The Philosophy of Everything 2e — Part IV: On Ethics

The freedom a person wins by taking their own mind in hand does not last long out in the open. I found this out the hard way. You can do all the work of the third part of this book. You can clear the lens, look at the room, and turn the lens at last on the one who is holding it. You can come out of it settled, awake, harder to push around.

Then you walk back into the street, into the crowd, into the ordinary press of other people. And you find that your freedom is only as safe as the people around you let it be. A free mind in the middle of a frightened, grabbing, half-asleep crowd does not stay free for long. Sooner or later somebody takes a piece of it.

So the freedom has to be protected, and there is only one way to do it. You make sure nobody is harming anybody else. That is the whole of it, underneath. The work of the inside, however well it is done, comes apart in a bad society. I said this earlier and it is worth saying again: you cannot save yourself alone if the building you are inside is on fire.

This was the fourth thing I had to figure out. How much freedom one person gets to keep, and how much they owe the people standing next to them. How a society can be arranged so the people in it live alongside each other instead of at each other's throats. And, after all of that, what a life still needs in order to be worth living. I needed that answer too, because surviving in peace, I had already learned, is not the same as living well.

There is a long word for this work, the way there was for the others. They call it ethics. The word has been worn smooth by people using it to mean "the rules I would like you to follow," but underneath it means something plain. Ethics is the work of finding out how to live next to other creatures without harming them. It covers the principles that let a person survive and flourish without taking it out of someone else's hide. It also covers the ways of arranging a society so that it moves towards peace and prosperity instead of away from them.

That is all an ethicist is really doing. Not handing down commandments. Working out what holds, between people, over the long run. And what holds, over the long run, is cooperation. I said so near the start of this book, and I have not found a reason to take it back. Working with other people beats working against them. This is not because it is nicer, though it is. It is because it is the only arrangement that keeps going. It is also the only one that can keep going without harming some other creature to buy your own safety. Cooperation is the direction. Competition is the deviation.

Even so, peace is not the end of it, and this is the part most people miss. A life can be perfectly peaceful and still be empty. We are not here only to stay alive and make more of ourselves. The body was built for that, and for many of us the body's work is mostly done. What is left is a person with nothing pressing to do, and a person with nothing to do does not rest. They rot.

So a life needs something else: a goal it was not handed by nature, worth chasing even though nothing forces you to chase it. I called these surrogate goals earlier, and I mean it as no insult. A surrogate is a stand-in, and these goals stand in for the ones that survival used to hand us. They are the work a person takes up once survival is finished. They are the thing that gives the days a point and, between us, moves the whole human project an inch or two forward. Being at peace with yourself is a great deal. It is not, on its own, enough.

So this was the last step. Living well among others is the fourth step towards freedom. The first was clearing the lens, which meant learning how to know. The second was using the cleared lens to look at the room. The third was turning the lens on the one who was holding it. The fourth is the one without which none of the others can be kept. It is walking back out among other people, and learning the distance that lets a person stay close enough not to be alone and far enough not to be swallowed. The whole of ethics, in the end, comes down to finding that distance.