to have more happier
people – what’s good is average happiness. So killing off half the population
for the benefit of the other half? Great! Gladiatorial combat for all!
Slavery’s a pretty sweet idea, too. Yeah, sure, a few people suffer unimaginable
horror, but on average everyone’s
better off! Yay! And if all that fails, there’s always involuntary euthanasia
for the least well off members of society.
Actually, you don’t even need the crowd. Two people
torturing a random person to death is a good thing, as long as they enjoy it
enough to cancel out their victim’s suffering.
Now I feel dirty again. The point isn’t ‘this form of ethics
is bad’. And yeah, all these problems I’ve mentioned have solutions. And the
solutions all create problems of their own! In ethics, you’re limited to either
stubbornly defending ideas that may or may not constitute grounds for getting
locked up, or limiting yourself to things which are pretty much redundant (‘don’t
stab people for no reason). Put simply, there’s a reason so many philosophers
re in favour of free speech. It works the other way around, too – a lot of
things which are perfectly sensible (and which it would be utterly stupid to
reject) turn out to be seriously logically flawed. Not just in ethics, either.
Try looking up Curry’s paradox, which I am incapable of explaining coherently,
but which twists traditional logic into a pleasing pretzel shape. Hell, even ‘this
statement is a lie’ is impossible to resolve without abandoning the kind of
basic logic most people use every day.
Looking at why logic is usually completely at odds with all
that is good and sensible in the world is fun! Yay for Christmas!
*No, not going with the paedophile joke. Far too unorigrinal.
And I made it earlier on Facebook.**
**It just occurred to me that the batman myth seems to have
a particular political bent – not only is there the obvious ‘handouts’ angle,
but there’s also the idea that invasion of privacy and constant surveillance
are acceptable if this power is given to a good person, and the idea that an
educated ‘elite’ individual is in the best position to judge. So, welfare state,
CCTV and an end to trial by jury. The guy even wears red***.
***Yes, for anyone who’s not sure, I’m joking.
