The Operation of the Moral Law
Chapter 6
Author’s Note: Below is the sixth chapter of my book, where I close the circle from the beginning of the book by returning to Ayn Rand’s ethics and examining its biological foundations.
And yes, it has been a long time since I have posted a chapter. My plan for completing this book was slowed down by the chaos of the last year of politics. That chaos has not really slowed down any, but I was still able to get some philosophical work done in the last year, and now that my current endeavors require me to publish more philosophical rather than purely political content, I hope very soon to be able to polish off the final chapters of the book and present them to you.
The table of contents so far:
Preface: The LEGO Movie Theory of Life Chapter 1: The Prophet of Causation Chapter 2: The Natural History of a Billiard Ball Chapter 3: A Causality Walk for Consciousness Chapter 4: How to Make One World Out of Three Chapter 5: The Self-Writing Slate
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Now here’s the chapter
Chapter 6: The Operation of the Moral Law
This chapter is the closing of a circle. We started with Ayn Rand’s ideas on the foundations of ethics in her essay “Causality Versus Duty.” We went down to metaphysics to understand what causation is in the first place. Then we looked at how causation applies to consciousness and to thinking, and we drew implications from that for the question of human nature. After establishing this base, we are now returning to the foundation of ethics.
When we talk about the foundation of ethics, this is a field usually referred to by philosophers as “meta-ethics,” on the same pattern as “metaphysics.” Meta-ethics deals with the questions beneath ethics. Rather than trying to solve some particular moral quandary or define a particular virtue, it asks what ethics is in the first place, what it is grounded in, how it is validated.
What question is ethics trying to answer?
Life, the Universe, and Everything
I am reminded of a story from the comic science fiction novels of Douglas Adams. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a running gag in which a race of aliens decides to build a vast supercomputer to calculate “the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” After churning for 10 million years, the computer comes back with its answer: “42.” Nobody knows what to make of it, so the computer explains that that the problem is that nobody ever defined what the question was.
This is a good analogy for what we’re dealing with in ethics. We first need to define the question. Consider two prominent and contrasting approaches.