A dialogue on my values
I was thinking to write a dialogue of a chronological type, yet then I thought that presenting the logic behind my values would be more interesting.
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Characters:
- An Inquisitive Yet Polite Fellow Traveler (FT)
- Michael Yudanin (MY)
Setting:
- NAX, a fictional airport where both FT and MY are stuck for the next N hours due to bad weather
FT: So where are you from?
A standard beginning. Differently from the English, Americans usually don’t take chances with weather. This question is quite hard for me to answer: I was born and lived seventeen years in Russia, the twelve years in Israel, and then moved to the US.
MY: Russia; but I lived quite a few years in Israel.
FT: Russia! What part of Russia?
Here we go – another standard piece. Now the exciting part.
MY: Siberia.
FT: Siberia?!
Images of polar bears behind bars of a giant labor camp in the midst of a blizzard are crossing his mind.
I’m omitting a 5-10 minutes conversation about Novosibirsk being a large industrial city, the fact that twenty or so million people live in Siberia and that Detroit could be a good approximation of the place where I lived in terms of weather, cracked pavement and employment opportunities.
Now we are getting to the part where a well-minded fellow traveler in becoming interested in what I’m doing now. We’ve already went through a minor excitement about this Siberian-born guy who actually opened his own company in America.
FT: Philosophy? That’s an interesting choice.
Which is to say – not every day one meets a person who decides to learn something as useless as philosophy. Who knows, though… – thinks the Fellow Traveler.
MY: Yes, I finally decided to do something practical :).
Every person is a world, and philosophy is something that can discover the hidden path to this world.
FT: Why philosophy?
MY: Well, I think it’s interesting. I always tried to separate between studies and business, trying to study what’s interesting and do work that brings money. And then, now I’m thirty five, so I decided to make a change. I actually want to teach philosophy in college.
FT: But why philosophy?
MY: You sure think it’s of little use, right?
FT: In a sense… actually, yes. I do. I had a roommate in college who studied philosophy, and let me tell you: I never understood why. He ended up working in a bank. You know, I’m an engineer, I work for Southern Power and I can say exactly what I do. Everybody can. It’s something tangible, something useful.
I can understand science: somebody is working in college in chemistry, and then drug companies can use it to make drugs.
But philosophy?
MY: You know, there is an old Chinese story about a man who was poor and miserable, and worked in a local garbage dump. Every day he was earning four pennies. On two pennies he was buying a piece of bread for his children. Two pennies went to buying a flower. An Englishman was observing him for a week. One day he couldn’t hold it and asked the guy: “Hey, why are you buying this flower? Don’t you see your children are hungry!? Why not buy them two pieces of bread?” And you know what the poor man said? He said: “The bread is a thing for them to live on. The flower is a thing for them to live for”
FT: I see you are pretty much into it… I understand your point. We all have something like that flower.
MY: So what’s your flower?
FT: Well, I play guitar. But how did you get there? I mean, how one decides to study philosophy?
MY: The road wasn’t straight. I actually studied behavioral sciences: psychology, sociology, criminology. Started a second degree in cognitive psychology. And then I realized that something was missing there. Took me a while to figure that one out – but I think now that was the experimental method. You rush to try things and see how they work in society, do research, publish papers, but then you realize that your assumptions weren’t solid. You need to have an idea of what “mind” is before you try to research it, for example.
The announcement joyfully informs travelers that all planes are delayed indefinitely because of the stormy weather.
FT: It seems like we are stuck here for good… So what specifically you want to do in philosophy? Study what the mind is?
MY: Well, I actually want to shoot high here. I want to try to find the foundation for ethics. I want to see if there is a criterion for good and bad. Something solid to rely on.
FT: OK. So you mean like there is a general rule that would tell us how to say what’s right and what’s wrong?
MY: In a sense. A criterion to which we can trace the rules and say if they are correct or incorrect.
FT: But it all depends on how you were brought up. In one culture it’s right to kill guys for sleeping with other guys, and in another it’s OK. How it can be general? Every culture invent its rules and laws.
MY: Here the philosophy comes. I think – or that’s what I want to find out, at least to try to find out – that there got to be some common basis. Some common basis that is not a matter of convention or agreement between people. Like in math: no matter what you think about that, two plus two makes four.
The fact is, we can all understand each other. You can talk about the strangest laws on Earth and understand the logic behind them, even if you don’t like them or think they are totally sick. That means we have some common basis. The ability to reason in a similar way, may be?
My own life experience pretty much tells me that it’s possible. I was raised in a society that was by any standard very different from where I’m now. And yet here I am, functioning quite well. People can speak very different languages, Russian and Hebrew, for example – and then you lean a new language and you can talk and understand. True – it’s not perfect. People are different – but there is a common basis. The biology is common, by the way.
FT: You still didn’t convince me. So what if we have the same biology? Teeth grow; rules are set by whoever has power, and accepted or not accepted by other people.
MY: Right, they are. But that doesn’t mean they cannot be right or wrong. There still can be a rule that tells us if they are right or not. Before the electricity was discovered, it had existed all along, right?
FT: Right, but that’s something physical.
MY: Ethics are not physical, but they are even more basic. Think about it: even a person who has no idea about electricity, a brain in a vat, would still think, and think in categories of right and wrong.
FT: He sure will. But you still didn’t convince me. Rules and laws are… how do I say it… soft? If you look at a car, for example, you cannot build it with the wheels on the top – it wouldn’t drive. Physics. With all this rules stuff – whatever you do, it will work.
MY: That’s because ethics are different. First of all, they are logical matter, not physical. Any rule or law obeys the basic rules of logic, which are the rules of understanding. If people cannot comprehend the rule, they will not follow it – it would not be there in the first place, because nobody will put it together.
But that’s not the point. The point is, there are good laws and bad laws. Got to be – not only we have an idea about “good” and “bad”, we also have this idea of basic criteria. True – we cannot always be sure what they are, but the mere fact we have this notion tells me it might be the case.
Now, the criterion for correctness of anything got to be outside the thing itself. Just like meaning has to be there before you can understand a word that has this meaning. So, some basic criteria should be out there – it’s a matter of discovery rather than of invention.
If we are talking about research, there is a remarkable similarity in what they call “moral judgment” between different people all around the world. We all can talk about specific cases where cultures are different, but the rules of behavior are much more similar than the way people dress or eat, for example.
And here is another thing, my favorite: it seems that societies who follow certain rules, moral rules, survive, while societies who do not – vanish. Take the Bible, for example. It has an account of a variety of ethnic groups, yet from these times pretty much only the Jews, Indians and Chinese survived. Even with that, it seems that China went through so many political and cultural systems, while Indian culture can be easily traced three thousand years ago. Why? If we look at the twentieth century, we would have the Nazi Germany that didn’t make it to fifteen; we would have Soviet Union that didn’t make it to seventy five – a tiny period for a country. Why? May be, there is something in the way these countries behaved, some sort of principle they violated and because of that couldn’t survive. Just like with evolution: if an organism cannot adjust, it becomes extinct. But with ideas it’s more complicated. The evolutionary pressures are different. Ideas don’t die with people, for example.
But we don’t need to go as far as ancient India. What do you think about capital punishment?
FT: I think it’s capital barbarism.
MY: Why?
FT: Because we cannot kill people, killing people is wrong. That’s precisely why we punish murderers – and then we want to do the same. Besides, death penalty is irreversible. What if there are mistakes? And there are mistakes!
MY: You see, in all your arguments there is nothing about upbringing and such. All the arguments appeal to some principles. General principles. May be even universal principles? I heard nothing about different cultures…
FT: It seems like you’ve given it some thought. It was sure very interesting. But you still didn’t convince me, at least not entirely..
MY: Well, I’m yet to develop these ideas up to the level they can convince anybody. But I certainly have my hopes.
Characters:
- An Inquisitive Yet Polite Fellow Traveler (FT)
- Michael Yudanin (MY)
Setting:
- NAX, a fictional airport where both FT and MY are stuck for the next N hours due to bad weather
FT: So where are you from?
A standard beginning. Differently from the English, Americans usually don’t take chances with weather. This question is quite hard for me to answer: I was born and lived seventeen years in Russia, the twelve years in Israel, and then moved to the US.
MY: Russia; but I lived quite a few years in Israel.
FT: Russia! What part of Russia?
Here we go – another standard piece. Now the exciting part.
MY: Siberia.
FT: Siberia?!
Images of polar bears behind bars of a giant labor camp in the midst of a blizzard are crossing his mind.
I’m omitting a 5-10 minutes conversation about Novosibirsk being a large industrial city, the fact that twenty or so million people live in Siberia and that Detroit could be a good approximation of the place where I lived in terms of weather, cracked pavement and employment opportunities.
Now we are getting to the part where a well-minded fellow traveler in becoming interested in what I’m doing now. We’ve already went through a minor excitement about this Siberian-born guy who actually opened his own company in America.
FT: Philosophy? That’s an interesting choice.
Which is to say – not every day one meets a person who decides to learn something as useless as philosophy. Who knows, though… – thinks the Fellow Traveler.
MY: Yes, I finally decided to do something practical :).
Every person is a world, and philosophy is something that can discover the hidden path to this world.
FT: Why philosophy?
MY: Well, I think it’s interesting. I always tried to separate between studies and business, trying to study what’s interesting and do work that brings money. And then, now I’m thirty five, so I decided to make a change. I actually want to teach philosophy in college.
FT: But why philosophy?
MY: You sure think it’s of little use, right?
FT: In a sense… actually, yes. I do. I had a roommate in college who studied philosophy, and let me tell you: I never understood why. He ended up working in a bank. You know, I’m an engineer, I work for Southern Power and I can say exactly what I do. Everybody can. It’s something tangible, something useful.
I can understand science: somebody is working in college in chemistry, and then drug companies can use it to make drugs.
But philosophy?
MY: You know, there is an old Chinese story about a man who was poor and miserable, and worked in a local garbage dump. Every day he was earning four pennies. On two pennies he was buying a piece of bread for his children. Two pennies went to buying a flower. An Englishman was observing him for a week. One day he couldn’t hold it and asked the guy: “Hey, why are you buying this flower? Don’t you see your children are hungry!? Why not buy them two pieces of bread?” And you know what the poor man said? He said: “The bread is a thing for them to live on. The flower is a thing for them to live for”
FT: I see you are pretty much into it… I understand your point. We all have something like that flower.
MY: So what’s your flower?
FT: Well, I play guitar. But how did you get there? I mean, how one decides to study philosophy?
MY: The road wasn’t straight. I actually studied behavioral sciences: psychology, sociology, criminology. Started a second degree in cognitive psychology. And then I realized that something was missing there. Took me a while to figure that one out – but I think now that was the experimental method. You rush to try things and see how they work in society, do research, publish papers, but then you realize that your assumptions weren’t solid. You need to have an idea of what “mind” is before you try to research it, for example.
The announcement joyfully informs travelers that all planes are delayed indefinitely because of the stormy weather.
FT: It seems like we are stuck here for good… So what specifically you want to do in philosophy? Study what the mind is?
MY: Well, I actually want to shoot high here. I want to try to find the foundation for ethics. I want to see if there is a criterion for good and bad. Something solid to rely on.
FT: OK. So you mean like there is a general rule that would tell us how to say what’s right and what’s wrong?
MY: In a sense. A criterion to which we can trace the rules and say if they are correct or incorrect.
FT: But it all depends on how you were brought up. In one culture it’s right to kill guys for sleeping with other guys, and in another it’s OK. How it can be general? Every culture invent its rules and laws.
MY: Here the philosophy comes. I think – or that’s what I want to find out, at least to try to find out – that there got to be some common basis. Some common basis that is not a matter of convention or agreement between people. Like in math: no matter what you think about that, two plus two makes four.
The fact is, we can all understand each other. You can talk about the strangest laws on Earth and understand the logic behind them, even if you don’t like them or think they are totally sick. That means we have some common basis. The ability to reason in a similar way, may be?
My own life experience pretty much tells me that it’s possible. I was raised in a society that was by any standard very different from where I’m now. And yet here I am, functioning quite well. People can speak very different languages, Russian and Hebrew, for example – and then you lean a new language and you can talk and understand. True – it’s not perfect. People are different – but there is a common basis. The biology is common, by the way.
FT: You still didn’t convince me. So what if we have the same biology? Teeth grow; rules are set by whoever has power, and accepted or not accepted by other people.
MY: Right, they are. But that doesn’t mean they cannot be right or wrong. There still can be a rule that tells us if they are right or not. Before the electricity was discovered, it had existed all along, right?
FT: Right, but that’s something physical.
MY: Ethics are not physical, but they are even more basic. Think about it: even a person who has no idea about electricity, a brain in a vat, would still think, and think in categories of right and wrong.
FT: He sure will. But you still didn’t convince me. Rules and laws are… how do I say it… soft? If you look at a car, for example, you cannot build it with the wheels on the top – it wouldn’t drive. Physics. With all this rules stuff – whatever you do, it will work.
MY: That’s because ethics are different. First of all, they are logical matter, not physical. Any rule or law obeys the basic rules of logic, which are the rules of understanding. If people cannot comprehend the rule, they will not follow it – it would not be there in the first place, because nobody will put it together.
But that’s not the point. The point is, there are good laws and bad laws. Got to be – not only we have an idea about “good” and “bad”, we also have this idea of basic criteria. True – we cannot always be sure what they are, but the mere fact we have this notion tells me it might be the case.
Now, the criterion for correctness of anything got to be outside the thing itself. Just like meaning has to be there before you can understand a word that has this meaning. So, some basic criteria should be out there – it’s a matter of discovery rather than of invention.
If we are talking about research, there is a remarkable similarity in what they call “moral judgment” between different people all around the world. We all can talk about specific cases where cultures are different, but the rules of behavior are much more similar than the way people dress or eat, for example.
And here is another thing, my favorite: it seems that societies who follow certain rules, moral rules, survive, while societies who do not – vanish. Take the Bible, for example. It has an account of a variety of ethnic groups, yet from these times pretty much only the Jews, Indians and Chinese survived. Even with that, it seems that China went through so many political and cultural systems, while Indian culture can be easily traced three thousand years ago. Why? If we look at the twentieth century, we would have the Nazi Germany that didn’t make it to fifteen; we would have Soviet Union that didn’t make it to seventy five – a tiny period for a country. Why? May be, there is something in the way these countries behaved, some sort of principle they violated and because of that couldn’t survive. Just like with evolution: if an organism cannot adjust, it becomes extinct. But with ideas it’s more complicated. The evolutionary pressures are different. Ideas don’t die with people, for example.
But we don’t need to go as far as ancient India. What do you think about capital punishment?
FT: I think it’s capital barbarism.
MY: Why?
FT: Because we cannot kill people, killing people is wrong. That’s precisely why we punish murderers – and then we want to do the same. Besides, death penalty is irreversible. What if there are mistakes? And there are mistakes!
MY: You see, in all your arguments there is nothing about upbringing and such. All the arguments appeal to some principles. General principles. May be even universal principles? I heard nothing about different cultures…
FT: It seems like you’ve given it some thought. It was sure very interesting. But you still didn’t convince me, at least not entirely..
MY: Well, I’m yet to develop these ideas up to the level they can convince anybody. But I certainly have my hopes.
Well, a philosophy teacher or professor knows that most of the philosophy students will go on to jobs in private commercial, industrial, retail, or voluntary sectors. The thing is, a serious training in philosophy will give people wisdom and thinking skills that will make them very good at working in a practical way. That is, a person who takes six philosophy courses and three business courses is probably going to be a far more successful in a business corporation than a person who takes nine business courses, generally speaking, on average. Philosophy isn't useless, and thinking isn't useless either.
ReplyDeleteAs to general principles that can be discovered and used to prove what is good or bad, this is an idea in contrast to mainstream Judaism, Islam, and Baha'i theology, where things are good or bad because God defines Good and Bad. In such religious systems, people try to find how God has defined good acts or bad acts, and then tries to work out whether any particular act seems to meet what is understood as God's definition of an act that is praiseworthy and encouraged, recognized, tolerated, warned against but not forbidden, generally forbidden, or strictly forbidden.
I suppose to make the leap from religious systems of good and bad one might suggest that the universe exists in such a way that sentient beings who have ethical principles XYZ will be more likely to survive and have more happiness and satisfaction in their lives, while beings who follow ethical principles ABC will be less likely to survive, and will have lower levels of happiness and satisfaction in their lives, at least in the long run.
If God has an aim to have human societies achieve a situation of high probability of survival and high levels of happiness and satisfaction, then God's "laws" of conduct will be the same ones a secular philosopher finds if they scientifically study the sorts of ethical codes that, in practical implication, lead to sustainable, harmonious, happy societies.
Is this right?