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Interview with Michael Scriven
MISHLOVE: I think one of the difficulties that people have with your position, which seems rational, is that we're accustomed, we're raised to think of ethics as being associated with the great religious teachings, for which people are prepared at least in story to sacrifice their lives. And today, when people throw off the oppression of some of these religious teachings, or otherwise rebel against the religions under which they were raised, they tend to let go of the ethical aspects at the same time. SCRIVEN: Absolutely. It is the first great insight to realize that many of the most ethical people in the last three thousand years of our culture had no religious affiliations at all; to realize that the Buddhists are atheists; to realize that the humanists are often completely dedicated, unselfish people. It's really important to realize that, because otherwise the baby goes out with the bath water. Now, religion is a source of great strength for many people. It's the foundation for ethical behavior for many people, but it's not at all necessary. And if you start thinking that it's absolutely necessary, then when you lose religious values you begin to lose your connection to ethics. But ethics is absolutely independent of that. Otherwise, how could we argue that God was good? It must be the case that we had independent standards of good before we started to talk about God being good or Christ being good or the great leaders being good. We have independent standards of ethical behavior, because societies don't survive without them. MISHLOVE: Well, I don't want to get into too many of the philosophical arguments here, but rather look at the psychology of this, because you have some very, very rational arguments for why we should all consider ethics to be one of the major things that we're doing. I'm impressed with the Stoic philosophers who suggested that the whole purpose of philosophy was to develop virtue. Yet psychologically, if I'm living a hedonistic or even an Epicurean lifestyle, why should I change? Or even stronger, what would make me change, even if I were convinced temporarily by listening to you that it was a good idea? I'd probably forget about it a half hour later. SCRIVEN: There's two really important reasons. One is the terrible cost the society exacts if you do get found out in the unethical behavior. We're looking at Senators, Vice Presidents of the country, being sent to jail or put into legal courts and sentenced time and again. That means the end of being able to hold up your head. It's a very severe cost, and a very substantial number of people are being picked up. So the first thing is, remember what it really does mean -- the end of your career, of your social respect, and so on; what about your wife and family, or husband and family? These are very serious costs. People underestimate them severely. Secondly, in the case of the business world, it means the end of the income which you were being unethical in order to protect. These are serious costs. And then the other thing is a very much deeper question. It's this: in selecting hedonism, did you look seriously at the alternatives? Can you argue that hedonism as normally conceived is really a more enjoyable form of life than a form of life in which you commit to respect for others? There's just absolutely no evidence that the life of the hedonist is more fun. One sort of thinks it must be, but if you look at the life of the people committed to service you don't find miserable people disliking their existence, not respecting themselves. You find people who respect themselves, enjoy life, and feel very good about it. So it be just as simple as a fundamental error in the choice of the axioms. MISHLOVE: In other words, what you seem to be saying is that if a person really pursued their self-interest, that ethics would fall out of that, would be a ramification of that. SCRIVEN: If you're really serious about that, you must look at the alternative basic values that are open to you, and if what you want is gratification of those values, then you must ask yourself, could I shift those values? I mean, take the person who gives up drink. There's somebody who gives up a fundamental source of value for themselves, and in doing so is liberated and has a life which is worthwhile instead of terrible. So the hardest-nosed pragmatist of all of us must face the possibility that they made a slip at point one, in not looking at the alternatives, in assuming that somehow wining and dining, which I greatly favor, is something which you can't have alternatives to -- that there can't be wining and dining if you commit to respecting the rights of others, for example. Of course there can. The person that commits to an ethical form of behavior is not thereby giving up all pleasures. They have redefined pleasure, and they still retain many of the old pleasures, but they have eliminated the risks. There is never anybody that's going to shoot them down because they were nice to other people and thought about other people, and that's a pretty major consideration, and there seems to be no loss of enjoyment of life. MISHLOVE: I suppose what you are additionally suggesting here is that for people who are in positions of power, in government, in business, it's to their advantage to build into their structure various penalties for unethical behavior, because we can't assume that people are going to always respond rationally. SCRIVEN: This is the great bootstrap phenomenon. We must train our children to be ethical because it gives them a better form of life, and in doing so we must set a good role model for them, and thus we bootstrap ourselves into being ethical. I not be willing to give ten percent of my income to charity just like that, but I be willing to fight very hard for legislation which taxes people ten percent for charity, because the indirect method is often the best method of self-control. And similarly with ethics; we try to encourage the media to push for it, the schools to push for it, the general attitude of business to push for it. And of course they will push us too, and in doing so we upgrade ourselves. It's a good system. MISHLOVE: One of the difficulties that people have when they get serious about ethics in this manner is they begin asking themselves the question which has a long philosophical tradition: what does it mean to be ethical? What are the rules? Does it mean following the Ten Commandments? SCRIVEN: Well, the basic rule is extremely simple, and it's common to every ethical system, and it is the rule of treating everybody as having prima facie equal rights -- that is, equal rights in the first place, although in a particular case there be a supervening principle based on the principle of equal rights which means that you differentiate. So for example, if somebody has a very large investment in a company, it's not inappropriate or unethical that they should have a bit more of a say in what it does. So that is the fundamental principle. The rest is all spin-offs from that, by adding factual premises and combining the two. So you get differences between the sects, of course, because if you believe there is a god of a certain type who doesn't think that drinking alcohol is appropriate, then you'll build that into your ethical system. If you don't have that extra belief, you won't have that in your system. MISHLOVE: You lost me there somewhere. SCRIVEN: Well, the differences that you see all the time between religious ethical codes are due to differences in the factual beliefs of that particular religion. But they still retain the fundamental principle, and they work up the details from that plus the facts as they see it. MISHLOVE: What you're saying is it all boils down to the principle that's stated in our own American heritage: "All men are created equal." SCRIVEN: Yes, although I think we might put women in there too. MISHLOVE: All men and women, all human beings, are created with some kind of inalienable -- SCRIVEN: That's the metaphor, but the basic fact is that in a society that commitment is a survival strategy, and societies that don't have it will do much worse, because their expectation of survival goes down. That's a simple mathematical theorem, so there is a sort of foundation for all this in mathematics. MISHLOVE: If I'm a selfish, unethical person, then, I might say, "Well, I don't care about the survival of the human race." SCRIVEN: No, but you do care about your own survival, and so we'll push very hard to make it not worth your while to continue in that strategy. If we haven't set up the penalty system, the surveillance system, and the education system, then the payoff to you will not be in the direction of ethics, and we will be to blame for not having you behave ethically. This is a very reciprocal arrangement, and so the society has tended to think that somehow religion was going to give them a free path to ethical behavior. Now that they're beginning to have doubts about that, they haven't got an alternative, and what I'm saying is, look hard at this; look at it in terms of game theory, decision theory strategies, and you see that underlying the ethical approach, there is something very simple. It's a commitment to a winning strategy in the survival game. End Part 2 of 3 parts
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