Ignorance is a Sin

Premise A- That, any course of action can be justified, if unknown information is ignored.
IE- Imagine that a foreign nation has been handling the interrogation of prisoners, and because they are effective, you don't ask any questions about how they go about accomplishing the intelligence gathering. Are you different from a country that openly condones the use of torture?

Imagine that you, as president, want a war, so you go to the FBI and ask for one. One month later, a major landmark within your country is destroyed in a terrorist attack. The war begins, and the FBI agents who were tasked with starting it are all awarded promotions. Are you superior to a president who directly orders an attack on a major landmark within your country?


It's easy to imagine scenarios where I can accomplish practically any deed without knowing the cost I paid to accomplish it. Willful avoidance of knowledge can easily dodge any moral question. The issue becomes a little less blatant when knowledge is not as readily acquired, but the principle remains the same.

IE- Should a job be done by the person best capable of accomplishing the job at the highest quality and the lowest cost?
The answer, should be by definition yes. If the answer given was not yes, then the job is being carried out for some purpose other than the completion of the objective of the work. In other words, the stated objective of the work is simply a cover for the true objective of the work, or at the least, there a exists another objective for the work that is not the stated objective.
The stated objective of work should always be the actual and complete objective of the work. This is because concepts can seem correct, until they become preposterous upon being stated. This doesn't mean that the stated objective of work must be public knowledge, only that those who decide to create work must have an understanding of what they are doing and why.

That said, the question posed of who should receive a job has some very interesting implications. First off, there is nothing that gives merit to someone's work outside of his ability to accomplish the work. In other words, the definition of work, is the payment of a price to receive a benefit. A high benefit at a low cost is always the measurement of a job well done. Putting the right people in the right job is thus superior to putting the wrong person in the same position. Any decision of job placement, is a question with the same moral implications as condoning attacks on your own territory, or torturing prisoners. Of course, who is placed in what job isn't an issue faced merely by management or recruiters. Decisions about employment are caused by factors such as direct political pressure, economic legal structure, cultural pressure, generally accepted theories, etc. For the same reasons that torturing someone is not okay based on a lack of knowledge that your actions led to the torture, firing a competent employee is not okay based on a lack of knowledge that you were doing so.

This means that no-one acts in a purely moral manner, because everyone is ignorant of the full implications of his actions. However, some of us are more ignorant than others. This ignorance is thence translated directly into evil action.

People who use the tools available to them to acquire what knowledge they can are superior to those who don't. Information gathering is therefore one of the most central requirements of moral society. In other words, a moral society requires that, as possible, all decisions be made using all available information related to the decision. A society that is better able to accomplish this goal is superior to society that cannot achieve this goal.

This presents two major issues- A method to categorize giant amounts of information such that the person who needs the information, knows that he needs it, and a method of gathering all of the information in the first place. In general, the best system we have come up with, for the purpose of controlling the flow of goods and services, is the price system. Anything that hampers the price system's effectiveness reduces the flow of information pertaining to those fields and is thus evil. It must not be forgotten that information gathering is not society's sole objective, that other objectives can sometimes take precedent. The core objectives of any society is of course, the achievement of desire. All other objectives are fractions of the whole, broken down so as to allow the viewing of issues pertaining to them. With that said, achieving any objective at the cost of another objective at an equal level, will not allow you to move forward. You will only achieve a string of pyrrhic victories.

The price system, as such, must not be distorted. Any action taken to modify the state of the environment must be taken in such a way that information is not lost.

Humans have a habit, of deciding that a certain amount of information is good enough. With this, they assume that any belief that is close enough to correct is equal to any other belief within the same circle. Once people stop considering how a decision should be made, the only relevant issue is that a decision be made. Hence, we place people in authority and treat their decisions as the best and most reasonable regardless of what decisions they make, or how they come to them. As structures of authority grow, the decisions become more distant from its effects, which in turn discards information pertaining to the decision.

The universe exists within the eye of the beholder. As a corollary, the specific nature of a given action can be known only to the actor himself. Forcing someone to take action, therefore discards this information. It cannot be known how much suffering was paid compared to the benefits received from an action unless the actor decides to take action to achieve a benefit. If the actor takes action to avoid another cost, the only known information is that the cost that wasn't paid is higher than the one that was. IE- that X>Y. Given the cost X was artificially created to force the actor into motion, and the benefit was Z there is no way to know whether the decision to pay Y in order to receive Z was the correct decision. In reverse, forcing someone not to receive a benefit also discards information.


This leads once again to the principle of distortion. A government, wherein everyone acts exactly as if the government did not exist, would by definition be an anarchy. By definition, an anarchy has no cost. IE- something that does not exist cannot cost anything. A government that caused no changes besides the creation of opportunity, IE a government that managed somehow, for everyone to do exactly what they would have done, except that the people had access to an infinite amount of electrical power would also be non-distorting. (note: I am not describing a government that subsidizes electricity. The government conjures it out of thin air.) This is because the government is not discarding any form of information.

The price of government is thus, distortion, or information discard. The design of every form of governmental action should thus be, the minimization of distortion and the maximization of results. To achieve this function, a well made law code requires as few forced actions as possible to achieve the same result. At this point it becomes important to focus on what results should be achieved. Specific results tend to be petty and stupid. For instance-
Having a child attend a series of classes and do particular homework.
Such a result has created a value system that determines that good is measured against whether the child goes to class and does homework. This value system is pathetic compared to one that measures whether the child is happy now and in the future.

School, as a concept, must be measured against the results of the schooling. To do so, it requires that the taker of the measurements have some idea of the cost of the schooling and the benefits. It therefore becomes important that the people who are taught must decide that they wish to participate in the classes. Ignoring this, will discard all of the involved information. You cannot assume that a nation is morally sound while discarding all information on the damage done to around a fourth of the nation's population. As a corollary you can assume that nation is immoral, simply because it lacks the ability to make moral decisions. The same can be said of any society in which each of its citizens is expected to partake in a series of premeditated actions before being treated as a source of information. Every separate entity has information unique to itself, by definition, and if that information is ignored it is lost.

Any system that achieves the same results without losing that information is superior. Every decision must be made based on the results of those decisions, and the results must be inferred from basic values. The decision must come at as low a cost as possible with as high a benefit as possible. Costs cannot be ignored, and results cannot be inferred to exist just because we want them. Everything about a moral society must be decided based on careful and complete measurement of the applicable variables.

Culture and Morality

Scenario A- You have sure knowledge of a bio weapon system that is going to be deployed on your home town a day from now. The weapon system shows no signs of its existence from the day it is deployed (tomorrow) until 10 days have passed. After the 10 days are up, anyone who has been within 30 miles of the site at which the bio weapon was used during the period of 10 days, regardless of the length of time, will die. You have no usable evidence to support your claims, and attempts warn the public are futile at best. However, there is a female who you are fond of and you would like to ensure her survival. Knowing her, convincing her to leave the city is futile. As such, the only way to save her is to abduct her, and keep her prisoner for 10 days.

Condoning the course of action described requires an admittance that rights exist to protect ideals, and that beliefs are morally neutral. In other words, a harmonious course of action is selected not based on what two individuals agree to, but is selected by choosing the optimal path within the set activities that would be condoned by both parties from the vantage point of knowledgeable observers looking back on the course of events.

Scenario B- The Earth is currently populated by a transcendent race of humanity. Unfortunately, humanity is still haunted by its past, which includes the mass scale use of super weapons, and is going to go extinct. Every day the amount of usable land remaining on earth shrinks as ecophage populations rise, and at this point civilization is no longer in a state wherein a solution can be reached before the entire Earth is converted into radioactive wastes, unapproachable even by super humans. However, as all hope seems to be lost, a meteor formed of exotic elements falls upon the Earth- elements that enable the creation of a spaceship and terraforming platform. However, the people who own the land upon which the meteor fell are early generation transcendentals, who were designed on a different basis than the later generations. These people believe that the only meaningful activities are things such as farming, or scientific research for the sake of improved tools. They look down on activities such as watching movies or playing games. Because of their culture, reproductive rates are incredible and whenever any one's earnings rise high enough that he can support another person he multiplies. It can be stated that if events are allowed to unfold without interference, the people who escape the Earth will slowly devolve themselves into machines, and will eventually consume the entire universe without any feeling left within them. In order to reach a future wherein people can go to the stars and seek more ephemeral realities, wherein people take action so as to laugh and cry rather than merely to exist, in order for life to continue being alive for more than a few generations- it is necessary to eliminate the first users of the meteor and claim it for the purposes of your superior group. Let's even add that your group has been pushed by the ecophages so hard that the only way for your group to reach the stars, is to wait for the group that originally got the meteor to build a spaceship for their own use, and then kill them in a surprise attack at the last possible moment.

Condoning the course of action described requires an admittance that morality is based on creating value, that a course of action is decided upon based on what the results of the actions are.

Scenario C- If your neighbor were to die, you would obtain his property by contractual agreement. You have learned of a ritual, that, if performed would enrage your neighbor to the point that he would come charging into your house with an ax and would then try to kill you. There is no conceivable reason why you would perform the ritual except so as to enrage your neighbor, nor is your neighbor different from other people in any other way except for his irrational hatred of this particular ritual. If you were to perform the ritual, you could easily shoot your neighbor when he broke in your door, and everybody would consider it self defense, and you would in turn obtain his property.

Rejecting this course of action requires an admittance that a course of actions can be viewed in terms of the results of the initiation of action, or, that a plan is judged from the difference in the universe between when the plan is initiated and completed. In other words, taking specific action in order to make someone try to kill you, and then killing him, is equivalent to using a perfect scheme in which you kill someone and then make it look like it was self defense. You start with an above average person who doesn't drive drunk or vote for communist governors, and who's slight flaws are obscure enough to make him less dangerous than anyone who has driven a car while not being sober- and you convert this person into a corpse, thus causing the world to have a higher proportion of below average people compared to those above the average, and instilling a certain amount of fear in the world. It's just theft and murder, and the initiation of violence was done by the same party in either version.

As such, violence cannot be constrained to such a simple heading as the redistribution of resources without consent, nor is it possible to build a working moral framework simply by maintaining the ownership of property. The moral use of resources must achieve a series of objectives, including-
A- The resources must, as best as is possible, be used to create idealized worlds.
B- There exists ideals that are superior to the ideals of others. The idealized world that must be created should be in accordance with what is truly valuable.
C- The framework of resource distribution must judge people by the purpose of their actions and by the correlation between the actor's beliefs, and reality.

Given this, the definition of violence which holds violence as a set of activities that in the eye of an observer, moves the world toward a less ideal state functions. A definition wherein violence is limited to actions that redistribute resources from their owner, as decided by first user or by consent of transfer, fails, at such a time as an action that requires a reaction, is the origin of the reaction. Since people are obligated to take actions that can include use of lethal force in order to protect their ideals, taking any hostile action against someone's ideal is equivalent to creating the required reaction yourself.

The fact that the creation of violence is evil is valid. More specifically, the more effort that is spent trying to destroy other humans, the weaker humanity becomes overall. A perfect human race would act in a completely harmonious manner. By not acting in such a manner, it is proven that humanity is not perfect. By definition, an imperfect existence does not act in a completely moral manner. It is because of our imperfection, that we must act in a violent manner, even though we would prefer to exist in a world wherein there was no violence. Or, put another way, in a world wherein nobody believed that anybody was actively reducing the value of the world, it is highly probable that the value of the world is not being reduced. In reverse, in a world wherein people believe that the people around them are reducing the value of the world, there is a high probability that the value of the world is being reduced.

Nonetheless, violence is itself merely a symptom of problems existing at yet lower levels. When a patient is burning from fever the doctor does not throw him in a lake- he tries to reduce the temperature by addressing the underlying problems. A philosopher who simply states that a disease would not exist if the symptoms were not present is being both cowardly and lazy. It is impossible to eliminate violence by opposing violence, just as it is impossible to eliminate a waterfall by placing obstacles in the path of the falling water.

In order to create the idealized world, what we need are not groundless rituals and rules, nor strings of connotation that allow us to skirt subjects we find unsavory. Morality in itself does not imply any rules, nor does it answer what we should or should not do. Morality exists in order to judge value- in order to state that X is better than Y and that Y is inferior to X. Assuming that a grasp of morality would allow you to construct a moral society is like assuming that a grasp of physics would allow you to describe the properties of meitnerium as if you knew it as well as you did iron. It's just arrogance. Morality exists to give us measurements. Physics cannot tell us the ideal alloy with which to build a bridge. It can, however, give us measurements that prove that some new alloy is better than the one we're currently using. The organization of society should be treated similarly, with multiple experiments running at all times, and with a recollection of what models have been attempted, and what they did. As such this insinuates a methodology through which societies branch off into multiple diverse groups which are then measured against each-other, with the most valuable societies being used as a basis for the creation of the next generation of societies.

Fortunately, nature has, so far, been favorable. Morally well designed societies have, throughout history, fostered superior understanding of technology. Dissenters within these societies have periodically used these technologies to populate new frontiers before the dissenters within inferior societies were able to reach them. However, this process, being natural and not artificial is fragile, in that is based only upon the particulars of the environment. IE- there exists no reason to ensure that the process described will function on an indefinite basis. Since it has worked so far, and there exists no pressing reason to alter it, it becomes reasonable to ensure the process continues to function through artificial means. This means using methods that nullify the most visible threats.

These scenarios would cause a breakdown of the natural process-
If frontiers could be populated by inferior societies.
If existing societies could expand into frontiers at a rate equal to the speed at which the frontiers were opened up.

The technological prowess needed to enter new frontiers will for the foreseeable future be exclusive to valuable societies. However, the use of these technologies may, over time, become available to inferior societies, allowing dissenters to populate their newly claimed territories using the residents of less moral societies, which would inevitably start using the newly claimed land for their own ends as the land was terraformed into forms that require less technological prowess for minimal use. This scenario has been seen in the past, with societies importing large quantities of slaves into frontier land, but has not generated catastrophic results so far due to logistical issues. However, if a single American colony on Mars could support many times its numbers in Chinese, we could eventually reach a universe wherein the majority of humans lived under tyranny for the convenience of a few groups that were similar to a morally sound society, but supported the continued existence of the tyrannies by providing the necessary body of scientific data and economic calculations to maintain civilization.

America had to fight a war with Britain in order to populate its frontiers. In theory, as technology improves, transportation becomes easier and geographic barriers both to force and to communication break down. It may be that the moon will have to fight a war for its independence. Or worse, that such a war could not be won, and as such, it would be impossible to continue to use frontiers as locations upon which radical and unpopular beliefs could be implemented. The reason the Protestants were able to participate in activities that the rest of Europe saw as unsavory and wrong was distance. However, what used to be a powerful barrier requiring months to overcome can now be crossed in a matter of hours. If future frontiers are opened not by a difficult journey, but by the removal of the barriers to that journey, then the people who are supportive of the majority views of society no longer have any incentive to not colonize. This in turn cuts down on mutation rates, and thus stops evolution.

As such, neither a peaceful tolerance of evil, nor an acceptance of empire is acceptable. It is not possible to conquer all those you hold as evil without creating an empire. As such, the alternative is simple- to obtain resources for superior societies and deny them to inferior societies. Trade is rational, in that at the end of any trade, both parties are superior to how they used to be, but when an inferior society lays first claim to a resource, the inferior society grows to encompass that resource, which in turns reduces the average quality of societies. This is why it is necessary to build nations- and why it is necessary for those nations to have borders.

Distinct nations allow for the existence of distinct societies, which in turn allows us to have measurements on the results produced by the societies. Fundamental alteration of currently active nations is not necessary. In fact, since the fundamental alteration of a nation by its nature, requires the replacement of one existing framework by another existing framework, it almost always consists of the conversion of one nation into another nation, in other words, expansion of nations through unscientific means. The goals of political activity then, is just to allow the fundamental precepts of a culture to express themselves. This does not exclude the possibility of reconstruction of governments, or other such possibilities- after all modern cultures are written in polymorphic code, and the top levels must adapt to match the lower levels. What it does mean is that a government should be consistent with the culture underneath it, and the actions on top should be taken with regards to the foundation underneath.