What is the cost of a life?

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a particular conundrum to the forefront of general debate. If we have to balance economics and lives which matters more? Are potentially economically damaging lockdowns really worth it? Various pundits do different calculations based on the “cost” of a life, and the gulf between the Right, preferring wealth, and the Left, preferring lives, is exposed as a stark ideological battle-line.

Much of the debate is based on a false dichotomy: earlier and tighter lockdowns can minimise economic damage by being shorter, and by not needing to be repeated, and so therefore, in the longer term, save both lives and wealth. It could also be argued that a high level of infections would itself risk mass panic, and an unmanaged form of “lockdown”, with people staying away from places of work and shops, that would actually cause more damage, both to the economy and people’s general well-being, than a properly planned and managed lockdown. Indeed, in the UK the lockdown can be seen just as much as something forced on the Government by the actions of individuals and businesses as much as something imposed top-down by a Government seemingly very reluctant to impose any lockdown at all. So much of this debate is ill-conceived, but not all of it.

Ultimately, though, we cannot dodge the question. Sometimes we have to put costs on lives, otherwise there would be no limit on what we are willing to pay, or on how much inconvenience we might suffer, to implement, say, any safety measures. But the methodologies used to calculate those figures are generally highly questionable, and the answers produced are very wide ranging. A common methodology is to ask people how many years of life they would be willing to sacrifice to avoid losing certain sums of money (this is called Time Trade Off, or TTO, for income). There are a couple of things wrong with that, not least that that makes rich people’s lives more costly than poor people’s (generally) but, more importantly, that the person surveyed is being asked about sacrificing their own years of life, not someone else’s. By contrast, in reality the trade-offs often apply to different people: one receives the “benefit”, the other the reduced life (REF 1). The question that should be asked isn’t Time Trade Off as we would each apply it to ourselves, but, for example, would it be acceptable for, say, a small businessmen to avoid bankruptcy by being paid to do a “hit” on someone else?

The answer to that one ought to be fairly obvious. Most people (whether humanist or followers of virtually any of the mainstream religions) adhere to a system of ethics based on the “Golden Rule”, i.e. that we should respect the wants of others as much as we respect our own wants (at least provided they return the favour), i.e. that we should all try and at least not be wilfully selfish. How many people would want to die or lose a loved one in exchange for someone else not suffering a reduction in income? If the answer is normally very few then it is clearly immoral to impose a loss of life on others to save our own income.

A better way to arrive at such a “cost of a life” figure is to use the concept of opportunity costs: basically only to “cost” lives in terms of other lives. For example, if you have a finite health budget, then, to save the most lives, you’d want to spend the money to save the “cheapest to save” lives first, and then gradually, as it were, increase that threshold to take in ever more expensive interventions, until the budget was exhausted. If you did the opposite, and prioritised allocating spend to the expensive interventions first, you’d run out of money sooner and be able to save fewer lives overall.

That’s philosophically less problematic than the first approach, but comes with one hidden problem: how do you decide on the size of the health budget in the first place? Perhaps you have to apply the approach to the whole of the economy, and say that the whole point of the economy is to provide life, and then do that calculation again.

Another question we should address is if all years of life are equally valuable to the person actually living that life? In answer to this it is useful to introduce some form of quality adjusted year of life, such as the quality adjusted life-year (QALY) used by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the UK. Does this mean, however, that we are then begging the question of how to compare money with lives, in that reduced income is likely to correlate with reduced quality of life? Not really, because here we are not talking about quality of life as defined by economic factors. In fact, provided freedom from want is avoided, quality of life is unlikely to correlate linearly with income. The more “money” we make, once our basic needs are met, the less that money contributes to our well-being, in a process of “diminishing returns”. This is why, if asked to notionally Time Trade Off life duration for income, rich people will put a higher value on their lives than poor people.

In fact, to break any even implied link to income and direct economic factors, we should not measure this quality adjustment in terms of Time Trade Off for income at all, but Time Trade Off for a direct improvement in life quality. For example, someone suffering from chronic pain might be willing to accept a shorter life expectancy in exchange for that life being pain free. Alternatively, someone who is childless might accept a reduced life span in exchange for being able to have children. In this way, it is possible to convert pure quality improvements, that don’t extend life span, also into QALYs or their equivalent.

So now we have the concept that our whole quality adjusted years of life “purchasing” budget is not just our “health” budget, or even our “road safety” budget, but the whole economy. Is this reasonable? In a way it ultimately depends on what we regard as the “meaning of life.” Nevertheless (as explained in “Questions and some answers: how to live with yourself and others”, REF 2) we seek meaning in order to find some form of fulfilment, or “quality”, in our lives. Therefore, it is indeed entirely reasonable that, in the final analysis, the purpose of the economy is indeed to provide quality years of life. Otherwise, at the very deepest level of justification, what is the economy’s point? (As explained in “What is economic justice and how can we create it?”, REF 3, the purpose of the economy is to serve people, not people the economy).

Then we have to repeat a calculation similar to the one we did above for the health budget, but now in terms of quality adjusted years of life. To be able to “buy” the most quality adjusted years of life, you’d want to buy the “cheapest” QALYs first, and then gradually, as it were, increase that threshold to take in ever more expensive “purchases”, until the purchasing power of the economy is exhausted. That allows you to “buy” the most QALYs: if you did the opposite, and prioritised allocating spend to the expensive QALYs first, you’d run out of resources sooner and be able to “purchase” fewer QALYs overall. The threshold you reach when you have run out of resources is the maximum allowable spend on a QALY, effectively the “cost of life”.

Not only that, but as “respect the wants of others as we respect our own wants” implies that we respect the wants of everyone equally (provided they return the favour at least), then at each stage of that calculation, i.e. for each resource allocation, we have to ensure that we don’t accidentally increase inequality by making whatever is the worse off section of the population even worse off. In other words: it’s a very difficult calculation to do!

It is undoubtedly difficult, and impossible to do perfectly. However, as this “costing QALYs in terms of the lost opportunity of other QALYs we could have bought instead” approach is arguably the only moral way to start even notionally putting costs on lives, or at least QALYs, even a very imperfect working out of this calculation would likely be superior to all of the other methods for putting a cost on life, especially as, in practice, those methods normally amount to putting a cost on someone else’s life. How we could go about performing this calculation is discussed in REF 4, below, where we also show that the result of this calculation could be extremely useful, for example potentially allowing us to depoliticise the setting of the size of the health budget.

For the time being though, we lack even the basic data to input into that calculation (though again, as also explained in REF 4, it would be possible to collect data that was “good enough” to make the calculation feasible).

So perhaps, right now, all we can is to ask people how much of our economic output we as a society would be willing to “spend” to “see off” different scales of threats. If we can’t actually put that question directly, then we can assess how, in actual practice, provided our society was democratic and reasonably well informed about the given threat, it has answered such questions in the past. In the case of COVID-19, if it was left unchecked, it could quite conceivably wipe out roughly 500 thousand people in the UK: for example, the Imperial College study (REF 5) estimates UK deaths from an unmitigated pandemic at 510,000. Total UK casualties in WWII by comparison were 449,700. Though that was fighting the Nazis, it isn’t unreasonable to guess that a not dissimilar number of Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, Socialists and Trade Unionists would have been murdered by the Nazis if we’d just surrendered. In fact, if we take the case of the Netherlands, and scale up to the size of the UK population at the time, it is not unreasonable to suppose that losing to the Nazis would have cost roughly 600 000 British lives (see REF 6, below). Of course, it could be countered that such a comparison does not take sufficient account of the “quality of life” costs to our way of life of Nazi occupation or overlordship, but, should naturally acquired immunity or a vaccine be unable to induce effective, reasonably long lasting, protection from COVID-19, then any society then that has allowed community transmission to be sustained is going to be facing not only indefinitely elevated mortality rates but enduring changes to its quality of life, from widespread grief and anxiety, through continuing social distancing to even the emergence of a surveillance state with protracted and enhanced emergency powers.

On the face of it, the scale of the threat from COVID-19 and the Axis powers therefore seems very roughly comparable. If so it is valid to ask how much the UK “paid”, in economic terms, to counter the Nazi threat. At REF 7 we estimate that figure to be, in modern prices, approximately 2.6 trillion pounds. Simplistically, we can divide that by 600 000, our rough estimate of casualties avoided, to produce a “cost of life” of 4.34 £m per life saved. (Some slightly less simplistic alternatives to that calculation are also explored at REF 7).

Of course, if a society was organised so that its economy already maximised quality adjusted years of life, within the constraints imposed by the need to also optimise equality, then any contraction of the economy would unavoidably reduce the quality adjusted years of life that the economy could provide. However, in practice contemporary societies are far from this point. Even the richest nations on Earth struggle to provide the basic needs of their citizens for homes, healthcare and sometimes even food, not because of any absolute shortage of resources, but because of problems with inequality. For example, the USA has no system for universal healthcare and, though the UK does, it tends to spend a lower proportion of its GDP on health than other comparable nations, and, to sustain profits, there is mass manipulation of all classes of society to engage in wasteful and environmentally damaging spending.

In such a situation there is plenty of scope for coping with economic contractions without suffering reductions in “quality adjusted years of life”, by better addressing inequalities and minimising the “invented needs” of consumer society.

It is extremely likely that, when this over, countries such as the UK or the USA will have enough food, clothing, housing and even healthcare to go around. There will be no need, even after a huge contraction, for genuine deprivation of any kind. So addressing the economic consequences of this ought to be simple: just redistribute properly. It’s only the greed of the rich and powerful (for example, in the UK the Tory donors and backers) that creates the economic problem in the first place: just as it did before COVID-19, with mass homelessness, “generation rent”, precarious employment, life expectancies flatlining and falling in poorer areas, tens of thousands of austerity-related deaths and even some starvation.

The terms of this debate are rigged by the Right (as usual). Solve the problem of greedy elites and there need be no real economic crisis, meaning we can concentrate on saving lives.

Notes and Sources

REF 1

For example, when it comes to setting limits on the maximum cost of medical interventions to be paid for out of general, and at least partially progressive taxation, the richest have an incentive to set the limit as low as possible, because they pay a disproportionate share of the partially progressive taxes and also, should they need to do so, can easily afford private healthcare, where as the general population tend to have the opposite incentive, and tend to favour a higher threshold in order to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Similarly, as another case in point, when it comes to COVID-19, the richest often have the means to protect themselves more effectively than the poorest, and also have the most wealth to potentially lose as a result of economic damage. Furthermore, the disease itself does not have equal effects across different groups of people, being, for example, more dangerous to public-facing workers, the old, the poor and males. Therefore, again, the benefits and costs of measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19 will not be borne equally across a population, and, even worse, people can make reasonable inferences of where their own interest is likely to lay even while those measures are still being decided. (It could be argued that the poorest have the most to fear from economic contraction causing further deprivation, but unless the contraction is so severe it causes an absolute and critical shortage of resources, that question really reduces to one that, rather than being about the economic impact of measures to fight the pandemic, is really about a society’s willingness to redistribute its resources, in an emergency, to eliminate deprivation).

In such real-life situations TTO methodologies are completely invalid, as the person receiving the benefit is different from the person receiving the shorter life, and that difference is appreciable even before decisions are made. The sophistry of using TTO style methodologies to answer these types of society-wide conflicts of interest, especially as it is often favoured by neoclassical economists, could itself even be seen as just another weapon in the armoury of the legitimising ideology of capitalist systems based around huge inequalities of economic power.

REF 2

The deeper philosophical underpinnings of this article, and “Golden Rule” style morality, are explored here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/questions-and-some-answers-how-to-live-with-yourself-and-others/

REF 3

How to try and make the economy and markets work for people rather than vice versa is explored here: https://gezwinstanley.wordpress.com/what-is-economic-justice-and-how-can-we-create-it/

REF 4

In order to calculate the maximum amount we, as a society, should be willing to pay to “buy” a quality-adjusted year (QALY) of life, in terms of what the economy as a whole could afford until we reached the point that buying more expensive quality adjusted years of life would reduce our ability to buy cheaper quality adjusted years of life, and therefore reduce the total quality adjusted years of life we could afford overall, what do we need to know?

We need:

A knowledge of the demand for each possible QALY acquisition

A knowledge of the cost for each possible QALY acquisition, including any hidden costs such as environmental impact or any negative economic side effects.

A knowledge of the QALY value of each possible QALY acquisition.

A knowledge of the value of total economic output.

At least a rough understanding of the potentially redistributive effects of each QALY acquisition: to try and avoid any that make the already worst off section of the population even worse off.

We’ll call this a calculation of the Total Economic Equality-corrected Opportunity Cost Threshold per QALY (for lack of anything snappier).

Of course, knowing about every single potential QALY acquisition in an economy is going to be impractical, so, to make the problem tractable, we would have to sample the data and then aggregate upwards from those representative samples.

We could accomplish the above by a series of surveys sampling QALY acquisitions across the economy (purchases and direct allocations, such as free at the point of use public services, e,g medical treatment). Include things that have been refused, e.g. medical treatments refused or that couldn’t be afforded. Include only acquisitions essential for sustaining life, or for which, in exchange for which, people would actually be willing to sacrifice some duration of life. To make the process more practical, survey categories of similar QALY acquisition over a fixed period of time, rather than each actual or potential individual acquisition.

To do the calculation, once the data is gathered:

Rank each possible category of QALY acquisition according to its cost-effectiveness.

Notionally, do the cheapest QALY acquisitions first, until the surveyed potential demand is met, until the entire QALY acquiring power of the economy is exhausted.

The most expensive QALY that is still affordable is then the maximum allowable cost of a QALY without incurring an opportunity cost, i.e. without meaning that by spending too much on expensive QALYS we can afford fewer cheaper QALYS and therefore cannot maximise total QALYS.

But how should we perform the “equality correction”?

Before adding each further category of QALY acquisitions to the stack assess would those acquisitions make whatever is the most deprived section of the population even more deprived? In other words, does this step have some redistributive effects that would exacerbate inequality? (For example, perhaps the production of certain drugs causes environmental damage to poorer areas). If so, are there other QALY acquisitions that could at least compensate for this effect? (In our example, cleaning up the drug factories). If not these QALY acquisitions amount to the better off “taking” from the already worse off and therefore violate Golden Rule style obligations to respect the wants and needs of others, the “fulfilment” of others, as our own. So this step has to be skipped.

To do this calculation perfectly is impossible. But we don’t need perfection, we only need it be “good enough”. It wouldn’t have to be very accurate to morally be far superior to the arbitrary, widely divergent and philosophically dubious ways we assess the maximum acceptable cost of QALYS at the moment.

This threshold is also very useful in decision making. For example, we have seen how setting a budget for universal healthcare that is funded from progressive taxation can pitch richer against poorer, and therefore quickly becomes a matter of political conflict, with the various interest groups then wrapping themselves in ideological flags of convenience. Could we depoliticise the setting of the health budget by working backwards from the threshold, i.e. taking the maximum allowable QALY cost, and modelling buying all medical interventions, for which there is an apparent demand, that cost that as much or less, until we derive our total health budget, according to fundamental moral principles rather than class interest or feigned ideology?

REF 5

The Imperial College paper, in fact that one claimed to have finally induced the UK Government to authorise a lockdown, is here: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf.

REF 6

The problem here is how to use historical data to try and estimate how many British lives British resistance to the Axis powers potentially saved. Of course, it could be argued that British resistance also saved non-British lives, but non-British lives and treasure were also sacrificed in that struggle (not least those from what at the time was the rest of the British Empire and Commonwealth), so here we considering only UK sacrifices compared with likely avoided UK losses.

We are going to use the example of the occupied Netherlands to provide at least a hint of what Britain avoided by successfully resisting Nazi occupation or overlordship.

Using this source:https://ww2db.com/country/Netherlands we’ll take Dutch casualties as a result of purely occupation, rather than active war-fighting, as 106 000, i.e. the estimated number of Dutch Holocaust victims.

To derive a comparable figure for the UK, we’ll scale up to the size of the UK population in 1939, using population figures for the Netherlands in 1939 and the UK in 1939 from this source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1939

That gives the UK population in 1939 as 47,760,000, and the Dutch population as 8,729,000, so the UK had a population 5.47 times that of the Netherlands..

We will therefore estimate the UK deaths that would have resulted from capitulating to Nazi occupation or overlordship at 579, 970. These figures are extremely rough so we will round that to 600 000.

Of course, we know that the risks of dying from COVID-19 increase significantly with age, especially from about age 50 onwards. Therefore it is even more likely that the QALYs that would have been lost as a result of Nazi occupation would have exceeded the QALYs lost as a result of an unmitigated UK COVID-19 outbreak. However, we haven’t factored in other complicating factors, such as the long term health effects on those surviving COVID-19, and, in the broad brush, the analysis still holds.

REF 7

So how much did the UK spend?

The National Debt dipped to 110 percent of GDP in 1940 before soaring to 220 percent of GDP after the close of World War II in 1945. (Sources: https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/debt_history and Slater, M, The National Debt, London: Hurst & Company,  2018,  figure 2).

As those are debt to GDP ratios we need to know how 1945 GDP compares to 1940 GDP in order to have a actual handle on how much the debt itself grew.

Using this source: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/ukgdpir/ we can calculate that 1945 GDP is 1.0268 times 1940 GDP, so 1945 debt to 1940 GDP debt ratio is 1.03 * 2.20 = 2.27 or 227%.

So debt increased from 1.1 1940 GDPs to 2.27 1940 GDPs . In other words 1.17 * 1940 GDP was added to the debt.

So we could say the approximate cost of the war was 1.17 * the GDP.

Current GDP: (https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/ybha/pn2)

2019 2,214,888 £m in current (2019) prices

We multiply that by the 1.17 we just calculated to derive an equivalent “war cost” = 2,591,418.96 £m in 2019 prices.

Dividing that by 600 000 we end up with about 4.34 £m (2019 prices) per life saved.

We can go further here, if we want to, in order to refine the analysis, though we should never forget that it is never going to be more than extremely rough and ready.

For example, it is also arguable that Britain expended resources fighting the war to avoid economic damage, especially Nazi confiscations and extraction of “tribute”.

So we have to ask how much economic damage the Dutch suffered during their occupation. Graph 3 of this source:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231849982_Did_the_German_Occupation_1940-1945_Ruin_Dutch_Industry#pf2 implies that, at its peak, Nazi occupation reduced national income by 55% from 1939 levels.

Therefore so let’s assume that we saved 55% of 1940 GDP by not capitulating, and deduct that saving from our spend.

So the pure life against treasure saving cost was (1.17 – 0.55) or 0.62 times GDP or 1,373,230.56 £m in 2019 prices (deducting the cost we would have incurred anyway, even if we had capitulated).

Dividing by 600 000 gives 2.29 £m per life potentially saved in 2019 prices.

But we also paid a cost in lives, of 449,700 lives. So we could argue that the 1,373,230.56 was spent to save 600 000 – 449 700 lives instead, or 150,300‬ lives.

1,373,230.56/ 150,300 = 9.14 £m (in 2019 prices) spent (after deducting from total war costs what we would have lost even if had capitulated) per life potentially saved in excess of lives lost.

That deals with deaths and economic damage, and all the effects there-of. Of course, as we discuss in the main text, there would be quality of life costs beyond those arising from deaths or economic damage from both defeat by the Nazis or COVID-19, but those are extremely difficult to quantify or even compare sufficiently to judge on which side those costs would be greater, and way well be comparable within the wide margins of error we are having to deal with here.

Questions And Some Answers: A Few Fundamental Ideas About How To Live With Yourself And Others.

PART 1: The Basics

To Be Or Not To Be: the Worth of Life

You think therefore you are.

You interact “externally” with something called “physical reality”.

You interact “internally” with something called “mental reality”.

Your interactions with “mental reality” can affect your reaction to, and even your perceptions of, “physical reality.”

You are compelled to seek satisfaction.

You are compelled to try and avoid dissatisfaction.

“Reality as you perceive it” is a fusion of your physical and mental realities.

You seek satisfaction, and to avoid dissatisfaction, in “perceived reality.”

You do not know or have any access to the ultimate nature of “perceived reality.” In fact, the question may be meaningless. All that can have meaning to you is, by definition, reality as you perceive it (if perception is taken to subsume conception).

Perceived reality seems largely outside of your conscious control. It therefore seems outside of your “self”. However, you learn that certain interactions with perceived reality cause you satisfaction, and other interactions cause you dissatisfaction.

You develop “rules of thumb”, and eventually “mental models”, to attempt to predict the outcomes of your interactions with perceived reality, in such a way as to maximize your satisfaction and minimize your dissatisfaction. Now these models assume that events in “perceived reality” have some type of order: i.e. that they follow rules. However, the assumption of order is itself a type of model (or meta-model), and one that you find works.

Those “mental models” come, eventually, to include the assumption that other beings also have “minds”, i.e. they could also think that they think, therefore they are.

You attach notions of “worth” or “value” to happenings and aspects of perceived reality, depending on whether those aspects further your satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

You seek to know how best to increase the “worth” of your own life.

To do so you must throw away all prejudices and preconceptions, or you will just find rationalizations for answers in which you already have been led to believe.

You know of the possibility of your own “death”, but you don’t know anything about the nature of the “death-state”. It could involve a state of complete unawareness/non-thought/non-perception, or a condition of higher satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. You do, however, know of no way back from the “death-state” to your current state.

The death-state seems to be a complete unknown. As such you can not assert anything about the nature of this state in your reasoning. All you can suspect is that any continuity of mind from death back to life seems to be very unlikely, as evidence for any such continuity is generally lacking.

For the purposes of argument, therefore, death can thought of as a “neutral” (not personally satisfying or dissatisfying) state that is irrevocable.

You must first decide whether to carry on living.

If your life does not seem worthwhile, as dissatisfaction outweighs satisfaction, you may decide that it is not worth living. To do so avoids (given our convention about the nature of death) any further dissatisfaction, but it also avoids any further chance of satisfaction. As far as you know you can never be dissatisfied or satisfied again.

Given the apparently irrevocable nature of the transition it would therefore seem wise to investigate all chances for future satisfaction or dissatisfaction first.

To this end a number of points are worth bearing in mind:

Your satisfaction/dissatisfaction is not just a result of what happens to you, but how you react to it. This is equivalent to saying that your sense of worth is, to some extent, under your own control. This is the wisdom of the Buddhists, the Hindus and the Stoics. Detachment can allow you to avoid much dissatisfaction, while still being able to enjoy satisfaction when it arises, arguably all the more so as it will not be marred by fear of dissatisfaction.

Life can have no meaning or purpose that has worth to you unless it satisfies your nature at some level. Would you accept a purpose imposed on you from without, which would negate everything you consider to have worth?

Now it is possible that life has some deep purpose that would satisfy, and have worth, for all minds. This would be the equivalent to the Purpose or Meaning of Life as normally conceived. However, we can not be certain that there is any such common, ultimately satisfying, purpose. Only your sense of what has, and has not, worth can give your own life purpose, and, to an extent, that sense of worth is under your own control. Arguably the practice of mental self-discipline is as important as learning skills involving influencing physical reality to a “worthier” state.

Your own investigation of how to maximize the worth of your life can only continue while you are alive. Death could preclude some liberating insight, forever. Your current sense of “worth” is unlikely to correspond to your future sense of worth as your mind grows.

The latter point is crucial. “The most worthy way of living your life” can be thought of as a provisional model, perhaps largely unconscious, equivalent to any of your models about the workings of “perceived reality”. However, any models that end your existence preclude your further refinement of those models. Any “models of worth” that prevent further progress in the quest for finding greater worth in living are dead ends and need to pass a test of absolute certainty before being adopted. As it seems unlikely that any model of worth can pass such a test it seems fair to say that the “model of worth” that you should currently adopt should be the “best guess” you can arrive at, excluding all models of worth that require finality. All models of worth are likely to be provisional and should be treated as so: any models that deny the possibility of further progress (towards attaining an even more worthwhile existence) should be treated with extreme suspicion.

This principle: adopt the “best guess” way of living as the “good life”, after you have excluded all those best guesses that preclude their own refinement or replacement, can be applied to whole civilizations, species or even all intelligent, conscious, life.

The above approach can help to resolve some of the near-paradoxes with the utilitarian moral philosophy. For example: if unhappiness tends to more than offset happiness then, in the utilitarian calculus, suicide could seem the most rational option. The struggle for existence, and for finding meaning in existence, should be abandoned altogether. Alternatively, perhaps we should all withdraw into drug-induced, or virtual reality induced, bliss. However, both these interpretations of utilitarianism are dead ends; they would not allow any further development in the quest for the “good life”. As we can not be certain that these interpretations are the “last word” when it comes to models of worth they should therefore be ignored. Only open-ended models of worth should be adopted: those that allow further change.

Why is the Quest for the “Good Life” Open-ended?

An argument along the following lines could be advanced:

Satisfaction is, by definition, the mental state we want.

That “satisfaction” should have some correlate, in terms of mental activity.

If you could find a way to directly induce that mental activity in your mind you will have effortless satisfaction: you will have “short-circuited” life.

Therefore, isn’t withdrawal to some virtual reality or drug-induced bliss, once it becomes technically feasible, the “good life” after all?

There a are number of points that could counter such an argument, and indicate why the quest for the “good life” is genuinely open-ended.

First of all, the most effective mechanisms for inducing the bliss for the longest possible time need to be found. Though this is likely to be more of a technical problem could you ever be certain that more effective mechanisms are not possible?

Secondly, what is the state of highest bliss your mind could experience? That is: could you ever be certain that you had found the “highest” state, especially given the fact that “your mind” is itself not immutable, and with some changes could be capable of experiencing higher states of bliss of which it currently knows nothing.

Thirdly, and expanding on the above – do you really know for sure what “your mind”, indeed what “yourself”, really is? “Identity” seems itself to be a subjectively constructed model. Your identity is just your “sense of identity”. The following, in fact, seems likely:

Consciousness is consciousness: that is the only things that differentiate one consciousness from another consciousness are the contents of that consciousness, that is what that consciousness is aware of. Your identity, “your mind”, is defined by the contents of a consciousness. Those contents may include a “model of identity or self”. That model, that sense of self, is based on the fact that the contents of your consciousness appear to include, Russian doll-like, a recorded nested sequence of “earlier” contents of consciousness. The model derives from those recordings a sense of your own mind being extended into the “past”. It is this set of nested memories of mind-state that give you a sense of continuity of identity over time.

However, the time-extended self is only a “model”, an interpretation of reality. It is possible that you just sprang into being, complete with a full set of false memories. This is all the more credible given that our memories are often patchy, even false. In practice your recollection of your mental state, say yesterday, does not really seem to contain many levels of “nesting” (at best you may remember remembering something, but we never seem to remember remembering remembering something), but we will remember that, yesterday, we had a sense of continuity of self.

Basically we consider ourselves to be the same mind, the same “self”, as the mind whose “past” states we seem to remember, if very imperfectly. (Note that it may be the case that others will know more about our past condition than we do, but they will not remember our past subjective states, that is how we really felt about things. However, the latter aspect of memory may be the least reliable).

The above discusses the notion of “yourself over time” and indicates that the notion appears to be just one of the many models constructed by consciousness.

What about “yourself at an instant”? What are the limits to the contents of your mind? The whole of directly or indirectly perceived reality, that is potentially the whole of the universe. (If perceived with a very distorted perspective)? Certainly this would have to be the case if, as may actually be true, everything in the universe affects everything else. For a lengthier discussion on this see the section of “existence” and the tree falling in the forest, below.

So, an information handling process that recurses its informational content back upon itself infinitely but instantaneously would seem to be a “consciousness”. A “mind” could be thought of as a consciousness whose informational content includes memories of the past state of that informational content. Only “content” differentiates one “consciousness” from another. It is the memory of its past states that gives a mind a sense of self.

The “you” that is seeking satisfaction is therefore open in two senses. As your sense of self depends on no more than the continuation of memory of your past mental states “you” could change dramatically without ceasing to feel like “you”. In fact, a more “advanced” “you” might have a better memory of past mental states and therefore a stronger “youness”. Just as the “you” you are now is very different from , and has a far wider understanding of reality, than the “you” at, say, two years of age, so a future “you” could be very different again, perhaps due to changing life experiences or growing wisdom, or to processes of biological growth or decay. Similar criteria could be applied to whole cultures, even whole species.

The second sense in which “you” are open is the one in which what defines your nature, moment to moment, is the content of your consciousness. The relative psychological importance of items in that content is very malleable. Some people appear to have sought satisfaction in becoming “long-sighted” when it comes to their mental content, identification of the “self” with content beyond the immediate and merely personal has produced saints, sages and fanatics, but has been a route to a worthwhile life for many.

The quest for the good life is open-ended partly because “you” are open-ended. What is being sought is not the highest satisfaction for you as you are now, but the highest satisfaction of which you as you ever could be would be capable, that is the most worthwhile life “you” could ever live.

The Role of Delusion

Should you ever choose to believe something you suspect may be untrue?

Some self-delusions, if they further your satisfaction without damaging your mental faculties and further progress in your quest for the “good life”, are desirable. However, that’s a big “if”. Wide spread self-delusion is likely to distort your models of perceived reality, so that those models no longer fit the facts, if not impair your ability to think clearly at all. Models of worth based largely on self-delusion are therefore “closed”, they are dead-ends that should be ignored.

Delusion is not necessarily undesirable, but should be treated with extreme caution.

The Nature of Language

Language is the tagging of the ideas that we use to build our models of perceived reality with symbols.

Words are just tools for creating, manipulating and communicating our models of perceived reality. Their meanings are necessarily somewhat arbitrary and they have no mystical power or existence. The power of a word, or any other symbol, should be judged purely by its usefulness for creating, manipulating or communicating models of reality.

Words/symbols “tag” ideas – that is they “tag” meaning. Meaning itself can not be directly conveyed from one mind to another. To attempt to fully “define” a word is therefore futile, and will run slap up against the mind-body problem, as manifested by such puzzles as “how do you explain colour to a blind man?” All word definitions simply attempt to explain a symbol in terms of other symbols, and are useful in situations where the symbol being explained is not fully understood, but the symbols used in the explanation are understood.

The Meaning of Existence

We use the word “exist” to mean a “thing” that could impinge in any way on our perceived reality.

So, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it is there a noise? Theoretically no, for by definition a “thing” whose definition includes a statement that it is unperceived could never, by definition, impinge on our perceived reality. However, in practice, the noise could be perceived indirectly, i.e. by virtue of its effects rather than the noise itself. For example, the noise could startle a butterfly into flight, and, if it is the butterfly so beloved of chaos theory then those wing-beats could induce a weather system to form a storm, and that storm could very much impinge on our perceived reality. We would have perceived the noise, but without even knowing so. In practice our models of perceived reality suggest that “things” are so entangled that to define a thing that is not currently directly perceived as not existing is not useful. (In fact this may be related to the fact that quantum systems seem to “collapse” once they significantly interact with their surroundings).

The Imponderable: Mind and Matter/Subjectivity and Objectivity

An explanation is a model of perceived reality constructed in symbols.

Explanations follow rules, either explicit or implicit. Those rules could be materialised, e.g. as a computer program. Explanations can have an existence independent on whether or not we understand those explanations. For example, a computer could use an explanatory framework, apply it to some input data and predict outcomes.

Explanation is of the realm of matter/objectivity.

Understanding is a subjective sense of something making sense, of knowing what something “means”.

Understanding is of the realm of mind/subjectivity.

Now how do we explain colour to a blind man?

That question is one a sub-set of questions, all basically of the form how does the material/objective realm give rise to the subjective nature of sensation?

The answer to the question lies in understanding and explaining the connection between the material and mental realms.

At that point of connection, by virtue of the fact that they can connect, the material and mental realms must share something in common.

Now, if we could fully explain that shared something we would be fully reducing that shared something to something purely of the objective/material realm. That “something” would then cease to be shared with the mental realm. Anything that can be fully explained can be fully objectified. Anything fully objectifiable cannot be the point of connect between the objective and the subjective.

However, if we can fully understand the point of connection then that connection becomes something fully reducible to the subjective realm, and therefore ceases to be the point of connection.

Therefore that point of connection is inexplicable and incomprehensible. (Note also that the phrase “point of connection” is not meant necessarily to imply an actual point. For example, the subjective and objective realms could actually be entirely contiguous in a way that would be completely monistic).

Nor should we think that we can just “objectify” a subjective experience by taking the neural correlates of that experience and inducing those correlates directly into another mind, for we would still have no way to know how those neural correlates actually “felt” to the other mind.

PART 2: Shared Systems of Worth: Morality

How Should We Act Towards Others?

From the above we seek to live in a way that we find most fulfilling without closing us off from discovering or inventing ways to seek even higher forms of fulfilment.

Now, in the conduct of our lives we will inevitably come up against other beings that are also trying to lead their lives.

How should we behave towards those other beings?

We could decide to compete ruthlessly with them. However, in a dog eat world there will almost always be a bigger dog. Even if we postulate that here we are actually talking about the biggest dog, that biggest dog is likely to never be entirely certain that it is the biggest dog, or to have such an advantage over the other dogs that it’s life will not be one of ceaseless struggle and fear, or to be certain that altering circumstances or a simple twist of fate could not depose it from its position of biggest dog.

Therefore, the dog eat dog way of life is likely to be a miserable one even for the biggest dogs.

Of course, we could postulate dogs who just live for the dog eat dog struggle, but as such struggle is likely to be brought to a fatally abrupt end rather quickly, even in this circumstance such a way of living could be categorized as a way of seeking life fulfilment that is closed, as, like suicide, it arguably precludes any possibility of seeking any higher form of fulfilment.

Ruthless competition with others also frustrates the opportunities for mutual gain that could be generated by cooperation.

Finally, ruthless competition with others is likely to produce a very narrow sense of self, that confines that sense of self to the immediate and purely personal aspects of one’s life that are least dependable in terms of generating long term fulfilment. Such a narrow self may be lonely and prone to all sorts of deprivations and suffering. Often, generating a wider sense of self will be more fulfilling. In short, leading a life of ruthless competition is likely to confine one’s mind to what the Buddhists’ term the “burning house of the self”.

How then should we behave towards others?

We should behave in such a way to avoid the dog eat dog outcome described above, that maximizes opportunities for mutual gain through co-operation and for expanding the sense of self, but without making us prone to being taken advantage of by others.

A “rule of thumb” for living in this way would be:

“Do not put your own interest above the interests of others who would not put their own interests above yours.”

Now, the above rule means that, in situations where others put there own interests over yours you are allowed to also place your own interest over theirs. However, such situations are very likely to create the outcomes we are trying to avoid: dog eat dog ruthless competition, narrow sense of self and little cooperation.

Therefore we ought to modify and expand the above rule as follows:

“Do not put your own interest above the interests of others who would not put their own interests above yours, and act in a way to expand the situations where others do not put their own interests above yours.”

This rule encourages us to create what could be termed a “growing moral community”. Note that the moral community could include many beings capable of acting morally towards each other, in other words of following the above simple rule (in fact of only having to follow the non-expanded version of the rule). Membership of the “moral community” is therefore not limited to beings of a particular tribe or nation, or even species, or even order of being, such as created and non-created, as in evolved, beings.

This rule of how we should behave towards other beings is effectively equivalent to the “Golden Rule” core moral tenet of all major religions and many humanists: for example the “We must treat others as we wish others to treat us” cited in the “Declaration Toward a Global Ethic” of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1993, or the “treat others as you treat yourself” of the first millennium BCE Mahabharata.

It also shares with the Kantian principle of “act if you are a universal legislator” in so far as, within the “moral community”, it encourages you to act as you would want others to also act, rather than acting in a way that advances your own interests at the expense of others.

It shares with Utilitarianism the principle of equivalence of the well being of all, in other words that I can not hold my own well being dearer than that of others. However, it avoids the paradoxes where-by strict Utilitarianism can sometimes seemingly create outcomes offensive to our moral intuitions, such as the slave-owner paradox, whereby it maximizes Utility if the fulfilment gained by the masters of slaves through slave ownership more than offsets the fulfilment deprived from the slaves.

Equality

Rather, the need to respect the needs of others as much as one’s own, provided the favour is returned, unavoidably entails a strong commitment to equality, as everyone must accord equal respect to the needs of everyone else.

Therefore no member of a moral community should, through action or even inaction, increase their own fulfilment at the expense of any other member of the moral community who already benefits from less fulfilment.

In other words, as the Golden Rule means we must equally value each other’s need for fulfilment, we can define the following principle of equality:

A moral community must be organised so as to minimise inequality by ensuring no one can gain fulfilment by reducing the fulfilment of anyone with less fulfilment than themselves.

This principle also equates to “fairness” and “social justice”. It is not, it must be noted, a mandate for any form of “free loading” or indeed for any form of exploitation at all. Where work or effort in any way detracts from fulfilment, that work or effort should be counted against those workers’ fulfilment, meaning that, when assessing equality of fulfilment, those workers should enjoy sufficient total fulfilment to compensate for their efforts.

Consider the implications of not following such a principle: that would mean we would create a community organised in such a way that the fulfilment of some, lets say the “winners”, is furthered by depriving the less fortunate, those with less fulfilment, let’s say the “losers”, of some or all of their already lesser fulfilment. That means that those favoured by such an arrangement would be having their needs placed above the needs of the worse off in such a community. That would be an obvious violation of the Golden Rule, that each member of a moral community should respect the interests, the need for fulfilment, of others as much as their own; as equal to their own.

This is a radical egalitarianism, but one that follows inescapably from the Golden Rule. Amongst the implications of this principle of equality are that it is indeed true, if the principle is accepted, that “the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members”. Any arrangement of living together in a moral community which benefits the least well off members of that community is to be preferred to other arrangements that do not help the least well off, even if those other arrangements would leave everyone else better off. Otherwise, the interests of the least well off are not being respected equally to those of the better off, thus violating the Golden Rule.

Note that the fact that it is allowable, and may be necessary, to re-organise arrangements for living together in a moral community in such a way that fulfilment is effectively reallocated from those who would otherwise be better off, in order to improve the condition of whoever will be worse off, means that this formulation for equality is NOT Pareto efficiency.

It is also not the maximisation of total well-being, so it avoids the slave owner paradox of Utilitarianism, where the well-being of the slave-owners more than offsets the reduced well-being of the slaves, so slavery is deemed permissible. If a more equal state makes whoever will be worst off better off, even at the cost of reducing total well-being (in the case of the paradox, that of the blissful slave-owners), then that increase in equality is moral.

Fulfilment

However, it is also not absolute equality of outcomes. It is radical but not “masochistic” egalitarianism. For example, it does not constrain the fulfilment of the most fulfilled in a moral community, provided those extra heights of fulfilment are not, in any way, obtained at the expense of the less fulfilled. It is not, for example, a mandate for everyone just being “equally poor”, unless, of course, being poor is what gives people fulfilment.

While respecting the principle of equality outlined above as primary, we also need to respect the need for every member of the moral community, within the constraints created by that primary principle, to find maximum fulfilment. We therefore need to add a principle of maximisation of total fulfilment, as follows:

Where there are many ways our community could be organised that accord with the principle of equality, the one that should be adopted is the one that maximises open-ended fulfilment, where open-ended fulfilment is fulfilment that does not close off the possibility of obtaining still higher forms of fulfilment.

This equates to the positive freedom of organising the moral community in a way that maximises the possibility each individual living a fulfilling life.

This principle is similar to the maximization of total utility in Utilitarianism but without compromising the commitment to egalitarianism necessitated by any “Golden-rule” style morality, combined with the principle that we should seek the highest fulfilment that does not preclude the attainment of still higher forms of fulfilment.

We could summarize these organizing principles as maximizing total open-ended fulfilment while reducing inequality by first ensuring that no one advances their own fulfilment by depriving the already less fulfilled of some or all of their already lesser fulfilment.

For example, in the case of the slave owners of the slave owner paradox, the only way to make the slave owners more fulfilled is to make the slaves less fulfilled, so that situation is immoral.

It is also important to note that the exact individuals who are “least well off” will vary as arrangements for living together change, and when we refer to the “least well off” we do not mean specific individual members of a moral community, but whoever is least well off in that given situation. Thus it isn’t moral to, say, further the fulfilment of the least well off members of a moral community by sacrificing the fulfilment of the better off members of that community to the point where the roles are simply reversed. Such as situation would neither increase total open-ended fulfilment or reduce inequality.

We should re-emphasise that the need to maximise total fulfilment can result in situations where inequality is actually increased, provided the least well off are not made worse off, provided there was no way, in that situation, that the least well off could have been made better off. Consider, for example, the case of a situation where there is a conflict of interest is over a potential source of fulfilment that cannot be shared, and the initial position of both parties to the dispute is one of equal fulfilment, then following the above principles would require that the conflict should be resolved in favour of the party that would then generate the most fulfilment. That party then maximizes total open-ended fulfilment, and even though this causes an inequality, it does so without reducing the current fulfilment of the other party.

For example, consider say a job opportunity that cannot be shared. Two people want the job, and the fulfilment of either person not obtaining the role will be increased by a zero amount. However, if one person gets the job fulfilment will be increased by double the amount that would be gained if the other person gets the job, perhaps because one person has a greater need for the job than the other, or would place a higher value on the job, or is better able to perform the job and so increase fulfilment more generally, or some combination of any of the above.

In that situation we have to compare a situation where one person obtains zero fulfilment, and the other person one measure of fulfilment, with a situation where one person still obtains zero fulfilment, but the other person generates a double measure of fulfilment (with that fulfilment accruing to themselves or perhaps being distributed more generally if they are better able to discharge the role). The latter resolution is preferable, as it is the situation where the fulfilment arising from one person is maximized, as a double measure of fulfilment, where as the fulfilment of the losing individual is zero in either case, and is therefore not reduced in this scenario.

Another way of looking at this is that it would not be possible to improve the lot of the loser any further (the loser gains zero units of fulfilment) regardless of who wins the job, but the case where the individual winning the job generates one unit of fulfilment represents a loss of one unit of fulfilment compared with the case where the individual winning the job generates two units of fulfilment. That loss of one unit of fulfilment, because it does not make the loser any better off, is pointless and so awarding the job to the individual who generates two units of fulfilment is the most moral thing to do. Otherwise we would be making someone worse off without actually improving the lot of the least well off party to this interaction, the loser. Pointless “levelling down” is to be eschewed.

In practice it is even likely that some degree of inequality is necessary to create incentives for efforts that maximise total fulfilment, provided that, in the final analysis, no one’s fulfilment has been lost to benefit anyone else who already had greater fulfilment.

Freedom From Oppression

As we have seen no member of a moral community should, through action or even inaction, increase their own fulfilment at the expense of any other member of the moral community who already benefits from less fulfilment.

Equity, meaning here the interests of all being respected equally in terms of outcomes, is equivalent to liberty in at least a “negative” sense, as freedom from oppression. By freedom from oppression we mean that no being is allowed to arbitrarily impose their interests on another and in doing so restrict the other being from following their own interests.

“Arbitrarily”, in the above sentence, means acting purely out of selfishness. The interests of every member of a moral community act in such a way as to restrict the pursuit of interests of the other members of a moral community, but in a non-arbitrary way, meaning that conflicts of interest must be resolved to maximise open ended fulfilment but within the constraint that no one should act to increase their own fulfilment by depriving any of the less fulfilled members of the moral community of any of their fulfilment. We must accord equal respect to the need for fulfilment of each and every member of the moral community.

A form of equity and an equivalent form of freedom therefore arise naturally in a moral community, purely by virtue of the fact that each member of the moral community respects the interests of other members as equal to their own. No member of a moral community should oppress any other member of the moral community, by treating that other person as subordinate to their own needs, as merely a “means” to further their own satisfaction, rather than as a being with needs of their own. The strong must never oppress the weak.

In practice, within a moral community, this form of freedom will correspond to equality before the law, as the laws of a moral community, by definition, should already be upholding the principle of equality.

We can therefore elucidate another principle:

All members of a moral community must be free from oppression, where oppression means anyone in any capacity acting in way that violates the principle of equality.

Consensus

But who decides the meaning of fulfilment? My idea of what is “fulfilling”, and especially of what are the “highest” forms of fulfilment, the most deeply fulfilling forms of fulfilment, could be completely different from yours. It quickly becomes impossible to compare the “interests” or “needs” of different beings, let alone assign “units of measure” to fulfilment.

Fulfilment is subjective. It can no more be made objective than any other qualia: that is the essence of the mind-body problem. Only a bat can know what it is like to be a bat.

However, the principle that all beings that are willing to respect the needs of other beings as their own still holds, to avoid the “dog eat dog world” and a general collapse into sullen, uncooperative, fearful, selfishness.

There is a route out of this dilemma. Firstly, to accept that agreement about the meaning of fulfilment and “interests” or “needs” requires respecting each being’s definition of fulfilment equally on its own terms, secondly to realise that the meaning of fulfilment must therefore be arrived at by seeking consensus.

Even the fool only knows the fool’s own mind. Though it is true that we would be best to listen to the assessment of the wise of the possible effects of the fool’s version of fulfilment on others, and the fool itself would be better off listening to the wise if they point out flaws in the fool’s own idea of open-ended fulfilment, ultimately only the fool can know what does or does feel fulfilling to the fool.

Therefore, the moral community must arrive at its own mutually acceptable definition of forms of fulfilment.

For brevity, we will now define a conception of what constitutes a fulfilling existence as the “good life”. It is therefore up to the moral community to arrive at a consensus understanding of the “good life”.

In other words, something approximating democracy emerges naturally out of this “Golden Rule” like morality. Each moral agent in that community gets an equal voice on what does or does not constitute the “good life”, because what does or does not feel like a “good life” is entirely subjective to every being and all members of the moral community must accord each other equal respect, although all those possible and varied conceptions of the good life must then be compared and contrasted with each other, and their interactions and conflicts discussed, so that the moral community can arrive at a consensus, compromise, conception of the good life through open debate. In this way, freedom of expression, where all members of a moral community respect the right of all other members of a moral community to have a voice and express their own opinions, also naturally emerges from this system of ethics.

We can therefore elucidate a further principle of consensus:

The meaning of the “good life” must therefore be arrived at by seeking a consensus of the moral community, with every member of that moral community having an equal voice in generating that consensus.

For example, in most societies that equal voice is likely to mean an equal vote.

Autonomy

Furthermore, the fact that the feeling of what does or not constitute the good life is ultimately subjective means that, in so far as a member of the moral community’s pursuit of their own conception of the good life has no significant detrimental effect on the fulfilment of others, they should be allowed to pursue that version of the good life with no interference from the broader community.

In other words, a principle of respecting autonomy also emerges out of combining a “Golden Rule” like morality with the idea that the feeling of the fulfilment is ultimately subjective.

Of course, there is also no objective measure of what “significant detrimental effect on the fulfilment of others” actually means. The scope of autonomy therefore becomes something else that must be decided by the consensus of the moral community. Only when so deciding all members of the community must bear in mind that, as the Golden Rule requires all to be treated equally by the moral system of the community, an overly restrictive scope for autonomy means that an equally restrictive scope will be applied to their own autonomy.

We can therefore derive a principle of autonomy:

The autonomy of every member of a moral community to live according their own notion of what constitutes open-ended fulfilment must be respected, with the limits to that autonomy, where those limits are necessitated by the fact that anyone’s actions could affect anyone else, defined only according to the principle of consensus.

This principle of autonomy is another form of “negative freedom”: the freedom of the individual from interference by others within the sphere where their actions do not have a significant affect on others.

Diversity

There is another major implication of the fact that a moral community can only define its conception of the good life through a consensus generating process: although there is an absolute core of moral principles logically derivable from what amounts to “enlightened self interest” (specifically something akin to the Golden Rule that, when combined with the fact that the feeling of fulfilment is ultimately subjective, also implies a need to arrive at a conception of the good life through consensus, and a need to respect autonomy) there-after all more detailed moral rules are actually “relative”, and could vary from moral community to moral community, context to context, across space and time.

For example, there can be no absolute moral rule about whether homosexuality is permissible or not. One moral community could confidently include homosexuality in the sphere of “autonomy”. But imagine a post-apocalypse society desperately trying to grow its population: for such a society encouraging the survival of their society by discouraging “non-productive” sexual relations could be an important aspect of their conception, in those circumstances, of the good life. Equally, a society suffering the effects of over-population might seek to encourage homosexuality. Also note that there is no absolute moral rule about whether heterosexuality is permissible or not. For example, consider a society with ready access to technologies for assisted reproduction, but which is threatened by a plague in the form of a catastrophic sexually transmitted disease.

Similarly, the degree to which equality of outcomes in terms of fulfilment equates to economic equality would be up to the moral community to decide, and would be highly dependent on context. For example, a “post-scarcity society”, where resources are currently effectively unlimited, perhaps one with an “open” frontier easily accessible to all, or which is so technologically advanced than any material shortages are completely avoidable, where all can, with their own efforts, gain what they need to live and make a living (for the sake of argument let’s assume that even somehow includes the sick and infirm), would take a more permissive view of subsequent inequalities than a society where the things people need to live and make a living are controlled by the few.

In the post-scarcity case, where everyone can gain what they need, economic inequality becomes almost a matter of personal choice and does not translate strongly into outcomes in terms of equality of fulfilment. However, in the latter “vital resources controlled by the few” scenario the few would likely use their control of the means to live and make a living to advance their interests above those who lack such means, there-by violating the Golden Rule, and to overly restrict their lives in other ways too, thus violating their autonomy, and use their “economic power” to influence the ongoing consensus generating process in that moral community, thus preventing a true consensus where all voices are equal from ever actually emerging. Here economic inequalities can result in huge differences in life outcomes in terms of open-ended fulfilment, often even bringing life itself to an otherwise avoidable premature end. Historically, “resources being controlled by the few”, especially resources needed to generate other resources such as productive land, has been the most usual human experience in at least post-neolithic societies.

A moral community will give expression to its consensus about the need for economic equality in how it defines the rules governing economic interactions, such as regulations, laws on what type of economic entity are formally recognised, rules on tax and social protection policies, and the extent to which it decides to organise its resources (and here the resources that can be used to generate other resources will be particularly important) communally or individually. It is important to note that it is the responsibility of the community as a whole, through its generated consensus, to decide how it wants to encourage economic equality, or, indeed, how it wants to ensure adherence to the principle of equality more generally.

What is fulfilling and what is fair, meaning what constitutes following the principles of fulfilment and equality in any given situation, is up to the community to freely decide, within the context in which that community finds itself.

Great caution needs to be taken where any individuals want to take decisions into their own hands that redistribute fulfilment. Taking for a moment economic resources as a source of fulfilment, simply going beyond the rules of the moral community to arbitrarily seize the resources of others is not permissible, as that involves individuals breaching Golden Rule style morality, by placing either their own needs or their own decision-making authority above that of others. Individual charity also becomes a last resort: a response to emergency need. It may be necessary when individuals are attempting to extend a moral community, but even in that case it would arguably be best offered on a communal rather than individual basis. Within a moral community, outside of those situations, the aim is that charity should not be necessary.

Charity is commendable in that it offers scope to exercise compassion, and a compassionate state of mind will best serve the creation and sustenance of a moral community. However, charity can also become a source of control, a means by which wealthier individuals and groups can dominate the poorer, ultimately to selfishly serve their own interests. Charity can be self-serving and arbitrary, even to such an extent that it increases deviation from the principle of equality. The most moral action of the charitable in a moral community should be to vigorously give voice to the need for fairness when the community negotiates and continually re-negotiates its consensus over such matters. If the consensus of the community is charitable the rules will be charitable, the principle of equality will be upheld and there should be no one within the moral community who needs individual charity, beyond sudden, immediate emergencies, where individuals “on the scene” can respond faster than the community itself. Outside of such sudden crises, a properly organised moral community should naturally protect all the vulnerable. In fact, an increasing need for charity is likely to be a sign that a moral community is breaking down.

Note that a moral community may also regard some needs as so fundamental to even having a chance at a fulfilling life that they will, by consensus, elevate those needs to the level of “rights”. “Rights” here means preconditions for finding some fulfilment that are regarded as so basic that they must be made available to all members of a moral community. Some of those “rights” may merely be re-expressions of the fundamental moral principles we have deduced above, such as the right to be free from oppression, and as such are universal. Others, however, may be more specific, such as the “right” to education or housing. Such more specific rights are not somehow chiselled into ethereal stone in some ideal Platonic realm: rather they are simply principles agreed by the consensus of a moral community operating within a particular context. For example, a “right” to housing may not make much sense to a nomadic community roaming an environment with a warm climate. It is up to each moral community, continually, to define and re-define, grant or revoke, these context specific rights, through its consensus generating processes.

We can therefore define a principle of diversity as follows:

Deriving detailed rights, ethics, laws and customs from these fundamental moral principles is up to the consensus of each moral community, dependent on context and the preference of each such community. This means that there will a diversity of rights, ethics, laws and customs, agreed within moral communities in differing places and times.

A Role for Majority Decision-making.

But how, within a moral community, should otherwise irreconcilable differences of interest be resolved, assuming interests collide, compromise is not possible and just allowing difference by respecting autonomy is also not feasible? In such an instance it is the majority opinion of the members of the moral community that should be respected.

Why? If you are in the minority, how can this be in your enlightened self interest? In fact it is actually in your interest to behave this way, because whenever such differences arise you are, by definition, more likely to find yourself in the majority than the minority. This rule is also, of course, most likely to maximise open-ended fulfilment without compromising equality (though it is not guaranteed to do so, as this assumes that the “majority” in a moral community is able to choose an option that is both moral and serves its own best interest). Finally, the moral community must have a mechanism for resolving such difficulties and majority rule is, by definition, the most likely to be viable in terms of having the widest support, and, provided it is tempered by respect for the autonomy of any minority groups, majority rule ought not to be too overbearing. A stable moral community serving the interests of most of its members most of the time will tend to work in the enlightened self interest of most or even all of its members.

We can therefore derive a principle of majority decision-making as follows:

Where it is impossible for a moral community to arrive at a complete consensus through discussion and compromise, or to agree to differ by allowing autonomy, then consensus should adhere to the will of the majority.

Where individuals membership of minorities is persistent rather than transient those minorities will often be identified with a “community” of their own. In practice, we usually live within overlapping and nested “moral communities”. Where such moral communities derive different rules by consensus, or apply rules differently, how should potential conflicts between the different rules of these moral communities be resolved, and what is the limit to the autonomy of each moral community?

Subsidiarity

Moral communities are a type of “society”. We define “society” as a group of interacting individuals that sets some of its own rules governing those interactions, i.e. a rule-bound and rule-making group. A society can be anything from a sports club to the United Nations, and all points in-between. The most important societies in our lives are the “sovereign” ones, where by sovereign we mean they have the ultimate rule-making say, overriding that of any component societies that form part of that sovereign society, or any broader societies of which that society is a member. Even where such societies have delegated some rule-making authorities to other societies they retain the right to take that rule-making authority back.

Usually, we are only members of a single sovereign society: in other words we participate in only one society that has ultimate rule making authority. However, it is possible to live within an arrangement where different societies hold sovereignty over different rule-sets. For example, from the fall of the Roman empire in the West up until the Reformation the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and of its ecclesiastical laws continued to hold throughout most of Western Europe, alongside that of the local secular rulers. Such arrangements are possible, but, unless the rule-sets are perfectly delineated and never conflict, rivalries will ultimately tend to occur between the overlapping sovereign societies, resulting in one or other attaining complete sovereignty. Situations of “parallel sovereignty” are therefore inherently unstable unless (as ought to the case in any sensible “federal” arrangement) such arrangements include provision for impartial and mutually acceptable dispute resolution mechanisms.

In the world post the Reformation and the European conquest of the Americas the bulk of the human population lives in sovereign societies that are also “states”. In order to be “sovereign” a society must be able to enforce its own rules over those of any other rule-making bodies. That authority could be moral, but more usually, historically, it has relied on the power to coerce. It is much easier to project the power to coerce within a carefully defended and controlled territory than it is to project such a power arbitrarily in space. As any society emerges and is sustained by interactions between the members of that society, societies also tend to be formed of individuals who effectively live in proximity with each rather than those who are scattered (though effective proximity increases in terms of distance as transportation and communication improves). Nomads and refugees can form societies of their own, but the real or apparent conflicts between the rules of these societies and those of the states with which these peripatetic societies overlap can cause friction and suspicion.

Therefore, sovereign societies tend to be associated with “states” in the sense defined by Max Weber: societies (and here we mean societies that have expanded beyond mere “bands” of people who are personally known to each other) that have the overriding use of force within a given territory. States that become totally sovereign, ultimately obtaining the rights to override the edicts of any other rule-making power in every sphere, are what are normally referred to as sovereign states (by definition, therefore, states did not become sovereign states in the Western Europe of recent centuries until they were able to confidently reject the authority of the Roman Catholic church, i.e. from the Reformation onwards). A state able to assert total sovereignty requires considerable authority both over its members and over other possible rival societies, so sovereign states are often associated with powerful sources of authority such as permanent military establishments, sovereign currencies backed by efficient systems of taxation, formalised bureaucracies to handle all the associated administration, and “softer” sources of influence, such as strong in-group cohesion created by shared language, perceived ethnicity or supposedly common values. For the latter reason sovereign states are often also nation states (where a nation denotes a group of people who tend to self-identify as having shared language, ethnicity or values). In fact, sovereign states are so commonly also nation states that the two expressions, sovereign state and nation state, tend to be used interchangeably. Often, it is the sovereign state that “retrofits” the idea of a “nation” to itself in order to improve its own internal cohesion.

Historically, most societies that have expanded beyond the “band” of people personally known to each other, including most sovereign states, have not been based on consent. Although such societies were often influenced by Golden Rule style moralities, the full implications of such systems of thought were not allowed to be worked through, so that, instead of respecting the right of each member of society to have their voice heard, such societies were based on command instead of mutual consent.

Where consent based social arrangements have emerged, it has often been as a result of such alternative arrangements growing and spreading within command-based societies. Sometimes this has been among the elites themselves, as a way of avoiding mutually destructive conflicts within the elites by instead evolving peaceful means to resolve disputes through consultation and through mechanisms for more impartial decision making, such as courts following a predefined rule of law. Sometimes it has arisen from below, for example in the form of popular assemblies or protest movements.

In the following discussion all societies are also considered to be “moral” societies, meaning moral communities, meaning groups that ensure that all their rules are consistent with the Golden Rule style ethics elaborated above. Moral societies, by definition, are consent not command based. For brevity the adjective “moral” will not be prefixed to every single following occurrence of the word “society”, but please assume it is there.

It is, as we have seen, only individual minds that can decide what they find fulfilling, i.e. who can define their own interests. Individuals participating in the consensus of a society have created a society that best reflects their own definition of their own interests, that “works for them”. Therefore the respect for autonomy that applies to individuals should also apply to the societies that those individuals create. In a way, those moral societies, created by the consent of their individual moral members, because they subjectively “make sense” to those individuals, should be regarded themselves as “extended individuals”.

However, just as individuals affect each other so do societies. Therefore, there have to be limits on the autonomy of societies.

The moral imperative to create an ever more extensive moral community means that societies should seek to come together to form larger societies, indeed, if they are moral societies they would be obliged to do so.

When this happens such societies must decide how differences in their rule systems, and in application of those rule systems, will be respected or reconciled. The principle of autonomy means that any decisions about rules that do not have significant effect beyond a society should be decided by that society. In other words, a principle of subsidiarity, of devolving decision-making authority to the lowest reasonable level, emerges naturally from this Golden Rule style system of ethics, once it is combined with the insight, arising from the mind-body problem, that the “good life” is a subjective concept.

Again, though, we have the problem of defining “significant effect”, or, in other words, the degree of autonomy that should be respected for rule-making and applying those rules. To agree that degree of autonomy, either in the first instance or whenever it might change, even if powers will be both lost and gained so that arguably, overall, the degree of autonomy remains constant, requires a majority consensus of all individual members of the wider society.

However, merely relying on a majority consensus of all individual members of the wider society risks allowing more populous societies to dominate less populous societies, thus marginalising the smaller societies. For example, the larger societies might seek to extend or restrict rules on autonomy in such a way as to advance their own interests at the expense of the interests of the smaller societies. That amounts to the individual members of the larger societies not respecting the needs of the individual members of the smaller societies as equal to their own, thus violating the Golden Rule.

Therefore, ideally all the societies affected would also need to approve any definition of their autonomy. Where the societies in question constitute a formal level of nesting of societies within a larger society, for example regions in a state, or states in a federation, or, say, branches of a cooperative, then how to do this is relatively straight-forward. Agreeing changes to autonomy will also require a majority consensus of all such affected component societies. Thus, when it comes to deciding the extent of autonomy, each component society of the wider society is treated the same as each individual member of the wider society, as, in a way, an “extended individual”. Simultaneously, as each individual member of the wider moral community could also be affected, a majority consensus must also be sought amongst the general population. Any changes to autonomy can only be accepted if approved at both levels.

Just as all individuals must be given equal autonomy (be equal before the “rules”), all member societies at a given level of nesting within a wider society must also be accorded equal autonomy. Each component society (at a given level of “nesting” within the wider society) must be respected equally, so must have its autonomy defined in the same way. That means that, should any society want to change those rules about autonomy, for example perhaps because a particular society is seeking to join the wider society or trying to create a looser relationship, a consensus as described above must be obtained.

Note that the autonomy of any society that is a member of a wider society is also likely to include the ability to non-permanently delegate some of that authority to other societies, including wider societies that include that society or “smaller” societies that are included by that society, as that society sees fit.

In this way it is possible to model how autonomy and consensus, and changes to autonomy and consensus, should operate across nested and differently grouped societies.

That deals with societies that are formal components of a larger society, such as states within a federation. A more difficult case is where societies exist within a broader society, but are not formal components of a wider society, for example religious groups, political parties or indeed any other special interest groups. Where the containing society seeks to change rules in a way that may affect such societies, it may not even be possible to identify which specific societies should participate in generating the consensus of the affected societies. For example, if food standard rules impact on religious dietary restrictions, should only the directly affected religious communities be given a say, or, as this is setting a precedent interfering with religious freedoms, should all religious communities be some way consulted? Also, what actually constitutes a “religious community”?

Such cases are not clear cut, and how to address these situations will have to be decided upon by the consensus generating processes of the containing society, dependent on context. At a minimum, though, the autonomy of these societies should be regarded as an expression of the autonomy of the members of these societies, and the usual rules on respecting the autonomy of the individual applied. Containing societies may also choose to protect the autonomy of specific types of contained societies by legislating to respect certain specific rights, such as the right of freedom of religious practice. Another possibility includes consulting with widely recognised representatives of such societies before making any changes that could affect their communities. Such a system of consultation could be extended even further: for example, by allowing all contained societies over a certain size, which have a formal and direct membership, to appoint representatives to a legislative body that reviews any changes to the laws, excluding from such arrangements political parties and most likely all such bodies that exist for purely political reasons. Another variation, in a representative democracy, is to make rules establishing that certain quotas of representatives must originate from specific special interest groups. The overall aim of all such measures is to protect the autonomy of minorities, thereby allowing minorities to protect their own interests, as defined by their concept of the “good life”.

Note that the subsidiarity of the arrangements outlined above implies that a strict application of Golden-rule style morality, combined with an understanding that we all can only define our own sense of fulfilment, including which societies “work” for us, means an end to a single one of the societies, in which we find ourselves to be nested, being totally sovereign in all matters. The sovereign state (including sovereign nation states) would have to be replaced with some form of federal arrangement.

Additionally, even beyond those federal arrangements, we may wish to give extra protections to the autonomy of the other communities and minority groups in which we find ourselves, in the ways described above.

We can therefore derive a principle of subsidiarity as follows:

The autonomy of each and every moral community contained within a wider moral community should be as respected as the autonomy of individual members of a moral community.

Is there a Schadenfreude Paradox?

The Golden Rule means we must give equal respect to each other’s need for fulfilment, so we must not advance our own fulfilment at the expense of anyone with less fulfilment.

But what if the least fulfilled in our moral community only find fulfilment from schadenfreude? They can only be happy if everyone else is unhappy.

We could counter that such people are not moral agents. But they could be: for example if they are willing to compromise their love of schadenfreude enough so that the now much degraded fulfillment of others matches their own only part satisfied desire for schadenfreude. This would be a sort of compromise in misery, with everyone being equally worse off, but our otherwise completely unfulfilled schadenfreude lovers as satisified with their lot as they can be without making others even worse off than themselves.

However, this would be ignoring the fact that it is the moral community as a whole which defines the “good life”, which reaches a consensus about what has “worth”, i.e. what truly constitutes fulilment, and what does not. Unless the community agrees that schadenfreude constitues open-ended fulfilment, has “worth” as an aspect of the good life, then the plight of the schadenfreude lovers can be disregarded.

Indeed, as schadenfreude will drag down everyone’s scope for fulilment, and do so indefinitely, any community is likely to decide that schadenfreude is not an “open-ended” type of fulfilment, if it can be regarded as fulfilment at all.

Defining the Membership of Moral Communities

We also have to ask how the membership of a moral society is defined. Technically, joining any such society, and being respected as a member with an equal voice, is open to anyone who willing to respect other people’s interests as their own (given that it is a defining characteristic of a moral society that the favour will be returned). But who meets that criterion is difficult to discern and will still be open to interpretation. Rules have to be established, by the consent of the members of the moral community. But that means the moral community has to have members to decide how it will admit members in the first place!

This is a “chicken and egg” paradox resolved in the same way as the actual chicken and egg paradox. Moral communities evolve out of other societies. Those societies might simply be small bands or networks of individuals who know each other and initially co-operate because of the possibility of continuous reciprocation reinforced by emotional ties. Such societies might elaborate a Golden Rule style morality and other formal rules as they enlarge. That enlargement might not be into a vacuum, but could be into the context of a wider already existent command-based society that encompassed the original band or network. Alternatively or additionally, conflicts within a command based society, such as protests or revolts or destructive rivalries within the elites, or the need to create greater cohesion to face threats (for example, the way kings were often forced to call parliaments to organise finance to fight wars) might result in the increasing adoption of consent based systems. The consent-based society that emerges will then have its own rules on “membership”, even though those rules might somewhat co-opt the rules of the command based society that is being replaced, such as potential membership at birth, and a full “voice” at whatever that society considers as maturity.

The above describes how consent based societies emerge in practice, but what principles should such societies follow when granting membership and a “voice”?

To be a potential moral agent, meaning an entity possibly capable of acting morally and being treated morally, a being must know its own mind sufficiently to have at least a vague sense of what constitutes and does not constitute its well-being. Otherwise a being can have no interests to be respected equally to your own.

Therefore only beings in which consciousness has emerged or in some sense “localised” can potentially be moral agents.

Beings that have never been conscious can never have developed “interests” that could possibly be violated. On the other hand, beings that have been conscious, but then lapsed into a potentially temporary state of unconsciousness, already have interests, including most likely, for example, an interest in being able to resume their consciousness at some point in order to continue an open ended quest for fulfilment. Such once conscious, now unconscious and potentially again conscious beings are therefore still potential moral agents. Never conscious beings are not. A never conscious being can never have arrived at even the vaguest sense of what is fulfilling, of what “works for it”.

Violating the interests of temporarily unconscious beings would, if we assume equality of treatment, also mean that your own interests could be violated whenever you become unconscious.

Once a being has a sense of its own degree of well being then it is a potential moral agent. In other words, it is now a possible member of a moral community. However, it may not yet be an actual moral agent because it may not yet be able or willing to reciprocate, that is respect your interests even if you respect its interests. In such a situation, provided you can do so without exposing your own overall sense of well being to damage by the potentially immoral acts of the other being, you are obliged to encourage the other being to become an actual moral agent and there-by an addition to your moral community. If you find fulfilment in so inducting the other being into your moral community then the sense of well being you so gain may even offset any potential harm to your well being done by the other being during this interaction.

A being able to respect your interests as you respect its interests is an actual moral agent and a member of your moral community, and so, to generalise, ought to be recruited into a moral society.

What we could term an “ideal” moral agent would go beyond mutual respect of interests and also seek to extend its moral community to other beings. But any being willing to respect the interests of members of a moral community as much as its own ought to become a member of a moral community.

This means that we should treat any being that has a sense of its own well-being as a potential member of our moral community if there is any possibility of it ever joining our moral community. But what about a situation where there is realistically no such possibility, where we are dealing with beings which, it seems likely, have a sense of their own well being, but could never, ever reciprocate? Then we are under no compelling obligation to treat such beings morally. Nevertheless, there are still constraints on our actions. To establish a habit that such beings can be treated however we want would be likely to spill-over into how we treat potential and possibly even actual moral agents. Therefore harming such beings where there is no gain, or where the only gain is perverse satisfaction in causing the harm, is still unacceptable, as otherwise we risk creating a precedent that it is acceptable to so treat any apparently conscious beings. We “normalise cruelty” and so undermine our basic moral taboos. Breaking those taboos may also encourage our own selfishness and so compromise any attempts to broaden our sense of self: it could harm us in a deep psychological (“spiritual” way). Finally, other moral agents may have an interest in the welfare of these beings with a sense of their own well being but no capability of reciprocating morally, such as emotional ties to those beings, so harming those beings would also harm actual moral agents.

All moral agents ought to have an equal voice in influencing the generation of consensus within a moral society. That is for a two reasons. The first is that, as such agents are now moral, they are required to have their interests respected equally alongside those of everyone else (in the moral community). If not someone’s interest have been placed above others, violating the Golden Rule (or, to be more precise, the interests of some moral agents have been placed above others, violating the Golden Rule). The second is that, as explored above, only the moral agent can define its own sense of fulfilment; what “works for it”. Only the being itself can ultimately define what is in its own interest. Therefore the moral agent must have a voice equal to the other moral agents in expressing and protecting its own interests. Only the being itself can “feel” what matters to it, and how much, in its own mind.

Note, the need for equality of voice (for example, an equal “vote” in reaching democratic decisions) arises purely as a result of those two reasons. Provided the being in question is mentally competent enough to be a moral agent, no further considerations of competency arise.

So what does all of this mean in terms of practical detail?

Joint Decision Making

The need to, in some way, allow all members of a moral society an equal say in making that society’s decisions implies the need for widespread consent-seeking mechanisms. Basically, the combination of a Golden Rule style morality, which requires all to equally respect the interests of all, with the fact that the mind-body problem means that each of us can only individually “know” in our own minds what “works for us”, creates an obligation to develop social structures that are radically democratic in the sense of giving an equal voice to all in making decisions.

However, the detail of what such radical democracy means in practice must be context dependent. In other words it will vary from time and place, according to “local” circumstances. For example, consent-seeking mechanisms could mean participatory democracy, representative democracy (with consent being conditionally offered for non-indefinite periods to decision-making by elected representatives) to even technocracy (provided the technocrats are appointed by a democratically mandated process, and held to account under a democratically agreed set of rules. In some societies, the way judges are appointed may be a case in point). Even demarchy, selection to make decisions by lot, is a possibility, provided the selection is genuinely random so that the chance of each member of society being selected are equal, and provided the rules governing selection and the rules holding those selected to account are democratically mandated (here, in societies with a jury system, juries are an example). A complex society will often embody all these consent-seeking mechanisms, according to local circumstances and history. The important point to note is that consent need not always be sought directly from each member of society; instead consent can be given, according to rules and within constraints already consented to and for a non-indefinite duration, for others to make decisions on behalf of the membership of society.

When it comes to voting systems a huge variation is possible, provided that the principle that each member of the moral society’s voice counts equally is upheld. There are, however, implications for the extent of the franchise. The franchise should be extended equally to every moral agent within the society. That might mean, for example, that age limits on voting are too simplistic and need to be reviewed, though, if doing so, care must be taken to avoid manipulation of the voter-base. Possibly having, as a back-stop, an age at which members of society must be granted the vote, but allowing the voting age to be extended downwards on a case by case where individuals can offer some form of evidence that they are already moral agents, for example by their conduct or through some form of basic examination, might be one option. Another problem could be that moral agents, once in possession of the right to vote, would struggle due to lack of experience, education or other mental impairment to engage effectively with the voting process and it’s associated debates. Where such individuals have legally recognisable protectors or guardians one option where would be for those protectors or guardians to cast a proxy vote on behalf of such individuals, provided those individuals consent to this, and the proxies adhere to strict guidelines, such as keeping the individuals they represent as fully informed as possible about their voting decisions and justifying how those decisions have been made in the interests of the person represented (to be able to properly hold the proxy voters to account, it is possible that in these cases any right to an entirely secret ballot would have to be at least partially waived).

It is also true that only moral agents within a society should have a voice in decision-making. There are therefore circumstances where this principle, rather than potentially requiring the franchise to be extended along the lines described above, could actually cause it to be restricted. Individuals who respect that the rights of others are equal to their own have to have their interests respected in turn by general society by the grant of an equal voice. But the converse of this is that when anyone can be shown, through a socially mandated legal process and standard of evidence, to have failed to act as a moral agent in a significant way, then they should be deprived of their voice in the decision making of that society until they have been through some process of redemption and rehabilitation. Such individuals have lapsed from being regarded as full moral agents to being, usually, regarded as mere potential moral agents.

The details of how such a principle could be implemented would, of course, vary considerably in practice. For example, individuals who show remorse by confessing and accepting their punishment might avoid the loss of “voice”, as might others of whose guilt is still subject to doubt, such as people on “remand” or who have still open appeals. In a system that involves incarceration model prisoners are other possible candidates, in order to encourage rehabilitation. Such exemptions would also ensure that there would be at least some representation within the society’s overall debates of individuals subject to that society’s system of criminal punishment. However, the important principle remains: it is being a moral agent that both obliges society to give individuals a “voice” and obliges society to silence that “voice” if they cease to be moral agents. The right to have your interests heard, for your view of the “good life” to be listened to, is a reciprocation of your respect of the interests of others.

For similar reasons the secret ballot can also not be regarded as a universal principle of radical democracy. In many circumstances the need to avoid vote selling or voter intimidation will mean that the secret ballot is unavoidable, but it is inherently undesirable. Moral agents receive a “voice” because they act morally: their notion of what has worth needs to be respected because they respect others. Voting morally is part of that; voting is a moral act. However, few acts are actually moral that are done entirely unaccountably in absolute secrecy. Furthermore, a secret ballot actually allows those who vote selfishly to take advantage of the better natures of those who vote selflessly. There are other more minor disadvantages of the secret ballot too, such as the fact that it makes manipulation of the vote count much easier to hide, but these issues are minor compared to the fact that it critically undermines the moral dimension of what should be a very moral act.

This means that where it becomes possibly practical to relax the secrecy of the ballot such relaxations should be attempted. Such relaxations are likely to be vital where voting is made compulsory, as one of the best defences against purely selfish voters is that, where voting is voluntary, selfish individuals are unlikely to bother to vote in the first place. Note that relaxation of the secret ballot need not be total: a possible option could include randomly exposing a proportion of the vote. That would making buying votes very difficult but still risks post-vote positive or negative discrimination of individuals based on how they voted. Any relaxation of the secrecy of the ballot would certainly need to be combined with very strict rules and monitoring to counter any discrimination based on how individuals voted, at least beyond the scope of political parties (it seems reasonable that overtly political bodies could, say, expel members who do not support the political cause in a vote). One advantage of only a partially exposed vote would be that individuals whose ballot is still secret would act as a comparison group, so making it easier to assess whether any discrimination or voter manipulation is actually going on.

Self Defence, Crime and Punishment

Above we explored how anyone who can be shown, through a socially mandated legal process and standard of evidence, to have so significantly failed to act as a moral agent that they have effectively ceased to be a moral agent, should be deprived of their voice in the decision making of that society. It is important to note that the deprivation of influence over decision-making is not a punishment, but a practical necessity: it is stopping someone who does not respect the interests of other members of a society as equal to their own from corrupting the consensus of that society to their own selfish ends.

Let’s term such practical measures taken by a society to protect itself, from those who are not acting towards that society as moral agents, as “sanctions”. Though the members of the society in question have no obligation to respect the interests of such individuals as equal to their own, because that obligation is not being reciprocated, they do have some moral obligations even towards adversaries. Firstly, there exists the possibility, that even potential enemies can be induced to become moral agents, thus extending or restoring the moral community. If that possibility exists then such adversaries should be treated as potential moral agents. Secondly, and even if a possibility of reconciliation with these adversaries does not exist, then the same principle applies as to all other beings that are not capable of being moral agents but that are likely to be capable of suffering, which is not to be needlessly cruel, as cruelty can too easily establish itself as a habit, ironically damaging the moral community itself. Cruelty in any form comes with considerable “moral hazard”, in that it can create precedents that undermine moral conduct.

Within those two constraints, though, the moral society is free to agree any sanctions that it deems necessary for its own self defence.

Beyond sanctions there are what we will term “rewards and punishments”. Rewards and punishments are positive and negative incentives that act as a “prop” encouraging us to behave morally. When we act morally or immorally, accepting our “just rewards” can be regarded as desirable, as a way to condition ourselves to behave morally in future. At the same time, acting morally purely out of desire to gain reward or avoid punishment can undermine the whole point of morality, which is actually to avoid “dog eat dog” competition and instead encourage the creation of a mutually supportive, even loving, community.

It is, of course, up to the consensus of each and every moral society to decide on its system of laws and the rewards and punishments backing up those laws. Equally obviously, the nature of those laws, rewards and punishments will be highly dependent on context, as will how and when morality is to be left as its “own reward” or encouraged by systematised positive and negative incentives.

Note, however,that neither reward nor punishment are ends in themselves: such a system of incentives and disincentives exists merely and entirely to encourage moral behaviour.

No one “deserves” those rewards or punishments. The whole notion of free will is a very obscure one, with an ultimate meaning that is very hard to discern. It could mean that a will is “free” if devoid of any external influences but, if so, and assuming it could be construed as having a will in any sense at all, only the Universe as a whole could then have “free will”. Alternatively, perhaps “free will” is a reference to the way a mind can take a step back from itself; question its own sentiments and actions; be “self conscious”. If so a clearer and more useful notion than that of “free will” might be that of personal “responsibility”.

By personal responsibility we mean the capacity to review our thoughts and actions and align them away from short term, immediate, almost instinctual, gratification towards benefits for others and/or longer term benefits to ourselves.

In a clear mind, meaning a mind that is really self conscious, a focus on personal responsibility can determine behaviour in a way that more closely follows moral principles than in a mind that acts on impulse. The idea of personal responsibility can determine our behaviour for the better.

The notion of “free will” renders any reasoning about of social and moral affairs impossible when it is held to transcend cause and effect. Then “free will” becomes something arbitrary, either random or even an inexplicable intrusion from some otherworldly realm. Such a concept of “free will” is entirely useless as a basis for defining a system of laws, crimes and punishments, as is closed to rational inquiry.

To know all is indeed to forgive all, but also to understand where a system of laws, rewards and punishments could condition our behaviour in such a way to further the creation and maintenance of a moral society.

The Limits and the Extent of Competition

One of the advantages of living in a moral community that upholds a “Golden Rule” style morality is that it strongly furthers cooperation, and everything cooperation can achieve. However, in practice many aspects of our lives are competitive, occasionally arguably unavoidably so. What, therefore, are the role and limits of competition within a moral community?

The competitors in a competition are apparently (and definitely potentially) acting in a way that asserts their own interests, through their desire to win, over the interests of their competitors, who they desire, at least by implication, to lose.

Therefore, at first glance, competition violates the basic principle of moral community, that is, not to place one’s own interests above those of other members of the community.

Are there therefore any contexts, within a moral community, where competition is permissible? Or, in other words, does “moral competition” exist at all, and, if so, what is it?

Competition can have benefits even for the competitors who lose. Those benefits could arise from “just taking part”, for example, the pleasure of engaging in a competition purely for recreational purposes.

Competitors can also derive benefits from competition indirectly if the competition itself has wider benefits for the community. For example, competition for jobs could benefit the wider community if such competition operates efficiently to ensure that the candidates obtaining those jobs go on to perform those jobs in a way that generates maximum benefit for the wider community.

Even losing competitors could therefore derive direct and indirect benefit from the existence of the competition and their participation in it.

Therefore, we can assert that competition is moral if all participants in a competition, even those who will lose, are better off if the competition goes ahead and they participate within it than they would be if it hadn’t.

Immoral competition would involve directly or indirectly forcing individuals to compete who, if they lose, would be worse off than if they hadn’t competed in the first place.

But what about competitions that generate benefits for non-competitors? It is possible to imagine a situation where regular competitions would generate benefit for the community as a whole, and it would be possible to receive that benefit without taking part in those competitions. Or, in other words, the indirect benefits we have conceived above as applying to even losing competitors would still accrue to them anyway, even if they didn’t participate in the competition, but in the case of non-participation without them suffering the costs of competing.

In this situation those who refuse to ever compete in these wider community benefit generating competitions could be considered as selfish, as placing their own interests above those of others, who they expect to compete and incur the risks of losing.

Therefore, taking benefit from the existence of a competition without ever being willing to compete in that competition oneself is immoral.

We therefore need to modify our above assertion as follows:

“Immoral competition would involve directly or indirectly forcing individuals to compete who, if they lose, would be worse off than if the competition didn’t exist in the first place.”

The most moral competition would be one that ensures that all competitors would be better off if they compete than if the competition did not exist at all and that generates and distributes benefits to the members of the moral community in such a way that

total fulfilment is maximised but within the constraint that no one benefits from more fulfilment at the expense of anyone with less fulfilment.

Obligations to the Future

We should also ask what obligations to the future bear upon a moral community and its members.

Now we have stated that the quest for fulfilment should be open-ended. Therefore, acting in a way that precludes further and higher fulfilment in the future is immoral.

However, is such a formulation too simplistic, too easy? After all, the capacity for reciprocation is a basic requirement for beings to stand in relation to each other as moral agents. We cannot exist in any such relationship with beings occupying a distant time that we may never inhabit. Indeed, some beings seem to feel little or no obligation to future versions of themselves, let along beings that they may never meet.

Therefore we might conclude that we have no obligations to the future. However, there are other considerations that are likely to negate any such conclusion.

Firstly, the future has no clearly defined starting point. Many beings with which we are interacting right now, as members of our moral community, may live further into the future than ourselves. Such beings are likely to regard any actions that prejudice their own future but benefit ourselves as placing our own interests ahead of theirs, thus violating the Golden Rule. Thus a moral obligation to future generations can “chain” indefinitely into the future.

Secondly, the prospect of an open-ended future is important to the sense of fulfilment, of well being, of many beings. To act in such a way that damages the future would undermine such beings’ sense of fulfilment in the present. If the consensus of our moral community recognises the validity of finding fulfilment in the sense of an open-ended future, then we, if we are members of such a community, should do too.

Thirdly, we are back to the idea of trying to break out of the “burning house of the self”. Many beings seek to extend the boundary of the self, to identify themselves with something larger than their own immediate, fragile, time-limited, “physical” selves. Again, such beings may root their sense of fulfilment in a wider sense of themselves, including an obligation to those beings who will live in the future. Again, our moral community may decide to embrace such a broader sense of what constitutes fulfilment.

Review

This exploration of how to live with ourselves and others is in no way meant to be final or complete.

In Part 1 we attempted to establish a basic understanding of reality and how we should relate to it and ourselves. In doing so we tried to avoided speculation: to only define what seems fundamental.

In Part 2, having outlined that rough context, we then tried to work out how we should live with others.

We arrived at some core principles of how we should live with others, centering around a “Golden Rule” style idea that we should respect the needs of others as equal to our own, provided they reciprocate, and that we should extend the “moral communities” so created as far as possible. We also discovered that, as each and every one of us can only define or feel our own needs in our own minds, due to the mind-body problem we explored in Part 1, how to interpret those core moral principles, including even the meaning of fulfilment and the “good life” itself, has to be arrived at by discussion and consensus, and that we should should therefore also protect as much autonomy as we deem possible, balancing a need to accept diversity against the fact that all members of a greater society, whether individuals or contained communities, all act in way that affects each other. Deciding where that balance rests is another consensus decision. Furthermore, the decisions any such social consensus will arrive at will be highly dependent on the context in which that community exists. Beyond the core set of fundamental principles, how those principles play out in practice to become detailed institutions, political processes, ethics, laws and customs will depend pragmatically on circumstances.

This is therefore only a starting point, a foundation philosophy. How to live with ourselves and others will always be a work in progress, not least because our “reality” and our understanding of that “reality”, and even the nature of ourselves, is always changing. This discussion, like the quest for fulfilment itself, should be forever open ended. Any reliance on detailed dogmas inscribed in some transcendent realm is delusional. Above all, we must all always think for ourselves.