Knowledge

I think that ethicists should spend more of their time pointing out what sort of actions are worthy of praise. There is a risk that if you get too negative, then you will drive people away and thus lose your influence. Since I have attempted to tell all of the reasons why blame might be appropriate, no doubt it will appear that my system of moral and ethical values is overly strict in some respects.

I should point out that people are in no sense required to caste blame for all of the reasons that I have laid out. That having been said, I will turn now to one of the areas that is most worthy of praise.

If an action is worthy of praise due to the fact that it shows a tendency to harm others, it is likewise worthy of praise due to the fact that it would tend to help. I have already laid out an explanation for why people help others by investing their money profitably. This is an area where people are not praised nearly enough. Without this praise people are likely to invest less than they should ideally. I am not saying that people have an obligation to invest, but that investing more money and doing so profitably would improve the human condition.

Another area where people can help others is in the expansion of human knowledge. The quality of our lives depends, to a large extent on the knowledge that is available to us. That knowledge is a public good. It can be made available to a larger number of people at little additional cost. I am not saying that actually teaching the information is easy or that the cost of teaching people the way this is usually done in our society doesn't depend on the number of people being taught. Neither of these statements is true. What I am suggesting is that information can be provided to a larger number of people in written form at little additional cost.

The cost of actually generating the ideas does not depend on the number of people who benefit from them. This is why generating these ideas and supporting this generation are both worthy of praise, because they help others.

Humans are generally much better off than they were in the past. Most of the increase in human well being has taken place since the industrial revolution. The goods and services available to each individual has increased dramatically. Much of that increase is due to improvement of our understanding about the world. That improvement in our understanding owes more the the fact that we have learned things that we didn't know in the past, than any improvement in mental ability that has occurred over this period of time.

Thus it seems plausible that a large contribution to human well-being is due to an improvement in the quality and quantity of the information available in books, or what Karl Popper called the third world. In this he devoted much of his thought to the philosophy of science, and in particular what constituted empirical science and why it was so useful.

In empirical science ideas are evaluated on the basis of conformity with empirical observation and parsimony. Ideas that are simpler are held to be better than more complex ones. Some philosophers of science suggest that if two ideas are both consistent with empirical results, then the simpler one is more likely to be true, or at least closer to the truth. While I suspect that this is true, Karl Popper pointed out that when we evaluate the usefulness of an idea we are not only concerned with whether that idea is true, but also with how it will effect the evolution of thought within the discipline concerned.

Karl Popper actually suggests that scientific ideas are useful precisely because they can be shown to be wrong. Science gives us methods for correcting our errors. He sites classical mechanics as an example of an instance in which a set of ideas continues to be useful even after it has been shown to be wrong.

Some people have erroneously claimed that he stated that ideas that were unfalsifiable were meaningless. This has lead to the unfortunate claim by some opponents of the theory of evolution that it is a tautology and hence invalid. In fact Karl Popper explicitly stated that tautologies need no empirical data to be confirmed. The negation of a tautology is a contradiction, which no amount of information could support. His point is that this falls outside of empirical science, and his claim is that he has come up with a useful definition of empirical science.