on Ethics

It used to baffle me that universities have such a thing as an Ethics department. I had read enough philosophy during high school to know that ethics is just one aspect of philosophy, and the hardest one to get any consensus. I also was under the Humean spell, namely that you can't drive an 'ought' from an 'is'. The fact is the only societal ethics that work are those enforced under the power of religious coercion; you make up some shit and kill people who don't agree with it.

So I wondered: what are those Ethics majors doing? Well I still don't know. The guys doing Ethics were mostly creepy dorks who I, desperate to get some poon back then, couldn't afford to befriend. Still after some time I did get some appreciation for Ethics studies. The fact is ethic problems are huge conundrums against which the basic logic we use in our everyday lives seems quite useless indeed. The old aspiration of objective morality reveals its impossibility when asked the old switch dilemma: push the button and one person dies, don't push it and 5 die. What is one to do? And why? Those puzzles are fun.

What's more fun is that there's some people who get paid for making up solutions for those puzzles. And as I was saying, those solutions are not based on any sound logic, because ethics doesn't work that way. Ethics works by making up convoluted and unfalsifiable shit, throw it somewhere and see what sticks. Guys like this do the throwing:

caption="I make up unfalsifiable shit for a living"

Well there's several ways of looking at this. The middle schooler inside me is excited that we have found a way of raising meat in space. I also got excited about aeroponics; any technology that can make Singapore a food exporter is awesome. Decreasing the value of land is a good thing in my view.

There's also the ethics angle, i.e. making up convoluted unfalsifiable shit. Actually I'm quite good at that too, so I shall add my two cents. The fact is that factory farming exists, and selective breeding of animals has existed for millennia. Selective breeding has caused, by purely biological processes, a lot of special breeds of animals which are genetically defective, suffer of bad health, and are basically fucked up in many ways as a by-process of breeding for particular traits which people find useful. The same slow motion biological engineering that is mainstream today, is found horrible and creepy if done by mechanical means. People have a natural aversion towards plastic tubes it seems. Jim Kalb would tell you it's not about the results, that means and processes matter too. Still is the fact is that when people see those braindead (literally so) chickens being fed through a plastic tube and muscles exercised via electric pulses they don't like it. Hume said that morality was only about feelings, so we should leave it at that. But we are more curious that he was, and we want to know why people don't like it. Well people don't know. Tell your wife/girlfriend/mother about this thing, and ask her opinion. And press her, ask her to articulate the reasons why she finds it creepy. She most probably can't. Nobody can actually, all we can do is make up some convoluted unfalsifiable shit to rationalize our feelings. I'll tell you my evo-psy theory: people have a built-in mechanism against new stuff; especially about food. Present ways of feeding oneself have gone through a long process of trial and error; so you may assume that it's safe. New stuff: industrial feed, GM crops; those are new, and we can't know if they are safe. So they scare us.

Ok, I know you don't care. As no one should. All this blabbing would be of no consequence if it weren't for a small detail. Bureaucracy. You see, food has to be produced, and the government has to make some regulations about what processes are allowed. As Foseti will tell you, our laws aren't made by our Parliaments but by the bureaucracy. But bureaucracy is about paper working, its about routine tasks. It's not about decision making. What criteria should they use? Well they outsource that to experts. Experts like the fat guy on top of this post. The demand for Ethics students in University comes from the Government which uses them to justify their regulations. They need a fat guy on a suit to make up some shit so they can go on with their workload.

In other countries, Corruption is basically people with money paying off the bureaucrats to make regulations on their favour. But in the Anglosphere, the Cathedral, the people with money go to the fat guy on a suit, pay him some money to make up some shit, and wait for that to be reflected in some new regulations. Just by adding a fat guy on a suit, you eliminate Corruption from the system. Then you can get other fat guys on suits to make rankings of Corruption in the world, where your country is one of the cleanest and nicest, of course.

The problem with André Ford's idea, which is strong, consistent, and quite elegant, is that he's no fat guy on a suit, so unless some business gets interested and starts the influence-buying process, the Chicken Matrix won't come to the market anytime soon. Population growth is leveling out anyway; the sort of people whose population is growing (only black Africans and Afghans by now) will never have the purchasing power to justify investing in his meat factories. It's a pity. I enjoy the idea of a Blade Runner-ish city state with a huge population fed on skyscraper-sized Chicken Matrixes.

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