Tag: morality

Men in Black ethics

I remember really enjoying the Men in Black movies when I was younger. They’ve got explosions, aliens, flying saucers, Will Smith. They’ve got everything that makes a movie great. However, the movies are missing one very important thing: good ethics.

It slipped by me when I was watching the movies as a kid, but humans in the Men in Black universe are kind of the galaxy’s village idiot. In the first movie it’s explained how television, computers, and basically every other technology was given to us by aliens. We’re apparently not capable of developing any of these things ourselves.

In a universe where its easy to travel from one planet to another and there are all kinds of interesting planets with interesting life to visit, we humans are stuck on earth. We get the alien technology that they don’t want: television. They keep their faster than light travel for themselves.

The culture of craft and making that’s seen a resurgence in the past decade or so has me very excited. It shows that people are creative, interested in learning, and willing to build things that make the world a better and more exciting place to live. It’s humans making these inventions, and we celebrate those past humans who invent. People like Philo Farnsworth, the Wright Brothers, and Alan Turing.

When movies like MIB cast humans as incapable of inventing, they do a disservice to our culture and our history.

Science and the immorality of propaganda

I believe, hopelessly, that this morality should be extended much more widely; this idea, this kind of scientific morality, that such things as propaganda should be a dirty word.

– Richard Feynman

The philosophy of science is concerned mainly with a search for truth. Science provides a method to find the truth. At his core, a scientist is someone who seeks to bring his beliefs in line with reality by doing experiments to test his beliefs.

The truth is a scientist’s most sacred quality, and anything that hides the truth or confuses it is immoral. Looking around myself at the world that I live in, I see a lot of instances of people hiding the truth, or purposefully confusing an issue, or phrasing things in a misleading way. It’s clear why people seek to hide the truth. If you convince people to do something, you can make a lot of money or get a lot of power. But while this may be good for you in the short term, it seems like it’s bad for society and the world in the long term. Decisions get made not on the basis of what’s best, but on the basis of what has the best propaganda.

Politics and advertising are the two main fields that focus on distorting truth or obscuring it with rhetoric. This means that tasks as simple as choosing toothpaste and as complex and important as choosing a national leader are far more difficult than they need to be. My solution has generally been to avoid all kinds of ads and propaganda, and look for actual data before making a decision.

It would be nice to live in a world where this kind of conscious avoidance of ads wasn’t necessary. We already have social and cultural moral systems that prohibit bad behavior. I propose that we work to incorporate prohibitions of advertising and propaganda in these already existing systems. It won’t even be very hard: just treat advertisers and marketers the same way you treat people who are rude or smell bad. The social stigma will eventually push people away from propagandizing.