Mental Plutonium

The genetic perspective of ethics is mental plutonium. It has every potential to very badly blow up in your face and kill a lot of people. You get your ideas a little bit wrong and you get Nazis or Genghis Khan or ethnic cleansing or any of a number of ways genetic ethics collided horribly with real living people. There is a reason for this. It's not that I believe "caring about genes at all in ethics makes everything blow up in your face" because that's far from the truth. Plenty of societies have had strong notions of familial ethical ties. For example, the system of honoring ancestors associated with multiple oriental cultures. Rather, I think that those who stray from the truth in only a few essentials (which reverberate throughout the logical/instructive element of society that drives ideological change over hundreds of years) are far more dangerous than those who deviate from the truth in ways great and small. Someone who cannot orient himself to the existence of an objective external world (i.e. someone who acts out poor metaphysics) is fundamentally hopeless. He will be totally unable to function. Someone who demonstrates poor epistemology will be unable to develop intellectually (even across multiple generations, because the parents will teach their children how to gather knowledge or fail to do so). Each level of philosophical understanding in which the agent orients himself towards understanding and manipulating the external world, taking as given that which is beyond his control, and taking into his control (or mentally, his potential control) is another level on which the agent becomes more powerful. He is able to act forcefully in the world. He is an example and his ideas are the ones that ultimately take hold and guide the actions of others. A more powerful actor is not necessarily better informed in ethics, or politics, or law. His capacity to judge the world does not lead unerringly to higher wisdom regarding when to make war, or who to kill. I believe and hope that it does lean in that direction, but it is no guarantee. Man's conceptual faculties are not automatic. This is the point of this blog. To play in a "safe" environment with very dangerous material which if it ever broke containment could run wild. There's only one problem: No effective system of containment has ever been devised for ideas. China is attempting a quarantine with their "Great Firewall of China", but it's not airtight and it clearly cannot last. The technology to subvert the firewall already exists and is being developed and spread at ever-increasing rates. There is no containment.