#admission: poking the english language with a stick makes me feel fucking fantastic

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After writing everything below, I felt like I should add a foreword of some kind describing what it’s about to get you not to skip it on account of it being 1200 words. I don’t really have anything though, besides “I liked it a lot and it describes my brain, and maybe it’ll make you think about yours.”

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There's a thought I've had a number of times but haven't yet tried to talk about or write out about, like... the ways in which people come up with morals? I'm sure this is pretty basic-level psychology and ethics stuff, but I haven't taken any classes of that sort, so here we are. It goes something like this (and the point is at the end, btw):

When we have disagreements with other people about fundamental moral beliefs, we have to understand it in one of fairly few ways, right? Like, either (1) the other person is just evil, or (2) they're misguided or have made an error but ultimately have the right values (or at least the ones I have), or (3) through their experiences they've come to differ in fundamental beliefs from me and their argument is, in that lens, totally consistent. Right? If you're going to engage at all in a disagreement, you have to pick or come to understand one or more of these (or, I guess, you go with the first one by default.)

So you kind of have to have some kind of mental model of how people think of the world and come to have opinions, so you can take a guess which part of the model is causing the disagreement. In more plain terms, when it really matters, you need to know what caused the other person to be wrong, yeah? Like when the other person is like, "we need to deport all redheads" or "my kid shouldn't be treated for this collapsed lung" or whatever.

And the first obvious distinction to make is like, "values" vs. all the other stuff that's situational and on top of them. Like a value could be fairness or loyalty or hard work being rewarded or something something family or everyone having a say or selflessness being good or the reduction of human or animal suffering or, I dunno, insert stuff about faith. I'm not sure where the line should be drawn, but my working theory is that values are the stuff you feel like everyone reasonably ought to share (even though you know not everyone does)? Again, I'm sure there's a chapter in a textbook about this. So by argument (2), all the other stuff is just disagreements about the right way to get to the same fundamental place, like how different people would "fairly" split a cake different ways, or how different experiences of religion would lead groups to differ on how to best respect the history and meaning of Jerusalem, or how to reduce the suffering of a dying pet or relative. But that's background.

Coming back to the mental model thing, my mental model is based on 2 specific things: first, I believe that despite values or goals that may differ, facts and logic never will. Hence if you can understand and accept the premise behind someone's values -> logic -> belief chain, but show them a logical fallacy in their thought process, or if you can show that the facts they were using were incorrect, then you're right and they're wrong, full stop. I'm sure this is obvious, but the corollary is that that's the only time I think you can really say that, and if you're going to make an argument that someone is wrong it has to be on those grounds. That's why I make the distinction between (2) and (3).

(To be clear, none of this is to tell you something you didn't know. But ever since I can remember, I was an existential kid; I often wonder about why I'm thinking or doing literally anything! And when I get in an argument or try to persuade someone of something, I do my best to make my thought process as thought-through as possible to give the highest possible chance of actually learning anything; otherwise what's the point. And if you want to be confident about why you're arguing something specific, you have to have thought about the mechanics of convincing someone of something. And so it goes.)

Anyway, the second specific thing is that, partially by choice and partially not, I am one of those people who tries to assume that all humans do share most values, if you drill down far enough. So yes, I think we all want the same things deep down. I think people do bad things for sure-still-bad-but-understandable reasons. I see people who think or do horrible things as "basically the result of what would happen if, from birth, I lived your life, not that that makes it at all okay." I try and identify when people do stuff out of fear and think, "they must be scared." I try not to ever forget the humanity of people I really fucking hate. Pretty much no one lives their life trying to be a dickbag, and those who do must have had a pretty unusual set of life circumstances to think that's a good idea, yeah?

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...but all of the above stuff is my thought process 99% of the time. That's the background noise in my brain. If I'm a computer, that's Windows (or, if I'm lucky, MacOS), not the program I'm actually trying to run. That's not what I made this post about, at least originally. The point of this post is to point out that sometimes I realize that all those values and stuff don't really exist.

Because, like, why do I think we should reduce the suffering of the misfortunate? Why do I think everyone should have a voice in decisions that affect them? Why do I think the punishment should be proportional to the crime... oh, wait, no I don't, whoopsie, I think the punishment should be optimized for reducing crime in the aggregate and that only a calculated unfair act deserves a calculated unfairness in return, because the correct value that we share is the betterment and fairness of society, and the common assumption that a small-scale simplistic system of justice makes that happen isn't an accurate fact on which to base a moral argument WHOOPS ANYWAY MOVING ON...

The answer, of course, is because it feels right. I had formative, emotionally deep experiences where people suffered, and it was unfair, and they had no say, and it felt bad and it felt wrong. And I extrapolated my values based on those feelings, and those feelings were put there by chemicals in my body that humans have evolved such that we would form a productive and long-lived society. I may feel like logic and facts are fundamentally right, and I have no choice but to use them, but morals are fundamentally... just what happened to work for humanity to survive. We don't have to choose to prioritize them, or to believe them.

But I do. And I recognize that too is because it makes me feel good to do so. (There's no getting around, from an existential standpoint, that you're made out of the same chemicals as everything else, unless you believe in higher stuff.) And I'm okay with that. "My religion is that the most fundamental feelings I've experienced are worth following" is a statement I'm totally comfortable with.

And if a disagreement boils down to that? Well, I'll go from there.