FIRST Principles

********************************************

I.

All sentient1 beings need to feel2 order3 and meaning4 in their lives.


This is the first basic principle. It will be analyzed phrase by phrase.

1. Sentient

A stone, presumably, does not have a need to feel that its existence is meaningful, that its surroundings would be different if that stone did not exist in the ways that it does. We could be imagining it, but we seems to think a pet dog or cat does sense such a need, and many of us would find it natural to extend that observation to all animals in their natural state, from wolves and deer to birds and even insects. About plants we may be unsure...

So... the less a person seeks to find order in - or to impose order upon - her or his existence, thereby giving it meaning - the more that person resembles a stone.

We could ask why it seems to be such an elementary impulsion for sentient creatures to expect to find their world meaningful, but whatever the cause of the impulsion, it is truly present.

2. to feel (order and meaning)

Let's not exaggerate. Few individuals are motivated to seek order and meaning in their lives in a conscious or comprehensive manner. Observing how others around us routinely behave is enough for most of us to satisfy our need to sense order in what we are doing, since we can either do likewise or do something different. 

But living with the feeling that one participates in senseless chaos would lead one toward an uncivilized, inhumane, irrational life.

3. Order

Just learning the facts is usually not enough. Something in us seems to require knowing Why things happen.There are two kinds of answer to the question Why? One is historical, and the other is logical, causal or philosophical.

"Why?" one may ask, to which another may reply, "First, X happened, then Y, and finally Z." Putting X in its historical or chronological sequence seems to show that even if X is unexpected, it nonetheless fits into at least one kind of order.

OR one may ask, "Why?," to which another may reply, "The occurrence of X was caused by the interaction of Y and Z." As the outcome of a causal process - the presence of Y and Z being the cause, and X being the effect - X fits into an understandable order.

Finally, the answer to "Why X?" may be "X is an A, and Y is a B; an A and a B together are the same as Z." In other words, through reason alone one can find the order in a set of circumstances.

Reassuring ourselves that we live in what is at least most often an orderly universe is something that apparently all of us seek to do.

4a. Meaning

Without order, phenomena do not have meaning. The pre-biblical version of Job's story dramatizes this situation. Job thinks - as many do - that the order in our world is a moral order. If one is immoral, one suffers. On the other hand, it must also be true - he assumes - that if one behaves entirely in accordance with moral principles, one will not suffer but will prosper. Job behaves morally, and he prospers. QED. All makes sense.

But then suddenly, although Job's moral behavior has not changed, his success and prosperity desert him.

When given the opportunity to speak with the divine creator who is responsible for order and meaning in life, Job asks Why?  But God does not reply. 

That is the whole story as it was remembered for many generations in many cultures. Apparently, it is possible to behave entirely in accordance with moral principles and still to suffer.

Later those who were gathering the most important spiritual literature together, which eventually became the Bible, apparently felt so great a need to find order and meaning in life that they invented an introduction to the story, creating the fiction that the random disasters that one by one befell the good man Job were part of a contest between two spiritual powers. They were not meaningless, as they seemed to Job himself.

Like Job, most of us cannot find meaning in random occurrences.

4b. Order and Meaning
 
And not all order is meaningful. In other words, order is a necessary prerequisite for meaningfulness, but order alone does not confer meaning on events or situations. Doing the same thing every day, in the same order, may be efficient or may simplify decision-making, but routine in itself is not meaningful.  Most of us find that mere routine does provide order, but we remain unfulfilled.  Both order and meaning are what we seem to need to feel in our world.

Religion promulgates the sense that a relatively clear order, giving us meaning, exists externally, independent of any human mind.  Science seeks an order and a somewhat limited kind of meaning that does exist externally.  Art is different, but also is one of the indications that we seek order and meaning.

Art, for both its creator and its perceiver - provides good practice creating order and meaning, but which by definition are separate from that which exists outside itself.

Like artists, each of us must create values, or thoughtfully adopt values created by others, resting on observation and reason from which each of us can derive the principles necessary for civilized human life.

In order to have a sense of order and meaning in our lives, we need to guide our actions by moral principles.   Since such values do not exist in nature, like things, they must be created so that from them, civilization may develop.

II.

The second principle is:
 
Civilized social life1 is based on humane moral principles2 derived from values3 created from facts4 as perceived by5 verifiable observation6 and unbiased reason6.

1a. Civilized social life:

It's not only that living alone is not the same as living as one of a group. It's not only that groups of individuals living together have a natural and inevitable tendency to get organized to some degree and in some ways. It's more than that.

No, a "society" - like a single individual - can be organized but uncivilized. Our basic first principle, though, is that our society will be civilized.

So what does that mean?

Perhaps at its essence, a civilization - or a civilized society - recognizes a principle of fairness or justice. In practice, fairness is not a sophisticated concept that anyone finds hard to understand. A child, for example, seems to develop a sense of fairness quite early in the maturation process. One of the first things you might hear a child say, it seems, is "That's not fair!" when it has seemed to her or him that he has done the same thing his friend or her sibling did but was rewarded when he himself was criticised for the very same action. At an early age, the child knows this is not right and that what is not right about it is that it is unfair. The problem is not the inconsistency; it's the injustice.

The key point, though, is that in civilized social life fairness and justice are defined with reference to everyone - not only to members of one nuclear family, or one extended family, or one clan or one tribe, or one gang or club or any one organization, or one religious sect, or even one nation. Family feuds, tribal or imperialistic wars, crusades are not instruments for exacting justice, establishing fairness, or making things right. Since it is not the purpose of such actions to treat outsiders fairly and since those treated "fairly" or "justly" in such conflicts are exclusively members of a particular group, such conflicts are uncivilized. The ancient Greek tragedies of the Oresteia dramatize the transition from a culture based on revenge (from tribe or clan culture) to a culture whose system of justice is based on impersonal laws.

In civilized social life, in other words, justice is based on principles, not on affiliations or kinship or any other personal feature, but on abstract standards that are applied to behaviors without regard to personal characteristics.

1b. Civilized social life

What is "uncivilized" social life?

Uncivilized social life is characterized by disorder of various kinds. In a society in which an absolute ruler rewards some and punishes others not according to principles more or less consistently applied but according to whim, fancy, or caprice, life is "uncivilized": unpredictable and intolerable.

Also, a social group characterized by individuals competing with each other with the results entirely indeterminable is "uncivilized." The strongest, most ruthless, and luckiest wins in such contests, with significant or possibly terminal results. Success in such societies is generated by chance and neither for just cause nor according to rational principles. That is an uncivilized way to live.

2. Humane moral principles:

The moral principles on which a civilized society is based grow from a respect for humanity: for other human beings, for all groups demonstrating respect for human individuals, for all who avoid inflicting pain on other beings (or on themselves, for that matter).

2. a.

Religious sects that emphasize the unworthiness and powerlessness of human beings, emphasizing instead the power and glory of the divine, sometimes do not positively espouse humane values. On the contrary, this sort of zealot believes that a person has no intrinsic worth and that no human life has any real value. People may be pitied, at best, but not admired or even respected. Is it "humane" to pity weak individuals who cannot help being worthless? Yes, but such a sentiment cannot be the basis of humane moral principles, which embody positive assessments of human value.

2. b.

We need to keep in mind that we are talking here about moral principles rather than metaphysical principles. Morality has to do with behavior. If one is speaking carefully, she or he will not say a person is "immoral" (or "moral"); only behaviors are either moral or immoral. Spiritual principles or concepts - even those emphasizing the might and authority of the divine as opposed to the fallibility and weakness of human beings (not to mention human mortality, contrasting with the deity's immortality) - do not necessarily impose inhumane moral principles on their followers. But such beliefs do not in themselves exclude inhumane morality.

3. Derived from values:

Moral values are the source of moral principles; logically, values come first. Values are concepts, which may be applied by actions; principles attempt to guide actions so that they embody or actualize the values an individual or a group upholds.

For example, if every human being is intrinsically valuable, then it is immoral to kill someone. (Incidentally, since a contradiction is easier to see than a confirmation, negative moral principles telling us what NOT to do are easier to articulate than positive principles telling us what to do.)

It is possible to extrapolate backwards from an action to the principles it exemplifies or the values it does or does NOT embody. If an individual has killed a number of others, for instance, the motivating principle might be "Kill those who... [are like those killed in this case]." And the value from which this principle is derived might be "[Such people] should be removed [for some reason]."

If an individual risks his or her own life to save some stranger in trouble, we might infer that among this person's principles is that all human beings should see the safety and welfare of others as her or his responsibility. This principle would presumably be based on a value system instilling every human being with value.

So, like other moral principles, humane ones are derived from values (humane values in this case).

But where do we find "humane principles"?

[Note: Relevant to the following section are the two parts of my discussion of the question, "Can moral statements be true?" below: http://byronderrick.blogspot.com/2012/04/can-moral-statement-be-true-part-one.html and http://byronderrick.blogspot.com/2012/04/can-moral-statements-be-true-part-two.html,]

4a. [Values] Created from facts:

If we see the sky growing dark late on a winter afternoon, we may say it is a fact that night has come. If we observe a person doing one thing or another, we may say it is a fact that he or she did that. If we feel our foot falling unexpectedly below ground level and pitch forward onto our knees, we may assume there was a hole in the ground that we had not seen. We hadn't seen it, but it was there; that is fact, we may say.

All of these facts exist external to us, or at least we behave as though they do; by definition, a fact is out there. (We may, of course, wrongly identify a phenomenon as a "fact" when it is not, when it is nowhere because it doesn't or didn't exist apart from someone's imagination.)

In this respect, a fact of course is different from an idea or a concept. A fact is different in this way from a value. In other words, values do not exist out there in the world, for us to get to know through our senses. We do not find a value the way we discover a fact. Values cannot be found because they do not exist in themselves.

When we see a person working hard to defeat a competitor even though such a defeat is clearly humiliating to the other person, while it makes no real difference to the individual we are observing, we may infer that the relentless competitor values winning for himself over making someone else feel good; but that does not mean that such a value exists, like the fact that the other competitor is being hurt. It shows only that the observed individual holds such a value.

People behave according to values they hold. Their actions upon analysis might reveal the values they hold. The only truth or "reality" values have is that they are believed by people and that they are sometimes inferred from human actions.

Naturally, just because "He" holds a certain value and behaves according to a certain principle has no necessary connection to "My" actions, my principles, or my values.

So I don't discover "true" values by looking around, and unless I decide to imitate someone else, I will not find my values and extrapolate my moral principles from others. So where will my values and principles come from?

4b. Created from facts:

If values are not real, existing in the world like facts; that is, if values - the source of moral principles - cannot be found... where do they come from?

They come from your imagination.

Values can be learned from others. Common experience and, I understand, many research studies have demonstrated this; values are not inherited like height and eye color, but the values parental figures live by as an infant grows up with them are likely to become his or her own. On the other hand, it is usually believed that a critical developmental experience for a young individual eventually is to consider her or his values independently. And, no matter what else we may say about this issue, we may state clearly that in a civilized society having a conscious sense of one's own values and the moral principles embodying them is encouraged and in fact is considered essential.

So, one cannot be content from simply reproducing the values of one's dominant culture. It is possible to do so. But such blithely accepted values from others are rather easily tossed aside in times of moral or ethical stress, which is when they are most needed.

Rather, in the final analysis, individuals create their own values from their own experience, using their own imaginations, informed to a reasonable degree by experience of others but making choices for one's moral base by oneself alone.

5. Perceived:

Most of us have had the experience of perceiving an event or situation and later discovering conclusively that the event did not in fact happen or the situation was not in fact what we had thought. "I know I left my keys on the dining table," you say as you look around your home preparing to go to work. Then you find them in the pocket of the slacks you wore the day before. OR "Wasn't it outrageous when X did Y," you think, and then you discover later that X had not done what you'd thought at first. It happens to all of us to think the facts are one thing when they were not; in other words what we perceive is not always "factual."

But what we perceive, balanced with what others tell us they perceive, and confirmed (or corrected) by later perceptions... what we perceive is the best we have. In creating our values system, we will be as careful as we can be to be influenced only by what we are reasonably sure are the relevant facts, knowing all along that just as we are creating these values ourselves rather than finding them in the external world, and knowing also that there is a small chance we have perceived the world incorrectly. (Even if values are created, in other words, dogmatism about them is inappropriate.)

We can be more certain of the worthiness of our values than we can of others' values because we cannot be as certain of the nature of their perceptions as we can of our own. It would be like thinking you know what joy is from someone else's description to you of it, rather than knowing what joy is from your own experience of it!

6. [perceived by] Verifiable observation:

It is well known that perceptions that are verifiable by other people, or by oneself more than once or under various circumstances are more likely to be "facts" rather than mere fantasies. Apparent perceptions that are unverifiable because they lack substantive content ("Jesus loves me") are also unsuitable as the basis for the creation of one's moral values.

7. Unbiased reason:

So we invent our values from facts, using reason. Just as we must do what we can to avoid fantasies (such as those based on fear - "The Devil is after me!" - and those based on hope - "If I strive to be good, I will live in bliss forever") as we seek relevant facts, just so we must do our best to avoid bias in reasoning about what is good and what is not good, what we should strive for and what we should avoid. The difficulty here is that bias itself is a value judgment. Most bias results from taking one's values from others, rather than from one's own experience and judgment.

So, if bias can be as much avoided in our reasoning process as illogic, if we can sufficiently separate relevant facts from fantasies, we can construct humane values for civilized living and derive from such values appropriate moral principles. Along with those around us, we will have a chance at building a civilized society.

III

Thus, the first two basic principles are -

All sentient beings need to feel order and meaning in their lives,

and

Civilized social life is based on humane moral principles derived from values created from facts as perceived by verifiable observation and unbiased reason.

*********************************

A Different Sort of Credit Problem

***

1

My wife (L-----) and I lived in Grenoble, France, from October 1970 to June 1971.  I was working in a one-year position; we had just been married on October 3.

My salary was automatically deposited each month for me in a checking account at the Banque de France.  The salary seemed low, even lower than some U. S. internships despite the fact that it was in fact for a fairly high-level, full-time professional position.  But there were generous benefits and government salary supports - such as small a monthly payment to allow us to buy milk and another monthly payment to support my particular profession... And in France at that time, the cost-of-living itself was remarkably low, too.

The result of all this was that at the end of the year, we found we'd actually saved almost half my annual salary.

2

I'd been lucky enough to land a good job in Washington, D. C., starting in fall 1971.  A nice little nest-egg for getting started in our new home - which turned out to be a two-bedroom apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland - was just waiting for us in our Banque de France account.

But there was a little problem.

The exchange rate between the French franc and the US dollar, which had been frozen for a long time, was freed up just as we had been preparing to leave France in summer 1971.  The amount of French money we could take with us in cash out of the country was severely limited, but the folks at the Banque de France had led us to believe that the exchange rate would stabilize in a few days, at which time we could write a check (cheque) on our foreigner's account (comte etranger) for the full balance so that we could set up a new account in America.  By the way, it was clear that the franc was losing against the dollar at that time, so that the Banque de France was losing a little more every day they held onto our money - and we gained a little more - but, never mind, because the rates were in flux, the funds could not be moved.

3

Before we'd left the U. S. in 1970 we'd sold my wife's car, putting the proceeds in a savings account we could use to buy another car when we got back.  That process worked fine, and because we were going from her big gas-guzzler (as they said back then) to a subcompact, we actually had enough cash to buy the new car.  We got a particularly good deal from my wife's Uncle Pat who worked for a Ford dealer in the Midwest.

We also had a few items of furniture each of us had accumulated and stored during our single lives, so we could sort of camp out in our unfurnished apartment... temporarily!  But we'd planned on fitting the place out right away so that we could be more settled and more comfortable... And then, we had this nest-egg that we could spend...

But wait a minute! We couldn't spend it because it was being held in France!

4

It seems like it wasn't until we actually moved our few things into our new apartment that Mr. Fogarty, the building manager, got around to mentioning, well, you know as everyone does, don't you, that there's a code that says 80% of the floor area in any apartment has to be covered by carpetting.

No, we hadn't known that, which meant we were going to have to take on still another expense, without the cash which was still over in France that we'd thought would cover everything we would need to get settled.

Anyway, it seemed only logical to buy the carpeting first, before we got any real furniture that we would just have to put on top of it.  So, we looked at Yellow Pages or something and figured where there was the biggest collection of discount stores where we could get the most for every dollar.  We'd have to just give up on our commitment to pay cash for everything.  No one else did that, after all.  So we would just buy it on credit.

I had a Visa Card deep in my wallet since I hadn't used it in 10 months or so, along with my Texaco card from even longer ago.  Same kind of thing for my wife.

5

We thought this carpet-buying thing would be one hairy big deal.  But we measured every room two or three times and figured out just what we wanted.  And for a while it looked as though negotiating the heavy car traffic to the stores would be the hairiest part of the deal.

We went into this one big place, and a guy came over to wait on us.  L----- said, "We've just moved here, and we discovered that it's a code that our apartment..."

"--Has to have 80% of all the floor space covered by carpets," he said waving an arm around.  "And let me guess," he added.  "The floor is parquet, parquet flooring, right?"

That was right.  He knew his business, our business.  "I've got just what you need," he said.

L---- was telling him the basics we'd been talking about as he led us over to some big rollers along one wall.

6

So after the carpet had been selected and written up for the order, The salesman asked for my credit card.  I gave him the VISA I had dusted off before we set out that morning.  The salesman disappeared into a rabbit's warren of little cubicles at the back of the showroom.  After a moment, he beckoned for us to join him.  We settled into a couple of chairs near his desk, as he stared into some little machine.  He said the card had been discontinued; did I have another?

"Well," I said, "only my Texaco card, which we haven't used for nine or ten months."  By this time we'd explained that we'd been living in France and that if our funds were not temporarily frozen in the Banque de France, we'd be making our current purchases in cash.  He accepted the gasoline card, explaining that all they needed was to show we had a good credit record.

L---- was relieved at that.  "Neither of us has ever missed paying in full our monthly credit card bill," she correctly explained.

7

Of course the Texaco card had been discontinued too, as had L-----'s credit cards.  "Why don't you just verify that we've always paid the monthly bill in cash?" we asked.  No luck.

The salesman was by now fully engaged in trying to make this sale.  He pondered one thing or another.  Then, he had a bright idea:  "Oh yeah!" he exclaimed.  "Do you own a car?"

Yes, we did.  It was right out front. 

"Who financed the deal?" the salesman asked triumphantly.  "CASH?!" he burst out when we told him.  "Nobody buys a car with cash!"

So after a minute, equilibrium recovered, he asked: "How can I verify that?"

8

Uncle Pat was at work that afternoon at Friederich's Ford several states west, and he confirmed that we had indeed paid cash.  Our salesman strode away murmuring to himself, but when he came back from his boss's office, the deal was made.

By the time the carpet had been delivered and was rolled out on our parquet floor, which meant we could look for furniture, we'd found that Texaco and L-----'s gas card company had been more than happy to renew our old credit cards on the telephone. 

We didn't have any more trouble, despite the Banque de France.  But from then on, when out shopping, we always kept Uncle Pat's business card with us, just in case!

***