Tag: classical liberalism

Is life inherently valuable?

I do my best to be mindful of when I hold beliefs and not opinions. Beliefs are conclusions I make without evidence, based on my feelings. Opinions are the conclusions I come to based on thinking through the evidence available to me. When I do notice myself believing rather than thinking, I make it my business to explore evidence and scrutinise my beliefs so that I could test their internal validity. After that, I either maintain or reject them.

The latest of my forays into the domain of my skull has involved my belief in the inherent value of human life. I am not sure when I started having this presumptious belief, but its unsteadiness became clear to me while I was listening to a podcast on abortion. The guest, Dr. Calum Miller, was a pro-life medical doctor. The hosts were both pro-choice comedians. While these descriptors are quite propagandistic, one thing stuck out. Dr. Miller boldly asserted, “Well, the starting premise is a belief in the inherent value of life. We can agree on that.” I am not sure whether I was particularly sleep-deprived or just keen on playing the devil’s advocate, which happens because that is how my personality works, but the first thought I had was “Is it? Must we?”

As I lay in the dark, pillow bent into the most comfortable shape possible, it dawned on me that I did not have any reason to maintain this belief. I was begging the question, and that is a no-go for fundamentals as a rationalist! There is no objective reason to conclude that human life is inherently valuable. We happen to prefer ourselves because that’s what genes have evolved to do. But, to look at the vastness of the universe and think that we, as specks of dust on an inconspicuous planet, are valuable, seems juvenile. This is also often a tool used to justify otherwise immoral things. Any good intentions that underpin this idea should not really count if the idea itself is faulty.

Do I have any idea of what should count? Nope. But just as I had no objective reasons to believe in gods when I became an atheist, and just as the absence of objective reasons did not render life meaningless, I think that if we put our heads together, we could come up with sensible principles. It really all depends on where we start our moral reasoning, and that depends on temperament, as Johnathan Haidt has shown. Circular reasoning, for sure, but in the end, I think the great Tim Minchin said it best. We’re just f***ing monkeys in shoes!

What do you think?

The Death of Civilisation?

Two ideas popped into my head at about 2 a.m. today and I thought that it would be best to write them down. They are somewhat connected, albeit loosely. I am still processing them, so they are more postulations than conclusions, but in the words of JBP, you write to find out what you think!

The first idea is that as a civilisation moves beyond its physicality, it begins losing its identity and the people within it also become more prone to losing their identities.

Western civilisation has moved more and more away from the physicality of industry and more and more towards a digital age of ideas. Things which have been traditionally physical, such as newspapers, money etc. have gone digital for the most part and have gone through process of stripping them down to their bare bones. The idea of a newspaper or of money is what remains.

Similarly, the idea of identity seems to be less tethered to the body and what it does. There is a popular description of things as social constructs and seemingly constant experimentation in that regard on the one hand, yet people seem to be in more identity crises than previously.

My suspicion is that this social trend towards disembodied identity is a response to the world itself becoming less embodied. Humans are, after all, a part of their world. It would explain why these ideas take root much easier among intellectuals than working class people.

The second idea is much easier to conceptualize, though I am not entirely sure if it is original. I think that western civilisation has an autoimmune disorder.

As information becomes more available, it seems that autoimmune disorders are linked to leaky gut. The tight junctions between intestinal cells are weaker because of some chemical process and so things which typically would have remained on the outside of the body (the digestive tract is actually a long tube through rather than inside of the body) are leeching into it. This seems to be tied, at least in part, to ingesting certain proteins like gluten in quantities which are too large and for periods which are too long. The weakening of these tight junctions and the leeching in of these toxins cause the body to malfunction and mount an immune response against itself.

Similarly, western civilisation seems to have ingested the ideas of postmodernism that there is no inherent value in its precepts and that everything is relative. These ideas are leeching into its institutions and these very institutions are malfunctioning and self-destructing by adhering to select values. e.g. openmindedness, intellectualism, markets.

Anyway, those are some crude explanations which are far from thorough I’m going back to bed.