

Moral Truths: The Foundation of Ethics

Copyright © 2014 Magnus Vinding

Parts of this book have previously been published in other books by the author, and on the site: magnusvinding.blogspot.com
Table of Contents:

Introduction

Prelude

A Short Demolition of Relativism

The Self-Contradiction of the Apparent Moral Relativist

Part I

The Basis of Moral Realism

Value: A Fact, Not an Assumption

Where the Complexity Lies

What about Other Ethical Theories?

Immanuel Kant: The Dedicated Consequentialist

The Felicific Continuum: Absolute or Not?

Clarifying the Qualitative Nature of the Felicific Continuum

The Ethical Implications of the Qualitative Distinction

Who Are We?

Part II

The Particulars of Ethics: An Open Question

Caring for Oneself Personally

Are All Conscious Beings Equal?

The Meaning of Being as High as Possible

We Should Examine the Question and Strive for the Goal

In Defense of the Goal-Oriented Approach

The Ethical Importance of Ideas

Means and Ends

The Urgency of Reducing Suffering

Uncertainty: Our Inescapable Condition

Specific Goals We Should Pursue

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Epilogue

Bibliography
Introduction

"Are Right and Wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? Oh no!"

— William Lloyd Garrison

It seems that we are sailing on a stormy sea without a compass, floating around without direction. But is this because there are no directions we truly should take, or is it merely because we have not managed to create the compass that shows us such directions?

My claim is that the answer is the latter: the compass can be made. There are truths about what we should do — moral truths — and these can be searched for and discovered, and based on these discoveries we can build a true moral compass that provides us with truly normative directions.

This is the central claim I shall put forth, defend and elaborate on throughout this book. The book consists of various essays that build upon each other toward the collective aim of pointing out the most basic moral truths. Most fundamental of these truths is the fact that all other moral facts relate to, and which all ethics comes down to ultimately (I use the terms 'ethics' and 'morality' interchangeably). This fact will be presented in the third essay, and it is, I claim, all we need to know in order to start creating a true moral compass, a compass whose pointings we truly should follow. Once we have this fundamental fact on the table, what remains to be done is "only" to sort out the more specific facts of our situation, and to navigate in the direction these facts point us in. This is not the simple part, however, for it is at this level that all the difficulties and complexities are found — in the specifics of what we should do, not the fundamentals. It may seem unclear what I mean at this point, but I shall elaborate further in the fifth essay, Where the Complexity Lies.

The first two essays are short, and collectively they serve as a prelude to the third essay, and to the rest of the book, as the purpose of these two essays is to demolish relativism, the vile antagonist of realism, in a concise manner. The first essay points out the self-refuting nature of the claim that no facts exists — a notion worth exposing as it is both disturbingly popular and because it stands in obvious opposition to any kind of realism, including moral realism. Having settled the undeniable truth of realism in the first essay — "undeniable" because one must be a realist to even try to deny realism — the second essay will move on to show the irrelevance of moral relativism in normative discussions by pointing out that moral relativists cannot consistently make any normative claims. This will be followed by the presentation of the fact that provides the final blow to moral relativism: the fundamental moral truth that makes moral realism true, and which provides the basis of morality. The essays that follow will all elaborate on this moral truth, defend its truth status, or examine its implications. One essay argues that the boundaries commonly drawn between different ethical theories are not as hard as commonly claimed, and that they all spring, more or less implicitly, from the same ethical truth, and hence tend to converge to the same ultimate goal. Another essay defends the claim that the fundamental moral fact really is a fact rather than a mere assumption, while another essay examines who we are and argues that it only makes sense to grant moral inclusion and care to all conscious beings — ourselves in the broadest sense — as opposed to merely caring about ourselves personally. These essays are found in the first part of the book, which is followed by a second part that moves beyond the fundamentals of ethics, and attempts to uncover some of the most basic practical implications of the fundamentals presented in the first part. This includes a clarification of the conditions and limitations under which we are bound to act, and not least a presentation of some specific suggestions about how we should act in this world.

So, in short, what I aim to present in this book is the core foundations of ethics, not merely the foundations of some ethical theory, but the foundations of ethics in the sense of that which we truly should do, and hence to show that ethical realism is true, and that it is so in a much harder sense than most think; that 'ought' really does follow straight from 'is' — from facts alone. This is significant, because only by realizing these facts will we be able to converge toward acting as we really should.

Prelude: A Demolition of Relativism
A Short Demolition of Relativism

A harmful and all too common idea is that it is impossible to know anything — that facts do not exist. The popularity of this claim, and the fact that anyone could possibly believe it, is quite astonishing given that the claim is both self-refuting and preposterous on its face. For if we apply the claim "there are no facts" to itself, then it must be true that the claim itself is not true either, and the claim therefore refutes itself. Adding to the claim that there are no facts except for the fact that there are no facts other than this one fact is no better, because, according to this claim, it must then also be the case — it must be a fact — that, say, 2+2=4 is not a fact. So the problem with this expanded claim is that accepting it forces us to admit that there is an infinite number of facts, because we can make an infinite number of claims about the world, and it must be true according to this expanded claim that none of these other claims are facts, which of course contradicts the claim itself. So, as closer examination reveals, this second claim is also incoherent and self-refuting, and therefore it cannot be true either.

Once we have accepted the validity of logic, the claim that there are no truths, or only a limited number of truths, is bound to fail, as reason itself compels us to admit that there is an infinite number of facts, and if we do not accept the validity of logic and reason, then why even try to make an argument in the first place?

Nothing keeps us from answering the biggest questions in life and agreeing upon their answers more effectively than the attitude of relativism, which is why it is so important to expose this attitude for the obvious self-contradiction it is, and to go beyond it.
The Self-Contradiction of the Apparent Moral Relativist

Having clarified that relativism is self-refuting and hence untrue, it is worth dealing with a common inconsistency of another, perhaps more popular, flavor of relativism: moral relativism, or, as we shall see, what is no more than apparent moral relativism.

While many people will admit that facts about the world do exist, it seems that many, especially highly educated people, will claim that ethical facts do not exist, at least no ethical facts that are true beyond a limited cultural context. Strangely, this often leads them to claim that the morality of other cultures should be respected and never judged on other terms than their own. This is obviously a self-contradiction since to claim that respect for the ethical codes of other cultures is always normative exactly is to claim that there is an ethical truth — that there is a claim about what we ought to do — that is true beyond a limited cultural context. So people who think of themselves as moral relativists actually tend to contradict the relativistic claim that no universal ethical truths exist, which reveals that they are, in fact, not truly moral relativists.

Unlike relativism with regard to all facts, moral relativism is not logically self-refuting per se, but assuming its validity does, however, prevent one from believing, and sincerely claiming, that we should act in one way rather than another — such a statement cannot be true according to a true moral relativist. And this includes statements about whether we should be moral realists or not, because even though moral relativism holds that moral realism is not true, the stance does not allow for the move that we therefore should not be moral realists. In making such a move, the purported moral relativist would stand revealed as a moral realist in disguise. Again, if one denies the existence of moral truths, one must, in order to be consistent, refrain from making purportedly valid claims about what we should do. This makes the moral relativist as valuable in a discussion about ethics as the relativist who denies that truths exist is in a discussion about any factual matter. The core statements that relativists make keep them outside of discussions that concern the facts they claim do not exist. So while moral relativism is not self-contradictory, it does prevent one from saying that there is anything we should do. If a moral relativist does that that would be a self-contradiction.

Many self-professed moral relativists will insist that they can claim certain ethical statements to be true, but only within a given cultural frame. First of all, this is not moral relativism, but rather moral realism with a view of ethical facts one could call contextualistic in a hard sense. Second, such a position faces difficult problems of its own, especially the problem that faces any strongly contextualistic view of facts, namely: what demarcates one context, one cultural frame or setting, wherein one set of facts is true as opposed to another? A shared language? A shared history? A shared view of connectedness? This moral relativism, or rather contextual moral realism, rests upon a hard distinction between cultures that is as impossible to draw as it is to defend, especially in today's global, interconnected world.

So while moral relativism is not self-refuting per se, it does seem like it is hard, if not impossible, to consistently believe it to be true, since it seems humanly impossible, or at least impossible for any humane being, to really think that no actions are ethically right or wrong in any strong sense. As Sam Harris notes in his book, The Moral Landscape: "Given how deeply disposed we are to make universal moral claims, I think one can reasonably doubt whether any consistent moral relativist has ever existed."

Moral relativism is as harmful for our ethics as relativism with regard to all facts is for any science. It makes further progress impossible and rejects the progress we have made so far as truly being progress. And not only does moral relativism block the progress of the study of ethics — the study of what we should do — but also the progress of our moral practice itself, as it causes us to not see clearly on ethical matters. It prevents us from speaking out clearly against immoral actions, and it keeps us from raising ourselves to higher moral ground, at least from doing so as fast and intelligently as we easily could.

To the extent that we have made any progress in science, it has been because we admitted that there are facts to be uncovered and explained in the first place — because we admitted that relativism is false. Similarly, to the extent that we have made progress ethically, it has been because we have realized, in one way or another, that some things truly are better than others. Admitting this is the only way in which we can intelligently strive toward ethical progress, because, otherwise, we cannot even talk about ethical progress — we cannot claim that the holocaust is really worse than a broken finger, or that we should avoid any of them. A moral relativist simply cannot consistently say this. As this reference to real-world examples exposes, moral relativism — the intellectual position that no state of the world is in any way better than any other; that happiness is not preferable over suffering and pain in any deep sense — is indeed nothing less than intellectually acquired psychopathy.

Unlike what the moral relativist erroneously thinks, we truly do have moral obligations, and one moral obligation that stands as clear as any is to go beyond moral relativism.
Part I: The Foundation of Ethics
The Basis of Moral Realism

What provides the core foundation of moral realism is a simple fact obvious from the experience of all of us:

A continuum of more or less pleasant experiences exists, and what ultimately matters is where consciousness falls on this felicific continuum; being as high as possible on this continuum is what ultimately matters.

This, I claim, is a fact, not a human invention, and to not realize this fact is to fail to realize the perhaps most important fact of all, as it is the fact that all morality relates to ultimately. For what this fact implies is that the goal of bringing consciousness as high as possible on the felicific continuum is what we ultimately should attain. It is the fact that bridges the gap claimed to exist between 'is' and 'ought'.

Such a claim about a link between 'is' and 'ought' may seem controversial and misguided, as all claims of this sort are widely held to be, yet it is in fact the notion that such a link cannot be drawn that is misguided, and it is so for various reasons.

First, the idea that 'is' and 'ought' should be divorced from each other in any deep sense is a hard one to maintain for the reason that 'is' includes all that exists, including any 'ought' — or value — that we have or could possibly think about, and to insist that we cannot base an 'ought' on an 'is' is therefore to insist that we cannot base an 'ought' on anything at all. So all talk about 'ought' must ultimately be based on 'is' in some way, as there is nothing else it can be based on, and nothing else we can talk about ultimately. As Henry Sidgwick noted in The Methods of Ethics: "On any theory, [my emphasis] our view about what ought to be must be largely derived, in its details, from our knowledge of what is [...]"

Second, a strict separation of facts and values — of 'is' and 'ought' — is also hard to maintain for the reason that, as philosophers Hillary Putnam and Sam Harris have both pointed out, the two are entangled. Not only are all values we hold and could hold themselves certain facts about the world, respectively about its actual and potential states, but the only way we can arrive at any fact in the first place is via values — one must stick to the 'oughts' of valid reasoning and observation in order to say anything about what 'is' in the first place. As Harris notes: "Scientific "is" statements rest on implicit "oughts" all the way down."

For this very reason, it is not only problematic to claim that only truths about 'is' exist while there are no true or valid normative claims, but actually inconsistent. Again, any claim about 'is' depends upon the validity of normative claims, so if one accepts that we can make claims about 'is' (which, as we have seen, one indeed cannot avoid, cf. that realism is undeniable), one has already implicitly accepted the validity of certain normative claims. And if one insists that there are no valid normative claims at all, one must also insist that there are no valid claims about 'is' at all, and here we see the folly exposed, as this is self-refuting: the claim that there are no valid normative claims is itself purported to be a valid claim. To state this point in another way: One must suppose the validity of certain 'oughts', at the very least the 'oughts' of reasoning, in order to be able to reason to any conclusion, and to reason to the conclusion that there are no valid 'oughts' is therefore not only bad reasoning, but indeed methodologically self-refuting. In fact, even just to state that one holds the view that no normative claims are valid is self-refuting, since one must accept the validity of normative claims in order to assert what view one holds, such as the claim that one should learn by observing, in this case by observing one's own mind. We simply cannot make any statements without accepting the validity of normative claims.

Third, the a priori claim commonly made regarding that 'ought' cannot possibly be derived from 'is' is simply an invalid one to make, because it amounts to no more than the dogmatic assumption that facts that dictate 'shoulds' cannot exist — that value and resulting 'oughts' are nowhere to be found in the realm of 'is' — and that simply cannot be asserted a priori, and, as experience reveals, it is indeed a wrong assumption. Furthermore, even if we had looked far and wide and found no facts that dictate any 'shoulds', that would still not prove that facts that dictate 'shoulds' cannot be found in the world, as it could then still be the case that such facts exist, but that we were unable to uncover them. Fortunately, the most basic and relevant truth is on the table — the truth that is perhaps the easiest of all to realize if we only care to look sincerely.

A final point worth making in relation to the strong separation claimed to exist between 'is' and 'ought' is that we all recognize that 'is' and 'ought' are closely related in the sense that, given that we have a certain goal, what we should do is a matter fact — a matter of 'is'. For instance, if one has the goal of baking a bread, it is a fact that one should get certain ingredients and do certain things with them in order to do so. This is not controversial: given that we have certain values, certain 'shoulds' do follow, and these 'shoulds' are a matter of fact. What is controversial, however, is whether there is a value — a goal — that we ultimately should, and in some sense truly do, have in the first place. Yet this is exactly what the above-mentioned fact provides the answer to, namely that there is such a truly valuable ultimate value: being as high as possible on the felicific continuum.

It may be objected that this continuum does not capture all that matters, yet this objection arises from two failures. The first one is the mistake of defining the felicific continuum too narrowly, namely in a way that excludes anything of value. For the felicific continuum does not merely refer to a continuum of pleasure and pain in any narrow sense, but to all possible degrees of well- and ill-being; it includes everything from spiritual selflessness to justice and fairness, and everything else that is part of, or contributes to, the happiness or suffering of consciousness. The second failure is to be blamed on language, or, rather, it is a failure of language, as language simply fails to capture what the extremes, or even the moderate high and lows, of the felicific continuum refer and amount to. We all have but a limited experience with the possibilities along the felicific continuum, and most of us do not visit its powerful extremes most of the time, and to the extent we have visited these extremes in the past, what we can recall, and hence what words can remind us about these experiences, is weak at best. Consequently, the words "we should move consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible — we should avoid suffering and attain happiness," do sound extremely tame, and no doubt completely fail to give a sense of what they actually refer to. Yet they convey an all-important truth nonetheless.

It is of course also possible to stubbornly maintain that nothing truly matters. Such an objection is, however, simply wrong. Again, it is a fact, one that is quite obvious from our experience, that it matters where consciousness falls on the felicific continuum, and if one does not realize this fact, the only remedy is to look harder. And it is important to do so, because, again, it is the very fact that makes all the difference when it comes to morality. If there were nothing of value ultimately, there would be no morality, no 'should' in any truly normative sense, but only arbitrary 'shoulds', which would be the case in a world devoid of the existence, or potential existence, of a continuum of more or less pleasant experiences.

This is where moral relativists go wrong: they miss the fact that something that really matters has arisen and exists in the universe — that something truly worth valuing is found in the realm of 'is', and which provides us what we should do in this world. Again, given that we have a certain value or goal, it is clear that certain 'shoulds' do follow, and the fact is that we do have an ultimate value: being as high as possible on the continuum of more or less pleasant experiences. None of us have chosen this ultimate value. We are, as consciousness, in some sense subject to this continuum: the higher states along it are inherently better than the lower ones, and therefore inherently normative. And with this fundamental value in place, the specific 'shoulds' do follow and are also a matter of facts about the world.

It is no doubt an open empirical question what these facts are — what specific states of experience that are more positive or negative, more valuable or disvaluable, than others for different beings, and how to best navigate in this space — but whether there is a continuum of more and less valuable experiences in the first place is not. Anyone who looks honestly at their own direct experience, or sincerely considers the difference between, say, the experience of being tortured and the experience of ecstatic joy, will realize that there undeniably are more and less valuable states of experience, and that being further toward the valuable end of this spectrum ultimately is what matters — it actually, truly, factually matters.
Value: A Fact, Not an Assumption

The claim that where we find ourselves on the felicific continuum is what matters in the world is not a new or unusual one. What is unusual, however, is the claim that this statement is not merely a reasonable assumption we can and should make in order to get a decent and agreeable system of morality off the ground, but that it is an actual fact about the world; a fact as certain, real and independent of human assumptions as, say, the fact that the moon exists. This claim is what I should like to defend in this essay.

In order to determine whether the claim that being as high as possible on the felicific continuum is what ultimately matters is merely an assumption it seems proper to first clarify what an assumption is. A common definition is that it is a statement we take to be true, but without justification or evidence of its truth. From this, it is clear that there is no dichotomy between a fact and an assumption, as an assumption clearly can be a truth, albeit one which we have no evidence for. The question is then: do we have no evidence that something that truly matters exists in the world? Must we merely assume that there is?

Before answering this question, I think it is worth raising a few related questions that themselves question the notion that it is a mere assumption. For instance, if it is the case that we must merely assume it, why is it that people who have contemplated ethics seriously have managed to largely converge on this same value: that what matters is moving consciousness away from suffering toward happiness and flourishing? If it is merely an assumption, why has nobody sincerely argued for, say, the opposite value system: that greater suffering should be the goal? If it is indeed just an assumption, then what can be the objection against assuming a different value system? What can be the objection against the assumption that nothing is of value at all?

One response is that the only reasonable option we have is to "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps" by making this non-arbitrary assumption, and that it is intuitively obvious that avoiding suffering and enjoying happiness matters and is valuable. Yet what does "intuitively obvious" and "non-arbitrary" mean? If this assumption indeed is intuitively obvious and non-arbitrary, does that not imply that we actually do have justification for it, and that it thereby is not just an assumption after all?

The truth is that it is not merely "intuitively obvious" that it is reasonable to assume that consciousness is the seed of value. It is a fact, one for which there is abundant evidence and justification in our experience, if we only care to take notice.

In fact, in merely admitting that positive and negative states of experience exist, we admit that something truly worth attaining and avoiding exists, as that is what it means to say that an experience is respectively positive or negative. Those are clear, explicit statements about value — about what is valuable to attain or avoid. So the fact is obvious from our experience, and it is even obvious from our language, yet in our expressed convictions, we somehow manage to fail to admit this all-important fact.

To return to the notion that the fundamental fact of ethics is an assumption rather than a fact, and the notion that we can base a valid and ultimately true moral framework upon such an assumption, it is worth pointing out that this notion is in fact incoherent. Because, as hinted above, if the claim that movement along the felicific continuum is what matters really is no more than an assumption — a claim for which we have no justification ultimately — then nothing prevents us from assuming something else as our basic ethical assumption. There would be no moral truths if it all at bottom rested upon an assumption that could validly be interchanged with any other, and there could be no valid objection against any other system of value ultimately.

The fundamental fact that value exists is not a physical fact, obviously, but it is a fundamental fact nonetheless, since it, like any fundamental physical law, only can be realized via direct observations that provide evidence of its truth, not through derivation from other, more fundamental facts. And the fact that we observe this brute fact in consciousness directly rather than by looking out at nature at large, and the fact that it is not expressed in physical terms, does not make it less of a fundamental fact about the world. It is a fundamental fact about the possibilities of the world, and, like the fact of consciousness itself, this brute fact reveals that there is more to this world than what can be described in purely physical terms, which is not to say that the dynamics of consciousness and of movement on the felicific continuum do not ultimately depend upon processes describable in physical terms — everything we know indeed implies that they do.

But if it is not a physical fact, what is this fact a fundamental fact about? It is a fundamental fact about the possibilities of consciousness. It is the simple fact that consciousness can find itself in states that are more or less valuable, more or less positive or negative. This is the, at this point familiar, foundational fact of ethics, and we did not create it in any way, nor can we "uncreate" it or validly assume that something else is true. We simply find ourselves in a world where it happens to be the case. We simply find ourselves as the very consciousness whose dynamics is the evidence of this truth.

In sum, we need not merely assume that there is something of value in this world — that changes in consciousness really matter. The only thing we need to presuppose to arrive at the position that there is is the core supposition of science that we cannot not make, namely that we can learn from our experience of the world. Indeed, the only thing we need to do in order to arrive at this fundamental truth about value is to look and notice.
Where the Complexity Lies

That all of ethics ultimately comes down to the fact that being as high on the felicific continuum is what ultimately matters may seem extremely crude and simplistic. How could questions about what we ought to do possibly be reduced to anything as simple as this? The answer is that ethics is not in any way reduced or made simple by the fact that its goal can be expressed in simple terms. It is surely not simple, but rather enormously complex. What recognizing this foundational fact of ethics does, however, is that it allows us to see where the complexity lies, namely in the particulars, not in the fundamentals. This is vitally important, because much confusion has arisen from the failure to see the distinction between these two, and because such a clarification helps us think more clearly about ethics.

An analogy might be helpful in order to make this point clear. Consider again the concept of a fundamental physical law. We know that the physical processes we observe around us can be explained in terms of fundamental physical laws, and these fundamental laws can themselves be expressed in relatively simple terms. Does our knowledge of these simple laws make the unfolding of the physical processes we see around us any less complex? Obviously not, but it gives us an understanding of what is going on at an underlying level, it provides a good frame in which we can think about the processes around us, and it allows us to predict certain things about these processes, though by no means all things. For example, knowing the fundamental laws that govern all the physical processes that take place in, say, any macroscopic biological structure does not in itself give us any useful understanding of this structure and its dynamics at the macroscopic level. Our knowledge of simple, fundamental physical laws simply do not in themselves tell us how lungs and kidneys function, although their function ultimately is the result of these laws.

So the fact that the fundamentals of physics come down to relatively simple laws does not make the unfolding of these processes any less complex, nor does it allow us to understand or predict every specific process we see, even though what is going on ultimately is subject to these laws. The same holds true for ethics: the fundamentals are simple, and can be expressed in simple terms, but the specifics are not, and knowing the foundational fact of ethics does not make ethics any less complex, and neither does it reveal what is right or wrong in relation to specific ethical questions, at least not in itself. What it does is that it clarifies what ethics is fundamentally about, and thereby it helps us think more clearly about it.

An even more accurate and clarifying analogy can be drawn — to science. The goal of science is simple and clear: to describe the world as accurately as possible. Yet the fact that the goal of science is both simple, clear and certain does not say anything about how simple or complex its discoveries will be. In fact, the goal of science in itself tells us nothing about what the particular findings of science will be in advance; merely stating that we aim for accurate descriptions of the world does not tell us what these accurate descriptions will turn out to be. The same is true about ethics. Merely stating its fundamental goal does not reveal what this amounts to in concrete terms; knowing that we should be as high on the felicific continuum as possible does not in itself tell us what will bring us higher on this continuum, nor what the upward-direction in itself amounts to in more specific terms. Stating the goal is no more than the humble beginning that lies before any attempt to uncover particular answers.

The similarity between science and ethics runs deeper still, however. Because not only are science and ethics similar in the sense that their respective fundamental goals do not tie them to specific conclusions beforehand, they are also similar, even identical, in the sense that their respective "whats" referred to above — what the accurate descriptions of the world are in the case of science, and what will move us higher on the felicific continuum in the case of ethics — both are open empirical questions. And the latter question can obviously not be separated from the former, as the fundamental question of science concerns all truths, and therefore it includes all truths that relate to ethics too. In other words, which specific states of the world that correspond to which positions on the felicific continuum, and how to best move on this continuum, are empirical questions. How we should act is an open empirical question.

This question is a complex one for sure — about as complex as the world we are living in, as our movement on the felicific continuum depends upon how the world is altogether. It depends on everything from our biochemistry to how geological and astronomical events unfold. One is almost tempted to say that it depends on everything — and it does.

It should be clear, then, that the specific questions about how to best tune and tweak all the relevant knobs that influence our movement on the felicific continuum is a matter of incomprehensible complexity. And this is the crucial point: it is here — at the level of the particulars — that the complexity lies; not at the level of fundamentals. As is true of the fundamental goal of science, the fundamental goal of ethics is not hard to realize and be completely certain of: being as high on the felicific continuum as possible is what matters. And, as is also true of science, the specifics are what remain open, namely what being high on the felicific continuum amounts to and how to get there in specific terms. These are open questions we can approach answers to, and it is here the big task lies.

Conclusively, the goal is clear, but what it looks like and how to best move toward it is not; that remains an open and hard question. It seems safe to say, however, that realizing the foundational fact of ethics — realizing what ultimately matters — will help us think more clearly about ethics, and that, as with most things that involve reaching a goal, keeping the goal clearly in view likely is very helpful in order to approach it effectively.
What about Other Ethical Theories?

An objection: "The ethical theory put forth here is presented as though it is a fact, but this seems to ignore the fact that other ethical systems, other fundamental values, have been put forth. How can they so easily be claimed to be wrong?"

I maintain that it is a fact that what matters is where we find ourselves on the felicific continuum, and hence claims about value that do not relate to this continuum are simply factually wrong about what matters in the world. As I should like to argue here, however, the truth is that the different value systems, or ethical theories, that have been put forth are not really in conflict with this fundamental fact of ethics. At most, they appear to be, yet in reality, they are rather complementary to the fundamental goal and to each other. The disagreements are found in the particulars, not in the fundamentals.

Consequentialism versus Deontology: A False Dichotomy

A dichotomy often considered all-important in discussions of ethics is one between consequentialism — the position that what matters are the consequences of our actions — and deontology, sometimes referred to as 'duty ethics' — the position that what matters is that we act in accordance with certain duties or rules. This dichotomy is, however, not as clear or meaningful as commonly supposed.

First of all, even at the purely conceptual level, these two positions are difficult to keep in separate rooms, because, like facts and values, they are heavily entangled: acting so as to bring about the best consequences is itself a rule, a duty, to live up to, which makes consequentialism a kind of deontology, and, conversely, acting according to duties is itself something done for the sake of bringing about certain consequences, even if those consequences are to consistently act according to given rules — that is itself a certain consequence, and therefore deontology is also a kind of consequentialism. As this entanglement should make clear, these two concepts cannot ultimately be separated. Contrary to common wisdom, the truth is that consequentialism is deontological in nature, and deontology is consequentialist in nature.

In fact, all ethical theories are ultimately consequentialist, as the deeper truth is that what matters in the world, both in reality and according to every ethical theory ever put forth, ultimately comes down to the state of the world in some way. And whatever influences the state of the world, be it an intention, an action directed toward a specific outcome, or an action carried out according to a principle for the sake of acting according to the principle, has consequences in the world in some way. That simply is what the term 'consequence' means, and there is no ethical theory that is not consequentialist in this sense, and there could not possibly be, for a theory that says nothing about how we should act — i.e. how we should influence/bring about consequences in the world — is not an ethical theory.

As should be clear, then, a fundamental distinction cannot be drawn between deontology and consequentialism, which implies that the distinction usually drawn between them is instead found at a more practical level. And it indeed is. The usual conflict between deontology and consequentialism concerns whether we in practice should act with the explicit goal of bringing about the best consequences, or whether we should instead simply act according to solid ethical principles. Even at this level, however, the conflict proves less clear than what often seems supposed. If acting according to solidly established principles is what brings about the best consequences, then that is what consequentialism prescribes — nothing in principle prevents consequentialism from prescribing a completely deontological practice, and it will in fact likely prescribe a deontological practice to a great extent. Similarly, given that otherwise wise rules lead to bad consequences in certain instances, most self-identified deontologists will admit that the rules we should act according to indeed do have rare exceptions — for instance, if we find ourselves in extreme situations — which reveals that a categorical adherence to principles does not, after all, weigh higher than the consequences of actions, even for most self-identified deontologists, and that consequences really are what deontologists are concerned about in the end (and again, they could not be concerned about anything else, because everything we do is a matter of influencing the world in some way, a matter of consequences). So, even at the practical level, a strict dichotomy between consequentialism and deontology is hard to maintain.

It may be claimed that some deontologists will insist that we should always act according to certain ethical principles no matter what their consequences are, and that they will maintain that whether one acts according to the rules or not is the ultimate criterion that determines whether an action is right or wrong. Deontology in this absolute sense is in conflict with the fundamental aim and value of ethics — being as high on the felicific continuum as possible — and for this very reason, this absolutist deontology is simply wrong; it is wrong about what matters and therefore wrong about what we should ultimately do, or at least about why we should do it. It can be doubted, however, whether anybody has ever seriously maintained such an absolutist deontological view, where principles for the sake of principles themselves are the highest end. As I will argue in the next essay, even Kant, who is perhaps considered the most perfect example of such a deontologist, was not a deontologist in this absolute sense.

Other Value Systems: Hypotheses About the Particulars

I think a closer examination makes it clear that supposedly different value systems, or theories of value, do not represent fundamentally different views of what is valuable, but rather different hypotheses about what, in specific terms, brings us highest on the felicific continuum. Deontology is one such hypothesis — it is the hypothesis that acting categorically according to certain principles is what leads, or at least helps lead, to the best state of the world; what brings us highest on the felicific continuum. So-called virtue ethics is another such hypothesis — the hypothesis that good motives and a good character is what leads us to the highest outcome, and this was even made clear by the father of virtue ethics himself, Aristotle, according to whom virtues were a means to the end of eudaimonia, which is tantamount to being as high on the felicific continuum as possible. Contractualism too — one could say it is the hypothesis that doing what we can reasonably agree to do is what will maximize our well-being. And preference utilitarianism — the hypothesis that satisfying wants is what brings about the best outcome.

There can be little doubt that all these hypotheses are somewhat on the right track about what brings us higher on the felicific continuum. It seems clear that adhering quite categorically to certain principles (deontology) is ethically vital, and the same is true of having the right motives and a good character (virtue ethics) since these greatly determine our actions. It also seems that acting according to that which we can all reasonably agree to do (contractualism) is of great importance, since avoiding misery and attaining happiness tends to depend strongly upon the degree to which sentient beings consent to what happens to them. The same is true of our wants and preferences (preference utilitarianism) — they often are an expression of what we in fact do need and of what in fact is good for us, and having them fulfilled is therefore undoubtedly also important to a great extent.

It is worth pointing out that these various hypotheses are not in conflict with each other. In fact, they can be highly complementary given that we tune the various knobs in the right ways — for instance, if we act categorically according to certain principles we can all reasonably agree to act upon, and if these principles help fulfill our preferences and promote good motives and a good character. It seems that such a deliberate tuning effort would comprise a more sophisticated approach to ethics than one where these various hypotheses are thought of as conflicting and mutually exclusive — a kind of thinking that seems common, which is hard to make sense of given that our current ethical practice clearly is, and has to be, a mix of these various suggestions in some way.

"Has to be" because just as it is clear that all these various specific suggestions are important and all point toward certain truths about what brings us higher on the felicific continuum, it is also clear that none of them are sufficient by themselves — we cannot get by if we stick to just a single one of these hypotheses, at least not in any of their usual conceptions. For instance, categorically acting in accordance with rigid principles is clearly an insufficient guide for all our conduct, especially in the context of radical changes in the ways we interact and in society at large, the occurrence of which have been the rule rather than the exception throughout human history. Just as insufficient are noble intentions, social contracts, justice and other social virtues in themselves, because we may have them all in abundance, but without, say, the right delicate processes going on at the level of our biochemistry, we will suffer horribly. So we clearly need more in life than strict duties and noble social virtues — there is more to moving up on the felicific continuum than these concepts, at least as commonly construed, capture and prescribe.

The same is true about having our wants fulfilled, because while getting what we want often is important, it is not all that is relevant, partly for the simple reason that we can, and often do, want the wrong things. We do not always want what we in fact should want, which is to say that the interests we have in practice are not always a reflection of our deepest interests — what we would want if only we had complete information about the relevant factors and were perfectly rational and able to grasp what we should want; i.e., what would make us most fulfilled. For example, if only the person who wants to blow himself up because he believes it gets him into paradise knew more about the relationship between mental and physical states, he would hardly be so eager to destroy the physical structures that enable the states of ecstasy and pleasure that he hopes to enjoy more of. This underscores the ethical importance of knowledge, and largely for this reason that our beliefs can be so deluded, and often are, it is true that the wants we have in practice — no matter how burning and deep they may feel — often are deluded too. Furthermore, even if a conscious being does not have the capacity to have wants, or if a being possesses this capacity without employing it, such a being is still of inherent value. It is the potential of a conscious being to experience more or less pleasant states of experience that makes such a being matter, not the potential for having, nor the possession of, wants, and a position that aims to fulfill actual preferences overlooks this fact entirely. So the ethical theories mentioned above clearly all capture much of vital ethical importance, but it is also clear that they are all insufficient by themselves in guiding our ethical conduct.

It seems clear to me that the various value systems and ethical theories that have been put forth over the ages actually do not contradict the claim that all that matters ultimately comes down to where we find ourselves on the felicific continuum, but that they rather seem in perfect alignment with it. They all seem to be particular strategies and values that have been suggested, and often embraced in practice, because they in some sense fulfill this underlying value and help us move higher on the felicific continuum. After all, if a system of specific values or principles consistently made us miserable, we would not want to embrace it in the first place — at least not if we knew that was all it did. And it is no coincidence that all specific value systems conform, to a greater or lesser extent, with this same underlying value, because it is after all what ultimately matters, and we all, moral theorists included, have at least an implicit recognition of this fact, and this recognition cannot avoid to shape our ethical thinking and ethical theories to a great extent. Yet much confusion has persisted on the issue nonetheless, including, perhaps especially, among moral theorists themselves. We have failed to make this recognition explicit, and, largely for this reason, we have failed to see where the disagreement between different ethical systems is found: in the particulars, not in the fundamentals — not about what ultimately matters.

Making the recognition of the underlying fact about what matters explicit would, I think, help us think more clearly about the particulars. It would for instance help us achieve clarity about the distinction between fundamentals and particulars, a lack of which has led to the harmful notion that the various ethical theories mentioned above are necessarily in conflict rather than being different particular strategies toward the same end, strategies we can try to unify in intelligent ways by taking the best from each of them. Narrow and inflexible thinking seems to be the problem here, the root of the notion that there is fundamental disagreement about what matters in the world. There is not. Eudaimonia, hedonism, utilitarianism, deontology, ataraxia, nirvana, satcitananda, pious efforts toward paradise, etc. are all particular strategies or states that relate to the exact same end: being as high on the felicific continuum as possible. There simply is not a myriad of different views about what matters ultimately. Virtually all ideologies, philosophies and religions over the ages have had this exact same fundamental goal (and, again, this convergence should not be surprising, as it is simply a reflection of the fact that movement on the felicific continuum is what matters, and we all realize this at some level; at the very least we feel it). Where there has been disagreement is, again, in the suggestions about the specifics, and they often differ wildly. Yet the fundamental value is the same. The various specific value systems and ethical theories ultimately all aim, with more or less success, to bring us as high as possible on the felicific continuum. That simply is what matters. It is what all specific values and ethical systems ultimately spring from, and what they must help accomplish in order to be considered good.

In sum, I do not see anybody, or any ethical theories, sincerely disagreeing about whether we should bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible, only about what being as high as possible on this continuum means, and how to best move there, and these are open questions for us to explore.
Immanuel Kant: The Dedicated Consequentialist

The German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) might be considered the clearest and most prominent example of someone who would have disagreed with the case I made in the previous essay: that virtually all ethical theories ever devised can be considered different specific strategies toward the same ultimate end — to be as high on the felicific continuum as possible. In this essay, I should like to briefly argue that Kant's view does not constitute such an example, but rather an example of the opposite, as his ideas about morality indeed were directed toward this very end, and hence they were consequentialist, although not in this life. This I do, not because Kant is of particular interest, but because his ideas about morality constitute a perfect example for exposing the myth of a sincere system of ethics that concerns something other than avoiding suffering and attaining happiness.

Kant's view is usually considered deontological in a strong sense — a moral absolutist view that holds that we should always act according to certain principles that admit of no exceptions no matter what their consequences are. This is often thought to place Kant in opposition to the view that we should act so as to bring about the best consequences, yet this actually does not follow. Only based on a narrow view of Kant's ethical outlook — one that completely overlooks his ultimate aim — can one conclude that Kant was not ultimately concerned with consequences. Because the truth is that Kant was concerned about nothing but the consequences of our actions — so concerned that he thought we should do whatever was required to bring about the right consequences, without exceptions, and that surely is the hallmark of a dedicated consequentialist.

In order to understand Kant's seemingly unremitting deontological view, it is important to understand the core aspect of the ontological view from which it springs: Kant was a Christian. He believed in god and paradise, and that the way into paradise in the next life was to be obedient to god in this one. Philosopher Stephen Palmquist has shortly summarized Kant's view of "the highest good" in the following way:

The true end of human life on earth is to realize the highest good, by seeking to be worthy of happiness through obedience to the moral law. It is a human duty to work toward this goal.

Palmquist also points out another important aspect of Kant's worldview: according to Kant, "[...] to obey the moral law is to please God."

Alone from this brief summary of Kant's view of morality, it should be plain to see that Kant was not a deontologist in the most absolute sense — he did not think that we should act according to certain rules independently of the consequences of doing so, but indeed for the sake of the consequences he thought this would have in the end. It is true that he thought that we should act categorically according to certain principles irrespective of their consequences in this life, but this makes sense given that Kant thought that this life only comprises an infinitesimally small part of our conscious lives, whereas an eternity of it might be spent in paradise, if only we are obedient to "the moral law" in this one. Given that one holds this view, it is only reasonable to consider the consequences of an action in this life to be of negligible importance: we should of course do whatever gets us into heaven for eternity, even if this has bad consequences in this short earthly life.

So Kant believed that the way into paradise — to ultimate, eternal happiness, which indeed was Kant's highest aim — was to please god by acting according to the moral law that Kant imagined god had instated, and which Kant himself tried to deduce. This is the origin of Kant's "absolute" deontology, and it reveals that this deontology was indeed not absolute, but a means to an end: we should act according to a given principle, to "god's law," regardless of the consequences of doing so in this life, because that is the way we can attain the greatest happiness.

It should be clear, then, that not only does Kant's view of ethics not constitute an example that contradicts the argument that seemingly incompatible ethical theories can be considered different specific hypotheses directed toward the same fundamental end, but rather one that is in perfect agreement with it. Kant's deontology was indeed his concrete suggestion about what will take us highest on the felicific continuum — a completely unlikely one for sure.
The Felicific Continuum: Absolute or Not?

An objection: "All efforts to move higher on the felicific continuum will ultimately be futile, since, as is true of everything, the felicific continuum is relative, not absolute. This means that no matter what we do, the pleasantness of our experience will always fall around an average, a zero-point, above which half of our experience will fall, while the other half will fall below. We can never end up on anything but zero in any ultimate sense; the good and the bad will always cancel each other out. The existence of the good depends upon the existence of the bad."

This objection is yet a relativist one, and it is even nihilist too in a sense, as it implies that what we do ultimately does not matter — it will all be the same in the end in terms of how good or bad our deeds and lives are. What the objection reduces to ultimately is a claim about the nature of the felicific continuum, namely that there is no background reality to it; that pleasantness or unpleasantness are only good or bad relative to the rest of a conscious being's own experience and nothing else. And it is a wrong claim.

It is of course true to say that all continua are relative in some sense, but it is also a trivial claim, because a continuum — a range of more or less of something — is relative, at least in some sense, by definition. The crucial point, then, is not whether a continuum is relative or not, but whether it is relative in the sense that there is no background continuum we can hold any given life experience up against. Such a background continuum surely is coherent as a concept, and countless examples could be mentioned. Consider for instance speed. One could argue that speed is always relative, and it surely is in some sense, yet it would clearly be a fallacy to claim that, because speed is always relative, a turtle and a cheetah will ultimately have the same average speed throughout their lives since the average speed ultimately comes down to about half of their speeds being above average, and the other half being below. Ergo: it all comes down to this same zero-point for both of them. The fast cannot exist without the slow.

As is clear from this example, the reasoning in the objection in relation to the felicific continuum above is not sound: the fact that there is an average-point around which there is a given dynamic does not imply that this average is a zero-point in any absolute sense. Like the concept of speed, there clearly is a deeper, absolute reality to the felicific continuum, and the various dynamics, the various life experiences of different conscious beings, clearly do not have the same average.

A simple consideration of the differences in people's quality of life makes this obvious. For example, as philosopher David Pearce has noted, some people suffer from severe, chronic depression throughout their lives, and such unfortunate people have high suicide rates, while other people find themselves to be very happy and resilient throughout their lives. As Pearce points out, it would clearly be wrong, and not least highly insensitive, to suggest that these depressed people have just as good lives as their overtly happier fellow humans. The average point of the quality of life clearly falls on different places on the felicific continuum for different people, and this continuum clearly is absolute.

If one really holds that no life ultimately can be better than any other because one's joys and pleasures only exist relative to one's suffering, and always will cancel out to the same zero, then one would be committed to the position that making one's life as good as possible — doing anything for the sake of making one's life good — ultimately is futile, since no life can be better than any other in the end. Furthermore, to take a more extreme example that makes the absurdities that this objection results in completely clear, this position would also force one to maintain that an entire life of extreme torture, from infancy to old-age, is not ultimately a worse life than, say, a normal life without any of these horrors. Hardly a position anyone would be willing to defend.

There clearly is a background reality to the felicific continuum — it is an absolute continuum, meaning that where one's states of consciousness fall upon it is not purely relative to what one has experienced in life. So it really does matter, ultimately and absolutely, whether we live through life-long torture or whether we live a normal life. It absolutely does matter where we find ourselves on the felicific continuum.
Clarifying the Qualitative Nature of the Felicific Continuum

Having established the absoluteness of the felicific continuum, it is worth clarifying more about the fundamental aspects of this continuum, specifically about its qualitative nature.

The perhaps most important fact to realize about the nature of the felicific continuum, together with the fact of its absoluteness, is that there is a fundamental qualitative distinction to be found along it. The felicific continuum does not go from immensely pleasurable states in the most positive direction to states of infinitely mild pleasure in the least positive end; it would surely be wonderful if it did, but this is not the world we are living in. Instead, both positive and negative states exist — states that are inherently worth attaining, to a greater and lesser degree, and states that are inherently worth avoiding to a greater and lesser degree. To take a simple example that should make the latter claim obvious: when given the choice to be burned alive or to take a pill that will end one's life immediately in a completely painless manner, it would surely be best to choose the pill, which makes it clear that some states of experience find themselves below the state of no experiencing on the felicific continuum. These are states that are inherently worth avoiding.

So the felicific continuum is partitioned by a zero-point — the so-called hedonic zero, which amounts to the state of no experience, or states of experience neither worth attaining nor avoiding — above which we find positive states and below which we find negative ones. And it is worth noting that the existence of such a qualitative difference is not obvious a priori, and neither is it obvious from the mere fact that there is a felicific continuum. Again, it is at least conceivable that no continuum existed at all, or that the continuum only ran from the modestly good to the ever better. What we observe, however, is that this is not the case. Our experience reveals that the felicific continuum does exist, and so does a fundamental qualitative distinction along it.
The Ethical Implications of the Qualitative Distinction

Having established that a fundamental qualitative distinction is found along the felicific continuum, it is worth clarifying the basic ethical implications of this distinction.

Some philosophers, such as Karl Popper and David Pearce, have argued that the fundamental distinction has the implication that suffering is incommensurable to, and hence cannot ever be outweighed by, pleasure of any kind. Here is Popper:

I believe that there is, from the ethical point of view, no symmetry between suffering and happiness, or between pain and pleasure [...]. In my opinion human suffering makes a direct moral appeal, namely, the appeal for help, while there is no similar call to increase the happiness of a man who is doing well anyway. A further criticism of the Utilitarian formula 'Maximize pleasure' is that it assumes, in principle, a continuous pleasure-pain scale which allows us to treat degrees of pain as negative degrees of pleasure. But, from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure, and especially not one man's pain by another man's pleasure. Instead of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, one should demand, more modestly, the least amount of avoidable suffering for all [...]

As Popper notes, what follows from this view is that the minimization of suffering should be our main ethical priority. This view is commonly referred to as negative utilitarianism, and it is usually contrasted with the perhaps more common view that there is a symmetry between positive and negative experiences, and that suffering can be outweighed by positive experiences, which may be taken to imply that there is no special obligation to minimize suffering over increasing pleasure. So who is right?

First of all, it is worth shortly establishing the most basic and obvious fact about the implications of the qualitative distinction, which is that, in an absolute sense, all experience below the zero-point on the felicific continuum in some sense count negatively, whereas experiences above this point count positively.

Being clear about this much, we can raise the difficult question: can positive and negative experiences be weighed against each other? Can positive experiences ever outweigh negative ones? It seems to me that they can, but there are important caveats here. First the simple case that they can: Most people are willing to endure mildly unpleasant experiences for the sake of experiencing very positive ones, and it seems they may well be right in this willingness.

Yet how much pleasure can outweigh how much suffering, then? By definition, an equal amount of pleasure outweighs an equal amount of suffering, but such a truism says nothing of interest. The interesting question is whether the range of possible positive experiences reaches as high as the range of possible negative experiences reaches deep. Once again, we are faced with an empirical question that we must look to our experience to answer, and the answer is clearly that it does not. For example, it seems that most people would not be willing to endure a full day of near-maximally intense suffering — for instance, have the sensation of being burned alive for a full day — for the sake of being granted a long and happy life. And even if one is willing to endure such a full day of horror, just how much is one willing to push it and endure in order to get a lifetime of pure joy? A week of pure hell? A month? An entire year? No matter how fond of life or tough one may be, nobody could reasonably be willing to push the lever to be anything close to 50/50 — say, enduring 50 years of pure hell in order to enjoy 50 years of pure, intense joy.

So there is undeniably a powerful asymmetry between the range of possible positive experiences and the range of possible negative ones, at least in terms of readily possible experiences for (presumably all) the kinds of conscious beings alive today. The way the range of happiness and suffering readily available to us falls on the felicific continuum seems well-illustrated by the image of an iceberg: the vast majority lies beneath the surface, the zero-point, and goes way deeper than the tip of the iceberg goes high, a tip that is vanishingly small compared to the mountain that lies beneath it. Intense shortly lasting suffering can make an entire happy life seem of little value in comparison. The same thing just cannot be said in reverse. This, I think, is the asymmetry that so-called negative utilitarians have rightly noticed, and which they have been surprisingly alone in pointing out.

And, as if it were not bad enough, the asymmetry between positive and negative experiences is not only a matter of the range of states of suffering reaching far deeper than the range of possible states of joy reaches high. Also in terms of how easily accessible the extremes of these ranges are, or even just their moderate levels, is there a great asymmetry. A single event can cause immense pain and suffering for a lifetime, whereas no similar event can cause a corresponding increase in happiness, or anything close to it. For instance, a button on an electric saw pushed at the wrong time, and an arm is lost — an unfathomable amount of pain appears immediately only to decline slowly over hours, days, weeks and months, perhaps never to be extinguished completely, and even if it is, a devastating disability and trauma is likely to remain. Countless examples like this can be mentioned — a single fall, and a back and two legs break, a single moment of inattention and a car accident causes lifetimes of physical disability, sorrow and PTSD, a few words spoken and a heart is broken never to be completely healed, a single push of a button and an entire nation is destroyed in fire and nuclear radiation. Yet not a single example can be mentioned of the opposite. No single event can cause long-lasting pleasure and flourishing on a similar scale, or anything close to it.

The reality is that we are very vulnerable in this world. Moving consciousness higher on the felicific continuum is like climbing a mountain in that there are so many more ways to fail and fall than there are ways to climb upward, and a fall will often be far deeper than any step we can take upward is high. Yet it is important to note that these realities of the felicific continuum do not imply that we should give up climbing this often all too challenging mountain.

In sum, it seems that some negative experiences can be outweighed by positive ones, but the reality is that there is a massive asymmetry in the range of states of suffering we can experience compared to the range of positive ones, and an equally unfortunate asymmetry is found when it comes to how easily accessible these states are: it is far easier to get to suffer intensely than to become intensely, or even moderately, happy. It remains an open question what the specific implications of these asymmetries are on the practical level, and whether we will be able to reverse these asymmetries and ultimately eliminate suffering. What stands wholly indisputable, however, is the massive importance of reducing and preventing suffering.
Who Are We?

"Reason shows me that if my happiness is desirable and a good, the equal happiness of any other person must be equally desirable." — Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

Having established that where we find ourselves on the felicific continuum is what ultimately matters, one of the most important questions to ask and answer is: who are we? Who is it that we should act so as to move as high on the felicific continuum as possible?

The answer, as I shall argue here, is all conscious beings. Again, we should act so as to bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible, and hence every conscious being is, by virtue of being conscious, inherently relevant in relation to this goal — inherently of moral value and importance.

This claim is often met with fierce opposition, an opposition that usually has narrowly selfish roots: why should I maximize the well-being of all conscious beings? Why should I not just maximize my own personal well-being? These would be the questions of the position commonly referred to as rational egoism, which holds that one should act so as to maximize one's personal well-being.

What justification is provided for this unique and exclusive focus on one being — "oneself" — instead of a focus on all? The core justification and seed of this position seems to be an intuition, the strong feeling that one should prioritize one's personal well-being over that of others. This "justification" is of little value, however, one reason being that intuitions that contradict this intuition also exist. For instance, many people, including myself, find it intuitively obvious that we should maximize the collective well-being of all conscious beings. So what are we to make of these contradicting intuitions? Intuitions of this sort simply do not provide any real justification. We must have better reasons than this.

In order to see whether rational egoism really poses, or indeed can pose, a challenge to the view that we should move all conscious beings as high on the felicific continuum as possible, what one might call the non-exclusive view, it is worth examining whether rational egoism can rationally be maintained, and particularly whether the unique self whose well-being rational egoism holds that we should maximize actually exists.

Before making this examination, it is worth noting that almost no matter how megalomaniacal ethical value one grants oneself in a personal sense, other conscious beings will still be far more important. Because even if one considered it defensible to ascribe greater value to oneself personally than to other beings, just how much greater value could one honestly allow to grant oneself? 10 times greater than other humans? 100? 1,000? The truth is that even if one grants oneself a million times greater value than one grants other humans, humanity as a whole, excluding oneself, will still count about 7,000 times more than oneself individually. And that is just humanity, which only makes up a tiny minority of the beings who inhabit the moral universe. And if we consider future conscious beings, the relative importance of oneself personally compared to others becomes even smaller still. The bottom-line, then, is that even if one ascribes extraordinarily disproportionate ethical value to oneself personally, other beings are collectively still of much greater importance than oneself. Therefore, even on fantastically selfish views, one will still owe greater obligations to other beings than to oneself — one's instrumental ethical value can easily be far greater than one's intrinsic value, and hence serving others will still generally be more important than serving oneself personally. So, counter to our intuitions, working for the greater good rather than merely one's own good is not only normative, but ethically required almost no matter how egoistically one values oneself.

Only almost, however, because it obviously does not apply to rational egoism, as this position holds that one should always maximize one's own personal well-being, and given this ultimate goal, rational egoism does not even allow for comparisons in value of oneself and one's own well-being to other beings and their well-being — if it did, it would not stick to its goal. This makes rational egoism tantamount to the view that oneself is of infinitely greater value than other beings. Already at this point, rational egoism begins to seem rather implausible.

What is the Ego We are supposed to be Egoistic for?

In order to find out whether rational egoism indeed can be considered rational in any way, we must know what the exclusive self that rational egoism refers to in fact is, and whether it even exists. We must look for the implicitly proposed self of rational egoism, and uncover its nature.

It seems intuitively obvious what it is that rational egoism refers to as "oneself" — it is simply the person that you are. The one who is born, given a name, living a life under this name, and who eventually dies and gets the given name put on a tombstone. Upon closer examination, however, this concept of a person proves less well-defined than we usually take it to be. Because what defines our notion of a person? What makes us think that a person is the same person over time? Is it the name? Clearly not, since people who change their names generally are considered to be the same person as they were before. Neither is it the DNA, as we do not seem to believe that changes in our DNA, which in fact occur all the time, make us a different person, and neither would we consider two different people with the exact same DNA to be the exact same person. So what is it that makes a person the same person over time? Or is the concept of a person who remains fundamentally the same over time merely a folk concept that breaks down upon closer examination?

The answer, as we shall see, is the latter. There simply is no such entity as a person or self that remains the same over time, and this is true both in physical terms and in terms of our direct experience.

The Falsity of Self in Physical Terms

In physical terms, we seem to largely identify the person with the body, perhaps the brain especially, as this is where all behavioral quirks and all thinking, the things we usually take to be defining of a person, arise from. For example, most people would consider someone who has an arm amputated or gets a new heart to be the same person, yet someone who gets the brain of someone else would, in the eyes of most people, be a different person. So might the brain, if indeed anything, be what makes a person fundamentally the same throughout life? The problem with this suggestion is that the entire body, including the brain, undergoes constant change throughout our lives. According to an estimate from Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center, 98 percent of the atoms that our body is made of are replaced every year, which implies that, as a matter of our constituents, pointing toward our brain or body at large and claiming that this remains the same over time simply is wrong.

Another suggestion has been made: it is not the atoms our bodies consist of that make us the same over time — after all, they can be replaced by similar atoms — but rather the way the atoms are put together. So, on this view, it is the specific physical structure of our body, including our brain, that makes us the same over time. This view also proves to be false, however, because at the level of structure, we also change all the time; changes occur in the structure of our body and brain every second, at every level. People who refer to our structure as the defining trait are right, however, that what remains relatively constant throughout an individual's life is the structure of the body and brain, and hence they are right that it is this largely similar and continuous structure that is the basis of our belief in fundamentally unchanging person-entities over time. The truth, however, is that such person-entities do not exist in the first place. There simply is no self-entity that remains the same over time. In physical terms, there is just a body that undergoes constant change while retaining a largely similar structure, and we have forced a folk concept down upon this body — the concept of a persistent, fundamentally unchanging person, or identity — but this concept is ultimately deluded.

A thought experiment may help make obvious the failure of the notion of a persistent identity, or person-entity. Imagine we have invented a perfect human teleporter — a machine that can scan a body, dissolve it, and then reconstruct it with the exact same structure somewhere else. We then make the machine scan a body, dissolve this body, and then immediately make it reappear in the same state right beside where the body just was. The subject will just feel as if reappearing somewhere else instantaneously, and appear with the exact same structure, and hence have all the same memories, ideas, thoughts and emotions as the individual we just dissolved. So according to most intuitions about personal identity, this person is the same person as the one we just dissolved; after all, the state of this individual would be more different from his initial state if he traveled the old-fashioned continuous way to the new spot, and one can therefore argue that teleportation is a way to stay more "oneself" in traveling somewhere else than any other method of travel can possibly accomplish, and that physical continuity is not required, in principle at least, for a being to fit our common intuition of personal identity over time.

Now imagine another scenario: we make another teleportation, except this time we do not dissolve the body we scan, but let it remain so that we end up with two individuals. On our common sense view of identity of persons, a person can only be one being — there can only be one "you" — so which of these two resulting individuals is the same person as before? The intuitive response would be the one who is in the same place, and not the other new one, yet this is not consistent with the conclusion drawn in the first example. There must be a mistake here, and there indeed is. The mistake is the idea of an unchanging personal identity, or person-entity, over time. In physical terms, what we usually refer to as a person is just a structure of matter that undergoes constant change, while remaining somewhat similar over time, and it is this ever-changing structure of matter that we seem to believe contains a core, a person-entity, which there can only be one of, and which remains the same throughout time. No such entity exists, however.

The failure of the notion of a persistently identical person-entity is also obvious from a closer look at the brain. Because there simply is no person-entity to be found in the brain. The brain is a multitude of parts, of neurons connected to each other in a gigantic, complex web of connections, and the traits we identify with a person are a product of activity distributed across this vast net of neurons that the brain is. So while the brain can be seen as one entity, it can equally be seen as a multitude of various interconnected entities.

This view of ourselves as a sum of many things is especially well-supported by the strange case of split-brain patients. These are people whose two brain hemispheres are disconnected because the corpus callosum that otherwise connects them has been cut. The remarkable thing about these patients is that they show every sign of having two different experiences in their two disconnected hemispheres. One can for instance show the one hemisphere a written word, done by only showing it to one eye, and this one hemisphere will then clearly understand and be able to show that it has understood this word, for instance, by using the hand it controls to point at or grasp for what the word said. However, the other hemisphere will know nothing of this understanding, and when the hemisphere that did not see the word is asked why the hand pointed or grasped as it did, this hemisphere will tend to provide a confabulation, which it shows every sign of believing itself. So when we surgically disconnect the hemispheres of the brain, we seem to end up with two disconnected systems that both try to navigate in, and make sense of, the world around them on their own. We seem to end up with two different conscious beings inside one skull.

Which one of these two seemingly different beings is the same as the original person, then? If I were this patient, which one of the hemispheres would I, the conscious mind, end up in after the procedure? Again, this question is a bad one. The conscious mind has simply been divided. There is no "I" that ends up somewhere; there is just a conscious mind that depends upon a vast multitude of distributed processes, and this is true of all of us, split-brain or not. Different processes in the brain give rise to different aspects of experience — sounds, sights, sensations etc. — and it seems that in the case of the split-brain, some of the aspects of the mind are just disconnected from each other; they seem to still be there, but no longer connected as they used to be.

The relevant ethical question in relation to this breakdown of our commonly held notion of self is why the neurons inside one skull should care about the future state of the neurons in this same skull more than they should care about the neurons in another skull? Rational egoism, interpreted in neural terms, claims that they should, but can any justification be given for this exclusive view? The answer is "no," because where neurons find themselves is ultimately an arbitrary criterion in ethical terms. For instance, if we transplanted a living brain from one skull into another, should anyone, including this brain itself, then care less about this being? Should this brain care less about itself if its neurons were successfully split and distributed to different skulls, for instance, by putting its two hemispheres into two different skulls? Anything but a "no" seems unreasonable, yet the truth is that there is no fundamental difference between caring about "one's own" neurons in another skull, or even in one's own skull, and then caring about someone else's neurons in another skull. The most crucial difference, one could argue, is that the neurons of others do not contain "one's own" DNA, yet this can hardly be considered a relevant criterion. For instance, if a mad scientist suddenly changed the DNA of all one's cells into those of another person, should one then, from the moment this happens, care less about "oneself"? Should one, before this happened, care more about one's life in the period before the change than the period after? That does not seem reasonable.

The truth is that caring and acting for the sake of the future states of one's own brain — and we always act for the sake of future states as our acts are never instantaneous — and caring and acting for the sake of the future states of other brains is not fundamentally different. In both cases, one cares and acts for the sake of what is essentially another brain state than the one that decides and initiates any given action. The fact that the future state of one's own brain is more similar and in some sense continuous with the present one simply does not make any important difference. It does not make it more "you," at least not in any fundamental sense, because, again, there is no such persistent "you" — only an ever-changing brain that gives rise to an ever-changing conscious mind. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it can actually also be seen, perhaps even more clearly, from our direct conscious experience.

The Falsity of Self in Experiential Terms

The fact that there is no persistent identity, no unchanging self-entity that we are, can also be realized from our direct experience, and all it takes is that we notice what our minds are in fact like. Because, in experiential terms, what we are is simply an ever-changing conscious mind; nothing about our conscious experience remains unchanged throughout our conscious lives, except, of course, for the fact that it is always conscious. The self, or person-entity, that we commonly take ourselves to be — which in subjective terms seems to be made up partly of sensations, thoughts and memories that we, as the conscious mind, identify with and fail to notice as objects in consciousness — is simply a self-representation that arises in our experience, which makes it yet another appearance in our conscious experience, and it is therefore, in experiential terms, no more what we are than any other appearance in consciousness.

The fact that the only thing that remains the same about ourselves over time is consciousness also makes it clear that it makes no sense to give greater ethical importance to oneself than to other conscious beings, because all other conscious beings are just as much consciousness as we are ourselves. In this sense, we really all are fundamentally the same. To unpack my former claim with a question: why care specifically for the future state of one's own conscious mind than for any other mind, when they are both different conscious minds from the present one, and both equally much consciousness as the present one? Sure, what we consider our own future conscious mind will tend to share a lot of our current memories, ideas and quirky tendencies, but there is no further fact than this — no further fact than that it to some degree is continuous and shares mental traits with the present state of mind — so why is any of that of ethical relevance in principle? It isn't.

It is surely based on our persistent ideas and memories that we believe that "we" — what we consider our own conscious mind — are fundamentally the same over time while all other minds are fundamentally different, yet this is an illusion. Certain ideas and memories simply make this appear so, and these, plus our other specific mental traits, are what constitute what we call the same person over time, but none of these traits are of fundamental ethical importance. After all, if one were somehow able to copy all the traits of one's mind into another being, would this imply that one should then care more about that being, and that one then has greater ethical obligations toward this being? Of course not. It is simply not relevant.

It may be objected that one's own present conscious mind does not experience the future states of other conscious minds, and that this is the crucial difference between others and oneself. This is to miss the point, however, and not least to be deluded about consciousness. Because it is surely true that we, as present conscious minds, do not directly experience the future conscious minds of others, but it is false, however, to claim that this constitutes a difference in any way between others and the future states of what we consider our own conscious mind. The truth is that our present conscious mind does not experience the future states of "our own" conscious mind either. What we consider "our" future state of consciousness will simply be consciousness in another state, just as much as the conscious experience of what we consider other conscious beings, now and in the future, is consciousness in another state. And, again, it is true that there is a greater similarity — one's own future mind will tend to share more memories, thoughts and traits altogether with one's present mind than the future minds of others will — yet this is still not ethically relevant.

The truth is that, in one sense, all we ever do is for another: we act so as to ensure the well-being of other states of consciousness, be it the future conscious states of other beings or the future states of the conscious mind we call our own. It is also true, however, that all we ever do is for ourselves: whenever we do something for anyone, others or ourselves, we act so as to secure the well-being of consciousness — what we are most fundamentally and persistently. Upon realizing this clearly, it becomes obvious that there is, in principle at least, no justification for giving special priority to the future of the mind we consider our own. There are just different states of consciousness occurring over time and space, and our caring incomparably much for the future state of the mind we call our own is simply rooted in a biased intuition. This intuition is quite easy to understand in light of our evolutionary history, but it has no basis in reason ultimately, as there is no fundamental sense in which there is an "I" that remains fundamentally the same over time in what we consider one mind more than there is across different minds. Again, quite uncontroversial to say really, all conscious minds over time and space are different from each other, yet they are equally consciousness.

It should be clear at this point that rational egoism in its usual narrow conception actually makes no sense, since the unique person whose well-being it claims we should maximize does not exist, at least not in the sense of a persistently existing being who is fundamentally different from any other conscious being. And a completely arbitrary criterion for what constitutes the supposed person we are asked to care for — for example, something along the lines of the conscious mind arising from activity inside this particular skull over time — simply cannot be accepted as a rational basis for anything. In light of the fact that the ego that rational egoism refers to does not exist in a meaningful sense, it becomes clear that there is nothing rational about rational egoism in its usual sense. The only persistent fact about the conscious mind whose well-being rational egoism claims we should maximize is consciousness itself. If we take this to be our persistent identity, which it in fact is — it is the only thing that can ultimately be said to be persistent about us, as conscious minds, over time — then rational egoism simply reduces to the non-exclusive view. This would truly be rational "egoism," as it is based upon the only notion of identity — of what we are — that does not break down upon rational scrutiny, and hence rational egoism, in its only defensible and meaningful sense, does not even pose an objection to the non-exclusive view, but is in fact completely equivalent with it, and results in the same conclusion in the end: we should move consciousness, ourselves, as high on the felicific continuum as possible. That truly is what we are.
Part II: The Particulars of Ethics
The Particulars of Ethics: An Open Question

As argued in the first part, the fundamentals of ethics are simple and clear. Where it is less clear, and where all the complexity and controversy lies, is when it comes to the particulars — the specific questions about which actions that will take us higher along the felicific continuum, and about what being high on the felicific continuum amounts to in more concrete terms. These are the questions that this second part is concerned with, and which it will try to provide some reasonable speculations on and answers to. Because while it is an open question exactly how we should act in concrete terms, this openness does not imply that we cannot say something reasonable about what we likely, and in many regards even certainly, should do. We certainly can, and that is what I shall try to do here: to present what I consider some of the most relevant ethical facts and good suggestions about the particulars, including how we should think about ethics at the practical level. And few things could be more important than thinking about this. In my view, this is the great project that lies before humanity today: to seek for the answers to these questions about the particulars, and to act according to our findings.
Caring for Oneself Personally

A question that arises naturally in response to the conclusion that we have no special obligations to ourselves as individuals in principle is whether this implies that we have no reason to give ourselves priority in practice. Does it imply that we should not take good care of ourselves personally? The short answer is "no."

Thriving Altruistically

There are indeed good reasons to take good care of ourselves personally and to secure our own personal happiness in light of the fact that we are not of special importance compared to other beings. In fact, one's personal happiness could hardly be more important than it is in light of this fact. Because the truth about us is that we generally are much better able to help others the more we thrive ourselves. If we do not have a healthy, thriving mind ourselves, we will tend to be in a bad position to help others — tend to become patients instead of agents in the moral universe. This is not to say that it is impossible to help others if we are unhappy, but it seems that whatever we can do to help others with an unhappy mind, we can likely also do, and do much better, with a fulfilled one. For this reason, increasing happiness — at least certain forms of happiness — even in people who might be considered fairly well-off already, may actually be a way to effectively reduce suffering in the larger picture.

None of this provides any case for mindless self-indulgence, obviously, but rather the opposite: it makes a case for being happy and fulfilled in the ways that best allow us to help alleviate the suffering and increase the happiness of others. It would seem, then, that we actually have an obligation to attain these forms of happiness — to promote the deeply pleasurable and connecting emotions such as affection and compassion — and, fortunately, it seems that there is at least one way in which this can be done reliably, which is by practicing so-called compassion meditation. Practices of this sort have been shown to significantly increase personal well-being and positive emotions, including empathy, and it also seems to foster affiliation with the suffering of others, and increased positive affect in the face of suffering. These facts make such a practice seem like a reasonable way to approach fulfillment, both individually and collectively, and they seem to provide us with a tentative, but quite concrete ethical suggestion: practice compassion meditation.

This would just be one suggestion about how we might be able to seek fulfillment in ways that make us better able to increase the well-being of others, in this case by making us care deeply about other beings in the first place, which seems a good foundational step toward helping others. And it is of course by no means a sufficient step, because if compassion is not guided by a deeper understanding of the world, it can all too easily result in ineffective, perhaps even harmful, impulsive actions. Yet compassion is a vitally necessary step, because without it, there is no powerful drive that causes us to make an effort to help alleviate the suffering and increase the happiness of others in the first place; no compass to drive and point us in a kind and wise direction.

It is of course not the case that conflicts between the well-being of the individual and the collective well-being of all conscious beings never arise. For instance, if it is the case that one feels more well-being the more compassion meditation one does, then spending all one's time practicing it would seem to be the best thing one could do for oneself personally, yet that will hardly help anybody else. Or, to take a more realistic example from my own experience, I knew in advance that seeing the movie Earthlings would make me feel bad while seeing it, and that it would affect me negatively for a good while after. But I also knew that, however badly I would feel while watching this movie, this would be nothing compared to what the beings in the movie went through, and what countless like them still go through today. Given that watching the movie would enlighten me about the state of the world, and likely help motivate me to do something about it, I was clearly right to put myself through this disturbing experience.

In such cases of conflict, we must simply try to find a golden balance. As a general matter, however, a decent synthesis seems possible. Happiness of a kind that is deeply fulfilling for oneself individually, and which helps one reduce the suffering and promote the happiness of others, is not only possible, but, I think, indispensable in order for us to be able to do as much good as possible. Because, again, it seems that a happy mind is generally better able to help others than an unhappy one is, and it therefore seems hard to make a case for any significant decrease in personal happiness for the sake of the group, at least when it comes to certain forms of happiness. And this is where the real conflict seems to lie: between different forms of happiness that we can seek. However, even here it seems that the well-being of the group and the well-being of the individual can easily be complementary. Because for the sake of the group, we should obviously seek to be happy in altruistic ways rather than in narrowly egoistic ways, and the same thing could well be true in relation to individual well-being; as mentioned, it seems that, at least in the case of most human minds, pro-social and altruistic forms of happiness tend to be the most deeply satisfying ones in the end.

Obligations to Oneself Personally

Contrary to what one might expect, the fact that we are not persistent person-entities, but, in experiential terms, consciousness in ever-varying states that are not fundamentally different across time or across individuals, actually gives us serious obligations to ourselves, and obliges us to take better care of ourselves as individuals than we might otherwise tend to do. As Derek Parfit has noted, it implies that we should not cause anything to our future selves that we would not do to others. We are no more justified in causing unnecessary suffering and pain to ourselves than we are in causing this to others. This is obviously not to say that there are not relevant differences between subjecting oneself to pain and doing so to others. Nor does it suggest that people should not generally be free to do with themselves what they want in practice, first of all because the alternative — forcing people to do certain things that are likely good for them and to avoid certain things that will likely harm them — will tend to have worse consequences than not intervening at all. And, second, because most of the time, people really are better judges of what is best for themselves than others are, which leads to another reason why caring for oneself personally still makes good sense, namely that we tend to be better able to secure our own well-being than others are.

Our future selves are dependent on our present actions in a way that the future selves of other individuals are not, and if we do not ourselves manage to act so as to secure the well-being of our future selves, there is no guarantee that others will. And if we fail to take adequately care of our future selves, we will obviously not be able to take care of others either, and for this reason it does make sense to give priority to securing one's own needs. A good illustration of this might be the practical guidelines that accompany the oxygen masks on an airplane: it makes sense to secure one's own mask before helping others, because even though this may seem callously selfish, the truth is that the alternative, the apparently heroic act of trying to help another first, is more risky both for oneself and the other. Furthermore, it is also generally the case that we can take care of ourselves far more efficiently than others can, and we should therefore, to spend our energy as wisely as possible, be the primary carers for our own basic needs, as we are by default.

So being responsible for one's own needs oneself is, generally at least, just the most practical and efficient solution to this problem of getting one's needs met. This argument can also be expanded to the needs of those closest to us. For instance, as a practical matter, it is simply easier, and in many obvious ways better, to take care of one's own child than it is to distribute the responsibility for a child to, say, a group of strangers, not least given the emotional needs of both the child and the parents. In sum, there is no good reason not to take good care of ourselves and those closest to us, while there are many good reasons why we should, both from a narrow personal perspective and from the broadest ethical one.

The Falsehood of Zero-Sum Thinking

The notion that there is necessarily a fundamental conflict between caring for ourselves personally on the one hand and helping others on the other, is a good example of a broader trend in our thinking about ethics that we need to get beyond, namely our conceiving of ethics as being a zero-sum game: we have a fixed pie, and our task is to divide and distribute it. The reason we need to step beyond this mode of thinking is, quite simply, that it is wrong. There is no fixed pie, or anything close to it. The truth is that there are ways to climb higher that bring us all higher, and ways to fall in which we all fall. The "pie" is anything but fixed, and the game is usually anything but zero-sum — the notion that it is is yet another example of our tendency to think in terms of opposites, limits and anti-theses rather than complements, possibilities and syntheses. To be sure, ethics often is a matter of conflict and priority between different goals. For instance, the time we spend pursuing one goal surely cannot be spent pursuing another goal that requires entirely different actions, at least not directly. The crucial thing to note, however, is that ethics is not just, or even most often, a matter of conflict, because many worthwhile goals ultimately require, or are at least furthered by, the same actions. So, as is the case when it comes to the pursuit of personal versus collective happiness, there need not be a deep conflict between different worthwhile goals, and they are in fact often complementary.

To take a simple example: Avoiding the ingestion of heavy metals like mercury and lead is not only good for our physical health, but also our mental health, and as a result it likely also benefits, or at least avoids harm to, things like our concentration, interpersonal relationships and intelligence — the stuff that just about any worthwhile goal is achieved with. The avoidance of heavy metals in our food and water is important for all of us, and for so many reasons. In other words, it is a win-win goal, and the point is that this is most often true when it comes to ethics, to what we should do: the best of all specific goals and actions will generally not be ones that merely benefit one group over another, but those that benefit all of us. They will not be a matter of zero-sum, but of win-win.

In sum, taking good care of ourselves personally is indeed normative and required, which is not to say that our common level of selfishness, or perhaps rather the ways in which we are being selfish most often, are justifiable; they clearly are not, as our buying habits alone make quite clear. We are obliged to take good care of ourselves, and therefore to be selfish to a certain extent, but this extent is the one that enables us to best help others — the extent that enables us to have the greatest instrumental value we can, which can, when we act wisely, easily be much greater than our intrinsic value, since we can relieve the suffering, and prevent the deaths, of countless other beings. In this way, the search for personal happiness we should be engaged in is ultimately an unselfish one, at least anything but a narrowly selfish one.

This strikes me as a most appealing vision and cause for the search for personal happiness: be as happy as possible so that you can help others become as free from suffering and as happy as possible. This is a collective project we should all unite around, and which is coincident with even the narrowest self-interests of all of us, since promoting each other's happiness in this way — promoting the kinds of happiness in others that are in turn conducive to others' happiness — will benefit all of us in the end. And, fortunately, this is a real possibility. It really is possible to seek personal happiness in a way that benefits others; what is perhaps most worthy of being described by the term 'rational egoism'. There are ways to flourish both individually and collectively in a win-win manner, ways that are not only compatible, but complementary and mutually amplifying. Our task must be to inform ourselves about these ways and employ them in practice.
Are All Conscious Beings Equal?

Another question that naturally announces itself in response to the fact that we are fundamentally all the same as consciousness, and the fact that we should bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible, is whether this implies that all conscious beings are of equal moral value intrinsically.

The answer to this question is also, most likely, "no." The fact that all conscious beings are all, in experiential terms, consciousness does not imply that all conscious beings can experience an equal range and duration of experiences along the felicific continuum — the continuum that moral value relates to ultimately. It seems safe to say that we do not. For instance, a comatose patient in a state of permanent sleep who experiences dreams like most people do at night is no doubt conscious, but given the vividness of most dreams and the ranges of experiences available in such dreams, an individual who is permanently trapped in such a state cannot reasonably be claimed to have a felicific range of experience that is as wide, and hence as significant ultimately, as that of someone who is awake.

It should immediately be noted that the implication of such a gradation of the intrinsic value of the range of experience of different beings in no way is that the beings with smaller ranges should then be subjugated by those who have a greater range of experience, nor that they should be treated any less well as a general matter — that would clearly be a non sequitur. Neither does it in any way justify needless exploitation of those who experience a smaller range of experience. On the contrary, we can actually sometimes have stronger obligations to help beings with a smaller range of experience than those with a broader one given that beings with a smaller range of experience — say, the coma patients referred to above — sometimes are more in need, and therefore will benefit more from our help, than those who may have a wider range of experience. So greater intrinsic value of a being's range of experience does not necessarily translate into that this being is more important than other beings in terms of whom we have the greatest obligations to, and should help the most, in practice. Only in cases of genuinely conflicting interests can greater intrinsic value justify greater priority, yet even in such cases it is not as clear as one might expect, one reason being that the instrumental value of the beings involved — the degree to which they will alleviate others' suffering — easily can nullify and outweigh any difference there may be in the intrinsic value of different beings' experiences.

Non-Human Beings

The question about the difference in importance between different conscious beings is especially relevant in relation to our attitudes toward non-human beings, since many such beings no doubt are conscious and no doubt can experience a great range of both suffering and joy, and yet we commonly talk about them, and act toward them, as if they inhabited another moral universe altogether — as if the life, suffering and happiness of humans is completely incommensurable to that of non-humans. Such an attitude cannot be defended. Like all other animals, humans have arisen through the process of evolution, and we are made of the same stuff, and have the same basic neurological structures as all mammals, and we share the most basic of these structures with all vertebrates. Like humans, non-human animals can suffer and feel joy, and to categorically reject that non-humans can be compared to humans in ethical terms is therefore nothing but anthropocentric speciesism. It may be objected that humans can experience a much wider range of experience along the felicific continuum than non-human animals can, yet such a response provides no justification for disregarding non-human animals morally in any way. First of all, the claim that humans experience a much wider range of experience along the felicific continuum is disputable to say the least. There is for instance little reason to think that the experience of physical pain is worse for a human being than it is for any other vertebrate, and one can in fact make a reasonable case that the opposite might be true, as has for instance been done by Richard Dawkins:

[...] I can see a Darwinian reason why there might even be a negative correlation between intellect and susceptibility to pain. [...]

Isn't it plausible that a clever species such as our own might need less pain, precisely because we are capable of intelligently working out what is good for us, and what damaging events we should avoid? Isn't it plausible that an unintelligent species might need a massive wallop of pain, to drive home a lesson that we can learn with less powerful inducement?

At very least, I conclude that we have no general reason to think that non-human animals feel pain less acutely than we do, and we should in any case give them the benefit of the doubt.

The truth is that we do not know whether humans can experience a greater range of experience on the felicific continuum than non-human beings. It could for instance be the case that humans can experience a greater range of experience in general compared to non-human beings, in terms of variation and nuance, and we may indeed, but that would not necessarily imply that our experience spans a greater felicific range — that our suffering and happiness is greater than that of other animals; it might indeed not be. Second, even if it is the case that humans are capable of experiencing a greater felicific range, a relevant question would be just how much greater this range is compared to that of other sentient beings — enough to justify the notion that humans and non-humans just cannot be morally compared? Unless the non-human range is zero, which it clearly is not, the answer to the latter question must be "no." Another relevant question would be whether such a greater felicific range necessarily would imply that humans constitute the majority of intrinsic value in the moral universe? It surely does not, and the fact that non-human vertebrates vastly outnumber humans — thousands of times at least — implies that the vast majority of intrinsic value in the moral universe is likely constituted by non-human rather than human experience. Furthermore, still assuming that humans can experience a greater range of experience than all other animals can, this would actually not in itself imply that we should care more for individual humans in practice than we should for individual non-humans, cf. the point made above in relation to that helping beings who experience a narrower felicific range easily could happen to be what best moves consciousness higher on the felicific continuum in practice. For instance, if humans can experience a greater felicific range than other animals can, this does not imply that we generally do experience a greater felicific range, and it could well be that we do not. We have for example managed to create relatively comfortable living conditions for most humans compared to the conditions under which other animals live — we for instance no longer live in constant fear of being eaten alive, and we no longer die in that way so often either; the same thing cannot be said about most of our fellow vertebrates. So even if other animals are not able to experience as great a felicific range as humans are, they could nonetheless experience a greater range in actuality, as they might visit the extremes they can experience more frequently, and hence their experience could actually be of greater intrinsic weight and moral importance than human experience generally is.

Whether humans experience a greater felicific range or not — I suspect the opposite may well be the case — the ethical implications of such a difference are not, as mentioned above, that subjugation and exploitation of any group of beings is in any way justifiable. It indeed is not. Yet this is exactly what we do: we have made a global industry out of systematically exploiting individuals on the basis that they are not human, raising and killing them by the billions under unthinkably miserable conditions. We make them suffer horribly for purely frivolous purposes such as palate pleasure, fashion preference and habit, none of which provide anything close to a sufficient justification for imposing suffering and death upon other beings.

When it comes to the specific ethical question about how we should act in relation to sentient non-humans, no doubt one of the most important ethical questions of all, the most basic step we should take is as clear as can be: we should, as I have argued at great length elsewhere, stop supporting our needless exploitation of non-human beings for frivolous purposes, i.e., we should embrace veganism. Until we do that, until we stop actively imposing needless suffering upon non-human individuals, and until we stop putting them in our mouths and on our bodies, we will not think clearly about them in moral terms, and we will not realize our obligations toward them. We will not be driven or able to help them until we stop harming them.

A big part of the problem is that we have an innate bias against caring deeply for non-human beings, as doing so in our evolutionary past did no good for us, and we have been slow to question this bias, which is why most of us still cannot make ourselves see anything really wrong about the suffering and death of non-human beings as long as it happens in the name of our consumption, or as long as it happens in nature. It seems that no matter how terrible the suffering taking place in nature is, most people persist in believing that we should not interfere with "nature's order," as if anything close to a benign order was in place. There is no such order, however, which is why we must move on from this attitude and eventually help non-human beings, as suffering in nature is one of the most serious moral problems of all; it certainly constitutes the vast majority of suffering on earth, and only speciesism or defeatism could cause us to refrain from acknowledging that as being a great moral problem. How we can best help reduce this suffering remains an open question, but it seems that embracing veganism — ending our practice of needlessly harming non-human beings for frivolous purposes — is the first step we must take toward helping our fellow sentient beings.

Needless to say, helping our non-human cousins does not amount to valuing human life and well-being any less. Again, our obligations to others only underscore our obligations to ourselves, both as individuals and as a species, as it still holds true that we must thrive ourselves in order to be an optimal help for others. Only a flourishing and highly developed human civilization, advanced both morally and technologically, can be a real help to non-humans, which provides yet another reason, on top of our intrinsic value, for taking good care of ourselves and our fellow humans.

Conclusively, all conscious beings are most likely not equal in terms of the felicific range they can and do experience, yet the implications of this inequality are anything but straight-forward in terms of how we can best move upward on the felicific continuum. It remains an open question how wide the felicific ranges that different conscious beings can experience are, and what the implications of these various ranges are. It is clear, however, that the implications surely are not that beings who may experience smaller ranges can be frivolously exploited, or even that such beings generally should be given lower priority in practice in any way compared to those who may experience wider ranges. And, needless to say, nor does it imply that any group of sentient beings are not morally important. All sentient beings matter.
The Meaning of Being as High as Possible

What does it mean to bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible given that we are innumerable different conscious beings who can experience different felicific ranges? What it amounts to in detail is, as mentioned, an open question, but that is not to say that we cannot elaborate on what it means in slightly more concrete terms. What it means is to bring the net felicific value of all conscious experience as high on the felicific continuum as possible. This is what we should do.

This immediately raises the problem of how to add up suffering and happiness, which surely is an extremely difficult problem, and anything close to complete precision in such calculations is no doubt impossible to achieve in practice. However, when we consider the simple cases, it is clear that addition and subtraction ultimately must apply in some way: other things being equal, a full day of total horror is surely worse than a mere second of the same, the death of ten happy individuals is surely worse than the death of one, and surely much worse again than a headache or a broken finger. So a moral calculus clearly does apply in some way in principle — there are truths about which outcomes are best in the aggregate, even if we cannot work out exactly what they are in practice.

Equivalent Formulations of Moral Wisdom

An equivalent, perhaps more practically oriented formulation of the statement that we should act so as to bring the net sum of conscious experience as high on the felicific continuum as possible is that we should act as if we ourselves are all conscious beings. This would lead to the same conclusion given that we are rational and want the best for ourselves. And if we take our identity to be consciousness itself, as it indeed is, this is, as made clear already, what we in fact should do if we act out of self-interest in the truest sense. Alternatively, a perhaps even better formulation of the same principle, given that it might be hard to imagine being all conscious beings at the same time, would be to instead formulate it in serial rather than parallel terms: We should act as if we ourselves are going to live through the experience of all conscious beings who will ever live. Again, this is equivalent given that we are rational and want what is ultimately best for ourselves as consciousness.

Keeping one of these equivalent precepts in mind may well be a good way for us to actually act accordingly — I shall argue later that it indeed is — and they in fact also to a great degree contain some of the most widely praised and accepted ethical precepts, such as the golden rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you; and its negative formulation, the so-called silver rule: do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.

Another widely praised ethical principle that also, at least in its most rational version, conforms with the statement that we should act so as to maximize the well-being of sentient beings is the so-called original position. This idea comes from philosopher John Rawls in his attempt to formulate a just principle to organize society around, and it is often considered an example of a wise ethical principle that goes against the aforementioned principle of bringing about the best outcome for conscious beings. The truth, however, is that, in its expanded, rational formulation, it does not. The idea is that we should organize society as if we found ourselves in a hypothetical original position, where we are placed behind a veil of ignorance that prevents us from knowing where in society we are going to be born — we do not know whether we will end up poor or rich, gifted or not.

Rawls' idea was that this principle makes us try to create the most just society we possibly can by making us organize society so that nobody is better off than others, at least not unless it benefits those who are worst off. The fact, however, is that the original position indeed conforms perfectly with the principle that we should maximize the net well-being of all conscious beings, at least given that we are rational and want what is best for ourselves. Because if we imagine that we find ourselves behind this veil of ignorance, and do not know which specific conscious being we are going to be born as, then, if we are perfectly rational and aim for what is best for ourselves — i.e. if we employ a game theoretical framework in which we can know to total precision what the felicific value of the lives of all conscious beings will be as a result of all different organizing choices we can make, but not which individual life we will live, and then aim for the best for ourselves as individuals — we actually should organize society and the world at large so as to maximize the well-being of conscious beings. This is what would be best for us, both for what we can consider our broad self-interest — for all consciousness — but also our most narrow self-interest as a single being behind this veil of ignorance. The organization we should choose will be exactly the same in both cases, since bringing the net sum of conscious experience as high on the felicific continuum as possible is also what maximizes any individual's chances of being as high on the felicific continuum as possible in this game theoretical framework, the framework one should base one's decision on if one is to make a rational decision from any such position of ignorance.

So, contrary to what is often supposed, the principle of organizing society — or, better yet, the world at large — from the original position is actually not in any way in opposition to the goal of maximizing the well-being of conscious beings, but in fact, if we are rational in this original position, in perfect alignment with it. And there surely is a lot of organizing to do toward this ultimate goal.

The Separateness of Persons or Lack Thereof

The formulation "bringing consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible" can seem to suggest that we are not different conscious beings, and that ethics concerns only one being — as if we are one mind, which we should bring as high on this continuum as possible. Is this the case? And if so, what are the implications? Should we no longer respect the autonomy and individuality of persons?

Again, we, the conscious beings, are indeed all consciousness, and in this sense there is not a fundamental difference between us — we sure are separate, but we are still fundamentally the same. That we, the conscious beings, are all, in experiential terms, consciousness of course does not imply that we are one mind in the sense that we are directly mentally connected and able to access each other's memories and thoughts directly; we clearly are not. We can, however, arguably be conceived of as being one disconnected mind, at least as much as a split-brain mind can be conceived of as such. This disconnected mind is, to make yet an equivalent formulation of the fundamental goal, the one whose collective well-being we should maximize.

So what are the ethical implications of such a conception, or of the similarly impersonal, and ultimately ethically equivalent, claim that we should bring the net sum of all conscious experience as high on the felicific continuum as possible? Is there a place for persons and personhood on this ultimately impersonal view? There is indeed.

One way in which the concept of a person still makes sense has already been pointed out: taking good care of oneself personally makes perfect sense in relation to the ultimately impersonal goal of maximizing the well-being of consciousness. This is a good example of the more general point that the impersonality of ethics in principle does not necessarily amount to impersonality in practice. The fact that we should maximize the well-being of consciousness, and that we might to some extent conceive of all conscious beings as one disconnected mind, in no way implies that we cannot in practice hold personhood sacred and respect different needs and wants of different individuals. In fact, the practical implications are the complete opposite. For instance, to overlook the specifics of what makes different individuals thrive and to treat all beings as though they were one mass person clearly does not follow, as that would no doubt only have bad effects. In order to reach the ultimately impersonal goal of minimizing suffering and maximizing well-being, we must indeed act so as to fulfill the different specific needs that different beings have; there is no conflict here.

Our need for maintaining personhood in practice goes deeper than this, however. Because the truth is that the notion of personhood, in certain forms at least, is nothing less than indispensable in order for us to act ethically toward other sentient beings. As a matter of human moral psychology, it seems clear that we need to see other beings as unique, irreplaceable individuals in order to kindle our moral feelings that cause us to take them seriously in our conduct. This is evident from the practices where humans have been robbed of their personhood — in Nazi Germany, for instance, where Jews and other minorities had their recognition as individuals effectively robbed, and were perceived as less than replaceable numbers in practice, and as a result, these people suffered immensely. And it is equally evident in our practice toward non-human beings today, where we do exactly the same as the Nazis did, and quite overtly so: we completely rob them of personhood by putting numbers on their bodies, by continually normalizing and trivializing the exploitation of them, by viewing them as replaceable resources, as commodities we buy, sell and fry as were they nothing but that — as if they were not, as they indeed are, unique, feeling individuals with pains and joys, or at least with the capacity to feel the latter if we ever gave them the chance. In every case of such impersonal practice, the end result is the same: unthinkable suffering for the beings whom humans fail to perceive as individuals.

So the ultimately impersonal goal of maximizing the well-being of conscious beings does not imply an impersonal practice, but rather the complete opposite. Not only is there a place for personhood and regard for individuals and their respective preferences in our ethical practice; these things are indispensable.

To tie up and conclude this essay concerning what it means to bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible, and not least what it does not mean, it is still an open question what it amounts to in specific terms. The goal can, however, be expressed in other, perhaps more practically oriented terms: we should act so as to bring the net sum of all conscious experience as high on the felicific continuum as possible; we should, given that we are perfectly rational, act as if we ourselves are going to live through the experience of all conscious beings who will ever live — as if we ourselves are all conscious beings. Similarly expressed, if we conceive of all conscious minds as a single disconnected mind, the normative mission that lies before us is that we should bring this "mind" as high on the felicific continuum as possible. And doing so does not entail a practice that dismisses individual differences or personhood, but rather one that holds the individuality and personhood of all sentient beings to be nothing less than sacred.
We Should Examine the Question and Strive for the Goal

Having provided some basic answers to a few burning questions that seemed in urgent need of being addressed, it seems we can now finally move on to ask the broader, perhaps most fundamental question of the particulars of ethics: how should we approach ethics in practice? Apart from the obvious points clarified so far — that we should take good care of ourselves in altruistically oriented ways and stop imposing needless suffering and death upon other sentient beings, i.e. embrace veganism — what should we actually do in this world in concrete terms?

This is the very question with which ethics is ultimately concerned, and it is, as pointed out many times already, an open question; what we should do most fundamentally is clear — bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible — but what this amounts to and how it is actually done in specific terms is an open question. Yet this is still not to say that we cannot say something reasonable about what likely are good, and even true, ideas in relation to how we should approach ethics in practice, just as the openness in science concerning what is true about the world in general does not imply that we cannot confidently assert, say, the fact of biological evolution or the existence of the moon.

In relation to how we should approach ethics in practice, I think there is at least one thing that we can confidently claim to be a good first step, which is the very asking and probing of this question itself: what should we do in specific terms in order to move consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible? There can be little doubt that making a great effort to ask and examine this question, and to purposefully strive for the goal of maximizing well-being based on ongoing examinations of this question, will be crucial, and likely the best tactic of all for approaching that ultimate goal. This may seem trivially obvious: if we have a goal, what we should do is obviously to try to find out how to best achieve it, and then intelligently strive for this goal based on the answers we find. I think it is in fact trivially obvious, yet that in no way makes it insignificant, and neither does it imply that everyone agrees with it, nor that we in practice act in accordance. We clearly do not.

Our Irrational Lack of Meta Rationality

Of all our efforts, the effort to find out what we should spend our efforts on in the first place generally make up an extremely small fraction. We have so many resources — money, time, rationality etc. — that we can employ with enormous effect throughout our lives, yet for some reason it rarely occurs to us to ask what the best way to spend these resources is in the first place. This makes little sense, and is not least highly irrational, because if we do not spend a reasonable amount of energy thinking about how we should spend our energy in the first place, there is a great risk that we end up wasting it — we risk end up spending all our precious time and effort on completely worthless, and even harmful, endeavors.

It is one thing whether one does a specific task in a rational manner, but it is quite another whether it is rational to do that task in the first place. We seem to be fairly familiar with the former kind of rationality — for instance, how we can optimize our actions toward a given goal, and best accomplish a given task — yet which specific tasks and goals that are reasonable to pursue in the first place seems a comparatively rare question for us to ponder. Being rational in this latter sense can be considered a form of meta rationality, as it is to be rational about which problems and pursuits we should spend our faculties of rationality on in the first place. And such rationality is indeed the pinnacle of rationality, and not least indispensable for our being rational ultimately, because if we spend our efforts to rationally pursue ultimately worthless goals — say, brilliantly accomplishing a task that leads to nothing but needless misery in the end — what does that make these efforts of "rationality" other than ultimately irrational?

To call this effort of examining which specific goals we should pursue in the first place for meta rationality is, of course, merely to give ethics a new name, yet it is a name that — unlike the term 'ethics' — highlights the unrecognized hyper-rationality of ethics. Because, again, what is a rational action if the goal it "rationally" pursues is ultimately irrational? In order to make sure that any action we make toward any goal indeed is rational, we must make sure that the goal itself is rational; we must think in terms of ethics. Therefore, although widely unacknowledged, ethics, or meta rationality, is in fact the ultimate arbiter of rationality. Rationality without ethical foundations is blind and ultimately not rational at all.

It is therefore most unfortunate that we so often seem stuck on this lower level of blind "rationality." We seem to have a tendency to work hard on the accomplishment of given goals and tasks — a task flies in from the side, solve this riddle!, and almost reflexively we work hard on solving it — rather than thinking deeply about the master riddle concerning which riddles we should be solving in the first place. And the drives and interests we otherwise tend to have and pursue indeed strongly hint that we must ask this question, as these drives are anything but ideal. Rather than being ethically optimal, our interests and drives are just the natural and often harmful interests that millions of years of evolution in a social context have predisposed us to have, such as a fetish for scandals and gossip, and a drive for pointing out the moral shortcomings of fellow group members while artfully overlooking our own. We seem to believe that we can be reasonably ethical without giving much thought to how we should act, but this is usually wrong, since our ethical intuitions are anything but fine-tuned for the global, interconnected world of today, where our actions, and failures to act, influence other beings whom we do not see: the starving child we could have saved, the tortured chicken we are about to eat. Furthermore, the hurdle of a global and modern context aside, our ethical intuitions are anything but fine-tuned for being ethical even regardless of the context; if anything, they are fine-tuned for gene-propagation, not the maximization of well-being or anything close to it.

The fact that we so easily care about the wrong things, and so often end up spending enormous amounts of energy on them, indeed underscores the importance of a meta rational revolution in our thinking. It underscores that we must learn, and praise it as a virtue, to resist our immediate and intuitive values, and begin spending more time openly considering the deeper, meta rational questions: should we even be pursuing this goal in the first place? Which specific goals are most worthwhile pursuing of all goals?

To take a concrete and provocative example: Few people display as much determination and hard work as professional athletes do, working tirelessly toward optimization on every level. They seem the perfect example of human dedication. Yet, if we think deeper about it, is this really the pinnacle of human dedication? Is the goal of becoming as good an athlete as possible really worthy of all the dedication and hard work of any of us, or is it ultimately a wasted effort that could have been spent much better? Would it not be wiser to spend at least some amount of energy to find out whether it really is a worthwhile goal, and to try to find deeper goals more worthy of our efforts? Ethical questions like these are of course not just relevant for athletes in particular, but for all of us and all we do: we must ask such questions to ensure that we do the best we can in this world and to avoid wasting our precious time and efforts.

Such questions might just be the closest we can get to blasphemy in this secular age, and some people may even consider merely asking this question to be unfair — "People should be allowed to pursue their own dreams, whatever those dreams may be!"

But it is not unfair to ask whether our pursuits are worthwhile, one reason being that the purpose of asking such a question is not to prohibit anyone from pursuing their goals, but rather to help ourselves find and strive for the best goals possible. In fact, if anything is not fair, it is to deny to at least ask oneself whether one's current goal really is the most important thing to pursue in a world where unthinkable amounts of preventable suffering and death occur every moment — for instance, every single day, thousands of children die from readily preventable diseases, and non-human beings suffer and are killed, unnecessarily, by the hundreds of millions. This question is indeed anything but superficial or unfair given that we actually can make a positive impact in the world if we try.

We Must Be Patient and Intelligent

As a case in point, behold Norman Borlaug. It is estimated that his scientific work aimed at the improvement of agriculture has helped save hundreds of millions of human lives, and this saintly outcome of just one man's work was in no way serendipitous. Borlaug did not end up being a scientist who helped save millions of lives by chance, but instead by identifying that there was an urgent need for science in our agricultural practice, and based on this, he decided to devote his life to science and agriculture: "I experienced the economic depressions of the 1930s, and from the experience, I felt that families on the land needed help from scientists, and I dedicated my life to science, and especially to food production."

Borlaug reasoned that better food production was a goal worth striving for, and based on this unmistakably meta rational contemplation about which deeper goal — which "game" — that would be worth his efforts, he set out to help humanity. In his own words: "I like to play the game hard. To me the most important game of all is the game of life, to try to elevate the standard of living of whom you are trying to help. I think it requires one's best effort."

Could anyone reasonably maintain that it would not have mattered if Borlaug had not reasoned and chosen as he did, and had instead chosen to become, say, a professional athlete? Given the great impact Borlaug was able to have, could anyone seriously maintain that he was not, in fact, strongly obliged to do what he did? (Again, to reiterate the context of my rhetorical question, it is estimated that his work has helped save far more lives than were lost in the two world wars combined.) The crucial point is that such an obligation pertains to all of us. Sure, we may not be able to have the great impact that Borlaug had, but if we never think deeply about how we can have a great impact, and if we never act on such considerations, we shall never know.

We need to be more like Borlaug as a species. We need to seriously consider and become clear about what the most important game of all is, and then act on it with our best efforts. If we do not, if we fail to consider which problems we should try to solve in the first place, and just unthinkably solve whatever problems, and pursue whatever goals, that randomly announce themselves in our minds and culture, that is exactly what we risk that the importance of the problems and goals we are occupied with is: random.

Our lack of examination into which goals that are worth pursuing in the first place is indeed one of our greatest unrecognized problems today. All too often we seem to strive for ends that nobody, not even ourselves, consider particularly important or helpful for anyone, and when we do work toward ends we find noble, we too rarely consider them deeply enough. For when we finally do want to "save the world," we too often jump the gun in order to "do something," instead of making a serious effort to find out what really will save the world. And the drive to "do something" is surely understandable given all the suffering going on right now, but the question is what we must do?

So, while it may seem cold, what we must do before we take action is to make a serious effort to become reasonably certain that the action we are going to take is efficient, and one that really does help alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. Otherwise, we can easily end up trying to put out fires with gasoline, and thereby our efforts to do good can easily end up causing more harm than they prevent. A good example of the latter is the categorical rejection of the use of genetically modified organisms and vaccinations that many well-intentioned people promote. These people surely have a sincere wish to make the world a better place, yet an impatient evaluation of the subject seems to cause them to rush to a conclusion and a course of action now responsible for suffering and death for an untold number of people.

A serious and careful analysis of the nature and importance of the problems that face us, and not least how to solve them, is a necessary first step if we are to do the right thing. This was in fact what Norman Borlaug did. Rather than rushing with half-baked "solutions" to the problem of inadequate food supplies and hunger, he patiently did the required work of finding out how to improve our food production. Many people surely died from hunger while Borlaug, along with other scientists, carried out this foundational work, but had he allowed this to prevent him from doing this work, many more people would no doubt have suffered and starved to death in the longer term.

The point here is not that we should not urgently do something to make the world a better place — to reduce suffering and promote happiness. We should indeed. But what we urgently need to do before we go down any path is to find out which path we should take in the first place; which problems that are most important, and how they can best be solved. We urgently need to be meta rational.

So my claim is that if we are to wisely pursue the goal of maximizing our well-being, we need to be meta rational in practice. That is, we must make a serious effort to investigate which specific goals we should pursue, and how we should pursue them, in order to move sentient beings as high on the felicific continuum as possible. And such an investigative effort will, most certainly I think, itself always be one of the specific goals we should pursue in order to do so. That simply is the best way to approach such a perpetually relevant goal: to keep spending a reasonable amount of energy to find out more about how to best attain it, and to then pursue it based on our findings.
In Defense of the Goal-Oriented Approach

The claim that we should adopt a goal-oriented approach to ethics in practice is far from uncontested or uncontroversial. The common objection is that taking a goal-oriented approach toward the goal of minimizing suffering and maximizing well-being is not, in practice, the best way to actually achieve this goal, because, it is suggested, working directly and purposefully toward this goal will lead us away from it rather than toward it, and therefore it would be better if we did not try to approach it directly in our practice. I should like to argue against this objection, and defend the claim that we indeed should have a reasonable goal-oriented approach to ethics in practice.

First of all, it is worth noting that it is true that a given goal is not necessarily best reached by a direct, goal-oriented approach. The seemingly paradoxical instruction "make no effort" makes this much clear. It is possible to enjoy a state of mind free of any conscious effort, but obviously not until conscious effort toward reaching it is dropped. The claim often made against the goal-oriented approach to ethics in practice is that the goal of moving consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible is of the same kind as the instruction above: achievable perhaps, but impossible to reach if we start striving for it with determination. This is not the case, however.

Second, it is also worth noting that the broader objection made against purposively directed ethics in general — the claim that a purposively directed approach to ethics is inherently unethical — is actually incoherent. This claim is indeed a most peculiar one, because the truth is that ethics cannot be anything but purposive ultimately. Every 'should' is a statement of a goal, a purpose, of some kind, be it about duties, virtues or specific outcomes, and if a normative ethical theory is not directed toward a goal of some kind, there is nothing prescriptive about it — i.e. it is not a theory of normative ethics at all.

So ethics, and any idea about how we should act in general, cannot coherently be anything but purposive and goal-related; it can only be more or less directly so, and my claim is that we should be highly direct in our approach: that having the actual goal in mind and working purposefully toward it most likely is the best way to approach it successfully.

How to Build a House

I think an analogy to house building is apt: If we are to build a house, who is to say that actually having the goal of building a house and acting purposefully toward this goal is the best way to build it? The fact that houses do not otherwise tend to build themselves would seem to tentatively suggest this much. If we do not have the goal of building a house in mind, and if we do not make a reasonable effort to find out how to build it, we will simply not end up building one. This is of course not to say that we need to constantly keep the goal of building a house in the front of our minds — although we likely will benefit from keeping it in the back of it — nor that we need constantly recite the mantra: "we are to build a house, how can it best be done?" This would indeed be a most unreasonable and counter-productive approach, as there are surely times where one should focus on nothing but the hammer and the nail. This is where the distinction between thinking about how to best achieve a goal always, sometimes or never becomes paramount. If we spend all our time only thinking about how to best build a house, we will obviously never build one, and the same is true if we never think about how to build one. If we are to build a house, there clearly is a reasonable middle-position: we must spend a reasonable amount of time and energy thinking about how to build it. What the most reasonable amount is stands as an open question, and it will likely vary between different building projects, but we can be certain that it is never all of it, nor none of it.

It may be objected that this analogy is not quite accurate, and it surely isn't, but it is accurate enough. Because the basic point holds true: in order to reach our goal we must keep the goal in mind and spend a reasonable amount of our energy on finding out how to best achieve it, and we must then work toward it based on our findings. This may seem obvious, but as goal-oriented creatures for whom goals and purposes are ordinary and appear anything but a miraculous and powerful tool, we may be prone to overlook the obvious: human goal-oriented thinking and action actually tends to work extremely well. And they generally work much better toward a given goal compared to if we do not employ these abilities at all, which is essentially what rejecting a goal-oriented approach to the goal of moving sentience as far away from the deepest depths of suffering as possible would amount to.

It will of course often be the case, likely most often, that forgetting the goal and acting strictly according to wisely reasoned principles, or carefully developed virtues, is the best thing we can do, just as forgetting the larger goal of house building and focusing only on wise "principles" such as "hit the nail on the head" is required in order to successfully build a house. Likewise, being oriented directly toward the goal of the greatest well-being of conscious beings does not imply that we should always speak in terms of the greatest well-being directly. Virtues such as honesty, compassion and justice are surely all necessary, as is knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology, and such virtues and fields of knowledge will likely often be more important to talk about and focus on in order to accomplish our ultimate goal than a direct focus on the often too abstract concept of well-being. A plurality of values in practice is nothing less than indispensable.

This is not in conflict with the goal-oriented approach in any way, however. In fact, given that holding a plurality of values and making somewhat indirect strivings toward the goal of maximizing our well-being are the best things we can do in order to reach it, this is obviously what a reasonable goal-oriented approach would prescribe — that we include and promote relevant virtues and rules in our practice to the extent they are good for the well-being of sentient beings. And we must in fact take the direct, goal-oriented approach in the first place if we are to find the best virtues to promote or the best principles to act upon, and if we want to find out how to best balance various practical approaches, such as a following of strict principles and a more open, moment-to-moment calculating approach. For instance, if we make an experiment where one group of people are instructed to act based on strict principles while another group is asked to calculate outcomes in various ways and act based on their calculations, we may find strict principles to be superior in practice in many regards, yet only by adopting the goal-oriented approach in the first place can we make such discoveries.

The same holds true in relation to making reasonable estimates of how much of our time and energy we should spend on finding out what we should do contra how much of it we should spend focused more directly on acting on and implementing our findings. Again, we have to take a direct, goal-oriented approach in the first place in order to find the wisest principles, motives and actions.

It seems reasonable to suspect that a large amount of energy should be spent on this effort of finding out how we should act in specific terms given that it likely can help optimize all our other efforts toward improving the sentient condition, and not least redirect all our efforts that are not remotely directed toward this goal, to an extent that in turn compensates for, and therefore justifies, a large amount of energy spent on this investigative effort. On the other hand, it also seems reasonable to suspect that our examinations of how we should act would recommend us a deontological practice in many regards, given that we arguably are deontological by nature, at least in many regards, and therefore deontological ideas will likely often be the most efficient and most easily installed software in our brains. For instance, it is much easier to adhere to the principle that making other sentient beings suffer and/or die needlessly is wrong and to have this principle firmly placed in our minds than it is to repeatedly make a detailed examination of the matter only to arrive at the exact same conclusion every time.

Different Levels and the Paradox of Hedonism

So while we should in practice be directly goal-oriented and openly examine how the goal of maximizing well-being is best achieved, we should undoubtedly also adhere to principles in an entirely strict manner in many cases, which hints the importance of making a distinction between different levels. For we can conceive of different levels on which our actions are taking place — for instance, a personal contra a collective level — and how we should think and act may well be very different on these different levels. For example, it could well be that we should be more goal-directed and calculating in order to bring about the best outcome on the collective level, say, when it comes to political decisions, while happiness on the personal level might be better found by not striving for it so directly.

The latter claim is known as the paradox of hedonism: searching for happiness, at least directly, is not the best way to bring it about. It is worth noting, however, that even if this simplistic claim is true of the pursuit of one's own happiness at the personal level, this would not imply that it is true at the level of our search for collective well-being. However, it seems that the paradox of hedonism is not even true at the individual level. It is true that seeking happiness moment-to-moment does seem to make us less happy, and sometimes even miserable, compared to if we drop our strivings for it and enjoy our present experience. Yet such a neurotic striving for happiness is not representative of all possible kinds of direct pursuits of happiness, and it certainly does not constitute an example of a wise one. Given that such a constant striving for happiness makes us less happy than otherwise, an intelligent moment-to-moment "striving" for happiness would instead be to drop this neurosis, and to follow the aforementioned, seemingly paradoxical recommendation to make no effort.

This striving may seem paradoxical, yet ultimately it is not. It is rather a matter of different steps, or levels, because, once again, we must be goal-oriented toward happiness in the first place in order to find this specific approach normative, and to recommend such a non-goal-oriented practice of attaining happiness by not seeking it. Or at least not seeking it moment-to-moment, which leads to another relevant distinction: seeking happiness moment-to-moment contra securing it in the long-term. And the truth about the role of striving, or any other relevant concept such as strict principles or felicific calculations, may well be different on these different levels too. In fact, in relation to striving at least, it seems safe to say that this is indeed the case. Because while seeking happiness moment-to-moment often can decrease our happiness, and that dropping the search entirely may be the best strategy toward happiness on this level, the same is not true in relation to securing our happiness in the long-term. First, because the efforts to plan toward certain long-term goals and then seeking them with determination often is necessary in order for us to bring about certain positive outcomes and secure our happiness, and hence we cannot reasonably adopt a strategy of just dropping such efforts entirely. And, second, because such planning efforts and long-term strivings for happiness are not accompanied with the dissatisfaction that the neurotic moment-to-moment search for happiness is. It is possible to plan and work to secure our well-being while being fulfilled and free of neurotic, moment-to-moment longings in the process.

We clearly can strive intelligently for happiness, even if the best such striving is one where we must sometimes give up certain strivings. Only to a narrow and rigid understanding of the concept of striving for a goal, an always-or-never understanding of what it means to aim for a goal, is there a paradox here.

Historical Evidence of a Positive Influence

One may reasonably wonder whether thinking in terms of the goal of maximizing well-being has been helpful toward this end so far in history, and while it can be difficult to estimate the historical influence of a mode of thinking to any great precision, it seems reasonably clear to me that it in fact has been helpful. Take for instance the 19th century utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) who was one of the earliest thinkers to think systematically in these terms. Based on such thinking he promoted women's rights, freedom of speech and individual liberty. Mill provided powerful arguments for these ideas in his writings — writings that eventually became highly influential on people's views on these matters — and these writings likely did help bring along the moral progress that later came about on these fronts. For example, much of the moral progress that happened in Western societies in the first half of the 20th century, such as women acquiring the right to vote, and freedom of expression getting the status of a universal human right, was exactly what Mill argued for, and it does seem less than indefensible to claim that he did not have a positive influence on progress of this kind.

Mill's utilitarian predecessor Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) would be another example of someone who raised attention to important ethical issues, and who influenced our moral attitudes in a positive direction based on his thinking in terms of bringing about the best outcome. He for instance argued for moral inclusion of non-human beings in his writings, which included the famous quote: "The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?" And while this inclusion unfortunately did not lead Bentham to put two and two together and realize that we should take non-human individuals off the dinner table, his insistence on the inclusion of non-human beings in our moral considerations was quite unusual and groundbreaking in his time, and it most likely did play a crucial role in inspiring more elaborate and wiser thoughts on the issue.

More examples of such positive influences could be mentioned, and so could negative ones perhaps, but since this is not a detailed examination of the historical influence of such thinking, I shall not elaborate further, but simply state my basic point: a glance at the historical influence that the thinking in terms of maximizing well-being seems to have had does suggests that serious and rigorous thinking in these terms generally has had a positive influence and has helped us move in a higher, more ethical direction.

Human Dedication Toward Well-being

We should not underestimate human ingenuity and determination. We should not underestimate our ability to reach a goal that we sincerely aim for. There is a reason we strive with determination and deliberation for goals we want to reach, the reason being that it tends to actually work. And certain goals require that we make a deliberate effort to reach them. We simply do not end up baking a cake without wanting and pursuing it consciously, and we do not end up increasing the average human life span three times, as we have, without making a serious, deliberate effort to prevent early human death. I think the same is true of relieving the world from suffering and creating a truly flourishing world. The best way to do this will all but certainly be by keeping that goal firmly in mind, finding out how to best approach it, and to then work toward it based on our findings. After all, what is the alternative? To forget the goal entirely, or perhaps to be less than fully determined on achieving it? How much less determined?

The notion that the best thing would be to not aim to maximize the well-being of conscious beings, or that we should not be directly aimed toward it, is, to my mind, not much different from saying that the best way to build a house is to not aim directly toward building it. If we had never wanted to build a house and never thought about how to build it, we would still be living in caves, and this is exactly where we find ourselves today in moral terms: in a state not far beyond the crudely primitive. We must do better than this, and the recipe is, quite clearly I think, to be fully dedicated toward the goal.

Human dedication is a powerful force that does help bring us toward what we aim for, and we have yet to see what can be accomplished by a humanity truly determined and purpose-driven toward maximizing the well-being of conscious beings, and which approaches this aim guided by reason.
The Ethical Importance of Ideas

Almost everything we do is an expression of the ideas and beliefs we hold. From the things we buy at the supermarket to the goals we spend our lives pursuing, what we choose, do and say is largely a direct manifestation of our ideas. This is how important our ideas are, and how important it is that we have good ideas in our minds.

What are good ideas, then? It seems that good ideas tend to be those that correspond to reality, since true ideas usually are those that best enable us to act wisely — the more precise a map we have, the better able we are to navigate in the landscape in which we find ourselves. For instance, someone who kills innocent people based on the belief that it leads to greater well-being for them in an afterlife can be as well-meaning as a doctor who cures suffering and saves the lives of other people based on the belief that this is what leads to greater well-being for them. What makes these two people act in so different ways is their different ideas about reality, not their fundamental motives, and the one who is doing the right thing is the one who has the facts right. That is how important knowledge is.

This is indeed where many of our problems arise from: wrong ideas about the world. After all, nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to be evil, and most people even seem to have a genuine want to make the world a better place. Yet due to bad ideas about how the world works, specifically about how to promote well-being in it, many people do just the opposite at the end of the day, carrying out horrible evil based on horrible ideas. It is indeed true that, to paraphrase Voltaire, if we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. Bad ideas is the most direct path to bad actions, and, again, this is how important our ideas and beliefs are, and how important it is that we are actively engaged in the sphere of human ideas — that we spread good ideas and criticize bad ones — since this is the battleground on which we must stop and prevent atrocities, and where we must build and improve our civilization. It is where any viable movement toward higher felicific ground must be ignited.

We humans have become a highly idea-exchanging species, exchanging ideas through language, both spoken and written. In this web of idea exchange, the ideas we receive from others and accept can to some extent be seen as inputs that in turn influence our outputs, our actions. Based on this conception of what an idea is, and the fact that any ethical theory is an idea or a set of ideas, we can approximate and rephrase what role an ethical theory plays in practice: it serves as an input that inspires a certain output. Thus, the basic criterion based on which we should decide which ethical theory to instate in practice becomes clear: the ethical theory we should accept and spread is the one that serves as the input that leads to the best output — the greatest well-being for sentient beings.

So the question is: which ethical theory would comprise such a golden input? The ideas concerning ethics that we should spread in order to promote the best outcome are no doubt many, but I think the basic criterion mentioned above will tend to be valid for all of them: we should have ideas about ethics that match up with reality, as that still is what best enables us to navigate accurately toward good outcomes, which is especially true with regard to moral truths in particular, as they are the very facts that concern what indeed is good. And in order for our ideas about ethics to match up with reality, we must realize the most basic truth of ethics that all ethical truths relate to ultimately: that we should bring ourselves as high on the felicific continuum as possible.

As argued in the previous essay, what tends to lead to a given outcome most effectively in the case of us humans is dedication toward that outcome, and I think such dedication will follow naturally from becoming absolutely clear about the fact that well-being is what matters. It therefore seems to me that this comprises the ideal ethical theory in practice, or at least what would serve as the backbone of the ethical theory that would comprise an ideal input: the fundamental fact that what matters is that we, the sentient beings in the world, find ourselves as high on the felicific continuum as possible.

This is undoubtedly not the only ethically related idea we should spread, but it is most likely the most crucial one, since all other important ethical ideas likely will follow from this primal one. Once again, the analogy to house building may be helpful: If we are to build a house, the idea that we should build it in the first place is vital to have settled. We will of course need other ideas than this, for instance, ideas about how we can in fact build it in practice, yet we are most likely to seek and find these other ideas and facts if we have this primal goal of building a house in mind in the first place. It is the idea that directs us toward all the other important ideas related to this goal, ideas that we might otherwise not seek for at all, which makes this primal idea seem the most important one of all to have in mind in order to build a house.

Likewise, just as the goal of building a house likely is the ideal input to get into our minds if we are to build one, the ideal ethical idea to have in our minds, and the ideal ethical theory to spread in practice, is likely the basic truth about what we should do — move sentient beings as far away from the worst misery as possible — and that we should be highly determined toward this end, for the reason that the other important ideas we need to know and spread in order to reach this goal likely will follow from this core idea itself. This core idea is like the installation file for an ever self-optimizing software program, in that it is all we need to put in place in order to start us off on an ever more refined quest for betterment, which is what makes this deceptively simple input so good and important to spread.

Conclusively, having good ideas in our minds is extremely important, and good ideas tend to be true ones. Of all these, the most important truth and good idea to have in mind and spread may well be the foundational fact of ethics — that we should bring conscious beings as high on the felicific continuum as possible — and that we should be determined toward this end, since this likely is the input that most effectively makes us approach that goal.
Means and Ends

One may wonder whether what I am proposing in this book is simply utilitarianism, and whether I am just claiming that this ultimately constitutes moral truth. Given that one defines what I have thus far argued is the truth of ethics as utilitarianism, then that is, by that definition, indeed what I am arguing is true about how we should act: being as high as possible on the felicific continuum truly matters, and therefore we truly should bring conscious beings as high as possible on this continuum. This is well in line with the common definition of utilitarianism, yet there are various reasons I have chosen not to use this term.

First of all, utilitarianism seems to have a great PR-problem. The term 'utilitarianism' seems inherently unappealing and also somewhat misleading, often giving rise to confusions about what the utility is for — utility surely cannot just be for its own sake? A trivial misunderstanding of what utilitarianism is about for sure, but nonetheless a common, and, given the name, understandable one.

Another problem with utilitarianism is that it is not well-defined. There are many different versions and definitions of utilitarianism, and many of these are very narrow, which is perhaps the greatest problem with utilitarianism in the form that it is commonly discussed. Because if one makes too narrow and simple utilitarian analyses, one can easily end up with very wrong conclusions that are therefore, at the end of the day, completely un-utilitarian.

Utilitarianism is often seen portrayed as synonymous with such ultimately un-utilitarian analyses and conclusions, and many proponents of utilitarianism throughout history are partly to blame for this, as they themselves have been guilty of making such narrow analyses. The truth of the matter is that we need to do the exact opposite: when we make analyses about how we should act, we must take a broad approach that includes as many factors as possible, and we should always be careful, as we should with regard to any factual matter, not to draw certain conclusions in a context of great uncertainty.

The widespread crude conception of utilitarianism seems to have much to answer for, as it seems largely responsible for the widespread dismissal of utilitarianism. And this is most unfortunate, for while trying to achieve the greatest well-being by means of simple mathematical calculations is rarely reasonable, having the greatest well-being of conscious beings as the ultimate goal of our conduct is.

Another reason it may be wise to avoid the term 'utilitarianism' is that it has become part of common "wisdom" that utilitarianism stands in opposition to deontological ethics or an emphasis on virtues, which can make utilitarianism appear exclusive with regard to these, and therefore make it appear to be far below the threshold of complete ethical idiocy. As I have argued already, and as the earliest proponents of utilitarianism also made clear, this is patently false, and also most unfortunate. For it is indeed obvious that good deontological principles lead to good outcomes and are indispensable for us, and the same is true of virtues, which makes them both highly recommendable on any truly utilitarian theory. Yet it seems that utilitarianism is not commonly understood in its truly utilitarian, truly wise form. Unfortunately, a seemingly natural human tendency to think in terms of anti-theses rather than syntheses seems to have won the game, and in this game, utilitarianism has become cursed as the villain that opposes all decent wisdom for the sake of a pale parody of "the greatest happiness." It seems to me that this curse is most easily avoided by avoiding the term 'utilitarianism' altogether. To try to cleanse a term from 200 years of artful and insistent misunderstanding seems in vain.

The End Justifies the Means

Another problem with the term 'utilitarianism' is that it has become synonymous with the expression "the end justifies the means" — an expression commonly considered synonymous with pure evil, as it is taken to imply that if only the final goal is great enough, it does not matter how horrible our road toward that goal is. To take this to be the central precept of utilitarianism is again, while tempting perhaps, a fundamental misunderstanding of what utilitarianism recommends in its truly utilitarian form.

The problem is that we seem disposed to think about goals in terms of a future point, where the path toward this future goal is not itself part of the goal — the path is the path and no more. The goal of maximizing our well-being is not a goal of this kind, however. What constitutes our collective well-being can never only come down to some point in the future, but instead always comes down to our experience in every moment. Every moment is itself relevant for, and part of, the end for which we are aiming: the greatest well-being of sentient beings. So every moment counts, and the path to any future state will therefore itself always be relevant in the final moral calculus, and hence the goal of maximizing well-being does not allow us to disregard the path to any given goal. It is in every way a path-dependent goal. Besides, even if the goal only were to bring sentient beings as high as possible on the felicific continuum at some future point, it seems highly unlikely that the optimal way toward such a goal would be to go through horrible suffering. A gradual ascendance where we reduce suffering as much as we can in every step seems like a better way toward higher moral ground in the future than a quest through hell.

The point about means not being separate from the end is not only true with regard to every moment of our experience, but also with regard to all of us as individuals. The goal of maximizing the well-being of sentient beings does not allow for disregard for any sentient being, because all sentient beings are the very end. Therefore, despite the common notion that Kant's categorical imperative stands in stark contrast with utilitarianism, there is in fact hardly a more perfectly utilitarian principle than that. We indeed should act in such a way that we treat our fellow sentient beings, whether in our own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. The same is true of Albert Schweitzer's notion of reverence for life — the notion that the good is to maintain, assist and enhance life, while evil is to destroy and harm it — since life, as in conscious beings, is the very end when it comes to the goal of being as high as possible on the felicific continuum.

Beings can of course be thought of in terms of how they can contribute to certain desirable ends; as mentioned, we can have great instrumental value, and we can, and indeed should, try to maximize this. However, no matter how great instrumental value any being can have, every sentient being will, by virtue of being able to experience a continuum of more or less pleasant states of consciousness, always be of intrinsic value. So no sentient being can meaningfully be considered a mere means toward the end of well-being. We are all inherently part of the moral kingdom.

So the goal of maximizing well-being is clearly not one that considers all means toward some distant end-goal justifiable, nor one that disregards how the goal is reached. For the truth is that the end-goal is not a distant end at all, and that the way the goal is achieved, the how, always is an inseparable part of the end itself. Every step along the road, and every being taking a step along the road, is itself part of the goal.

Utilitarianism and Numbers

Another common objection against utilitarianism is that it reduces ethics to numbers, which constitutes yet another PR-problem, since ethics, as any self-identified utilitarian indeed knows, of course rarely can be discussed purely in terms of numbers. There is a valid criticism here, however, because there does seem to be a bad utilitarian tendency — or, rather, a tendency of bad utilitarianism — to simplistically estimate various values with arbitrary numbers in attempts at making utilitarian analyses, thereby rendering these attempts at finding useful conclusions little more than useless. Again, we must be careful in a context of great uncertainty, but, once again, the problem is with bad attempts at utilitarian analyses, not utilitarianism itself.

A categorical rejection of the use of numbers in the context of ethics, and the denial of their utility, is, however, completely misguided. The objection often goes that numbers overlook the individual, but the truth is actually the opposite. As Paul Slovic and others have showed, we are terrible at moral reasoning when it comes to groups: we tend to care more about individual beings when they are presented to us individually than when they are presented to us in a group. In fact, the truth about our default moral psychology is more damning still, since we seem to care less about two people collectively than we do about a single individual, and we seem to care even less about large groups of people than small ones. So, strangely, we happen to care much less about groups of individuals than we care about single individuals alone. That the death of an individual is a tragedy while the death of a million is just a statistic is indeed true, not as a matter of ethics, of course, but as a matter of human psychology. Sam Harris has captured this tragic fact about us quite well:

Three million souls can be starved and murdered in the Congo, and our Argus-eyed media scarcely blink. When a princess dies in a car accident, however, a quarter of the earth's population falls prostrate with grief. Perhaps we are unable to feel what we must feel in order to change our world.

Indeed, our feelings alone are insufficient. We need numbers. For the truth is that without numbers, we overlook individuals. Reason tells us that if we care about one individual, and just as much about another, then our care for these two as a group must at least be as great as the sum of our care for them individually, yet our basic moral intuitions gets this basic math all wrong and nervously begins subtracting. Our moral intuition does not capture the most basic moral arithmetic; it seems that only arithmetic does. So the truth is that numbers count, and, as Michael Moor has noted, they do so exactly because individuals count. Only by employing numbers can we protect individuals from being overlooked by our deeply defunct moral intuitions.

Utilitarianism and Rights

Yet another PR-problem for utilitarianism is that it is widely considered to be inherently opposed to the concept of rights. Again, this is not the case — as mentioned, John Stuart Mill was a dedicated utilitarian and one of the most prominent defenders of the right to freedom of speech. Nonetheless, it is again the case that self-identified utilitarians do hold a big share of the responsibility for this misconception, as these often have failed to defend certain rights that, if granted, obviously would improve the state of things vastly.

For the truth is that rights matter immensely, not irrespective of their consequences, of course, but exactly because of the consequences that sensible rights bring about — after all, if the granting of a right did not have good consequences, why grant it? And it should not surprise us that rights have positive consequences, because, after all, what is a right? It is simply a protective fence that we agree to put around beings so as to provide a firm protection of some of their most basic interests from any violation, or at least to protect them under normal circumstances, as it makes sense that some rights can fall away given certain conditions — for instance, if one commits crime. Few things could be more important for the sake of our well-being than such a firm protection of basic interests, because nothing is more important than the most basic interests of sentient beings. In terms of the felicific continuum, frivolous interests and pleasures cannot remotely outweigh basic interests and needs such as being free from injustice, oppression, suffering and death.

A case in point is the right that animal rights theorist Gary Francione argues for: the basic right of non-human beings to not be treated as property, and therefore not to be treated as resources we can use and kill for frivolous purposes. The granting of this basic right would, quite clearly I think, be the very best thing we could possibly do in relation to non-human beings in order to spare them from suffering, because, as I have argued in Why "Happy Meat" Is Always Wrong, the only alternative position defended on this issue, the notion that it is justifiable to raise and kill non-human beings "as long as we treat them well," an implicit core foundation of our acceptance of the property status of non-human beings, only ever will, and only ever can, lead to enormous amounts of suffering for the individuals whom we raise and kill. The best thing we can do with regard to other beings is surely not, surely never, to regard and treat them as property — such treatment indeed always has reliably horrible consequences, which should be obvious to everyone who dares to look at our practice — and therefore anything but the granting of this right to all sentient beings would be mightily un-utilitarian.

So it clearly makes good sense to grant rights; it is in fact nothing less than vital that we do. And we must indeed grant and claim rights, because otherwise we will not have them. The notion that we somehow all inherently have rights independently of whether we agree to grant them is clearly not true. If our freedom of speech is robbed, then we do not have freedom of speech, but are robbed of a right we should have. After all, if the rights we officially grant all humanity today truly were rights we inherently have, why did we need to negotiate and write them down in the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948?

There is a difference between saying that we should all have a certain right, and then actually having it, and speaking about the rights we inherently should have as though they are rights we inherently have, which seems to be the norm, is just false and confusing. Rights do not become any less important by acknowledging that we need to formulate and protect them ourselves. Nothing is gained by lying to ourselves. On the contrary, we need to be clear that rights are something we must fight for, revise and negotiate, because otherwise we might just end up successfully convincing and sedating ourselves with the mantra that rights are something we already have — something we need not continually negotiate, refine and fight for, as we indeed must.

Conclusively, the goal of maximizing well-being does not exclude or disregard the most basic and decent means or concern for means, since some of the most relevant means toward the goal of moving sentience as far to the north as possible, such as every single being and every single moment, themselves are part of the very end. Nor does it amount to a rejection of rights, a rejection of deontological practice, or a reduction of ethics into being a matter of mere calculation.
The Urgency of Reducing Suffering

As clarified in the first part, the horror of the states of suffering readily available to us goes vastly deeper than the good of readily available joyful states goes high, and this is likely true of all conscious beings we know of given that we have arisen through the same process. A relatively short period of intense suffering can vastly outweigh the joy of an entire life, and this should give us pause and make us contemplate the significance of suffering.

Suffering is intrinsically bad, it is intrinsically a cry for help, and the fact that it reaches so deep, while pleasures do not reach comparatively high, would seem to imply that we cannot defend prioritizing pleasures purely for their own sake when we could instead answer the deep screams for help and reduce serious suffering. And the reality of the world, whether we dare face up to it or not, is that immense suffering is taking place in every moment, and however hard it may be to admit, we actually can do something about much of it.

We are in the middle of an emergency, with billions of sentient beings suffering beyond comprehension every moment — some eaten alive, others boiled alive in slaughterhouses, some tortured to death, countless starving to death, etc. — and it must be addressed with urgency. The goal of reducing this horror, and the question of how to do this effectively, should undoubtedly occupy our minds far more than it presently does. We need to wake up to the urgency of suffering and change our ways accordingly, for there is indeed something very bizarre about the amount of resources we spend on frivolous pleasures and entertainment while our fellow sentient beings are suffering intensely.

How to reduce suffering most effectively here and now is indeed an open question, and one we must start thinking seriously about. However, in the longer term it seems that the ultimate project must be to abolish suffering completely, a project that has been roughly sketched out by philosopher David Pearce in his book The Hedonistic Imperative. This is surely a monumental ambition, yet no ambition could be more worthy of our efforts.

Until we can achieve this worthy goal, we must find ways to reduce suffering as effectively as we can, for as many beings as we can. For no matter how much suffering is going on in the world, it all matters deeply. No matter how many beings suffer in the world, it still matters that we help reduce the suffering of any single being. Such help is never insignificant; for the being we are helping, it is everything.
Uncertainty: Our Inescapable Condition

The world is chaotic. We know that we can never know the precise outcome of any action, and we will therefore always be bound to act under uncertainty about what the precise outcome of our actions will be. For this reason, we also know that precisely which action that will lead to the best outcome, precisely which action we should take, is bound to be uncertain too.

How can we act wisely, then? If we can never know the precise outcome of our actions, how can it make sense to try to act so as to bring about the best outcome? It can make very good sense indeed. For the fact that we are bound to be uncertain about what the precise outcome of our actions will be does not mean that we cannot be reasonably certain about what the outcome is very likely to be. To make a simple analogy to physics, we know that we cannot predict the physical position of anything to complete precision, yet this does not prevent us from predicting, say, the motion of the moon relative to the earth with great precision, even quite far into the future. The same holds true about what the outcome of our actions will be: a lack of complete precision and certainty does not imply complete ignorance. We can, and indeed often do, have reasonable certainty about what the outcome of our actions will roughly be, especially in the short term, and that is all we need in order to start approaching a given goal.

Since we cannot in practice know what the precise outcome of our actions will be, all we can do in practice is whatever seems most likely to bring about the best outcome for sentient beings. We can of course be wrong about what is most likely to do this, yet this only underscores the point made earlier that we need to make a great effort to examine this question, and find out what indeed is the best path to pursue. Because it surely is hard to say which actions and which specific goals that are worth pursuing, yet, again, this does not imply complete ignorance. We clearly can say something reasonable about it, with certainty even, if we only try. For instance, subjugating and killing innocent beings without good reason is surely not the path toward betterment; making humanity converge on the goal of maximizing the well-being of sentient beings and encouraging dedication toward a collective, compassionate and intelligent pursuit of this goal is no doubt a far more likely path.

This example is a low-hanging fruit, of course, but it does serve to demonstrate that we clearly can say something reasonable about what we should do in practice, and not least what we should not do. Furthermore, even though it is a low-hanging fruit, it is nonetheless one that we fail completely to pick and digest in our practice, a practice that seems to be a perfect reflection of the opposite conclusion, as we do needlessly subjugate and kill innocent beings, billions of them every year, while largely failing, and even failing to try, to make humanity converge on the goal of improving the condition of sentient beings. Our current practice clearly finds itself far below the lowest hanging fruit in moral terms, which means that even the most basic moral reasoning and moral conclusions can be of immense importance and help improve our practice enormously. Again, that is how important it is that we start thinking about the specifics; that we start thinking about how to better the condition of sentient beings, a question that humanity has given surprisingly little thought, and hence one we can easily make much progress on.

It may be objected that what I am proposing — that the fundamentals are certain, while the specifics are largely uncertain — while being true, is completely impractical, as it does not always provide us with certain and simple answers we can act on. This is to miss the point, however. First, the lack of certain answers does not prevent us from adopting a wise, precautionary principle with regard to any ethical question in the face of uncertainty. Whatever principle we would find reasonable to adopt outside of this empirical framework could also be adopted within it, except, of course, if there is strong evidence against it and thereby good reasons to not adopt it. Second, as just clarified, we clearly can obtain certain answers that do have monumental implications for our practices based on this framework — perhaps not for every ethical question, but at least for some of the most important ones. Third, admitting that it is an open question what will move sentient beings the highest on the felicific continuum is anything but impractical or a weakness, but indeed a mighty strength. For aside from having the quality of actually being true, what it implies is that we should approach ethics with a genuinely humble scientific mindset — with a curious, inquiring mind with which we eagerly seek new information and continually evaluate all the data available to us, and then act based on this. And there is nothing, I think, more practical than this at the end of the day.

Conclusively, as with all matters of knowledge, the inescapable lack of complete precision and certainty about the details does not imply that we cannot have functional certainty, especially when it comes to where we should be headed in the most basic of terms. It does not imply that we cannot assert many things about what we should and should not do beyond a reasonable doubt. We can indeed, and our fundamental condition of uncertainty therefore provides no excuse for not getting on with some serious thinking about how we should act, followed by some serious action.
Specific Goals We Should Pursue

It is, as mentioned, an open question which specific actions that will lead to the best outcomes, and, as we have now seen, this is true for various reasons. However, as has also been made clear many times at this point, the openness of the question and the inescapable lack of complete precision does not imply that we know nothing, nor that we cannot say anything reasonable, and certain even, about how we should act. We can indeed, and, as I have argued, one thing we should do beyond a reasonable doubt is to be meta rational — to examine and clarify which specific goals that are worth our pursuits in the first place. That is what I should like to do in this final essay: to briefly point out and contemplate some specific goals that seem among the most important ones we could pursue. These goals, while being more specific than the goal of moving sentient beings as far away from suffering as possible, are still quite general, and while their importance is undeniable, the more specific question of how to best achieve them remains open. Yet, again, striving to reach these specific goals and starting to think about how we can best achieve them is no doubt a good start toward actually doing so.

The goals presented here will all be presented in a very short manner that cannot possibly do them justice, yet I hope to be able to at least shortly sketch out why they are important, and also to point out some ways in which they complement each other — in fact, I think they all support each other — which underscores their importance and the value of fulfilling each of these in themselves more than worthy goals. These goals obviously do not comprise anything close to an exhaustive list of goals worth pursuing, and in stating them I in no way suggest that all the most important specific goals we should be pursuing are settled — they clearly are not, and likely never will be, and that is why we always need to be meta rational and continually think about which specific goals that are most reasonable to pursue. Rather, the purpose is simply to clarify some of the most obvious directions in which we should be headed, thereby ending this book with some relatively practical and specific, albeit still quite broad, goals we should pursue, which must after all be the ultimate goal of any book on ethics: to provide useful inputs that help us, and help improve what we do, in practice.

Global Veganism

A transition toward veganism is beyond doubt one of the most important steps humanity can take toward a better world today — toward relieving the suffering of sentient beings, including humans. Humanity's exploitation of non-human beings constitutes the biggest source of readily avoidable suffering on the planet, as it imposes suffering upon billions of beings every year. And not only do non-human beings suffer horribly from our atrocious exploitation and consumption of them; so do humans. For our raising and consuming non-human beings is also a contributing cause of some of the biggest problems that face humanity, such as environmental pollution, food and water scarcity, lethal pandemics, poor nutrition and many common diseases, including the group of diseases that is by far the greatest killer of humans on earth today: cardiovascular diseases.

We exploit non-human beings and make them and ourselves suffer as a result. Why do we do this? This is indeed the mystery, for one would think that there would be something that at least resembles a good reason for our bringing all this horror into the world, yet there is not. Those of us who live in modern societies do not need to eat other individuals in order to be healthy, and we therefore only exploit and eat non-human beings because of habit and palate pleasure, reasons that in no way can justify imposing suffering and death upon others, or upon ourselves. And since all of humanity gradually is coming to live in modern societies with access to adequate food, there is no excuse for keeping on exploiting and abusing other sentient beings, or for keeping on causing suffering and increased risk of diseases and death for ourselves.

The common objection against this goal is that a better alternative to abolishing our exploitation of non-human beings would be to "treat them better." This objection is not one that I shall reject here in detail, as it requires some elaboration, and since I have already done so elsewhere, yet the short answer to the objection, as already hinted in an earlier essay, and as I have argued at greater length in Why "Happy Meat" Is Always Wrong, is that we will never treat other beings well — we will cause them monstrous suffering — as long as we needlessly exploit, kill and eat these beings. As long as we eat and enslave non-human beings, we will inevitably keep on being morally confused about them, we will fail to truly see them as ends, and we will keep on torturing them, which is indeed what we do. Furthermore, treating the beings we exploit better, whatever that means, does not solve any of the other serious problems that our raising, killing and eating of non-human beings causes.

I have here tried to shortly summarize the importance of our transition to veganism, yet the importance of this to most people quite alien goal cannot adequately be conveyed and argued for in this short space, and I therefore refer the reader to two of my short books on the subject, Why We Should Go Vegan and Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It for a more elaborate case for the importance of veganism.

When we think deeply about the matter, it becomes clear that global veganism is one of the goals most worthy of our efforts. How the goal is best accomplished is an open question, yet spreading information and educating ourselves — by pointing out the consequences of our practices, and not least by questioning the speciesism of our culture — are certainly the core means toward this goal of veganism, and toward our finally becoming a species that helps non-humans rather than harming them.

The Spread of Democracy and Individual Liberty

Democracy and individual liberty are also hard to separate, and their importance is also immediately obvious: being oppressed and without the ability to govern the most basic decisions of one's own life undoubtedly causes misery, whereas the opposite causes the opposite: the greater degree of personal freedom there is in a society, the greater the experienced well-being generally is.

There are of course many degrees of oppression and freedom, and some degree of oppression is undoubtedly present in all societies, which makes resisting it omni-relevant. However, to say that the oppression of humans is equally present in all societies is just wrong. In many nations, people are not allowed the most basic of freedoms, such as the freedom to speak their minds, and doing so anyway often results in imprisonment, torture and death in these nations. These are conditions of suffering that those of us who have the freedom to express ourselves cannot begin to imagine what are like — what it is like to not just be threatened with, and subjected to, torture oneself, but to be threatened with the possibility that everyone one loves will be tortured and killed if one does not comply. Such threats of horror against any potential revolutionary is what makes the firm iron-grip of a dictatorship nearly unbreakable from the inside, and it reveals how important it is that we who can speak our minds, we who are free to choose what we want to spend our time and efforts on, decide to make an effort to help free these people who cannot free themselves. Indeed, with great freedom comes great responsibility, and we cannot defend squandering all our freedom and time on mere gossip and frivolous amusements while our fellow humans are needlessly tortured in the dungeons of countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia.

The immediate suffering imposed by oppression and lack of freedom is far from the only problem, and far from all the suffering, that oppression brings about, however. For when there is no freedom of expression, progress on all fronts is effectively strangled, and bad ideas thrive, as there then is no mechanism by which ideas can be criticized and corrected. And this is indeed vitally important, for at the end of the day, few things cause more suffering than bad ideas, for instance in the form of religious superstition, blind faith in a regime, or the notion that it is okay to kill non-human beings as long as they have lived a good life.

This also underscores the importance of freedom of expression, and the tireless employment of this freedom, no matter what our circumstance is. For freedom of expression is not merely required to satisfy some of our most fundamental needs, but, when employed properly, also an engine that keeps on raising us higher. It is only through a free exchange of ideas and openness to criticism and new ideas that we can improve our ideas and worldviews altogether, and, again, such an openness and allowance of criticism is also what provides the best defense against the spread of harmful ideas, the primary source of genocides and other forms of needless misery. Largely for this reason is securing our freedom to express ourselves — securing a free flow of information — also important for just about every other goal and form of progress worth striving for, as almost all other goals benefit from, and even depend upon, that old ideas can be criticized and that new ones can replace them. For instance, if we are not free to spread information, progress of both moral and scientific kind will be significantly slowed, if at all possible, if ideas cannot be exchanged freely, and this is especially true of the crazy ones, since the ideas that ignite such progress almost always are those that seem crazy initially. So every other worthwhile goal, from global veganism to scientific and technological progress, powerfully depend on freedom of expression, on the spread and maintenance of democracy and individual liberty, which underscores the mighty importance of this goal.

Understanding the World

A sophisticated understanding of the world is everything. It is what allows us to navigate accurately in the world and improve it. For if we really understand what matters in the world — that consciousness finds itself as high as possible on the felicific continuum — and if we understand how to navigate well in this world — how to move consciousness as high as possible on this felicific continuum — we will be compelled to act in accordance with what this understanding itself obviously dictates: we will bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible. Anything else would be a clear symptom of a lack of such an understanding, and that is how important it is that we approach a sophisticated understanding of the world.

We need to expand and refine our understanding of all aspects of the world and how it works, for it all matters deeply and is all necessary. One thing that is hard not to consider especially relevant to understand, however, is the brain, including how its states relate to conscious states, since consciousness is what matters ultimately. For in the end, the difference between the greatest suffering and the greatest joy ever experienced comes down to brain activity — the experience of, say, being burned alive is ultimately a matter of certain activity in the brain, activity that is no doubt triggered by intense firings of the nerves in the skin, but these firings are not inherently painful. The pain and suffering is ultimately a product of the activity found in the brain, of silent, delicate electrical firings that take place in certain patterns. This is the counter-intuitive source of heaven and hell, and this is how important what is going on in the brain is, and how important it is that we understand it. For as a matter of our experience, what is going on in our brain literally is everything. And a sophisticated understanding of these processes will hopefully enable us to eventually prevent hell-like states, and make us joyful and fulfilled beyond what we can even begin to imagine today.

The importance of understanding the world also reveals the great importance of becoming better at the game of understanding the world — that we train our minds to be open; skeptical, especially when it comes to our own views; and persistently curious, and not least that we become aware of the many biases that influence our thinking and belief formation. Indeed, understanding the world is undoubtedly important for all other goals worth attaining, since the answer to the question about how to best achieve any given goal, and also how valuable any given goal is in the first place, is a matter of understanding the world in some way. And while this is trivially obvious, the significance is far from trivial, as its practical implication is that we should pursue an understanding of the world in a far more dedicated and ambitious manner than we have done so far.

Getting Beyond Our Bias Against Changing Ourselves

This is probably the most controversial goal listed in this essay. For we seem to believe, even the most irreligious among us, that the way we are — our genes and our default neurochemistry, for instance — is finely tuned and intelligently ordered, something we should not change too much, perhaps unless we are disposed to the worst kinds of suffering. This notion is a subset of the broader notion that what is natural is good, a notion whose wrongness hardly could be more obvious, as there is nothing good about nature per se. Nature is full of suffering, of non-human beings who are eaten alive, of random mutations that cause unbearable suffering, of neurochemical imbalances that result in states of depression far below the hopeless. There is absolutely nothing good about these hallmarks of nature, and only by living a life in the lucky absence of them could one be tempted to be romantic about the "natural." All these horrors are more than worth avoiding, and changing ourselves and "nature" in fundamental ways is ultimately the only way we can do this.

A healthy skepticism against making changes to our hardware is of course apt given that there are many things we do not yet understand about ourselves in these terms, about our neurochemistry, for instance, and about how our genes interact and express themselves. We cannot responsibly rewrite our genome today, yet this lack of competence should not amount to a categorical rejection of such an effort or similar ones for all time. For the crucial point is that we are unlikely to remain this incompetent for long, and when we do become able to significantly reduce, perhaps even eradicate, suffering, our otherwise healthy reluctance to change — to changing ourselves and other sentient beings away from the "natural" — could quickly become the prime cause of unnecessary suffering in the world, or at least the prime cause of our failure to prevent it. And it may not be long before reliable improvements of our hardware, which is likely to happen by means of drugs in the short term, become possible; before happiness and suffering essentially become a matter of choice, and when it does, romanticizing and choosing the "natural" and all its suffering would be nothing short of atrocious. That is how important it is that we get beyond our bias against changing ourselves.

What is it that we are so romantic about with regard to our current "design," anyway? So many of our problems can be traced right back to the traits that are the natural product of the evolutionary process that has led to our species, traits that we can one day remove from our source code if we choose to. We are selfish, easily jealous, anxious, stressed, hateful and otherwise emotionally hijacked, and not least powerfully disposed to tribal and racist hostility, resulting in violence and death. These are all traits one would expect from a species that has evolved in a context of competing groups of people in a pre-civilized world, and the thin garment of culture is usually all that prevents them from running amok. We are a compassionate species, yes, yet only in relation to club members, as we are also the kind of species that cannot be moved to stop a genocide against other species because eating and wearing their body parts happens to be a habit and a part of our culture. Indeed, how is it not clear that we should change ourselves for the better if we can?

How should we change ourselves, then? What should we become? These are open questions that we need to start thinking deeply about, yet improving our intelligence, happiness and physical and mental health in general seem obviously wise steps — something that is also important for every other goal worth achieving, as greater intelligence likely also would help us better achieve our other goals more effectively. Just as wise would it seem to make us less prone to bad habits, to increase our self-control and remove our tendency to be uncritical group followers — in other words, to empower ourselves to be independent individuals who act in accordance with our deepest interests rather than immediate impulses. We could become less egoistic and instead be "selfish" in wise, fulfilling, altruistic ways; we could become more courageous, more honest, more moral, loving, kind and compassionate.

It is of course not the case that we cannot bring about positive changes in what we do, and even what we are to some degree, by means of culture alone — that is, after all, how all our progress has taken place so far in the history of our species, and this effort should in no way be underestimated. Yet there simply is a limit to how much we can change ourselves by means of culture alone. For just as a chimpanzee, unlike a human child, will never be able to communicate with us in fluent English — or anything close to it — no matter how good our instructions, there are also valuable skills and forms and levels of pleasure and intelligence we will not be able to ever possess with our current hardware, no matter how hard we try culturally, because of the limits that our current hardware impose upon us.

Culture surely does matter, but so do our genes, and no matter what we do at the level of culture, actions on this level alone will never be able to eliminate horrors such as suicidal depressions or our propensities for violence, greed, hate, jealousy, racism, etc. At the level of our genes and predispositions, we are an animal who is well-adapted to survive in a tough and often violent local environment, not to thrive and function intelligently and in peaceful harmony with ourselves and other beings in a global, interconnected civilization. We are gradually becoming able to change this, to evolve and improve ourselves so as to not suffer and cause others to suffer due to our ill-adapted and often miserable nature, and we may someday even become able to relieve all life from suffering by means of such interference. The only thing that will be able to stop us then is our own bias against, and a categorical rejection of, changing ourselves and "nature" in general. Again, that is how important it is that we go beyond this bias.

The Employment and Spread of Meta Rationality

This final goal has already been mentioned and defended in previous essays, yet the spread and employment of meta rationality is a goal that any attempt at making a reasonable meta rational analysis must recommend, since finding out which goals we should pursue surely itself is a goal worth pursuing. So I find myself compelled to include it here too. Furthermore, including this as the final goal also underscores, once more, the point that the goals listed here do not constitute a complete list of goals worthy of our efforts, but that we should keep on thinking deeply and tirelessly about which goals might be worthwhile — keep being meta rational.

The spread and employment of meta rationality is of course also a goal with relevance for all other worthwhile goals, as the successful pursuit of this goal is what uncovers all such goals, and also what informs us where we should be headed more specifically with regard to our goals — for instance, which aspects of the world we need to understand most of all. And the spread of such thinking — of serious thinking about the fundamental question, what should we do? — along with the realization that such thinking should determine what we do, surely holds the potential to transform our culture and conduct completely. For the absence of deep thinking about this question is basically what keeps humanity in what can still only be characterized as very dark ages ethically — a pre-meta rational epoch in which the goals most of us pursue are more or less random rather than guided by thoughtful analyses about which goals really are worth pursuing.

If we change this, if meta rationality becomes widespread and firmly installed in our minds as a common skill in something like the way that mathematics and reading has become, we might enter a meta rational epoch. We might enter an era where we all join forces in reflecting about how we should act, and in which our conduct consequently becomes rational to an extent so far unseen, in contrast to which our current practice, which is largely unguided by serious meta rational efforts — a practice of more or less intuitively guided, more or less random pursuits — will appear laughably irrational. Eventually, it may even come to appear unbelievable, given that meta rational reasoning surely is the most important first step in order to be able to act rationally; given that without it, our actions all too easily end up being blind, unguided, and even worthless fumblings in the dark.

It is indeed time we change this and enter such a meta rational, and consequently super-rational, epoch and become an ethical and rational species that realizes what is valuable in this world and acts in accordance. It all starts with deep considerations about how we should act, and it must continue in that way.
Epilogue

My aim in writing this book has been to argue that there are hard truths about what we should do — that what we should do relates to, and is determined by, a certain aspect of the nature of the world, this aspect being the continuum of more or less pleasant states of experience. A world wherein such a continuum cannot exist is a world where nothing truly matters; a world where such a continuum does exist is a world where things truly do matter. As our experience reveals, we happen to live in a world of the latter kind.

My aim has not been to end the conversation on ethics, but rather to call for such a conversation, because, in my view, the conversation has never really started, and it is time it does. We need a conversation, and a culture, where we move beyond the too commonly bought model of caricatured, antithetical ethical positions, and where we acknowledge our fundamental goal, the goal of being free from suffering and enjoying the greatest fulfillment.

This is what ultimately matters, and hence what we truly should pursue. And my claim is that we need to become deeply dedicated toward this goal since this all but certainly will be the best way to actually approach it. If we do so, if we manage to become as captivated and obsessed by the goal of minimizing suffering as we currently are by, say, competitive sports and the private life of celebrities, and even more obsessed and dedicated still, we will undoubtedly see a massive change for the better. We will see an ethical turn of our culture after which we will finally become a species whose conduct is firmly guided by meta rationality and reflective intelligence instead of mere randomness and unreflected intuitions, a species of beings who live examined lives instead of poorly, post hoc rationalized ones. We will become what we must ultimately evolve and improve to be: an ethical species first and foremost.

Such a complete change in our culture is not impossible. How we act and view the world has changed in fundamental ways before, and in far more drastic ways than we tend to deem possible. For instance, we now know that the stuff we see around us is made of atoms, and we understand its dynamics in mechanistic terms. Many of us take this understanding for granted, and can barely imagine an alternative view of the world, yet the truth is that the existence of atoms only has been well-established for about a century, and physics as we know it today was only established a few centuries earlier. Before this, we mainly understood the world around us in supernatural terms, and the way we now understand the unfoldings of the world — in purely mechanistic terms — was not only non-existent, but completely alien.

As this mechanistic revolution in our worldview makes clear, our thinking and worldview can indeed change in fundamental ways, and quite rapidly. Today, physics is a highly developed field of human knowledge, one that is full of open questions for sure, but also one that is full of knowledge and predictive power. It went from being completely non-existent in the sphere of human thought, at least in anything resembling its current form, to becoming one of the most essential and prominent aspects of it. What one could hope is that the same will happen with regard to ethics, what should be the crowning and supremely governing jewel of human thought, yet which is no more than an underdeveloped and largely ignored branch.

That ethics might one day acquire its rightful place in our culture, and that deep ethical considerations could become the main driver of our thoughts and actions may indeed seem unthinkable today. Yet just as unthinkable, and more unthinkable still, did it once seem that it should become trivial to understand and talk about the boiling of water or the motion of planets without invoking supernatural powers. What caused this change in our worldview away from the supernatural was simply that we realized and admitted that there are natural facts of the matter, and that we then spread these facts. This is exactly what we need to do in order to make ethics as developed as physics currently is, and in order to bring on a significant ethical evolution. If we just recognize the most basic truth about what matters in the world, and recognize this clearly, the rest will follow, as such a recognition itself compels us to become dedicated toward the truly normative goal of moving consciousness — ourselves in the widest and ultimately only consistent sense — as high on the felicific continuum as possible. Such a recognition will compel our thoughts, conversations and actions to become highly inspired and driven by meta rationality.

So the truth is, I believe, really all we need in order to grow into an ethical species, a species that strives to improve the sentient condition with everything we have. Hence, the final conclusion about what we must do can be stated rather simply: seek the truth and act on it.
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 A similar logical demolition of pragmatism of the kind that Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas defend is found in Harris, 2004, pp. 179-181 and pp. 279-283.

 Harris, 2010, p. 45.

 It is also worth noting that those who have said the most interesting and useful things about ethics over the course of history, people like Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, all happened to be moral realists in a strong sense, which is of course not surprising, as only moral realists consistently can say anything about what we should do. It is no coincidence that ethical wisdom has sprung from moral realism, while only the opposite has sprung from moral relativism.

 That moral relativism indeed does amount to intellectually acquired psychopathy is also captured well by the following quote from anthropologist Donald Symons that reveals the kind of absurdity that the attitude of apparent moral relativism commonly leads to:

If only one person in the world held down a terrified, struggling, screaming little girl, cut off her genitals with a septic blade, and sewed her back up, leaving only a tiny hole for urine and menstrual flow, the only question would be how severely that person should be punished, and whether the death penalty would be a sufficiently severe sanction. But when millions of people do this, instead of the enormity being magnified millions-fold, suddenly it becomes "culture," and thereby magically becomes less, rather than more, horrible, and is even defended by some Western "moral thinkers," including feminists.

Quoted from Pinker, 2002, p. 273.

 Putnam 2002; Harris 2010. A presentation on the issue by Putnam can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCTawI5hfEU

 Harris, 2010, p. 219.

 Einstein seemed to express this common, but fallacious a priori separation of value and what 'is' as clearly and succinctly as possible when he wrote: "For the scientist, there is only "being," but no wishing, no valuing, no good, no evil; no goal." (Einstein, 1950, p. 122)  
Einstein was surely right about the first part: there is only "being" for the scientist — there is always only "being" for everyone. The crucial point, however, is the fundamental fact of value, which is the fact that reveals that "being," or what 'is', includes a sphere of more or less value — it actually does include good and evil — and that sphere is as real as atoms, headaches and mountains, as any scientist who sincerely notices what human consciousness is like will be able to confirm.  
Furthermore, one could also dispute Einstein's claim about there not being a goal for the scientists by raising Putnam's points about the fact/value dichotomy. For instance, does the scientist not at least have a goal and wish to describe the world accurately?

 "But being as high on the felicific continuum as possible is not truly, objectively valuable. This continuum of value is merely something that has evolved in animal minds over the course of evolution, and our evolved sentiments make it seem as though it is a source of true value, whereas, in reality, it is merely our own evolved preferences. It does not exist outside our conscious experience; it is only in our minds."  
If one by "outside our conscious experience" means outside the experience of sentient beings, then no, the felicific continuum does not exist outside the experiential realm, but this truism does not imply that value is not real. After all, the exact same claim can be made about, say, pain, which obviously does not exist outside consciousness either. Should that imply that pain is not real? That it does not truly, objectively exist? (And one should be careful not to confuse the two different senses of the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' —  http://magnusvinding.blogspot.dk/2014/04/is-it-objective-or-subjective-clearing.html.)  
Yes, the ability of sentient beings to experience a range of more or less pleasant states — more or less dis/value — has clearly evolved over the course of evolution, but that does not imply that this value is not truly valuable and truly matters. As should be clear to anyone who looks, this value really is real, in every relevant sense of the term. And the fact that this is a fact about consciousness, found only in the realm of consciousness directly and not outside it does not dispute this conclusion in the least. It simply does not follow that value is subjective in the epistemological sense, i.e. biased and invalid, merely because it is subjective in the ontological sense (again, see the clarification of the confusion of these two terms found in the link above).

 "But," it may be objected, "should we want that which is truly valuable? Should we want that which is truly worth wanting?"  
I think asking this question is a symptom of confusion, on many levels. First, the question arises from a failure to understand the meaning of the term "truly valuable," as what it refers to is that we not only should want to be as high on the felicific continuum as possible, but that this is what we already want most deeply. And we actually cannot want anything else most deeply. We are subject to the continuum of more or less pleasant states of experiences, which means that we find being as high as possible on this continuum inherently valuable. It is what is inherently valuable to us; it is our inherently normative goal. We actually have no choice in the matter. So the question about whether we should want that which is worth wanting is simply a question about whether we should recognize and aim for that which we in fact want most deeply.  
Second, the question also gets the relationship between 'should' and that which is truly valuable the wrong way around. For we cannot derive that which is truly valuable based on 'oughts', we can only derive 'oughts' based on that which is truly valuable. 'Oughts' follow from a goal, or value; it is not the other way around.  
It is of course true that our actual want for something does not imply that we should want it, yet our actual, expressed wants are not what is referred to by that which we want most deeply. What we want most deeply refers to what we should want, meaning what we would want if we had perfect knowledge — what would bring us highest on the felicific continuum. Unfortunately, this is rarely what we want in practice.  
The difference between what we actually want and what we should want, or what we want most deeply, is closely related to the difference between what is known as classical utilitarianism — "act so as to maximize well-being" — and preference utilitarianism — "act so as to maximize the fulfillment of wants." The difference between them comes down to the difference between our deepest wants and the wants we hold explicitly in our minds. Hence, to the extent we in fact want that which we should want, that which is in our deepest interest (which, undoubtedly, we often do not), there actually is no difference between classical and preference utilitarianism.  
Who 'we' are and whose deepest interests it is we should act according to shall be made clear in subsequent essays.

 I think we all do recognize this fact implicitly, as its truth is evident from our everyday experience, for instance, when we stub a toe. So it is a fact we in some sense know, at least dimly, but we rarely dare put our words and convictions in alignment with this dimly acknowledged fact and fully realize and admit it.

 Jeremy Bentham, for instance, seemed to express this view — that the fundamental fact of ethics cannot itself be justified — in the first chapter of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

Is it [in Bentham's words: the principle of utility] susceptible of any direct proof? it should seem not: for that which is used to prove every thing else, cannot itself be proved: a chain of proofs must have their commencement somewhere. To give such proof is as impossible as it is needless.

Here, Bentham makes a critical mistake, for while being as high as possible on the felicific continuum, or, in his words, the principle of utility, is fundamental in ethical terms, it is not, as Bentham claims, "that which is used to prove every thing else" in terms of what is true. When it comes to determining the truth of any claim, which is what we are talking about here — is it true that being as high as possible on the felicific continuum is what is ultimately valuable? — that which is used to prove everything else is something else entirely, namely our power of observing and learning about the world, in the broadest sense of both the terms 'observing' and 'world'. This power we can employ, and thereby easily verify and prove that which Bentham claims we cannot prove. Indeed, that was undoubtedly how Bentham himself landed upon it, for how else could he possibly have found this principle valid beyond dispute.  
Bentham's claim is just as confused as, and analogous to, the claim that we cannot justify or prove the correctness of fundamental physical laws, because they are fundamental — because they are the truths that all other physical truths derive from. Clearly, this is a non sequitur, for we can indeed verify the truth of fundamental physical laws (at least within certain ranges) by observing the world. The mistake lies in a failure to distinguish between what could (not unproblematically) be called ontological primitives and the epistemological primitives, and the fact that something is (in a sense)an ontological primitive does not imply that it cannot be verified.

 That only physical facts can be fundamental, certain and objective (in the epistemological sense of this word; see  http://magnusvinding.blogspot.dk/2014/04/is-it-objective-or-subjective-clearing.html) is simply a misunderstanding, albeit a common one, which is likely due to the success and relative exactness of the physical sciences. The fact that consciousness and a continuum of more or less pleasant states exists is just as certain and objective (still in the epistemological sense of this word) as the validity of any supposedly fundamental physical law we know of, and one could even say it is more certain, since we know that the purportedly fundamental physical laws we have formulated so far are not ultimately compatible with each other (quantum mechanics and general relativity contradict each other under certain circumstances), whereas the existence of consciousness and the felicific continuum is certain beyond dispute.

 G.E Moore's open-question argument is a perfect example of such confusion. Moore thought that the fact that we can meaningfully ask whether a specific state or aspect of experience is good means that we cannot equate any state of experience with the "good," and hence that we cannot locate "goodness" in the natural world at all. Moore was certainly right about his first observation concerning goodness, or value, as it surely cannot be equated with any single, specific state or aspect of experience. He was wrong, however, in thinking that this implies that goodness cannot be found in the natural world, as goodness does relate to facts about specific states of experience, namely where they fall on the felicific continuum — this is the continuum that "goodness" ultimately relates to, and asking whether being as high on the felicific continuum as possible is the highest good possible is an unnecessary and closed question, as it is so by definition.  
Moore also rejected that pleasure could itself be equated with goodness, because he considered pleasure to only be an aspect of that which is good. However, Moore also wrote the following in Principia Ethica: "By far the most valuable things [...] are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects." (Moore, 1903, p. 122).  
It seems to me that Moore's view of the inadequacy of pleasure to capture what is important simply springs from his conceiving of pleasure in its narrowest sense rather than its broadest. We of course value other things than what we usually identify as pure pleasure, such as knowledge and safety, yet these things are ultimately valuable because they help us avoid unpleasant experiences and secure pleasant ones, in the widest sense of the words 'unpleasant' and 'pleasant'. And, furthermore, there is also often an intrinsic pleasure to knowledge and safety, which also makes them valuable in themselves. Either way, virtues such as knowledge and safety are ultimately valuable because they help us move upward on the felicific continuum, the continuum of good- and badness, which is why, for instance, it makes sense to say that knowledge and safety are generally good, though perhaps not always.

 Sam Harris makes more or less the same argument in his book The Moral Landscape, and the argument I am making here is in many ways convergent with the one Harris makes. However, in some ways, it is not. For example, Harris seems to build his case for moral truth and a science of morality upon an assumption, the assumption that well-being is our core value, as opposed to recognizing this to be a brute fact. As pointed out in the previous essay, this assumption position with regard to moral truth is incoherent, as we are then not talking about moral truth ultimately. Again, if it really were just an assumption, a claim for which we have no justification, then nothing would prevent us from making an entirely different fundamental assumption, for instance, that maximizing suffering is our core value. Fortunately, such an assumption would not be valid, as the truth is that ethics does not rest upon a fundamental assumption, but a fundamental truth.

 Because again, the absolutist deontologist could in principle be right about what we should do in practice, which is to say that acting according to a given set of rules for their own sake could, at least in principle, be what brings us highest on the felicific continuum. The absolutist deontologist would, however, be wrong about why these rules then are right — they would be so because they bring us as high as possible on the felicific continuum. As I shall argue later, however, there are good reasons to not just follow a rigid set of rules, but to hold the actual goal clearly in view, and constantly refine our pursuit toward it.

 Again, insisting that deontology is not consequentialist is to think too narrowly about what a consequence is. Take for example deontological rights views. Even they are consequentialist, and overtly so. The bad consequences to be averted on these views are just called "rights violations" as opposed to anything else. And there are indeed very good reasons to believe that avoiding violating a reasonable set of rights is the first thing to do if we are to move ourselves from the lower states of the felicific continuum.

 One could also argue that a separation of virtue ethics from consequentialism and deontology cannot be maintained either, as one could say that acting according to noble ethical rules (deontology) is itself a virtue, and similarly that always performing the act that brings about the right outcome (consequentialism) is also a virtue. Again, separating ethics into these different categories as though they exclude each other and necessarily stand in opposition cannot be defended — the fact is that they can as easily be seen as complementary, and even equivalent given that they are defined in a certain way. What matters is simply that we minimize suffering and maximize well-being, whatever rules, virtues or acts it requires — and what it requires is an open question for reasonable investigation.

 At least in their usual narrow sense, because, again, one can define always doing the right act as a virtue, in which case one could argue that all we need is to be virtuous. Similarly, one could argue that acting according to the rule "always do what is best" is deontological, in which case all we need is to be deontological in this sense. Or that what we can reasonably agree to do is what brings us highest on the felicific continuum (because otherwise we would not be reasonable), and hence, one could argue, contractualism captures all we care about etc. This is not, however, the sense in which these words are usually used. There may seem to be a contradiction, but there is not: in the widest and most fundamental sense, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology and contractualism cannot be separated, and can, given certain broad definitions, be considered sufficient principles by themselves, while in the more narrow, practical sense in which they are usually used, they are all useful, but in themselves insufficient.

 Such moral absolutism is not uncommon within religious moral frameworks, and the reason is no doubt the same as in the case of Kant: these frameworks are based on the belief that such moral absolutism is the way to the highest good.

 Palmquist, 1994.

 Ibid.

 It may be objected that Kant occasionally insisted that happiness, or pleasure, was not the highest good. I think he was merely confused in such an insistence, however, and not least inconsistent. Bertrand Russell exposed this inconsistency in the following, perhaps somewhat facetious manner:

Kant was never tired of pouring scorn on the view that the good consists of pleasure, or of anything else except virtue. And virtue consists in acting as the moral law enjoins, because that is what the moral law enjoins. A right action done from any other motive cannot count as virtuous. If you are kind to your brother because you are fond of him, you have no merit; but if you can hardly stand him and are nevertheless kind to him because the moral law says you should be, then you are the sort of person that Kant thinks you ought to be. But in spite of the total worthlessness of pleasure Kant thinks it unjust that the good should suffer, and on this ground alone holds that there is a future life in which they enjoy eternal bliss. If he really believed what he thinks he believes, he would not regard heaven as a place where the good are happy, but as a place where they have never-ending opportunities of doing kindnesses to people whom they dislike.

Russell, 1954, pp. 36-37.

 It may be suggested that Kant is not the most obvious example of a real challenge to this view. What about Nietzsche and the nihilists? First of all, I am not claiming that exceptions cannot be found, merely that they are more rare than commonly supposed, and that in case they can be found, these ideas about ethics are simply wrong about the fundamentals of ethics. That being said, it might be worth paying an ultrashort visit to Nietzsche and nihilism.  
Nietzsche thought that what we call morality is ultimately just an expression of personal or cultural prejudice, a conclusion he may have arrived at based on his historical examinations that revealed that what has been considered normative has varied, at least to some degree, throughout history and in different cultures. To conclude that moral realism is false on these grounds would, however, be to fail to distinguish between that which we consider ethical and that which in fact is ethical. The fact that people have held different views about, say, how humanity arose does not imply that there are no truths about the matter, and the same holds true of different views about morality. Nonetheless, Nietzsche seemed to think that different ideas about morality do provide a relevant blow to the idea of moral truth, and he would deny that there is any underlying truth when it comes to morality — it is all just cultural prejudice. This is simply wrong, however. Again, there really are more or less pleasant states of experience, the difference between which really matters, and this is not a prejudice, but just as much an observed fact, and just as certain a fact, as any we know about the origin of humanity or anything else. In fact, as a matter of Cartesian doubt, I think the existence of the felicific continuum is one of the last facts we can possibly doubt. As Bentham noted in the beginning of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: "Systems which attempt to question it [in Bentham's words: that pain and pleasure are the "sovereign masters" that "point out what we ought to do"], deal in sounds instead of senses, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light."  
Nihilism, the view that nothing matters, is wrong for the same reason, and, furthermore, it is also an insincere position, as nihilists themselves clearly do hold that their lives matter — they do care about avoiding suffering, which is why nihilists sometimes commit suicide; not because they are consistent nihilists.

 Here is Pearce:

"[...] tragically as one sees today, there are some people who endure chronic suffering / chronic depression, and some of the worst depressives - they are simply never happy - they spend their whole lives below hedonic zero. And it would be cruel to suggest that in some sense they aren't really unhappy because they haven't got happiness to compare their misery with."

Quoted from the description of this highly recommendable video with Pearce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yym0VzgXBGk

 This is not to say that our life experience and how we frame our experience in general does not affect how we experience life; it surely does. However, such effects will themselves ultimately be effects that come down to where experience falls on the absolute continuum that the felicific continuum is.  
On a related note: The concept of the hedonic treadmill — the idea that almost no matter what we do, our level of well-being remains relatively constant — may seem to give grounds for skepticism regarding the absoluteness of the felicific continuum. It should not, however. First of all, the hedonic treadmill is by no means a fundamental law about the limits and possibilities of happiness, but rather a tendency that emerges from our particular biology, a tendency that seems to have have been adaptive in our evolutionary past. Second, for the very reason that it is no more than a tendency, exceptions are not rare. People clearly can have their lives radically improved, for instance, people who are relieved from chronic pain or mental disorders. Under such circumstances, enormous and lasting increases in well-being evidently can take place. Lastly, the fact that most of us do seem to experience a relatively stable level of well-being over time does not imply that we experience the same level of well-being as others do, that we fluctuate around the same levels. Again, we clearly do not. We are not equally (un)lucky in terms of where our lives play out on the felicific continuum.

 Again, if one does not realize these facts, the remedy is still to look harder at one's own experience, or perhaps to contemplate the experiences of others who have visited more extreme ends of the continuum.

 Popper, 1945, pp. 284-285.

 Negative utilitarians rarely seem to dispute this. What they will maintain is that the positive value of positive experiences cannot outweigh any negative value.

 If one went through it in order to come out on the other side to help prevent a greater amount of suffering in the world, this would be another matter. In case one could prevent monumental suffering, one would have an obligation to endure this suffering. Two things are worth noting in relation to this. First, we can prevent a lot of suffering, and we fortunately do not have to go through such horrors in order to do it. We have no excuse, just a massive obligation. Second, this example illustrates well how our instrumental value can be far greater than our inherent value in ethical terms, since our helping other beings easily can be worth more than even the most happy life — in itself at least — we could possibly live ourselves.

 It is worth noting that the acknowledgment of this asymmetry cannot be identified with so-called prioritarianism, first of all because there is no special priority in noticing it. The asymmetry lies in the reality of the possibilities before us, and to not prioritize accordingly would be the only position worthy of the name 'prioritarianism', as only that would amount to anything but straight-forward prioritizing. Second, prioritarianism usually refers to certain groups of individuals being prioritized specially, not to the prioritization of suffering.

 For instance, how many people would be willing to bring a child into existence if they knew that their child would live an entire happy life until it is ended in an extraordinarily terrible way — say, by a day of torture to death? Likely not many.

 It may be objected that negative utilitarians have not spoken about the asymmetry in these terms, and that they still would not allow even small amounts of suffering in order to promote great happiness. While this is true, I believe that the practical prescriptions that follow from this iceberg view are not much different from those that follow from the views of most negative utilitarians.  
In relation to my claim that virtually all ethical theories converge toward the same aim, one might ask whether this also holds for negative utilitarianism. I think it clearly does, as negative utilitarians also aim to be as high on the felicific continuum as possible; they just hold that positive experiences cannot significantly move where we are on this continuum, at least not as long as suffering exists. The disagreement concerning whether suffering can be outweighed by pleasure or not, while being very basic and significant, is ultimately a disagreement about particulars. It is not a disagreement that brings the most fundamental fact of ethics in dispute — that we should bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible — but a disagreement about what this amounts to in (slightly) more specific terms.

 See A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 This is not to say that rational egoism cannot be united with great altruism; it sure can, given that altruism is what maximizes one's personal happiness. However, in cases of conflict, rational egoism does not allow for comparison, as the goal is to always maximize one's personal well-being.

 This estimate was reportedly made by physicist Paul C. Aebersold, but I fail to find a direct link to it. The best I have been able to find is Time Magazine reporting on it:  http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,936455,00.html

 That there is no persistent personal identity is not to say that the concept we have of persons is not useful. It is indeed indispensable. It should be noted, however, that rational egoism is not claimed to rest upon an ultimately arbitrary folk notion of personal identity. If it were, it would be obvious in stating this position that what it rests upon, and hence the ethical position itself, is arbitrary and ultimately a failure upon closer examination, as closer examination indeed reveals it is.

 Such a hypothetical machine is commonly invoked in discussions of the problem of personal identity, which is hardly a coincidence since the mere thought of using such a machine immediately begs for such discussions. Rigorous use of such thought experiments can, for example, be found in Parfit, 1984.

 A similar thought experiment is found in Parfit, 1984, and Kurzweil, 2012.

 Even if the state of the brain did remain exactly the same over time, and even if we were fundamentally different egos, this would actually not change anything, since what matters, again, simply is where consciousness finds itself on the felicific continuum. This fact does not allow for any arbitrary priority — consciousness matters no matter where or when; only where it finds itself on the felicific continuum matters ultimately — and hence this fact about what matters alone makes it clear that special priority for ourselves personally is not justified, at least not in principle.  
The purpose of my exposing the falsity of an unchanging personal identity is merely to show that rational egoism fails even on its own terms. Not only does the fundamental fact of ethics dictate that we should not care arbitrarily for any one being, but, as we shall see, so does rational egoism itself, at least when taken to its truly rational conclusion.

 One could argue that, subjectively, we are not our conscious experience, but rather the non-phenomenal witness of our conscious experience. In my view, both views are valid. In subjective terms, we are both the totality of our conscious experience (surely not any part of it more than any other as all aspects of our experience equally are appearances in consciousness) and also the subject of it.

 This might be recognized by some as the central teaching of Eastern philosophy and spirituality, and it indeed is, although it is a shame that this recognition is still considered bound to a certain tradition. All it amounts to is the recognition of what is true about ourselves — that we are not a persistent discrete self — and that this can be realized in first-person terms. Therefore, the truth about ourselves, that we are not selves, is not just one that can be believed, as Parfit noted it could (Parfit, 1984, p. 280), but one that can, as contemplatives have reported throughout the ages, be experienced. If we look for what we are rather than assume it, which was what Descartes managed to keep on doing (assuming it) even when he thought he put everything up for doubt, which is not surprising given that the self-notion is one of the most subtle assumptions of all, we find that there is just consciousness with its ever-changing contents, and we are aware of this, but not as anything to be found in consciousness.  
Derek Parfit also quotes "Buddha's view" in Reasons and Persons to illustrate the similarity between Parfit's logically derived, third-person conclusion that an unchanging personal identity is an illusion with the conclusion Buddha reached via first-person experience. For instance: "no person is found here" and "this bundle of elements is void of Self". Quoted from the final appendix in Parfit, 1984.

 The ethical relevance in practice is another matter of course, which I will return to in a subsequent essay. As a practical matter, it indeed does make good sense to grant some priority to oneself, and to take good care of oneself personally.

 We might of course feel that this is relevant, yet, as a closer view of what this feeling actually amounts to reveals, this is not the case. For what it amounts to is the position that ethical concern depends on whether others experience the world as we do — whether they share our thinking and worldview — and hopefully it needs no pointing out that such a feeling cannot be defended. A similar experience of the world to our own simply does not hold any ethical relevance per se.

 It is indeed lucky that we even have the ability to care about other conscious creatures — especially those who do not belong to our own species, which we admittedly also do have great problems with — because in evolutionary terms, that surely is the anomaly, and one which has undoubtedly only arisen because we evolved in a highly social context. The adaptive role of the conscious mind's identification with an "I" that must care mainly for itself and have children, and which fears its own death is obvious, and that surely is the root of this persistent, yet quite obvious, illusion, because there is not truly such an "I." It is pure imagination, which is obvious both in physical and experiential terms, and realizing this can help us see much more clearly about how we should act in this world, as this Darwinian "I"-intuition surely is one of the greatest obstacles there are to ethical wisdom.

 For an examination and rough estimate of who the conscious creatures are, see A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 Fredrickson et al. 2008: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3156028/>  
Klimecki et al. 2013: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22661409

 It should be noted, though, in relation to this specific example, that the increased affiliation with the suffering of others that compassion meditation promotes makes it seem unlikely that anyone doing this practice, at least in the right way, could end up in such a state of isolated self-satisfaction. It seems inevitable that such a practice would eventually cause one to get up and do something about the problem of suffering.

 Here is Parfit's elegant formulation of this statement, which really is a precept to live by: " _We ought not to do to our future selves_ what it would be wrong to do to other people" (Parfit, 1984, p. 320). And one might as well substitute "future selves" with "oneself," since everything we do for or to ourselves, as mentioned, is something we do for or to our future selves, as our acts are never instantaneous.

 Given that one can take care of oneself, of course. This is not an argument against helping those in need. The point is rather the opposite: if one can help those in need, one needs to take good care of oneself so that one can keep on doing that in the future.

 Again, this is not an argument for diminished care for others. One of the best things parents can do for other children is indeed to provide good care for their own children so that they become mentally healthy individuals who can themselves be kind to, and help, other children during their own lives. And, to state the obvious, not taking care of one's own children does not help other children in any way.  
Are there conflicts between spending one's resources on one's own children and spending them on other children? Sure, and here a golden balance must be found, but striking such a balance will most likely not lead to a situation where one's own children end up unhealthy in any way because of deficient care. Also here it seems that a decent synthesis is possible — it does not seem inconceivable, for instance, that teaching one's children to care deeply for others, and being a good example of such care in practice as a parent, benefits one's own children too.

 Not that there is a defensible distinction between mental and physical health ultimately, as mental health can be said to be an expression of the health of the nervous system "measured" from the inside, subjectively. Yet the two different concepts are generally quite useful.

 For this reason, panpsychism in no way justifies moral laziness of the sort that goes: "Oh, anything might be conscious, so I will just keep on eating and wearing other sentient beings." Because even if, say, a thermostat is in some sense conscious, there is no doubt that thermostats do not feel a range of more or less pleasant experiences, as we know that the physical processes that support this arise on a higher level. It does not let us off the hook in relation to taking seriously sentient non-humans who clearly do experience a range of more or less pleasant experiences. Again, for an examination that seeks to clarify who the sentient beings are, see A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 I am not claiming that dreams cannot be vivid and both pleasurable and horrible, but they generally do not compare to the waking state in any of these regards.

 Dawkins, 2011.

 See: http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/number-of-wild-animals.html

 This is not to say that they do, nor that they do not, but simply that it is a possibility, and that the claim that humans can experience a greater range of experience than non-humans, aside from being disputable, also does not necessarily imply that human experience is of greater intrinsic weight and importance in actuality.

 See Why We Should Go Vegan, Why "Happy Meat" Is Always Wrong and A Copernican Revolution in Ethics for an elaborate case for this conclusion. As I argue in Why We Should Go Vegan, the case is even clear from a perspective purely concerned with humans.

 Again, for a brief examination of who these beings are, see A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 How we should act in light of this uncertainty is a question I shall return to in a subsequent essay.  
This important distinction between answers that can be found in principle and answers that can be found in practice is also found in Harris, 2010.

 At least in subjective terms, which are the terms in which "we" must be referred to ultimately — without subjectivity, there is no "we."

 One can of course criticize these shiny precepts in their narrow sense, and point out that they are not truly equivalent to the precepts above, given that beings are different, and therefore do not necessarily want the same thing as one would want oneself. This is of course true, yet such a criticism is easily rejected by understanding these rules in a less narrow sense that takes our differences into account: we should do unto others what we would have ourselves do to them if we were them. This expanded formulation, which one could argue is the precept that the golden rule implicitly expresses in a shorter, more elegant manner, is at least in close alignment with the precept that we should act as if we are going to live through the experience of all others.

 Rawls only included humans in his original original position, which was surely nothing but a reflection of an unoriginal speciesist bias. For an elaborate attack on this bias, see A Copernican Revolution in Ethics.

 This in fact fits well with what one might expect, as it seems intuitively obvious that the world we would choose to create behind this veil of ignorance is the same as the world that we would create if we were to live through the experience of every sentient being who will ever live. And one could even argue that, as a practical matter in a world where we are in fact not perfectly rational, the latter principle is the superior one, given that thinking in terms of the veil of ignorance could tempt our human bias for hope for not being born unlucky. Adopting the precept that we should organize the world as if we are going to live through the experience of everyone leaves no space for such a bias, it allows no one to be left outside of our concern.

 Such a perfect alignment is also true in case of the ethical theory known as discourse ethics, which holds that our actions should be those that rational agents can rationally agree upon through reasonable, open debate. If the agents really are rational, they will choose to bring consciousness as high on the felicific continuum as possible.

 Again, I am not claiming that we can be conceived of as one directly mentally connected mind. My claim is simply that, just as much as a split-brain mind can be claimed to be one mind, so can different minds in different skulls, which admittedly does stretch the common definition of a mind somewhat. This is, however, also partly the point: our conventional definition of a mind needs to be, not just stretched, but fundamentally changed, as it generally draws a hard, suspiciously soul-inspired, distinction between different minds, and this distinction cannot be defended. That is the real, yet universally widespread superstition: that we are different as fundamentally different self-entities — "souls" — rather than being different structures of matter that give rise to different symphonies, sometimes tragedies, of conscious experience. And this holds true within the same skull: here we also have different physical structures distributed in space giving rise to different experiences, the difference being that these experiences are directly mentally connected.

 A similar point was made by Bentham in the first chapter of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: "It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual."

 Quoted from:  http://borlaug100.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2013/08/NormanBorlaugQuotes.pdf

 Ibid.

 Environmental activist  Mark Lynas is a good example of someone who used to be violently opposed to GMO's until he actually sat down and looked at the data.

 An idea that has, for instance, been put forth by Jürgen Habermas in his writings on ethics and what he calls communicative action. He draws a dichotomy between purposive and communicative modes of conduct, thereby overlooking that the communication and consensus that he argues are normative themselves comprise a goal that we in Habermas' own view should purposefully strive for. The same point has been made at greater length in Steinhoff, 2009.

 A principle that, if we adhere to it, commit us to veganism. See The Simple Case for Going Vegan.

 Philosopher Bernard Williams seemed to express such deep skepticism with regard to whether a firmly goal-oriented approach would be good in practice. He for instance wrote:

Utilitarians are often immensely conscientious people, who work for humanity and give up meat for the sake of the animals. They think this is what they morally ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standards. They do not, and perhaps could not, ask: How useful is it that I think and feel like this?

Williams, 1985, p. 178.

I find Williams' question quite strange, especially given the good examples of virtuous conduct he mentions. Extremely useful would be my answer, and most likely even supremely useful. Williams' paragraph strikes me as a perfect example of the agile acrobatics of human moral laziness.

 This is a rephrasing of one of Kant's formulations of the categorical imperative; he only included humanity.

 Slovic, 2007.

 Harris, 2004, pp. 195-196.

 Uttered in this highly recommendable TED-talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWus1943K0

 See Francione, 1999.

 And in fact also one of the best things we can do for the sake of humans. See the second chapter of Why We Should Go Vegan.

 My own case for the rejection of the property status of sentient beings is found in Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It and more implicitly in Why "Happy Meat" Is Always Wrong.

 In the United States alone, it is estimated that nearly a million birds are boiled alive in slaughterhouses every year — see for instance:  http://nation.time.com/2013/10/29/nearly-one-million-chickens-and-turkeys-unintentionally-boiled-alive-each-year-in-u-s/ — and that is just one of the many forms of horror we subject non-human animals to in our practice of raising and killing them.

 I am not claiming that there is anything wrong with entertainment per se, yet there is admittedly something quite bizarre about the time and money we spend on entertainment while our fellow human beings are put in concentration camps where they are subjected to torture, as it happens in North Korea, and while equally needless and horrifying evils routinely are imposed upon non-human beings. We do indeed all find ourselves in a very bizarre context.  
Again, I am not arguing that we should not take good care of ourselves and have fun — we should indeed — but the key is a golden balance. As made clear in the essay Caring for Ourselves Personally, the conflict between increasing happiness and minimizing suffering is a false one, at least when it comes to certain forms of happiness, since being fulfilled in the right ways can enable us to better help other beings, and falling to one's knees in depression is surely the last thing that will help reduce the suffering of others. However, this does not leave us off the hook and justify a narrow focus on our own personal happiness. We must indeed be happy, for our own personal sake, of course, but, ultimately far more importantly, so that we can help reduce others' suffering effectively.

 See <http://www.hedweb.com/>  
A concise exposition of the project of abolishing suffering, what Pearce refers to as the Abolitionist Project, is found here: http://www.abolitionist.com/

 As argued, the goal-oriented approach is, after all, likely the best one, and doing what seems most likely to maximize well-being is likely better than not striving based on any estimate at all, especially if our estimate of what is most likely to bring about the greatest well-being is based on a thorough examination. Again, we should not underestimate the power of careful examination coupled with determined deliberation.

 For elaboration, see Why We Should Go Vegan.

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

 Take our treatment of dairy cows. If anyone did what we do to dairy cows to a human being — continual insemination followed by immediate stealing of the resulting younglings for them to either, in the case they are female, be subjected to the same fate or, in the case they are male, be killed shortly thereafter — it would undoubtedly be called torture. The only thing that would prevent us from calling it anything else when it is done to a cow, a goat or any other non-human being is speciesism.

 See Why We Should Go Vegan, especially the second chapter.

 There is no doubt a significant positive correlation between how free a nation's citizens are — for instance by the standards of Freedomhouse — and their experienced well-being; see for instance data from the Happy Planet Index for data on average self-reported experienced well-being in different countries.

 And this is why all ideas must be subject to criticism and ridicule. Threats of violence and feelings of being offended by criticism or ridicule must never let us shy away from criticizing bad ideas, be they about the privileges of royal families or the doctrines of Islam. If we cannot criticize and laugh at something, we shall suffer from it.

 It may be objected that I am here conflating freedom of expression and democracy, that they are not the same, and that the importance of freedom of expression does not make a case for the importance of democracy. While this is true to a first approximation, and while freedom of expression and democracy may stand for different things in theory, the reality is that they largely do imply each other in practice. Freedom of expression is simply best protected in democracies, and democracies without freedom of expression are not true democracies. One simply does not find satisfying examples of the one without a significant degree of the other.

 All events we experience in the world are ultimately only experienced by us because these events influence the state of our brain. Everything we ever experience is ultimately activity in our brain, which is not to say that what we experience is not to a great extent a reflection of the world around us — it sure is.

 Such a quest, which is basically what David Pearce argues for in The Hedonistic Imperative, will of course require more than just a sophisticated understanding of the brain, yet an understanding of the brain, including the factors that determine its activity, is arguably going to be its center-piece.

 Again, see David Pearce's The Hedonistic Imperative and the Abolitionist Project: http://www.abolitionist.com/

 See Mark Walker's Happy-People-Pills for All for an argument for why we should seek to increase our happiness by means of drugs.

