Ethical Subjectivism: Part 6

Situations

Writers in Ethics often use the phrase "state of affairs," but I wish to avoid the term as it usually applies to an individual. While individuals, such as a marooned or isolated person, find themselves in a situation, I am concerned with social situations. So, in what follows, I normally use the term "situations" to mean social situations.  When I referring to an individual, I will use the term "state of affairs" or another circumlocution to indicate an individual situation. What's different about situations is the involvement of many people, or moral agents, and their complex interactions. Unlike a state of affairs centering on an individual, the course and outcome of situations is often very difficult to predict because they are one thread of a non-linear network. Very small changes in boundary conditions can change the course of behavior, thus bringing about completely different outcomes. Thus, similar situations can have different, contrary results.

Most recent philosophers use the atomist (reductionist) approach to ethical problems: break down the problem into its component parts and anaylze each of them. Then put everything back together to replicate the whole. This is the traditional approach of the physical and life sciences. By and large that strategy works, except in certain, weird areas of subjects like Quantum Mechanics. Whenever we are confronted with non-linear problems, the logic of cause and effect, the idea of mechanical linkages, breaks down. Luckily,  non-linear systems can be modelled in programs (e.g., computer software) which are not bound by the usual rules of our immediate experience. (If they were, most computer games could not exist.) The worlds of imagination and computer software have ways of dealing with problems that cannot be computed, as in 2 + 2 = 5.

An essential claim of my work is that ethical problems are social in nature, so fall into this category of the non-linear  They cannot be solved "logically," in the sense of Aristotellian syllogisms, but they can be solved programatically and imaginatively. Literary works of fiction, poems and plays present situations in an imaginative way. In their workings, they may apply moral maxims, and suggest outcomes and ethical principles, although they are not in works in Ethics per se. Thus, it is valid to consider relevant works of art in analyzing ethical problems. (I attribute this insight to Camus.) It is also valid to come to different conclusions about the problem, just as one might see different colors in the light coming through windows. The upshot of my claim is that it should be possible to model the ethical development of societies, even if it is never patently clear what ethical principles apply.

I note, again, that what is different about this approach is reliance on evidence, not hypotheticals. In this, I follow the rules I believe are used in modern Courts of law. While motives - intentions - are a factor in criminal trials, juries are admonished to make their decisions based on the evidence. In capital cases,  the standard of proof is "beyond a reasonable doubt." Such a standard rarely allows of conviction based on circumstantial evidence or claims about the defendant's motives. Circumstantial evidence and motives might corroborate evidence pointing to guilt, but they can also undermine conviction or punishment of a capital crime in the absence of overwhelming evidence. Thus, mental states such as insanity or incompetence are usually taken as sufficient reason not to impose punishment, even when the evidence is compelling. What's important here is that the condition of the individual is secondary to what is available to the public.

Another preliminary: I reside in the United States, a country dominated by a philosophy (if that is what it is) of rugged individualism. This philosophy encompasses a set of attitudes left over from Frontier Days, during which every man for himself was a style of life necessary for survival. Rugged individualism peremeates American economic, political and social institutions, and is one of the major reasons socialism and the Welfare State have not taken root here. Living in such a society makes it difficult to discover the social nature of ethical principles, the bedrock of communitarian and Utopian political, social and economic philosophies. I believe wearing individualist-colored glasses explains why most American philosophers focus on individual behavior, to the near total exclusion of social behavior. That is the same reason the sociology of class and caste remains hidden in the woodwork, while the dinosaur-sized subjects of that study roam the land. My work is about that social nature of ethics, in support of claims made about "The Ideal State" in GSQ, and desite the unpopularity of social-anything in the United States.
 

There are social myths designed to hide the blatant truths of social behavior. This is because intelligent particpants of society are willing to live a lie in order to gain the benefits of society by fitting in, but feel uncomfortable about it. For example, the so-called "free market" is actually a mechanism for concentrating wealth in the hands of a few, who then use that wealth to direct the lives of most members of the economic society. This is not a democratic process, nor is the mechanism even a representative democracy. Capitalism puts enormous power in the hands of an unelected few, all the while claiming this is the result of free economic choices in a democratic society. The reality of American society is a loose form of Fascism, a coalition of the State and Corporations, as distinguished from the strict form of Fascism, the Corporate State; but this truth cannot be openly discussed in America.

One of the most fundamental social myths pertinent to ethics is that lies are destructive. We are instructed to tell the truth. That instruction is taken to be a commandment, an imperative and a duty. Violators will be punished, as we are reminded by recent cases of imprisonment upon a finding of perjury. "Truth, Justice and the American Way" is a basic ingredient of the Superman myth, and all its variants and clones. Yet, I claim, society is not so constructed. The truth is, social cohesion rests on a tissue of lies, however confusing and possibly self-contradictory that statement may be. Perhaps it is better to say that the observed pattern of social behavior demonstrates the social utlity and importance of lying.

One of the oldest and most widespread lies is the virtuous nature of our leaders. In ancient times, for personal reasons I cannot fathom, the rulers tried to associate themselves with the gods and even claimed to be immortal. Pharaohs claimed themselves descendants of Osiris, actually believed themselves immortal and built monumental Pyramids as their permanent abode. Yet they knew the simple fact that their ancestors, all of them, had died. Each one expected his own death. The usual reconciliation of these astounding, conflicting ideas about life and death is that there is an after-life, a life carried on by an invisible soul. To have such an idea presupposes Ryle's Ghost in the Machine, the dualist philosophy of two substantial worlds, flesh and spirit. The point of stories about the gods was to support the notion of Divine Right, resurrected by French Kings until they were overthrown in 1789. Now scarcely anyone believes political and military leaders draw their authority from the gods, even though they are routinely blessed by religious functionaries (rabbis, priests, monks, ministers, immams, etc), so different stories are in circulation to justify their status. The leaders are supposed to have special abilities of making decisions - the lonely President bowed under the weight of the world  - or they inspire people with an emotional vision - Camelot - or they are masters of deceit - the most common habit - who get away with it. The political process, whether in a democratic or authoritarian State, demonstrates the role of lying as social glue.

The historical record shows that any sufficiently large society includes members with conflicting goals. The existence of Courts to settle disputes is an ancient invention. A great deal of time and money is spent in every society to fix the rules of justice in minute detail, so that almost all participants will be satisfied that the verdicts rendered are fair. If those condemned to death or some form of permanent exile (imprisonment) are not satisfied, it won't matter. But if even a small minority of the society at large believes the system is unjust, rebellion or revolution is likely to occur. So, a great deal is at stake in the decisions of Courts and Legislatures. Even more is at stake in political processes which generally involve a larger fraction of the population than the justice system. At the core of the processes of justice and politics is conflict resolution.

It is nearly impossible to get everyone to agree about goals that include many features. Should we cut down the old oak tree, or leave it to die slowly? Almost every neighborhood will have advocates for one side or another of this minor problem, and for quite different reasons. The salient feature of the political process, however implemented in different societies, is to bring this problem to a satisfactory solution for as many as those involved as feasible, or at least enough of them ("the majority") to allow carrying out a decision despite any residual protests. There are a lot of tricky, weasel words in that last sentence, but that is also a universal feature of the political process. For example, "as feasible" is not a hard and fast guideline to consensus. Some people will be easily convinced of whatever solution is proposed, some will refuse any solution, and yet others will seem to be unconcerned by whatever is done (until it is done). The political process seeks an end to dickering over the decision by reaching a consensus as soon as possible, without the undue expenditure of energy. Thus, "as feasible" implies making as few trades and promises as possible, because every further consequence of the decision requires another decision and yet more work. The most common way to bring the process to a conclusion is to get enough participants to believe their wishes are fulfilled in the decision; i.e., proposed solutions are sold.

Selling a political solution is not different in any way from the selling of any other product or service. Politicians and used car salesmen have in common the ability to get people to buy whatever they are hawking. At least here in California, very few people want to buy a Ford or Chevy, preferring to buy cars from Japanese companies (especially those actually made in Japan). Despite that bias, Ford and GM do sell cars in California, using sales tactics taught in schools for salesmen. (Ford pioneered teaching customer psychology and salesmanship.) Those sales strategies are taught because they work, but they require abandonment of truth-telling as well as other social conventions in order to overcome customer resistance. (For example, salesmen will use the bull horn to yell at customers who walk out of a high pressure sales situation, in the hope the customer will feel humiliated in public. For some people, being brought into the public spotlight is worse than submitting to an unwanted contract.) In the political realm, the same strategies are used politicians to bring about settlements. The reason such strategies are necessary is that the parties to the decision would not otherwise accept it. Upon reflection, I am sure readers will recognize many other everyday examples of the selling of solutions.

What these examples show, I believe, is that neither truth-telling nor lying is condemned by society. The ethical principle in actual use is "Truth is Preferred over Lies (or, Truth Preference, TP);" i.e., we would rather hear the truth, but we will not insist on it, especially when some countervailing value or interest is at stake. A further consequence of this ethical principle is that there is no general condemnation of lying. On the other hand, the ethical princple, "You ought to tell the truth," is vaguely implied by the preference for truth, perhaps as an interpretive heuristic of that principle. The admonition of truth-telling, then, is a simplified guideline to the more complex working principle, which is why we teach children not to lie.

There is a curious problem with the Truth Preference principle: each individual must have some idea what is the truth in order to recognize and apply it. Truth Preference cannot work without some method of distinguishing "truth" from "lies." Such a distinction need not be absolute; there need not be any ideal Truth or Falsehood. All that is required is that, subjectively, individuals have a grasp of true and false; that they assign the appropriate truth values as needed. The social network will weigh individual decisions about truth or falsity, and eventually settle on a probable value. As in triangulation, multiple perspectives will find an approximate center in the same way as the fibers of a webbing will align with respect to each other when their ends are tugged.

Truth Preference is most obviously demonstrated at work and other structured social situations involving stratification (class and caste). Underlings fear their bosses. They are reluctant to tell the truth, if that hurts their chances of promotion or other favorable treatment. That sort of situation is presened in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, when Koko woos Katisha. Lord High Executioner Koko is about to be boiled after dinner, while the very ugly Princess Katisha believes she was deprived of a husband when Koko supposedly executed Nankipoo, the Mikado's heir. Katisha and Koko privately know she is repulsive, but Koko needs a reprieve from a death sentence and Katisha needs a male, any male. Thus, a deal is struck: Katisha will marry Koko. The obvious working maxim of this arrangement is 'whichever way works' In the operetta, the main characters get some satisfaction,. so all ends in varying degrees of happiness. In business and political situations, that is also the main aim of the negotiations, flattery, little white lies and other activities. Each participant has goals (ends) which are to be reached by various means. In all these situations, another working principle is "the End justifies the Means." Whatever each participant believes about ethics, they usually believe what they do is not bad or evil, and is justified in achieving the end in view. So, there is probably a close relationship between Truth Preference and Ends Justifying Means.

There is no single maxim or principle that explains the behavior of players in scenarios like the foregoing. People might act out of self-interest, or on a calculation of the greatest good for the greatest number. They might act by applying Kant's Categorical Imperative or, simplified, the Golden Rule. Perhaps they are motivated by fear, greed or lust, or by friendlier emotions and desires, to perform acts in this situation they would otherwise avoid. Traditional ethical theories attempt explaining the moral behavior of intelligent agents by reference to a few universal or merely general principles. I believe the focus on agents is mistaken, and reduction to a few principles unwarranted by the evidence. The moral agents we know about, human beings, act on complex considerations, a mix of emotions and thoughts that changes from moment to moment. All that we say about individual morality is an ad hoc explanation of it in retrospect. That is, all of the traditional observations and explanations are correct to some extent, but they are not universal explanations of ethical behavior. The reason for that lack of generality is wrong focus: ethical behavior is social, not individual.

Humans learn to tell lies at an early age, and they are prompted to do so by their parents, siblings, relatives and friends. We don't dare to tell our grandparents that they are old, wizened, fat or forgetful. Noting that they are about to die is forbidden, unless the dying bring it up. Children, more often daughters than sons, are presented with a dilemma when parents grow old enough to require increasing personal care and support services; i.e., the swap of parent-child roles is confusing and difficult becsause it requires different evaluations of perceptions. In order for children to properly care for the parents, they must recognize the truth, the facts, of their parent's condition, which is what parents had to know in order to care for their young children. In many cases - sooner or later, all cases - children have to lie to parents about what is being done and why, just as adults have to lie to their bosses and others superior to them. Very old parents usually don't understand why they need the care provided, and resist the denigration of their authority. Similarly, our superiors don't apprciate challenges to their social position. Bosses often fire people who go around them, so it doesn't pay to let them know how something was done, when doing it required not following orders. What the doer hopes in those cases is that the success of what is done will cover up however it was done; i.e., we rely on the satisfaction people have in results - ends - to prevent examination of means. ("Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.") Thus, children learn to tell their parents lies about where they were, and what they did, to avoid embarrassment and punishment, all the while encouraging false parental beliefs about the perfection of their offspring. Those lies create a false persona, the protection of which becomes acute among post-puberty teenagers. There is one person known to a teenager's friends - the proto-adult - and another to the parents, particulary with respect ot sex lives. The end result of these lies is an adult who forgets the roles tried during the teenage years; i.e., in the end most of us lie to ourselves about who we are. Freud insisted upon the forgetfullness of childhood. I think there is an extended forgetfulness applying on the teenage period. All of this is propose that who we are is an invention that started in childhood. We discard inconvenient facts and figures and reinforce other  aspects of our behavior, all to create the persona which pleases oneself; a persona we present to the world. Who am I? I don't know, really, and neither does anyone else. Each of us is just whoever we display at the moment. Lies are deeply imbedded in one's persona, one's character.

The only way we can determine what we are is by social inspection of the historical record. In other words, each of us has a history which is probably not the history recited as "my story," but a record that, in principle, could have been recorded and made available for public examination. I think most people are grateful their lives were not recorded in full, as they are in varying degrees ashamed or embarrased by what they've done. If so, anyone who makes oneself available to the public in whatever way (e.g., holding a public office or managerial position) is a peccadillo waiting to happen. What we all hope is the invented persona will hold up against challenge, at least long enough to lead our adult lives. In this respect, we are like insects metamorphosing from larvae to cocoon to adult, in our rebirth forgetting what we were and believing in only what we seem to be.
 

It might be argued that the story we tell about ourselves is neither a truth nor a lie, but only a story, a convenient fiction. This argument assumes a ficton is without truth or factual value, it is undecidable. But the persona one expresses is a fact in one's mind; i.e., one's persona is a self-made theoretical construct. The persona fits what one comes to believe about oneself. It is commonly said that 'who we are' is the truth about ourselves, even if who we are cannot be fully explained or described. I and everyone I know feel that their stories are true, or, anyway, true enough. That truth may not be entirely factual, what could be discovered publicly, but it is certainly the gestalt of oneself. In a very loose sense, then, the story which is one's persona is a matter of truth, the truth which the public and oneself believes. That truth is represented in the facts about oneself which support the persona. In that sense, our stories are not merely fictions, even if they are closely allied to fictional story-telling. The difference is that our stories are about characters believed to be living beings, whereas fictional characters are described in that famous disclaimer, 'any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.'

The importance of persona, the public representation of self, is that our moral judgements are played out by that character. Whatever a moral agent does is attributed to the persona, what people believe we are, regardless of who we privately believe we are. Praise or blame associated with our activities goes to the persona, not to our supposed "inner selves." In that sense, our stories are like literary fictions or theatrical dramas.

I think we make up our personas to accomodate the social worlds in which we live to what we believe about ourselves. In developing that story, we take account of social norms - socially approved or moral behavior - whether to conform or not. Even outlaws usually know what society expects; they just choose to ignore them in  favor of personal demands. (When an outlaw is truly unaware of social expectations, that person is declared incompetent and assigned supervision.) In varying degrees, the persona is designed to scrape by social norms while fulfilling as many individual  desires as possible. To the extent that social norms constrain individual behavior, the individual perceives the norm as an imperative, 'You ought to do this,'  or as a command or duty, 'You must do this.' The social moral maxim (norm) seems a voice from afar, not something from within (moral judgement). Traditional ethical theories are somewhat correct in their descriptions of moral behavior and ethical principles, but fall down in not recognizing the source as social norms, an external impetus, not an internal voice.

Since social norms are the result of complex feedback processes - the settling of a network - what individuals want affects the outcome. What they want is expressed in the persona, which is part of the feedback process because it is already adjusted to what the individual believes society will accept. One way to think about this is in analogy to biological evolution, or even as a one of the scales of evolution (like the patterns developed from Mandelbrot's fractals). The persona is phenotype, the external expression of the individual, as distinct from whatever is going on "inside" the body, most importantly in  the brain. The genetic components, what's inside, make small changes to the phenotypic components, some of which succeed and others not. Thus, usually slowly, social norms are changed as the individuals change. All that this sort of ethical evolution accomplishes is the survival of the species; i.e., the ethical system. It does not attempt or guarantee the satisfaction of individuals beyond the minimum required to avoid its overthrow. For that reason, ethical systems we now consider unjust (e.g., those justifying slavery and autocracy) survived for a very long time. Things only change more readily when a large fraction of the population has an opportunity to change its circumstances, as happened with the advent of modern science and the Industrial Revolution.

In the foregoing passages, I have outlined the idea that ethical principles such as Truth Preference are the result of a social winnowing of individual actions. They are not consequential in the sense of being dependent on any particular act or circumstance or intention. They are not non-consequential in the sense of being expressed as commandments or other universal regulation of human affairs. Sometimes ethical principles appear as non-consequential demands on individual behavior because they are imbedded in the culture in which children are immersed from birth. What we call culture - the habitual and ritual behaviors we learn - is the medium in which social norms live. Sometimes moral maxims are consequential in the sense of advising certain behavior on account of what will happen. The maxims are also part of culture, frequently passed on as myths and cautionary tales. The reason I claim ethical principles and moral maxims are not consequential, and also not non-consequential, is that both sides of this traditional division ignore the possibility of other ways to think about them. One of those other ways is what I am  presenting here.

Another method of analysis developed in the last half-century is based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. This is a very structured game in which odds are set for co-operating or not. Depending on the matrix of  rewards and punishments for co-operation or lack of it, players (the prisoners) eventually learn to play a certain way. There is a difference between how well players survive, depending on the strategies they adopt and how many rounds are played. Based on game theory, there is a role for altruism in the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is used as a model of biological competition and reproduction. It is still controversial whether altruism plays a basic role in biological Evolution, and very controversial whether altruism has anything whatever to do with human morality. My view of the matter is that biological altruism (and the opposing selfish gene theory) is only tangential to human ethics and morals. I think ethics is a social phenomenon which arises out of social structures at least two removes from genes and one remove from phenotypes. The debate over altruism is about the effect of behavior on Evolution, but that behavior is thought to be genetically rooted. It is not free-floating in social institutions and culture, which are the sites of ethical principles and moral maxims (collectively, social norms).

Intelligent players - moral agents - do not have to observe the rules of the Prisoner's Dilemma: they can cheat. Cheating is a choice. It is not available to robots or even intelligent zombies constrained  by rules and regulations. To cheat is to abandon rules and regulations imposed by external agents (society) in the hope of remaking the world as one imagines it should be. Cheating is an adventurous approach to situations, as one cannot be certain of the outcome. The lure of cheating is simply the huge rewards possible of things go as planned. Bank robbery, for example, is a form of cheating, a way of accumulating money without suffering the inconvenience of work. Positioning oneself as a banker or money manager is usually another form of cheating, as money handlers take a much larger proportion of the money flow than required to lead an ordinary life. The difference between bank robbers and money managers is great: over 95% of bank robbers are caught and sent to jail, whereas fewer than 1% of money managers suffer that fate. There are more and less successful forms of cheating.

Cheating rests on lies. The critical component of a cheat is imposing a different set of rules on the activity than would usually apply. Cheating is a social activity in which there is the cheater and the cheated. The cheater must convince the cheated that the substitute rules apply, or otherwise arrange for the cheated to believe the altered situation is the usual one. This latter case was comically demonstrated in the Oscar winning film, The String. Confidence men routinely get money from people by convincing them of something that is not true; e.g., that they are winners of the Irish lottery. The infamous Nigerian letters circulated on the Internet seek "marks" ("suckers"),  those willing to believe their ship has come in. The motivation that draws marks into the cheat (or "scam") is the desire to get something for nothing. It is a common belief among salesmen that everyone has a little bit of larceny in them, so people can be attracted to the salesman's pit by offering something for nothing. The common advertising ploy of "2-for" and other seeming discounts from regular prices  are based on that lure.

Casinos and lotteries are a form of cheat because the odds of their games are not the natural ones. State lotteries and Keno games, for example, keep about a third of the income, returning two-thirds to the gamblers. Most slot machines offer a better return, as the house keeps only 1-2% of what's played. Casinos and lotteries can only continue in business because they rake in the money, taking their share "off the top." For that reason, on the average, the gambler must lose. But, there is no shortage of gamblers anywhere in the world, even where gambling is illegal. States set up their lotteries based on formerly illegal "numbers games," as well as Bingo (popular at Churches) and Keno (popular in Nevada), because those are traditionally the most profitable games. People play these losing games because they do not calculate odds, but believe they might be lucky (personally worthy) enough to get something for nothing. Casinos encourage that belief in as many ways as possible. For example, they offer below-cost meals subsidized by the proceeds of gambling. Winning high rollers are given free lodging and other perquisities for a night. Casinos offer package tours which subsidize the cost of round trip travel, lodging, meals and entertainment, and even include free chips, because, on the average, those who take the offer will be sufficiently enthralled by the casino environment to lose far more than the subsidy. None of that happens by accident: casinos and lotteries hire top notch social scientists, psychologists, mathematicians, physicsts and business managers to arrange every detail. The right kind of people are irrresistably lured to the casino where they are fleeced. Inside the casino, the normal rules of human society are suspended, which is why it is a cheat.

Cheating is not just the simple tricks children play on each other. It is an organized method of doing business, especially in Capitaist countries. Advertising is a critical component in the success of casinos and most other businesses dependent on consumer sales. Institutions avoid advertising and other tricks that advantage sellers by employing professional buyers and negotiating contracts. Businesses run by savvy managers almost never pay the MSRP or retail price.for anything, even things as insignificant as pencils and paper. The lowest level of employees are sometimes allowed to buy things for the business at local stores, but only certain things that have been calculated to cost less than they would if assigned to the purchasing bureaucracy. Very often, such local purchases must be made at specified outlets using pre-established revolving accounts that include negotiated discounts on purchases. In other words, businesses understand that the consumer is cheated in retail sales processes - they rely on it - so they act to prevent themselves from being cheated by other businesses.

Capitalism relies on a cheat named "surplus value." Surplus value, including profit, is what a business gets by charging more for its products than fair market value. Surplus value is a controversial and difficult topic for many reasons, including the problem of what is "fair market value." The idea of surplus value is at the core of advertising, and arises naturally in Adam Smith's economic theory. In the free market supposed in Smithian economics, buyers and sellers negotiate a price for each product or service as in an auction. When something is scarce, there are buyers wanting more of it than sellers can offer, so the price rises because effective demand rises. Similarly, when more of something is on offer than buyers want, the price falls. These scenarios imply there is an equilibrium point at which supply meets demand. The importance of this much simplified economic lesson is that surplus value is positive, negative or zero in direct relation to the difference of demand and supply. When buyers pay more for a product than its cost of production, the sellers collect surplus value  (selling price less cost). Thus, surplus value depends on scarcity. Adam Smith's assumption was that profits would be reinvested to create more product, until demand was satiated. Thus, surplus value was not a cheat, but a self-liquidating natural mechanism to clear markets. But, that is not the way things have worked out in actual use.

While Smith's surplus value is directly related to scarcity, it is a small step to link surplus value to the perception of scarcity. In the village markets of Smith's time, it was difficult for sellers to create perceptions of scarcity for several reasons. Villages were small, so people could scout the entire village in a short time. Everyone knew everyone else's business, so it would be difficult to hide supply or otherwise create an illusion about a product. Many simple products could be made (or grown) by the consumer themselves, so consumers knew what the product costs. Buying something in the market was often just a convenience. Sellers using tricks to boost prices in a village risk being shunned or driven out of the village altogether (and possibly tarred and feathered as well). So, linking surplus value to perception depends on larger markets. Consumers have to be unable or unwilling to determine directly whether there is scarcity; they must rely on second hand sources for an estimate of value. Once the means of production and distribution moved away from the villages to large cities, it became possible to manipulate prices. Advertising is the main mechanism by which prices are set in large markets. Advertising creates the perception of value by inducing consumer demand and creating artificial scarcity. (This product is right just for you, and no one else can have it if you buy it.)
 

As I have argued elsewhere, modern Capitalism depends on managed markets for its continued operation. Manufacturers cannot operate in the absence of guaranteed demand, simply because the amount of capital and labor required to make mass market products cannot be risked; i.e., it isn't reasonable to assemble millions of cars, or even thousands of bottles of perfume, unless sales results are known in advance. Before the Roaring Twenties, Capitalist economies regularly went through cycles of boom and bust during the Victorian era. The peaks and valleys of each cycle were ever greater as the Industrial Revolution expanded from Great Britain to the Continent, and thence to America and Japan. Capitalism engendered a sort of mass hysteria, a social manic-depressive disease, which finally culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The major solutions to this problem were the Keynesian mechanisms (unwittingly) introduced by governments. The Welfare State was abetted in stabilizing economies by managed markets. The managed market is basically a Twentieth Century invention which began piecemeal in the 1920s, and applied en masse since World War II. Managed markets include advertising, incentives, loans and mortgages and obedience to social rituals which guarantee consumption of mass produced products. Malvina Reynoilds' "Ticky-tacky Boxes," Diet colas, sneakers and TV are all part of the managed market, because the greater implication of the managed market is the managed life. A managed life is the life not lived in the absence of social controls. In fact, managed economies are outstanding examples of interactive social networks in operation.

Managed markets are a cheat because they induce demand by arranging things in a manner suitable to producers, often to the detriment of consumers. While, in principle, consumers could control a managed market, the actual practice everywhere is that corporations and government manage markets. Consumers are made to conform to the demands of the institutions because institutions are organized, while, by and large, consumers are not. Consumers work for the same institutions that manipulate them, but they do not have any effective voice in managing the institutions. Most unions long ago gave away the interest employees have in management decisions ("company policy") by agreeing to confine negotiations to wages, hours amd working conditions. (An exception exists in Germany, where, by law, unions are represented in Corporate Boards.) But even when consumers qua employees are represented in company policy, the usual decision is to compensate the company's employees for the abuses delivered to consumers generally. In other words, employees are bought off by exempting them from the abuse. Thus, until recently auto workers were able to buy cars for much less than MSRP. With managerial classes firmly in control of corporate and government policy, the surplus value generated by sales has been redirected to the benefit of owners (shareholders) and managers. Especially in the United States, surplus value has not been reinvested as Adam Smith imagined it would.
 

These economic situations show that cheating is built-into the workings of modern, Capitalist countires such as the United States. Things could be arranged differently according to competing, Socialist models, which require less cheating, but they are not. Since society hangs together on account of the interaction of all its components, the economic cheat influences social norms. This is clearly so historically. Before the 1920s, it was considered dangerous to buy a house with a mortgage, whereas that is a nearly universal practice today. Buying everything on credit is the nearly universal practice today, whereas once it was condemned. Even when I was a young adult, it was fairly difficult to obtain a credit card or charge account, as credit was available only to those deemed "very responsible." This change in economic attitudes reflects a huge change in the workings of  society, including moral perceptions and social norms, since World War II.

We make up the world in which we live, and see it through whichever colored glasses we care to don. What is "real," and what not? Does anyone really know? So long as our invented world does not conflict with some physical parameter, it will persist. (Houses built atop volcanoes are likely to have problems sooner than others.) What I have called a cheat is always present in every set of social norms, simply because the best we can do is make an approximation to "reality." In the absence of a final test for reality, the approximation is the reality. How then do we know it is an approximation? Because things change: what was good yesterday is bad tomorrow, what was wrong then is right now. (That is what I call moral evaporation.) If nothing changed, there wouldn't be any clue of a difference between "reality" and the status quo. As it is, reality is something assumed to underlay the appearances, not because any bedrock is there, but because we feel a need for solidity somewhere.

Truth Preference generates the possibility of cheating because it allows of lies. Players in the social game want to win, whatever "win" happens to mean to each of them. Playing to win pushes and pulls on the fabric of society, just like jumping on a trampoline. All of that pushing and pulling is a form of cheating, of distorting the matrix from its resting state. Cheating allows of many more solutions to the problem of social co-operation, just because it is a changing of the rules which, in turn, changes winners and losers. Some forms of cheating, such as casinos, can thrive whereas others, such as bank robbing, cannot survive given the background mix of other social norms. It is conceivable that bank robbing could be a successful cheat in a different sort of society; it just doesn't work in First World countries. Such different societies exist in the remote regions of the world, such as the opium traffickers in mountainous Afghanistan, Thailand and Burma or the slave traders who still carry on their trade in various parts of Africa. While First Worlders think of bank robbers, opium dealers and slave traders as criminals, those are traditional trades in many parts of the world. Some of those trades weren't even illegal two centuries ago.

While a certain amount of falsehood or dissimulation is requisite for the maintenance of social well being, I am quite sure there are limits. Things cannot be wholly represented as lies for the simple reason that, then, nothing would work. Even if an absolute tyrannny such as Stalin's is based on many falsehoods, at some level someone has to know the truth. Joe Stalin probably wanted to keep his minions confused and deceived, but he had to know what are the deceits in order to rule. Stalin probably wanted to confuse and deceive Hitler's invaders, but he had to use T-34 tanks on the front line. Those who made the tanks hads to know enough to make them. So, again, falsehood only works to a certain degree.

Is there some way we can determine to what extent Truth is Preferred? It is tempting to say that one cannot fly in the face of the facts, but that is not so. Many societies survived for long periods despite having defective conceptions of the natural world and the social, political and economic orders. (Here, "defective" means as judged by recent standards.) How people think things work is very often not at all the way they do work. It was a common belief in ancient times, as in the Maya and Aztec civilizations, that some human action was required to influence the gods to make rain and grow the crops, as well as to make the sun and moon go their courses. I assume the philosophical basis of those beliefs was an analogy to human affairs: it takes an active agent, a conscious decision maker, to make anything happen among humans. That observation was probably generalized, leading to animistic beliefs (all living things have spirits) and as well as ancient and modern religions. We may be just as deluded in our belief in modern science, but there are some measures that indicate modern science has less error in it. The primary such measures are the success of predictions based on scientific theories, and reproducible, extremely accurate measurements of physical constants. In other words, even though all of our knowledge is merely probable, statistically validated, the likely error is very small. This implies that observers sufficiently intelligent to use scientific methods are generally in agreement about the facts. Those facts, and the likely accuracy of the theories on which they rest, are a basis for evaluation of what is true in the world of our experience. So, at least with respect to facts, we have a measure of the extent to which Truth is Preferred.

The difficulty is that factuality does not give rise to morality. This merely restates Hume's dichotomy between 'is' and 'ought.'  That something is so does not make moral agents judge it so. An obvious example is the refusal of about half the American population to accept Darwinian Evolution, even though almost all scientists, especially biologists, agree Darwin's theory (as modified) is correct and that evolution is a fact. Moral judgements can be founded on denial of the facts, or invention of an imagined world, as currently demonstrated by Christian and Islamic religious fundamentalists. Despite the apparent success of fundamentalism, the natural world can test and limit belief. It appears, for example, that Islamic fundamentalism brings about social conditions approrpiately called "Medieval." That is, where the Taliban and other Islamic fundamentalists have been in control, social organization seems to revert to styles common in Arabia during the Middle Ages. The same is true of Christian fundamentalism, except that the Medieval reference is pre-Renaissance Europe. In both cases, fundamentalism is inconsistent with modern science and society. While Islamic fundamentalists seem more open to science, their use of it is primarilly in the acquisition of weapons. Christian fundamentalists are hostile to modern science, especially biology, so are not likely to sustain First World civilization as it is. While there are many deplorable features of First World civilization, liberated lifestyles are dependent on a panoply of goods and services usually not available in Puritanical societies. It is doubtful, for example, whether people uneducated in modern biology can sustain modern medicine and, even more basically, modern public health. It is doubtful whether people uneducated in modern liberal arts will control the nuclear weapons in their custody, especially if they are willing to die for their Cause. Not being willing to die for the Cause is something invented in the post-World War II era, which is essential to preventing Doomsday.

The above observations are based on the notion that society is all of a piece. While Hume was logically correct to separate facts from judgements, in human affairs the two are inextricably mixed up. What judgements are possible is one thing, what is feasible quite another. The moral judgements people make are conditioned by the facts and their circumstances; i.e., personal knowledge and outlook are socially conditioned. Duties, what one is required to do, and guidelines, what one ought to do, are imbedded in the social fabric. Laws and regulations formalize duties and advice, and couple them to punishment for discovered offenders. So, almost everyone grows up with the pre-built judgements that murder and stealing is wrong. We are aware from early childhood that we will be punished for transgressions of social norms. Social norms appear as facts during our socialization. Ethical princples and moral maxims can be facts if we have a suitable theory that explains their existence. A major reason for proposing normative networks is that such networks provide a mechanism for evaluating and storing moral judgements in the social matrix (culture). Through a combination of training and experience, members of society perceive the stored oral judgements as an external, a fact. The social norms are not just gudielines of behavior, but also training in the methods of making judgements. This is to approve and generalize Immanuel Kant's insight that his Categorical Imperative was both rule and method: social norms are not just expressions of duties and advice, they also involve how people arrived at those conclusions. In law, for example, there are not only Precedents, but also Legislative History and Intent, all of which are written examples of social norms. In addition, we have the visible example of those who make public laws and judgements which provides a model for individuals.

In alleging that ethical princples and morality are social in nature, and that oughts appear as facts in the social milieu, there are several pitfalls to avoid. My claim does not imply that the world has any value. Values are expressed by moral agents, intelligent creatures capable of making moral judgements. Social arrangements suggest certain values to moral agents because moral agents are "wired" a certain way.; i.e., the explanation of social habits and moral thinking lies in how our brains are made. This is to assert that, if our brains were made up differently, we would have different kinds of societies and moralities than are commonly observed. The values do not reside in the wiring, nor do our habits and social rituals. Each of us acquires a culture in the process of maturation. Acculturation is a form of programming; i.e., of memorizing and rehearsing the facts and procedures members of society use in their relations. Programming works to the extent that our brains are capable of performing the programs and appropriate learning procedures. Our learned culture is expressed in our habits, which include teaching them to others. The result of these comments is that 'ought' cannot be found anywhere in particular, nor is there any real  'good,' as they are constructs of the brain in operation; i.e., concepts of mind.

Society itself is a mental construct, because, from a purely, observational point of view, all that is seen is individuals who behave in certain ways when in proximity to others. We need not posit any ontological status of society to make it a meaningful term. It need only have an epistemological status based on the notion of culture, which is something that describes the behavior of certain individuals. In principle, culutre is not species specific; it could include humans and ETs. The point is, that in looking at social behavior and theorizing about morality, we do not have to attribute any reality (grant ontological status) to 'ought' or 'good' or any of their correlatives and derivatives. It is enough to say that individuals behave as if those values existed; i.e., they are programmed a certain way.

This immediately suggests the source of Truth Preference: each of the individuals who make up society are the proverbial blind men examining the social elephant. The same phenomenon occurs in trials, where it is now discovered that eye witnesses do not see the same thing. Each of us is biased in what we observe and how we observe it. So each of us has a different handle on what constitutes the facts, including the moral facts. The application of ethical principles varies among individuals, as should be obvious to anyone who reads or see the daily news.

That each individual has a limited understanding of the world, including ethical principles and moral maxims, also limits successful performance in the world. Prior to Colombus, Europeans had some very wrong idea about planet Earth which prevented them from exploring too far from land. European settlement of the New World was not possible until ideas like the 'world is round' and 'land masses beyond Eurasia and Africa exist' were accepted. Those limitations due to ignorance or stupidty did not bother the people of the time, nor do such limitations bother people today. Very few people try to go beyond the boundaries of what is known. Most people are satisfied with their lot in  life, even if they would like things to be materially better. Especially as people grow older, after comfortable social and economic arrangements have been made and tested, they become increasingly complacent.

Ordinary people have a standard for measuring truth, the right and the good: Good Enough. This is a pragmatic test which each person applies individually. It is the common sense version of the "similar circumstances" attached to Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative. The truth is what makes thing work they way one wants; it is what suffices. Similarly, what's right is what fulfills one's social obligations. What's good is whatever leads to the feeling that 'things are good.' (Note: there are too many cases (uses) of the words "good" and "right" and "truth" to analyze here.) Good Enough explains why satiated people are loath to change their circumstances, and why people become more conservative as they grow old. What is most important for this work, Good Enough explains why something less than The Truth and other ideals is not only acceptable, but is the de facto measure of social norms. We are willing to attain the feasible, all the while paying lip service to greater glories. (The Medieval insistence on living a perfect life prevented the improvement of living conditions, an extended instance of  the pefect being the enemy of the good.)

Evolution, as I understand it, relies on Good Enough, which is to say that Nature is parsimonious. All an organism needs is an advantage over its competitors. It needs to escape or overcome its predators to survive, and out-reproduce its conspecifics to set the course of its species. It does not need ultimate weapons that vanquish all enemies all of the time, because, as human beings discovered to their chagrin, ultimate weapons are often Doomsday machines. Evolution proceeds by genetic mutations which result in phenotypic change, or secondary uses of existing phenotypes. There is a cost of acquisition, since new or changed phenotypes are most often detrimental or even lethal. For example, brightly colored feathers are likely to attract predators. On the other hand, those animals with brightly colored feathers that manage to escape predation might have more matings and may pass on their survival abilities (as in peacocks, bower birds, etc). Which competing factor eventually dominates cannot be predicted, as there are just too many environmental variables, but, retrospectively, the developmental pathway will be obvious. The natural result of many trials is to find a way, and then to find a better (higher benefit/cost ratio) way. This approach is not an exhaustive analysis to find the best way, but incremental change to find an acceptable way. Major businesses, such as breweries, use software models of the Travelling Salesman Problem to find reasonable, not perfect, solutions which guide their marketing and scheduling operations. More generally, most long-lived corporations have adopted criteria of Good Enough, of what will suffice, which are gradually improved as a result of competion just as in Nature.

Good Enough is a principle of suffciency, not perfection; i.e., it is not absolute. Adopting this sort of principle in our ethical theory has major consequences in other ethical matters, such as the notions of rights and welfare. To accept Good Enough is to undermine a theory of Natural Rights, or absolute or inherent rights. Put bluntly we humans don't have an ethical basis for our claims about our rights on account of Good Enough. Nor do we have a claim of entitlement to welfare benefits. On the other hand, the Principle of Equality does allow that whatever claims we may have are shared equally by all. If am entitled to Social Security, so is everyone else. Now as a supporter of the Ideal State, which is a Welfare State, Good Enough is a very disappointing principle, so I must point out that it need not rule with an iron hand. There may be countervailing or ameliorating principles in operation, at least for moral agents (those who can make voluntary choices). Good Enough allows the possibility of struggle against the dominant social norms, because the social norms were, in the first place, the result of the social interactions of individuals. Those who do not accept whatever is Good Enough have to come up with their own rationales for something else, which is entirely analogous to the neo-Darwinian evolution just discussed.

What happens to those struggling for change? Is there some principle or maxim which justifies their actions?

In this ethical theory based on normative networks, there are built-in feedback loops among all individual members of society, so that whatever one does affects everyone else to some degree. What I call "society" is simply the collection of those individuals who are so linked, regardless of how they behave and what happens to them. That there are different societies shows that the influence of individual actions is limited by the range and depth of communication. In this age of satellites, minor societies are being crushed out of existence by the volume of images and sounds emanating from globalized entities. Television has been the major means of homogenizing American sub-cultures since the 1950s, and now it is doing its work in the rest of the world. Not everyone accepts being thrown into the cultural blender, as shown by the rise of the Religious Right in the United States, and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Even though cultural values are communicated from one place to another, they are not automatically adopted on account of social inertia and resistance. Inertia arises from the tendency of people to perform their habits until they learn others. How fast they learn new habits depends largely on how stressful it is to change, and how much force is applied to make the change. Most people comply rapidly when required to change little things on  pain of beating, and much faster when required to accede to demands when seriously threatened with death. Most people prefer to live to fight another day, although there are plenty of suicide bombers in the Middle East who believe they will be rewarded in heaven. In the absence of coercion or fanatical beliefs, life goes on and change comes slowly. There is a clearly a difference between coercion and the normal process of change which has ethical implications. If struggle against the established order can be justified, to what extent is it justified? I think this question needs to be considered as a matter of priorities; i.e., what are the conditions for overriding Good Enough?

To begin answering this question, we must examine the justifcations for Social Security and other social programs that benefit people, in the absence of a doctrine of rights. Most industrialzed countries now provide a range of benefits commonly called "entitlements." An entitlement is usually a claim on the distribution of resources which has been granted to members of society. Sometimes, as in the cases of environmental protection and resource set-asides, the entitlement is a claim of society generally on the resources themselves; i.e., a property claim, or "ownership." Public ownership implies an entitlement of every member of society to the benefits of the property claimed. Snce the source of entitlement is social in nature, it is not unconditional: society may impose conditions on uses of property claims. This last point implies that individual ownership (property claims) is revocable, which justifies social actions such as eminent domain and the imposition of taxes.