Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → are ethics just aesthetics, instincts, lifecycle trends, or fashion statements?

A devil’s advocate psychoanalyzed me while I was away in Guatemala last month:

A few months back he found God, or his atheist non-existent equivalent. His emails to me began to change — at first I noticed the enthusiasm and purposefulness and figured he was just remembering how fun life can be if you’re not dragging a heavy desk job around on your back (he quit his job during his miracle conversion). But I also noticed a change of tone that seemed familiar but that I couldn’t quite place.

Then I realized… that he was acting born-again. It was not at all what I would have expected from the old cynic…

The obsession with questions of ethics (which he’d always seemed to dismiss as a dead-end street before); the cosmic portent he attributed to mundane choices in his wee, mortal, primate life; the way his words seemed to survey the field from a high altitude… everything was there except the wrathful thunder-voice from the clouds telling him what to do and the surrender to a mildewed literature of mythology and dogma.

Or so I hoped.… I’d tried to draw him out in email and get him to admit that he’d signed up for Landmark or gone in for that Buddhist stuff again or joined Narcotics Anonymous in the middle of a bad mushroom trip or found Jesus swimming in the bongwater. Nothing doing… he seemed to have been not on the 5-lane superhighway to Damascus when lightning struck, but going on his own uphill machete-chop through the jungle.

I think there’s a species of considered reflection and sober decision-making that has probably been respectfully suffixed with “complex” or “syndrome” in the hallowed journals of psychology. Fellows about his age suddenly become aware of themselves in a new way, discard their sophomoric philosophical dodges and amateur hedonisms, and then quickly hide under the big rock of some preformed dogmatic nonsense before things begin to get too scary.

It remains to be seen, I suppose, whether or not he will avoid that fate. But he seems pretty well-immunized. I guess this born-again mental process is independent after all from the dogma-vultures who feed on its victims.…

He’s kinda high on righteousness and rhetoric right now. He’s been reading Sartre on the French Resistance and you can tell he’s drawing parallels. He thinks he’s living in a country under occupation by vile aristocrats and their frightened toadies and, well, there’s not much to argue with in that interpretation except that it lends itself to extremes of melodrama and a certain urgency, if, that is, you’ve got a newfound concern for ethics or somesuch.

Well, it’s interesting to be put under the magnifying glass in this way. To the extent that open-ended observations like these need a response, the response should probably be centered on three questions that are raised: 1) Is my newfound interest in washing my hands of financial support of the government a symptom of a more general personal renaissance in the area of ethics? 2) Is this a stereotypical Seasons of a Man’s Life-style thing that I’m just embroidering with my own eccentricities (and therefore this blog is potentially as banal as the love poetry of the pubescent)? 3) Is it akin to a “born-again” religious conversion?

I’m tempted to start by making observations of my own, starting with the fact that all of this interesting examination might just be a fancy way of trying to evade question #4: But is he right? Amateur psychoanalysis can be a nice ad hominem way of trying to make an uncomfortable argument go away. (It can also be a way of getting further mileage out of the freak-show-like interest one can take in a kook with his bizarre manifestos and such — and if this is your motivation, I can sympathize with you, but forgive me if I don’t feel like indulging you.)

To questions #1–3 I may have to plead a reluctant “no contest.” I do feel like I have been taking questions of ethics a lot more seriously lately, and my decision to start this experiment is a symptom of that. Whether this is something that can be dismissed as a “syndrome,” as question #2 suggests, or if instead it is just an overdue maturing of my outlook is something you can decide for yourself.

As for the religious speculation, well, I guess in part it depends on your answer to #2. Religious answers to big questions aren’t really my style, I’ll tell you that much. I tend to see religious answers as ways of avoiding questions or wishing them away. That said, I’ll admit there’s more about this universe of ours that remains mysterious to me than there is that I’m pretty clear about, and there’s a lot of room in that mystery for stuff I’d be willing to adopt a worshipful attitude toward if any such thing shows its face to me, so I’m not going to write off the religious thing entirely.

And as I read about the history of tax resistance, civil disobedience, and such, and about people who stood up to governments bravely in ways I hope I’d be capable of — I’m finding that a lot of my role models and heroes have taken motivation and inspiration from religion. So I’m becoming a lot less hostile and dismissive of the religious outlook than I used to be. Religion for many people seems to be a way of avoiding questions of truth and responsibility, but for some people it’s a method for relentlessly confronting these same questions.

Dear Picket Line—

Maybe this is a dumb question, but… You’ve embarked on this bold experiment of yours, and it looks like you’re hoping other people will join you. My question is: why do you care? I mean, what is your ethical center? Where do you get the notion that we should all treat each other in a decent fashion?

—Salmos Catorce

Dear Salmos—

That’s not a dumb question. That’s one of those advanced, extra credit, smart questions.

My ethical philosophy started where most people start: absorbing the ethical guidance from the people around me when I was a child, trying to systematize that advice into principles I could apply in a more general way, and looking to law, philosophy, or the God hypothesis to try to find some sort of concrete grounding behind these principles.

Most of these principles, and certainly most of the hypothetical foundations behind them, disintegrated from their own contradictions, absurdities, and unlikelihoods as I got older, and so eventually I became an ethical skeptic.

I didn’t think there was any way to objectively ground ethics, and I figured it was probably effectively a subset of aesthetics. And so I started to live a life freed from concern about transgressing phantom ethical boundaries — not even as an egoist, but something more haphazard and arbitrary.

Had I been of the mettle of a Nietzchean übermensch, I might have become a Nietzchean übermensch, or maybe a Randoid demi-hero, or quite possibly just a dick. As it was, I mostly became sophomoric and inconsiderate.

Somewhere along the line, I discovered that I’d misevaluated ethics as being something that must either be given a rigorous foundation in reason or must be discarded as a superstitious façade covering up or justifying social manipulation, personal prejudices, and cultural convention.

I realized that I was making ethical evaluations all the time, as much as I might pretend to believe that no such things were possible, and that these ethical evaluations were as real parts of my experience as, say, color. I couldn’t run away from them without going through grotesque internal distortions of reality (like trying to pretend that I didn’t see “blue” because I couldn’t find a rational foundation for color).

So I decided to bite the bullet and try to accept ethics rather than try to rationalize it away. So my “center” is an ethical “sixth sense” where I look at some situation and intuitively know “that’d be wrong” and steer away from it. Perhaps that means that ethics reduces to aesthetics after all.

Reason is a participant in my ethical evaluations, and in my evaluation of my ethics, but I don’t expect it to take the lead, and I don’t expect ethics to be derived from reason. There may be no reason to serve God and not the Devil at any particular moment. A lot of religion seems to be an attempt to invent reasons — God’s commandments, or divine judgment with punishment in the afterlife, for instance. But I’m kind of fond of imagining the existentialist atheist saying — ha! there’s no God, and no reason to serve God and not the Devil, but I’m going to serve God anyway! Wheeee!

It’s a performance I’m putting on for myself. Or a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book writ large.

Nothing matters, ultimately, except to the extent that we decide that it matters. No God will fill out a performance evaluation for me. I won’t be reincarnated as a prince or a lamprey. Our suffering and triumph means nothing in the greater scheme of things. Cruel and evil people prosper and then die old and satisfied in their sleep while innocent children have their arms ripped off by bombs and die of dysentery. Neither get redemptions from a heavenly accountant — from the perspective of eternity, their books are already balanced and their accounts are of no account. My bones will crumble to dust in no time at all, and my name will be forgotten as quickly. And I am going to try to be a good person anyway because that’s what I want to do with my life.

Steven Pinker has written an overview of scientific research into the origins and nature of human moral perception for the New York Times.

This variety of inquiry into ethics differs from the traditional philosophical approach. The idea here is that the human experience of moral judgment can be usefully analyzed without reference to some theoretical objective moral standard — thereby sidestepping the traditional philosophical quagmires.

Moral judgment, in this school of thought, is a variety of sensation: a subjective qualitative experience that doesn’t have a qualitative counterpart in the objective world — in the same way that there is a continuous spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies in the objective world, but the sensation of color only exists in the subjective world.

Or, perhaps more closely analogous, “disgust” is a mental evaluation of the state of the world, but not a characteristic of that world — only a state of the mind that evaluates it.

If you look at morality in this way, you can go on to design experiments that show how people morally evaluate scenarios, what their brains do when they do so, and how this correlates with their behavior. And you can make educated guesses for how natural selection might have favored certain varieties of moral evaluation in our ancestors.

The promise of this approach is that you aren’t just arguing ethical philosophy (which can seem pretty fruitless), but you’re actually collecting data and testing hypotheses — mmmm… the delicious taste of Science!

However:

Here is the worry. The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

It may be fruitful for us to discover why certain people under certain circumstances are morally repulsed by genocide, and other people under other circumstances are not, but the reason people dive into the philosophical quagmires rather than just leaving this to the scientists is that they’d like to go one step further and say that, in addition, one of those moral evaluations of genocide is the correct one, in much the same way as a mathematical truth is not just a point-of-view.

A scientific, descriptive understanding of moral sensations seems to leave something out. It threatens to reduce ethics to an arbitrary drive evolution has planted in us for reasons that have more to do with our dead ancestors than the living neighbors we practice it on. It seems to pull ethics outside of the realm of argument and make a mere phenomenon of it.

But even at this extreme, the consequences aren’t quite so bad as this. Note that people sometimes critically examine their instinctual evaluations and find them to be irrational and in need of rational augmentation. See, for instance, the “five second rule” by which food that has just been dropped to the floor moves from the safe-to-eat category into the too-vile-to-pass-our-lips category after a brief passage of time. This rule, or something like it, is something that many of us feel to be true, viscerally, but know to be hogwash, epidemiologically.

It isn’t difficult to believe that this feeling of disgust over dropped food is probably a heuristic in the form of a feeling — one that evolved to protect us from dangerously contaminated food — and that dropped food doesn’t become inherently or objectively disgusting when the subjective edibility timer runs out. But knowing the purpose and origins of our instinctual perception of disgust — knowing that it’s a mere phenomenon and an artifact of how evolution shaped our brains — doesn’t end the story, but provides a jumping-off point for rational refinement of the original sub-rational evaluation.

It’s possible that the same is true of investigations into moral evaluation. Most of us have a semi-rational ethical worldview that we like to think we conform to, and a moral “feeling” apparatus that operates, more-or-less in parallel, at a pre-rational or even subconscious level. The more we know about how that apparatus operates, the more we can anticipate when and how it will conflict with the ethics we would choose consciously and rationally. Then we can prepare and adjust accordingly.

In the fifth section of the third book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, having pinpointed the subset of acts that are voluntary, chosen, and deliberate, now says that it is these acts in which virtue is demonstrated.

Virtue is found in the exercise of means (wishing for the correct ends is presumably more a matter of wisdom than virtue). The exercise of means (or the decision not to) is a matter of deliberation and choice, and so is in our power, and therefore so is our virtue.

You are responsible for being reasonably informed about what you need to know to make the right decisions in the circumstances you encounter, and if you ignore this responsibility (or if you actively contribute to your own ignorance, for instance by being drunk or by looking away from some inconvenient truth), you cannot use your ignorance as an excuse for vicious actions.

Since virtue is a habit (as is vice), it may be a choice to initially acquire a vice or to neglect a virtue, but once you have done this habitually, it becomes less voluntary over time. This is interesting for a couple of reasons: first, if virtues and vices become less voluntary as they become more habitual, it would seem that they become less praiseworthy or blameworthy also; second, it seems to create another obstacle in the path to becoming a virtuous person if you aren’t one already — how do you go about changing bad habits if they aren’t even very voluntary any longer? (Aristotle does not yet address either of these points, but I hope he does eventually.)

In some recorded lectures about the Nicomachean Ethics that I was listening to during a recent leisurely train ride down California, Joseph Koturksi emphasized that Aristotle defined moral virtue in particular as a habit of choosing the golden mean — that is to say that it differs from other varieties of habit in not constricting choice but in exhibiting itself as choosing.

It seems from this that the lack of moral virtue can take two forms, or a combination of the two: not choosing, or choosing poorly. (I suppose a third variety would be a failure to make correct choosing habitual, but my reading of Aristotle suggests that this habituation is an automatic process, and so its absence would be more suggestive of, say, brain damage, than of anything correctable by philosophy.)

Anyway: “habit” in the case of moral virtue isn’t meant as a sort of unthinking, repetitive, by-rote sort of behavior. Point made.

Next, Aristotle addresses the argument that while everybody aims for the apparent good, what appears to be good to each of us is not under our control but is just a given part of our temperament or constitution or some such. Aristotle says that if this is true, then you aren’t really to be blamed for deeds you perform under the misapprehension that you’re doing the right thing. However, he says that to some extent, you are responsible for your own temperament and constitution, and to that extent you can inherit responsibility for the misdeeds you perform under its influence.

But in any case, if our virtues are voluntary and we can be praised for them, our vices are too, and we can be blamed for them.

From here, for most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics, we’re going to go into an in-depth look at particular virtues. The rest of this book will look at courage and temperance. Book four will concern liberality, magnificence, pride, industriousness, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, bonhomie, and the quasi-virtue of shame. Book five is all about justice. Book six concerns the intellectual virtues. Book seven concerns continence and also contains a discussion of pleasure that will be continued in book ten.

Several days ago my sweetie and I were relaxing at home with a DVD from the library: the movie Secretary. It’s a silly story about a mousy young woman (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who also, coincidentally, played the vivacious tax resister in Stranger than Fiction) who becomes the secretary of an eccentric lawyer and who finds her job transforming into an erotic dominance/submission scene in which she learns to play the submissive and ends up personally flowering and maturing in the course of doing so.

It’s not a very deep film, but some of her character’s comments about the pleasures of submission — unthinking obedience to the commands of a trusted dominant — and the sort of confidence and, oddly, “freedom” that results from this, lodged in my head and got me thinking about this and that.

Much of this “freedom” is freedom from having to make up your own mind and make your own decisions and assert your own risky initiative. What am I going to do? Whatever the dominant wants me to do or tells me to do. If that’s always the right answer, it makes deciding a snap and much less of a burden, and permits you (or seems to permit you) to shift most of the burden of the responsibility for the consequences onto the dominant “decider.”

In a bedroom scene, that’s all fun and games, but when such things come out of the bedroom and into society at large, this sort of evasion of responsibility can be very dangerous. Hannah Arendt spent some time analyzing Adolf Eichmann as someone who had decided to renounce his will and devote himself to carrying out his Fuhrer’s will; once he was caught and put on trial for this, he pathetically tried to excuse his behavior by saying that having made himself an agent of the Fuhrer’s whims, he was no longer able to behave according to his remaining ethical instincts.

A couple of years back I quoted Arne Johan Vetlesen’s summary of Arendt’s argument: “superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss.” Vetlesen says that indulging this temptation not only dangerously enables you to commit evil, but is a sort of evil itself:

Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to become an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others.

The military chain of command is another dangerous variety of D&S game in which essentially unquestioning obedience is expected. I suspect that a craving for submission and for freedom from the burden of decision-making and its consequences is a strong motivation for many people who join the military. This burden can feel especially heavy to young people just emerging from home and from institutional education into the freedom of adulthood and all of the responsibility it entails.

But I also thought about Aristotle’s assertion that a virtuous person takes pleasure in behaving virtuously that outweighs any incidental discomfort of any particular virtuous act. If you have an image of virtue in your mind and you conform your actions to that image and then take pleasure in having done so, to what extent is this like a sort of private D&S game in which your image of virtue is the dominant and you are the submissive?

In a Christian context, this is explicit: the Christian accepts Christ as his or her Lord and Master, and says Thy Will Be Done, I will deny myself and take up my cross daily, and so forth. Kant, for his part, thought that an act was really virtuous only if it was unpleasant, painful, or difficult — whip me! beat me! make me virtuous!

How do you identify and correct for a decadent parody of virtue that really amounts to a responsibility-denying D&S scene? That is, how do you know whether you’re being virtuous or whether you’re submitting to a freedom-restricting straitjacket in the name of virtue? How do you avoid getting in a situation where you do the wrong thing, but “can’t help it” because you’ve obligated yourself to submit to Christ’s teachings, or to think of the greatest good for the greatest number, or to maintain Army discipline, or to obey the categorical imperative, or whatever your dom happens to be?

And how would you defend against the argument that Aristotle’s model of virtue is essentially a D&S scene in which a mental model of virtue is the dom?

One possible line of defense would be to note that, in Aristotle’s scheme (unlike Kant’s, for instance), virtuous acts are not necessarily painful or difficult or against your inclinations — indeed, often quite the opposite: virtue is a variety of excellence and an important path toward eudaimonia — flourishing, thriving, happiness. So at least this isn’t an S&M thing, where you martyr yourself and then take pleasure in your suffering. Also, as Joseph Koturski pointed out, moral virtue is the habit of choosing well, so it doesn’t unburden you of the need to choose at all. To the extent that a D&S scene is partially about freedom-from-choice, an internal, non-dogmatic dom doesn’t do the trick (whereas a Categorical Imperative or a scriptural Jesus might do).

It seems like up to now, Aristotle has been speaking of justice as a set of conventions. Either it is explicitly a matter of being law-abiding, or it’s a matter of being “fair” where fairness is defined according to the prevailing community standards.

But in the seventh section of the fifth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that political justice is only partially conventional. There is also a “natural” component: “that which everywhere has the same force and does not exist by people’s thinking this or that.”

(If you’re following along in another edition, this section and the ones around it are divided up differently in various translations. This is true for all of the books, but seems especially varied here.)

All along, there has been this tension about whether justice is to be invented or discovered — that is, whether it is solely the product of human invention or whether it preexists and its human-created approximations are more-or-less faithful to it. Aristotle has been walking along the boundary between these two positions: trying to discover the virtues (like justice), but trying to discover it via anthropology, that is by examining how people conventionally discuss and enact the virtues. Now he attempts to face the issue head-on.

Aristotle entertains the idea (promoted by the Sophists) that all justice is conventional, and that the only natural laws are things like the laws of physics (“as fire burns both here and in Persia”) while laws of justice are absolutely mutable and might as well be arbitrary.

He says that there’s a grain of truth to this: certainly it would be possible for any particular proposed “natural” law of justice, to imagine a nation in which that law is inverted so that what we think is just, they outlaw as unjust, and vice versa, and to imagine the people of that nation internalizing that law in that way.

But Aristotle doesn’t think this is the end of the question. He says that there may still be such thing as “natural” law, even though people may be able to override or contradict it with conventional law. He compares this to being right- or left-handed. You can probably train a right- or left-handed child to switch hands or to become ambidextrous. This doesn’t mean that handedness is completely conventional, only that although it is natural it is moldable by human effort.

To Aristotle there is a natural standard by which conventional justice can itself be judged. Although what is just by human enactment is subject to change and is to some extent arbitrary, there are better and worse examples of these things, and “but one [constitution] which is everywhere by nature the best” (it’s unclear whether he means that for each polis, there is a best constitution for it, or whether he means that there is a single best constitution that all political groups would be best off adopting; the translators tend to keep this ambiguous but seem to me to lean toward the latter).

From here, things get confusing. This sounds like it’s saying something important, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what:

Of things just and lawful each is related as the universal to its particulars; for the things that are done are many, but of them each is one, since it is universal.

Is Ross trying to be confusing? Time to hit the translator panel again. Here’s a clearer version from the Chase translation:

Now of Justs and Lawfuls each bears to the acts which embody and exemplify it the relation of an universal to a particular; the acts being many, but each of the principles only singular, because each is an universal.

Okay; that’s not so important after all… it’s just a preamble for what follows (back to Ross again):

There is a difference between the act of injustice and what is unjust, and between the act of justice and what is just; for a thing is unjust by nature or by enactment; and this very thing, when it has been done, is an act of injustice, but before it is done is not yet that but is unjust. [Ditto for just actions.]

What does all that mean? Just that an act is an act of injustice when it is acted out, but when an act is only contemplated it is not yet an act of injustice but may be in the category of things that would be unjust if they were acted out? Is he just defining terms, or is there more to it than that? I hope things become more clear in the following sections.

I’m also thankful for The Joy of Curmudgeonry, who brings us an interesting corrective to human presumptions in drawing up ethical systems, in the form of Thomas Carlyle’s Schwein’sche Weltansicht.

At Wendy McElroy’s suggestion I read William Wollaston’s The Religion of Nature Delineated. It is at times brilliant and ahead of its time, at times utterly daft and pedestrian. As a writer, Wollaston is much more straightforward and easy-to-read than many of his 18^th century contemporaries, and even when he goes astray he often does so in interesting ways.

His goal in the book is to try to discern ethical truths solely by combining observations about the natural world with rational deductions from these observations — to see if he can derive a sort of universal, baseline religion without the aid of divine revelation but merely by drawing logical conclusions from the available facts. What sort of religion might you come up with if you had no assistance from God or his prophets other than the light of reason, the evidence of the senses, and a steadfast regard for truth?

Religion, to Wollaston, is synonymous with ethics. The science of categorizing human acts into the categories of good, evil, or indifferent is the basis of religion. He acknowledges the many attempts to formulate a rational rule to govern this categorization, and that these attempts have failed, but he asserts that such a rule must exist, and, furthermore, that he has discovered it. The opening chapter of his book, probably the most interesting one, gives his rule and the reasoning behind it. It goes a little something like this:

1. All acts that can be categorized as good or evil must be acts of an intelligent and free agent, capable of choosing or not choosing the act.
2. Propositions are true if what they express conforms to how things actually are.
3. A true proposition may be denied either by words or by deeds. By deeds, I don’t just mean language-like gestures: sign language, pantomime, body language, and the like. “There are many acts of other kinds, such as constitute the character of a man’s conduct in life, which have in nature, and to imply some proposition, as plainly to be understood as if it was declared in words.” For example, if a company of soldiers attacks another company, they are by virtue of their attack stating the proposition that the other company is their enemies, which may be a true or false proposition. Or, if you promise to do A but instead do B, you are by the very act of doing B instead of A denying the truth of your earlier promise.
   
   This does not mean that only those actions that actually communicate something to someone else, or that are theoretically intelligible by someone else, are those that deny propositions. In the privacy of your home, when you reach for the salt-shaker, you are asserting the proposition: this food isn’t salty enough yet.
   
   Some act-statements, like speech-statements, may be conventional (for example, in some religions, putting on head covering is a sign of reverence; in others, taking off your hat means much the same thing). Other act-statements are more universal and can said to be natural in a way that words never can be because words are always particular to some language.
   
   “Whoever acts as if things were so, or not so, doth by his acts declare that they are so, or not so, as plainly as he could by words, and with more reality. And if things are otherwise, his acts contradict those propositions which assert them to be as they are.”
4. No act that contradicts a true proposition can be right.
   1. False propositions are wrong, so acts that assert them cannot be right.
   2. True propositions express the actual relationship between a subject and an attribute of that subject. An act that denies this relationship denies reality and is therefore wrong, against nature/reality.
   3. If there is an omnipotent Creator-God, then to deny what is actually true is to deny what God has deliberately called into being. This is not to say that we should be fatalistically blasé in the face of an evil act, for instance, but that in such a case we should acknowledge as being a true proposition that an evil act occurred.
   4. There are eternal truths that seem to be part of the Divine intention, like “every thing is what it is; that which is done cannot be undone,” and to deny any particular truth that fits this pattern is also to deny the eternal truth itself, which is in effect to deny God. To deny anything to be true that is in fact true, and that an omniscient God therefore knows to be true, is also to put yourself in opposition to God.
   5. To deny what is true in any instance is to embrace absurdity and to put truth and falsity, good and bad, and knowledge of any sort out of reach.
   6. To deny what is true is to transgress against reason, “the great law of our nature.”
5. Acts of omission as well as those of commission can be assertions or denials of propositions. This requires a bit more subtlety to deal with, but, for example, you do not necessarily deny that The Religion of Nature Delineated is an interesting book by not personally being interested enough to read it, but you do deny that everyone ought to read some Shakespeare if you don’t bother to read any yourself. If you don’t read anything at all, you deny that reading is valuable, or that the value it gives is important, or some proposition of the sort. Certain truths seem to imply certain actions: if I am rich, and there are poor, were I never to be charitable I would be in a way denying the truth of wealth and poverty by not taking the obvious step such things imply. If I neglect to help someone in dire need when I am the best or only person able to help, I am making an assertion about myself, that person, the straits that person is in, human nature, and so forth.
6. To judge rightly what a thing is, all of those attributes of the thing that are capable of being denied must be taken into account. For example, if a thief rides off on another man’s horse, the thief isn’t denying that it’s a horse by doing this, but that the horse was another man’s property. The thief’s actions imply certain assertions about the horse (I can do with it what I please, it’s a horse, it’s safe to ride) but don’t imply anything about others (it’s a filly, it’s mottled brown, it was born in Kentucky).
   
   Truths are always consistent with one another, so you won’t ever find yourself in a situation in which you must deny one truth in order to affirm another. What if you make a promise that you are later unable to keep because of some other obligation? “It is not in man’s power to promise absolutely. He can only promise as one who may be disabled by the weight and incombency of truths not then existing.”
7. When an act would be wrong, forbearing that act is right; when the omission of an act would be wrong, doing that act must be right.
8. Moral good and evil are coincident with right and wrong.
9. Acts of omission and of commission that have the effect of denying what is true are morally evil. Their opposites are good. Acts that have no propositional content are indifferent.
   
   Denying any truth is evil, but some such denials are worse than others. All sins are not equal. For instance, it is worse to deprive someone of an estate than of a book, even though in both cases you are denying the truth of ownership: the estate might be worth 10,000× the book, in which case the evil is also 10,000× greater. (He tries to justify this by saying that the owner’s valuation of the property is somehow part of the truth statement that the thief is denying, which I think is probably incorrect. The thief isn’t saying anything about the value of the property to the owner by stealing it, necessarily.) The quantity of evil/guilt involves “the importance and number of truth violated.” Good actions, that is, acts that serve as true propositions, are also good in degrees, by inverting the evil that would be the result of their omission (or, I suppose, their commission in the case of good deeds of omission, but that seems to lead into a thicket: aren’t I just about always failing to commit a near infinite number of possible sins?)
   
   Though some deny that there is any such thing as good and evil, indeed there is just as there is a difference between true and false. Indeed: they resolve to the same thing. There have been many attempts to find a criterion or rule for distinguishing good things from evil ones, or some ultimate end that serves as the criteria by which good and evil acts can be distinguished, but these have all either failed, or are incomplete, or are circular tautologies, or eventually just reduce in practice to this rule I have proposed. (Here he reviews several such attempts.)
10. The natural existence of good and evil implies natural religion. Religion is “nothing else but an obligation to do… what ought not to be omitted, and to forbear what ought not to be done.”
11. “[E]very intelligent, active, and free being should so behave himself, as by no act to contradict truth; or, that he should treat every thing as being what it is.”

From here, Wollaston answers some possible objections to his scheme, most of which are the result of misunderstandings of what he’s getting at. He slips up, I think, when he discusses the case of whether or not it would be a wrong denial-of-truth to refuse to tell an enraged murderer where his prospective victim is hiding. Among his answers here is that “no one can tell, in strict speaking, where another is, if he is not within his view. Therefore you may truly deny that you know where the man is.” This seems to subvert his scheme by hinting that you can behave deceptively while holding on to the truth verbally and legalistically and thereby stay on the straight and narrow. In general, his answer to this objection seems to rely less on the scheme he’s introduced and more on ordinary folk ethics, which seems odd to me, since I don’t think this objection is particularly threatening to his scheme.

Wollaston also says that some truth-denying sins are worse than others. Some are so minor as to be “evanescent or almost nothing.” Furthermore, it is only those truths that have some reference to other living things that we really must respect. If we don’t treat a television as a television but instead treat it as a target at a shooting range, we don’t commit a sin against the truth (as we would if we treat it as our television when it actually belongs to someone else). To me, this seems an important qualification tacked carelessly onto Wollaston’s scheme, and weakens the original justification for it, which was that a denial of truth as such was a denial of truth as an aspect of God and therefore a denial of God, without any regard for whether that truth had some relation to other living things.

That concludes the first chapter.

Chapter two concerns happiness. Wollaston agrees with Aristotle that happiness is best measured over the sum of a person’s life rather than in any particular time-slice. He also asserts that to make oneself happy is the duty of every intelligent being, and that we must take this truth about intelligent beings into account in our dealings with others.

Furthermore, nothing that denies truth can be productive of the true and ultimate happiness of any being; neither can the practice of truth make any being unhappy (in this life-wide sense of happiness). This bold assertion he bases on his understanding of the nature of God (which he’ll expand on later): nobody has the power to increase his happiness by setting his will above the evident will of God, and, also, it would be absurd to think that God would be so sadistic or defective as to punish people for conforming to His will. Because of this, our duty to make ourselves happy and our duty to conform in word and deed to the truth amount to the same thing, and this is our true religion.

Chapter three concerns reason and epistemology. If we cannot actually know the difference between true and false, or at least have some good heuristics, then all of Wollaston’s project is for naught. He starts by giving an interesting and sophisticated description of how sense qualia and certain ideas and relationships are both examples of immediate mental data. These ideas/qualia as such are irrefutable data that we can use as axioms. Wollaston also asserts, less rigorously, that reason can in fact obtain new truths for us (if not, what else is it for?).

The practice of reason is another term for what is also called conformity to truth or the pursuit of true happiness, that is, the true natural religion. Each person must be his own judge of truth: “to demand another man’s assent to any thing without conveying into his mind such reasons as may produce a sense of the truth of it, is to erect a tyranny over his understanding and to demand a tribute which it is not possible for him to pay.”

There are also things we can’t determine the truth of, but there may be various ways in which we can get a probable truth, and he discusses several such heuristics, for instance, which sorts of authorities to trust. In such cases, you’re as obligated to conform to the probability as in certain cases you are obligated to conform to the truth: you put your money down on the best odds, even though you can’t know how the dice will roll ahead of time.

Chapter four concerns the free will problem. Is it even possible for people to conform to the truth? Wollaston acknowledges that people are not completely in control of their actions, and that you can only be morally obligated to do what you are in fact capable of doing. You are obligated to conform with truth only so far as your faculties, powers, and opportunities allow, and to the extent that the truth is discernible by you. That said, don’t act like this is an available cop-out. You must endeavor “in earnest… heartily; not stifling [your] own conscience, not dissembling, suppressing, or neglecting [your] own powers.”

Wollaston thinks that the free will problem comes up in ethical philosophy as a sort of dodge by people who are hoping for some sort of excuse for not taking ethical problems seriously. If you were told that a great reward was waiting for you in the next room if you were just to go and retrieve it, you wouldn’t waste time discoursing about whether or not you had the free will necessary to undertake such a task — you’d just get up and go. But in the realm of ethics, people for some reason feel obligated to dive into the free-will labyrinth rather than just staying on the straight and narrow path to what they know is best.

In chapter five, Wollaston decides to prove the existence of God and describe His nature. It’s your standard first cause argument (every effect has a cause stretching back through time, but there must have been some original uncaused cause to set this all in motion) combined with the argument from design (isn’t the universe amazing and don’t we see evidence of God’s order and benevolence everywhere?).

Wollaston also shares some thoughts on the compatibility of the divine regulation of the universe and of divine omniscience with free will; whether petitioning an omniscient God with prayer makes any sense; what God might have had in mind by introducing free will into His creation; whether God might from time to time rescind our free will to set us on a particular course; why it is that God seems sometimes to reward the wicked and punish the good; and how it is that we have immaterial souls planted in us by God.

To the certain relief of his publisher, Wollaston discovers that the truths about God that any heathen could discover by diligently applying reason to those facts and relations immediately available to our minds conform remarkably well to contemporary Christian worship: we should feel gratitude to our creator, and express this in prayer; we should eschew idolatry; we should form into congregations and worship together; and so forth.

In chapter six things get interesting again, as Wollaston derives and maps out what in modern anarcho-libertarian popular writing is called the “non-aggression principle.”

1. People are distinct individuals, each with certain unique properties.
2. Each person has by nature the possession of certain things, such as his own life, limbs, labor, and the products thereof. That is to say that basic property rights are inherent in the state of nature and don’t require government or custom to come into being.
3. Whatever is inconsistent with the general peace & welfare of mankind is inconsistent with the laws of human nature and therefore wrong. The right laws for a society are those that produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
4. Reason respects cases, not persons, so something that would be true for person A with respect to person B would also be true for B with respect to A if the case were inverted.
5. In a state of nature, people are equal in terms of dominion (with the exception of the natural dominion parents have over their children). Power does not confer right — if it did, it could confer the right to anything, including denial of the truth, which we’ve already proven to be wrong.
6. “No man can have a right to begin to interrupt the happiness of another.”
7. However, you do have the right to defend yourself, to recover what is stolen from you, or to make reprisals against those who have aggressed against you (to recover the equivalent of whatever you have lost by the injustice). To have a right to anything means also that you have the right to defend your possession of that thing.
   
   Alas, his first justification for this is that each of us has a natural capability and instinct for self-preservation, and that it would be absurd for us to have such a thing and not be allowed to use it. It seems to me like this same logic could be used to justify aggression.
8. Initial property rights are established by first possession or by something being the product of one’s own labor, and last until they are voluntarily relinquished by the possessor. Stolen property, if it is never reclaimed, may eventually lose its taint as it is passed from hand to hand or generation to generation, so it is not necessary to be able to trace every possession back to a first legitimate owner.
9. A property right may be transferred by compact or donation. Among the rights a person has by virtue of ownership is the right to dispose of property in this way, and both the giver and the receiver are acting within their rights. Trade is mutually beneficial and commerce is a social good.
10. Therefore: property is founded in nature and truth.
11. If you don’t dispose of your property by compact or donation, it is yours until you die. If someone else uses your property without your consent, they are in effect denying the truth of your ownership, in violation of the principles of chapter 1.
12. If something is your property this means exactly that you have the sole right of using it and disposing of it.
13. If you use something or dispose of it, you are simultaneously declaring the proposition that it belongs to you. (Borrowing or renting something is a special case, in which you declare that the thing is yours for the time allowed without doing violence to the truth.)
14. Injustice means usurping or invading the property of another; justice means quietly permitting to everyone what is theirs.
15. To not do violence to the truth you must avoid injustice. Injustice is wrong and evil.
16. To carelessly cause suffering in others, or to delight in the suffering of others, is cruel. To be insensitive to the suffering of others is unmerciful. Mercy and humanity are the opposites of these.
17. Those who religiously regard truth and nature will, in addition to being just, also be merciful and humane, these things being right.
18. Let me reiterate that.
19. Therefore: murder or injury (not in self-defense), robbery, stealing, cheating, betraying, defamation, detraction, defiling the bed of another man, and so forth, as well as tendencies to these things, are heinous crimes (tendencies include things like envy, malice, and the like).
    
    The value of something (for instance, when calculating compensation for injury) is determined by how the rightful owner values it, not by some objective standard and certainly not by the standard of the person who behaves unjustly with respect to it. A crime done in secret (for instance, to sleep with a man’s wife behind his back) is still an injury and a violation of the truth.

Another interesting thing in this section is that Wollaston seems to anticipate Kant’s categorical imperative, for instance when he says that a person who breaks a promise “denies and sins against truth; does what it can never be for the good of the world should become an universal practice…” (Wollaston died the same year Kant was born.)

Most of what Wollaston concluded in this chapter would be simpatico with modern anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, though many would cringe at his attempts to find a utilitarian grounding for his scheme, and the objectivists would quibble at the altruism involved in Wollaston’s mandate of mercy.

But in the following chapter, Wollaston reintroduces and justifies government, though he does this along classical liberal lines that probably wouldn’t leave all of the modern fans of the previous chapter behind:

1. Man is a social animal. Even if there were not many advantages to living socially, as individuals we would inevitably come up against other people. Disputes are inevitable. There will be vicious and ambitious people who will strive to become more powerful and thereby more troublesome to the rest of us. It is natural, therefore, that good people will form local alliances of mutual support and defense.
2. The purpose of society is the common welfare of those in it.
3. People enter into society for that purpose, which implies certain rules or laws according to which they agree to be governed. This means that they must settle on certain areas of unanimous consent, certain methods for resolving disputes, a system of punishments and deterrents to discourage offenses, and on a method of protecting the alliance from outside attack.
4. Such laws must be consistent with natural justice in order to be in harmony with truth and thereby not evil. (Like Robert Nozick, Wollaston believes that a state can naturally emerge from anarchy without violating natural rights along the way.)
5. A society with laws implies a hierarchy, with governors and governed, judges, magistrates, and the like. This seems to rule out anarchy, though Wollaston says that “if the society has none [no executors of the law, or no laws, it’s not exactly clear what he means], it is indeed no society, or not such a one as is the subject of this proposition” so maybe he’s leaving open the possibility.
6. A person may relinquish some of his natural rights and put himself under the control of laws and governors in order to gain the protection of being in a law-governed society. This is a form of contractual exchange, in which a person gives up something and gets something the person feels is more valuable in exchange, and so this is no violation of the truth as laid out in the previous chapter. (Indeed it would be a violation of the truth not to make such an advantageous exchange.)
7. This exchange, says Wollaston, may either be explicit or implicit. If you take advantage of those privileges that are not your natural rights but are only available to you as a citizen of a commonwealth, you implicitly own allegiance to the laws that go along with it, even if you have not explicitly taken an oath or what have you. Merely accepting the protection of a state, or choosing to live within its borders, is an implicit acceptance of its laws.
   
   This does real damage to the scheme Wollaston set up in the previous chapter, in which he said that the value of something is set by the rightful possessor of it, and that only the rightful possessor has the right to use or dispose of it. This modification reminds me of the people who set up shop at road medians, who, when you’re stopped at a red light, wash your windshield without asking you if you want their service, and then act as though you owe them payment for a service you never requested.
8. Once you become a member of a society, you need to respect not only the natural rights of the people in it (as described in the previous chapter), but any conventional or legal rights that the society establishes: for instance, their titles to property, or the privilege of the state to resolve disputes (rather than individual initiative to seek redress), or subordination to legal authority.
9. When the law is silent, or impotent, people retain their natural rights, and should behave as described in the previous chapter. If the law is contrary to natural justice, “one of them must give way; and it is easy to discern, which ought to do it.”
10. Societies established like the ones described in this chapter have a right to defend themselves against other societies. “War may lawfully be waged in defense and for the security of a society, its members and territories, or for reparation of injuries.” This is deliberately parallel to his formulation of an individual right in the state of nature. Nations with respect to other nations are situated like individuals with respect to other individuals in the absence of a state (at least “so far as they have not limited themselves by leagues and alliances.”) Another way of looking at this is that a nation may defend collectively the agglomerated individual rights of its citizens against the unjust aggression of an outside individual or group of individuals under the very same principles that individuals in the state of nature can defend their rights against one another.

Chapter eight concerns families and kinship: the nature of marriage, the responsibility of parents for children, the authority of parents over children — “I have designedly forborn to mention that authority of a husband over his wife, which is usually given to him, not only by private writers, but even by laws; because I think it has been carried much too high. I would have them live so far upon the level, as (according to my constant lesson) to be governed both by reason” — the debt of gratitude and other duties children owe parents, and the justification for us not treating all men as brothers but actually treating our kin better than everyone else.

Absolute maxims about individual liberty favored by some libertarian and anarchist thinkers often seem to run aground on the parent/child relationship. By what right do I as a parent interfere with my child’s liberty to run out into traffic? Well, it’s not hard to come up with some good reasons, but it can be hard to shoehorn them in alongside certain confidently-asserted principles about liberty. So it’s a sign that Wollaston takes the subject seriously that he includes this chapter.

He also tries to guard against the monarchist gambit of sneaking tyranny in through this gap by analogizing the relationship of a king to subjects to that of a parent to children. Wollaston says this won’t fly for a number of reasons.

The final chapter concerns human nature. It reiterates our duty to devote ourselves to truth, reason, and virtue (three names for the same thing). Some of the self-facing virtues are prudence, temperance, chastity, and frugality, but Wollaston is quick to stress that these are not virtues of self-denial so much as of rational self-interest. Chastity, for instance, is not the avoidance of sex, or of the pleasure from sex, but it’s knowing how best to fit sexual pleasure into our lives in a way that is compatible with our long-term goals and with other virtues.

Virtue, says Wollaston, tends to lead to happiness; vice to unhappiness. It’s not as though “virtue can make a man happy upon a rack” or dissolve all the misfortunes we may encounter, but in any situation, the most advantageous act and the virtuous act coincide (vice can’t make you happy on a rack either).

Wollaston goes on at great length to speculate on the nature of the soul (which he describes at first in a way that we might use the term “mind” for). He rejects three monist hypotheses to resolve the mind-body problem: 1) that all matter thinks, 2) that certain configurations or motions of matter generate thought, 3) that thinking is an epiphenomenon of some sort that accompanies certain configurations of matter. Instead, he asserts that thinking is a property of some special, non-material substance that God attaches to some sort of diaphanous interface in our brains that allows it to receive impressions from the physical world and to direct our bodies.

This substance is the soul, and, it being non-material, we have no reason to expect that it expires when the body it is attached to dies. From here, Wollaston makes a number of ill-supported speculations about the nature of the soul. Worst, he reasons that there must be an afterlife because he has proven that there is a just and reasonable God, and yet on earth there is so much cruelty and injustice and disorder, that only a just and harmonious afterlife could possibly balance the scales and be compatible with God’s nature. Alas, the proof of God he relies on as one of the axioms of this argument itself proceeded from the observation that the universe was so orderly and benevolent that it must be the creation of a just and wise God. So Wollaston has to utterly contradict himself to try and prove his point.

In all, once he gets past some interesting and well-considered thoughts on the mind/body problem, the rest of this chapter in which he gives his speculations about the nature of God, the destiny of the soul, and so forth are pretty worthless: just his own opinion of how he would organize the universe were he a just, omniscient, and omnipotent creator. He even uses that most desperate gambit of saying that even if the immortality of the soul cannot be demonstrated, “yet it is certain the contrary cannot”! From which he slides into Pascal’s Wager. (His version is slightly improved by his assertion that a virtuous life that is to our advantage from the standpoint of eternity also happens to be to our advantage from the standpoint of our mortal lives.)

His concluding advice: “let our conversation in this world, so far as we are concerned, and able, be such as acknowledges every thing to be what it is (what it is in itself, and what with regard to us, to other beings, to causes, circumstances, consequences): that is, let us by no act deny any thing to be true, which is true: that is, let us act according to reason: and that is, let us act according to the law of our nature.”

In late 2016, The Religion of Nature Delineated was released as a free (as in speech, and as in beer) ebook, with a number of readability improvements for the benefit of today’s reader. You can download it from this link.