A Word of Advice For The New Year

Happy New Year to my fellow bloggers and readers! I hope 2015 treated you well 😛 This year I spent new years eve in downtown Seattle drinking beer and eating cinnamon rolls with some of my closest friends. We huddled next to a fireplace on a rooftop and got to witness some surreal fireworks dancing above the space needle. It was definitely one of my favorite new years experiences so far!

Like every new year, 2016 represents a time of reflection for our future aspirations. It’s also a time we should remind ourselves of our values because they are so often forgotten in the routine of our everyday lives. Here are 10 humanist ideas to follow for the upcoming year- thanks to one of my intellectual heroes, Bertrand Russell, for inspiring many of these.

  • 1- Read incessantly. Read fiction to enrich your imagination and nonfiction to expand your knowledge of the world.
  • 2- Always doubt and never stop questioning. Never feel absolutely certain of anything.
  • 3- Tell the people you love that you love them. Hatred is foolish, let it go.
  • 4- Be truthful even if it’s inconvenient. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
  • 5- Be open to eccentric opinions. Something that is considered absurd today may become common sense tomorrow.
  • 6- Take chances. Don’t regret avoiding the new and unfamiliar.
  • 7- Don’t be afraid to suffer through discipline. Sacrificing short term pleasures is often a road to happiness.
  • 8- Enjoy the ordinary days. You can only have one worst day of your life.
  • 9- Listen carefully. Overcome disagreement by thinking slowly and controlling your emotions.
  • 10- Never stop creating. Give yourself the experience of discovery and imagination. And then when you’re ready, share it with the world.
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Ethics and Economic Justice

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have been reading David Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons the past couple of months and I must say, it’s been a wild ride. I recommend it to anyone that subscribes to utilitarian ethics and having their world views pushed to the limit. It may seem farfetched to some, but I suspect Parfit will go down as one of the greats in the history of philosophy.

The book covers a variety of loosely related topics, but I want to focus on the type of utilitarianism he concludes from his arguments: Prioritarianism. Prioritarianism holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well being (Utilitarianism) with extra weight given to worse off individuals. Let’s look at an example to sharpen the distinction between the two.

Imagine a two-person society: its only members are Jim and Pam. Jim has an extremely high level of well-being, is rich, and lives a blissful life. Pam, by contrast, has an extremely low level of well-being, is in extreme poverty, and lives a hellish life.

Now imagine that we have some free resources ($10,000 for example) that we may distribute to the members of this society as we see fit. Under normal utilitarian circumstances, the $10,000 will generate more well-being for Pam than it will for Jim. Thus giving the money to Pam would be the morally correct choice. However, let’s imagine slightly different circumstances.

Jim, for whatever reason, even though he is already filthy rich and very well-off, would gain just as much well-being by receiving the $10,000 as Pam would. Suddenly utilitarians don’t have a preference on who gets the money because both Jim and Pam’s well-being would increase the same. Prioritarianism on the other hand would give the money to Pam, because she is worse off than Jim.

Furthermore, prioritarianism doesn’t act just as a tie breaker for well-being, sometimes it favors priority over a small amount of well-being in order to emphasize compassion. So if Jim were to somehow gain more well-being from the money than Pam, Prioritarianism still wouldn’t necessarily favor him. It is important to note that the amount of well-being traded for priority is arbitrary, but in most cases we can rely on common sense. But why is that?

Well there is a good reason: There are diminishing returns on the value of goods and money. Would Jim be able to tell the difference between having 1 billion dollars and 1.00001 billion dollars? No, he wouldn’t have a clue. In fact there have even been studies, including a prominent one by Princeton University Researchers, that money doesn’t buy happiness after one earns $75000 a year.

It is estimated that it is around this point where money is no longer a primary concern in ones life. People can focus on health, relationships and leisure’s without the stress of paying the bills at the end of the month, which is a real fear for millions of Americans.

If you subscribe to prioritarianism ethics, a certain amount of wealth redistribution becomes fundamental to a healthy and moral society. In a society where Walmart’s Walton family (one of many examples) owns more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, millions of which are living in poverty and struggling to survive, can a rational person really argue that this disparity in wealth is ethical?

Welfare state capitalism may currently be the best economic model, but its inability to redistribute wealth fairly will continue to raise questions on how it can be improved. Economic justice isn’t about equality. It’s about removing the gross excess at the top to help prevent suffering for those at the bottom.

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What Does A Utopia Look Like?

From its inception in ancient literature, to the popular movies and novels of today, humans have tried to imagine what a perfect society would look like. And not surprisingly, it’s been a difficult task. Often times these perfect societies portrayed in works of fiction and movies turn out to be dystopias in disguise. Novels such as Brave New World, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange and movies such as The Matrix, Minority Report and Equilibrium all share this feature.

Another characteristic these stories share is that they all took great advancements in technology for these societies to become a reality. And eerily enough, it’s hard not to see the resemblance these works of art share with what is actually taking place in the real world.

Technology will continue to advance and with it comes a plethora of possibilities. Can we use this technology to create a utopia? Is a utopia even possible? Or will this attempt at a perfect society lead to a dystopia in disguise in which so many works of fiction have imagined?

To me, a utopia would provide happiness to everyone that belongs in it. And ideally, to describe the opposite of Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” in his book The Moral Landscape, a utopia would attempt to achieve the best possible happiness for everyone. Let’s call it BPHFE.

It’s incredibly difficult to imagine how BPHFE would be implemented into a society. Brave New World attempts to do this by stupefying the lower castes while they’re young, and providing them with plenty of drugs and recreational sex when they’re older. And while you must admit this would increase pleasure, there is a sense of manipulation in the way it is achieved. Besides, happiness doesn’t have to revolve only around drugs and sex.

I believe curiosity is a vital ingredient towards achieving BPHFE. It is curiosity that allows us to keep advancing as a civilization through our willingness to learn and experience new things in life. In order to achieve a society filled with curious people (and therefore BPHFE), we must do the opposite of the society in Brave New World: educate the masses.

A BPHFE utopia would have individuals involved in occupations that would spark their own unique passion and interests. Perhaps the technology of the future will have some type of test to best determine our natural characteristics. Ideally, this would allow every individual to flourish by increasing their curiosity freely and unrestrained.

Advanced machines and computers would keep society functioning. They would provide humans with everything on the bottom two layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. These technologies could also produce goods to enrich the lives of the people for the highest layers.

This society would embrace minimalism. Money wouldn’t exist. People could focus purely on their passions without fear, anxiety and hatred. Possessions would have little value or meaning. Life would consist of love, curiosity and experiences; and that’s all we would need.

My idea of a utopia surely has its flaws, but perhaps the concept is not entirely unfathomable. The question remains: What does a utopia look like? Stay curious.

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