Interlude:

Freedom, Values and Morals

Time out for a reality check. Granted, we've proved that "Never interfere with anybody else's moral standards" is a self-contradictory command (because, I have to keep stressing, it is itself an interference with at least some people's moral standards). But this fact doesn't automatically imply that it's okay any time you feel like it to go around forcing other people to conform to what you think is right. What is not black is not automatically white.

What it does mean is that we've got to come up with some objective criterion to find out when it's okay to interfere with others' following their conscience, and when we should let them alone. And when we do, it turns out to be fairly close to the non-interference preached by the New Morality. Well so what? It doesn't follow that the New Morality is nothing but unmitigated evil.

If, as I said, the basic moral obligation underlying every moral code, whether it realizes it or not, is that you must never deliberately act inconsistently with what you are as human, then the question arises as to what it is about human beings that makes it consistent or inconsistent to interfere with each other, and when.

Human freedom.

And here we get into another place where contemporary culture has involved itself in a contradiction. On the one hand, we think we should be free to do as we please; but on the other, the culture agrees with Bertrand Russell (Surprise, surprise!), who said somewhere, "we aren't free to please." That is, according to him and the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the science of psychology proves the notion that it's a myth and a delusion to think that we're "free" in the sense that we can choose any of the alternatives we are aware of. We think we can, granted, but in fact (according to them), the only reason we think so is that we're unaware of where the weight of the influence lies; we can't (still according to them) choose anything but the most strongly motivated course of action. How could we? We'd have to pick the less strongly motivated action. (Well, that's the point of freedom, isn't it?)

Of course if we can't choose the less strongly influenced side, this means that we can no more help choosing what we choose than we can help falling when thrown out of an airplane. Our genes, our training, and the circumstances we are in (says this theory) determine what we're going to do and what we're going to choose. So we're not really free at all.

But it follows from this that it's inconsistent to "leave people alone to do whatever they please," because, depending on how they were brought up, they'll do all kinds of objectively destructive things; and, like dogs, they should be trained (interfered with) not to do such things. So, according to the science of behavioral psychology, people are not in fact free, and so shouldn't be left free.

But there's something fishy here too, that Skinner never really answers in his writings. Who's going to do the training? Obviously, someone who's programmed in the "right" direction--because he can't be any more free than anyone else. But who trained him? And how is he going to do this? People aren't preprogrammed to listen to the trainers, and so how is he going to get them to listen to him so he can retrain them? Everything is already preprogrammed, according to this view, and so all of us, trainers and trained alike, are totally helpless, and therefore, the world is going to go on just as it always has. --Except that Skinner and the behaviorists don't really believe this, because they want to change things into their version of the Brave New World. So it seems that, without realizing it, they think that somebody's actually free.

So let's take a look at their theory. Remember, you test theories by finding out if the things they predict actually happen or not. Does this one predict the way we actually behave? (I'm amazed that scientists will test theories about rats, but little questions like this seem to escape them.)

Where do we start? It has to be from some fact that no one disagrees with (or you'll have to prove everything, which is impossible). Very well, everybody admits that people's choices seem to be free to the people making them (they do at least think they're capable of choosing any of the alternatives). So let's take this as the starting-point.

Now how do you account for people thinking that their choces are free? The free-choice people, of course, say, "Because they are"; but determinists (people who, like Skinner, think that the choices are preprogrammed and couldn't be anything but what they are) have to explain it somehow as a mistake. And they do so by saying that, when a choice seems to be free (as opposed to the situation where you say, "I couldn't help doing that"), this feeling is due to the fact that you don't know the factors (the influences) that are in fact forcing the choice.

For instance, you feel "free" because you think you chose the weaker side when you refused the second piece of cake that tempted you so much, when in fact (they say) your fear of being fat was so strong that it overcame the desire. If you realized how strong it was, you'd think, "Nope; I just can't bring myself to eat it," and wouldn't feel free; but because you don't know how strong it is, you think you could have taken the cake, when actually it was impossible because of the fear.

This is not only the explanation given, it is the only possible explanation for how we can feel free if in fact all our choices are determined by the weight of the influences on them. But this is as far as the determinist theory generally goes. Instead of being good scientists and testing the theory, they say, "Okay, we've got an explanation that makes sense; and so that's the way things are.

So let's do their work for them and ask what you can predict if this theory is true. And what we come up with is the opposite of what actually happens. You can see that, since the theory says that the reason you think you're free is that you don't know what's forcing you, it follows that those who are being forced by factors they are unaware of would feel free.

But that means that what are called "compulsive" people, those who used to be called "neurotics," would feel free, because they are being compelled to do things without any idea what's forcing them. We still have no real knowledge, for instance, of what makes one person an alcoholic and another a social drinker: Is it a genetic disposition, something wrong with the brain, a habit, a chemical imbalance, or a combination of some or all of these, or something altogether different? No one knows, least of all the alcoholic. All he knows is that he drinks in self-destructive ways, without at all knowing why, and feels out of control. But he of all people (if this theory is true) should feel most in control, because the mechanism forcing him to drink is totally unknown.

But there's more. For a long time, most alcoholics do feel in control; they think they can "take it or let it alone" long after everyone else is aware that they're hooked. Why is that? Apparently, because they don't have any reason for letting it alone, and so they never try--until something happens giving them a reason for not drinking, and they try, and then they realize that they're out of control.

For our purposes, this moment of revelation is very instructive, because it invariably comes, as I say, at some time when they have a very strong reason for not drinking and actually choose not to drink, and then find to their dismay that they took the drink "in spite of themselves." They don't know at this moment what made them drink (in fact, when they made the choice, they thought they weren't going to drink); they only know--now--that they couldn't help it, in spite of the fact that they actually chose not to do it. So the compulsive recognizes his compulsion when he chooses not to do what he is compelled to do, and is shocked to discover himself doing it. If this doesn't happen, then the person doesn't try to get help, because he still doesn't realize he's a compulsive. That is, if he thinks that he just decided he'd rather take the drink, then he still feels in control.

But what's important here is what this says about the determinist position on choice. You see, the choice at this moment must (according to them) be preprogrammed, because all choices are; and since this one (the actual choice not to take the drink) feels free, then it must be programmed by something unconscious. So there's some unconscious factor in the alcoholic at the moment which forces him to choose not to drink, and which overwhelms his desire to drink--because he chose not to take the drink in spite of his desire to do so.

But at the same time, the person finds that, for no known reason, he can't actually carry out the choice, and he drinks in spite of the choice. So whatever made him actually drink is also unconscious. And what this means is that, simultaneously in the same person, the unconscious factor that forces the drinking overwhelms the supposed unconscious factor that forced the choice not to drink, while also being overcome by the choice-forcing factor as far as the choice (but not the act) is concerned.

Huh? Come again? Factor A forces you to choose not to drink, in spite of your (known) desire to do so. Factor B forces you to drink, in spite of Factor A. Why didn't Factor B also force you to choose to drink? Because (evidently) it wasn't strong enough to overcome Factor A (remember, everything is determined by the strongest influence). But factor B is strong enough to overcome Factor A; it won't allow Factor A to carry out the choice. So Factor B is at one and the same time stronger and weaker than Factor A. Makes sense? Of course not.

What I'm saying is that the determinist theory has to suppose that in the same person's unconscious mind at the same time there are overwhelming influences in opposite directions, each of which completely swamps the other. But there's no evidence that either of these "unconscious factors" even exist; they are assumed to exist to make sense out of how we can think we're free if we're not actually free.

Now there are twists and turns the determinist can use to get around this, but take my word for it, in the last analysis, the theory is incoherent. It predicts the opposite of what actually happens--and so as a scientific theory, it bombs. (If you want to read a more extended treatment, there's one in Part II Chapter 3 of my Modes of the Finite, which goes 44 pages of 9-point type.)

But then why do scientists hold it? There are three reasons, basically. First, when I, as a philosopher, point out that the theory predicts what is false, the psychologists I talk to say, "What do you know, you've got no Ph.D. in psychology," and can't be bothered checking to see if I'm right.

But secondly, scientists, including psychologists, are human like anyone else. I remember once when I was an editorial assistant on Sky and Telescope magazine, I was asked to summarize a fascinating article in some serious, technical journal (I think it was Science) about what is called the "moon illusion" (why the moon appears big on the horizon), which showed by a number of experiments why the then current theory, advanced by a psychologist named Boring, had to be false, and the author's theory (which dealt with seeing the moon against the objects on the horizon) was a better theory. I wrote up the summary and handed it in; but as it happened, Molly Boring was another assistant on the magazine, and the editor in chief asked her to take it home to Daddy to check it out. The editor called me in the next day and said, "We're not publishing this." "Why?" I said. "Because Boring says it's garbage." "But this guy proved that Boring can't be right!" "Look," said the editor, "we're affiliated with Harvard Observatory, which is a branch of Harvard University, and Boring teaches psychology at Harvard, and he says it's garbage. Case closed. Find another article to put in." They laughed at Mendel too, with his experiments with pea-plants, and I'm told that Einstein had tomatoes thrown at him when the Theory of Relativity was new. Nobody likes to be told that what he wrote his doctoral dissertation on was a waste of time.

The third reason scientists reject human freedom (and this is the real one) is that if you allow the choice to be free, in the sense of determining itself (as opposed to merely random), then somehow the choice chooses itself (as it certainly seems to, since we know when we make the choice that we could have chosen to postpone it)--and this smacks too much of the "mystical" or "metaphysical" or even (gasp!) "spiritual." And how can you be a scientist if you admit that there's something free of the determining laws of physics and chemistry? Heavens, that would mean that human beings are something special! Better to hold onto a theory that doesn't work than succumb to that sort of thing! We'll find a fix for the difficulty somehow.

But those who aren't locked into the mindset that anything that implies spirituality has to be false, can take the evidence and draw the most reasonable conclusion from it--always allowing for the possibility that new evidence might make us change our minds. We don't have to pretend that this new evidence is going to be out there leading to the conclusion we'd like to reach.

In this case, the failure of the determinist theory does allow us to say this: Our inescapable experience is basically correct: we can choose any of the alternatives available to us (even the ones with weaker motivation); but (a) this choice is influenced (though not determined) by reasons--but only those we are aware of (only the conscious ones affect the choice) at the time, and (b) our choices do not always have control over our acts; sometimes, as St. Paul says, we "do what we choose not to do." Further, (c) our emotions can exert indirect "control" over our choices themselves in that they can blind us to information we would otherwise be aware of, and create illusions that we take as facts. For instance, Monica Lewinsky said one time that she thought that Bill Clinton was in love with her and was just waiting until his Presidency was over to divorce Hillary and marry her. Now obviously, anyone who could actually believe that would have to be blind and deluded. But if you've ever fallen in love, you know how easy this is.

In other words, we do have control over our choices, but we can be tempted, and sometimes the temptation is too much for us and we give in. Duh. This is what people have thought for thousands of years; and is it really surprising to find that they got it right? After all, it's been experimented with and thoroughly tested in the only laboratory that really counts: the laboratory of experience.

But the New Morality is practically schizophrenic on this topic, veering from a belief that each of us is totally helpless to the conviction that we're all totally free and unable to be affected by temptation.

For instance, on the one hand President Clinton is treated as if he were the complete victim of Monica's blandishments, and was unable to help himself when she snapped her thong at him--and at the same time Monica is supposed to be totally resistant to the aphrodisiac of authority, and completely immune to any fear of what might happen to her life if she said No to the most powerful boss in the world. Any boss with any common sense who is attracted to his subordinates takes steps to see he is never alone within five hundred feet of one, both for her sake and his; and any subordinate who sees a ring on the boss's finger knows that he's off limits, and out of respect for his possible weakness (and hers) is all business before him.

--Unless, of course, there's nothing wrong with sex if you both feel like it. But that's a different Commandment, which we'll discuss later, when we see its basis.

But it isn't just Bill and Monica, by any means. New Moralists say of the salacious programs on TV, for instance, "If you don't want to watch this kind of program, turn it off," as if the fact that it's easily available doesn't create a temptation that many who actually don't want to succumb might find it hard to resist. (I'm reminded of St. Augustine's friend who was persuaded to go to the gladiatorial match he didn't want to watch, and spent the first part covering his eyes with his hand--but when he heard a shout, peeked out through his fingers, and was hooked.)

--But I said that they were schizophrenic about this. Notice how they want to make sure nobody hears Dr. Laura.

Now what's the real situation here? It's one thing to have pornography or violence available in the sense that you can get it if you go out of your way (that's not censorship), and it's quite another to have it right there in your home at the touch of a button. You can only say it's the same thing if you assume that people have perfect control over their baser instincts--or that the instincts aren't "baser" in the first place.

And on the other side, New Moralists excuse all kinds of things because of the way we were brought up, like the Menendez brothers who shot their parents full of holes because, poor things, they'd been abused as kids. There's a further ramification of this too, based on evolution, which I'll get to later, showing why the New Morality is big on collective guilt and soft on individual responsibility. Suffice it for now that the supposed "scientific" theory of determinism seems to bolster this position--but it can't as I said, be true because what it predicts is the opposite of what happens.

Freedom and non-interference.

Anyhow, if you've followed me, we, at least, can say that we human beings can make choices that are not determined by our character and circumstances--though influenced by them--and that this seems to be what is distinctive about us.

We must also say, however, that we can't necessarily carry out all our choices, not only because we don't have complete control over our acts, but because our choices in themselves are unlimited, and our actual potential is limited, as I was claiming in the last chapter. You can choose to be a crocodile if you want, but you can't be one; you can choose to be a woman if you're a man, but the best you can actually accomplish is to pretend that you're one.

So a restricted freedom is what we have as human. It follows, then, that insofar as we are free, we shouldn't be interfered with (because that would contradict our reality as human); but insofar as our freedom is restricted, it can be interfered with.

But how does that spell itself out? It would seem that if my exercise of my freedom interferes with your exercise of your freedom, then I'm being inconsistent, because I'm in effect saying that you're not free, when in fact you are. And therefore, I'm not free to do anything that restricts anyone else's freedom to act.

Sounds good, but it won't work. Suppose Johnny and Franky both want to play with the same toy, but it's not one that both can play with at the same time. The fact that Johnny wants to play with it means that Franky can't, and the fact that Franky wants to play with it prevents Johnny from doing so. The result is that neither can play with it because they would be restricting the freedom of the other--and yet freedom was supposed to allow you to do what you wanted.

So the restriction on our freedom can't come from the fact that someone else wants to do something. Yet it's obvious that I can't ride roughshod over everyone else just because I claim to be "free to do what I want." Then what is it that makes sense out of restricting my freedom to act?

Here's the answer. You must refrain from doing anything that does actual damage to the present condition of another person. The actual state a person is in gives him, in other words, a right that restricts everyone else's freedom to act.

What do I mean by "actual damage"? That there is some aspect of the person that is objectively contradicted if he can't do some act. Thus, for example, it is part of being an adult citizen in America that one can vote. If I prevent you from voting, then in effect I am saying that you are a citizen who isn't a citizen. I have a license to drive a car, which is an "acquired right" that I got by taking a test. If you tell me I can't drive, I show you my license, and then you have to let me; otherwise, I'm a driver who isn't a driver. A student who has paid his tuition at my college has a right to attend classes, but doesn't have a right to a degree until he fulfills the requirements. His paying of the tuition puts him in the "student" category, which is contradicted if he can't attend class; but it doesn't put him in the "graduate" category until he fulfills all the requirements; before then, he just wants the degree.

This aspect of myself that connects me with a certain act is called the title to the right. The title to your car says that you can do anything you want with this car, and no one can stop you; the deed to your house is a "title deed," giving you the right to do what you want with it; your citizenship is your title to live in the country and vote and do all that citizens can do; your humanity is your title to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and so on.

And the general rule here, of course, is your exercise of any right never extends to the violation of any actual right of anyone else. Otherwise, the "right" contradicts itself. So, for instance, you might not be in practice able to burn your car up because it places other people and property in danger. But the point is that no right every is "greater than" or "overrides" anyone else's right. Whenever you exercise what would otherwise be your right, and your exercise would actually violate any actual right of someone else, then in those circumstances, you can't exercise it.

But the important thing to note is that rights do not depend on what goals we have, or what we want to be; they depend on what we now are, for the reasons I outlined above. We are masters of ourselves, but not of others; but this does not mean that we have to defer to the whims or wants or "felt needs" of others, but only to what they objectively are. And a given person has to make a case to others that his objective reality allows him to do a given act (show them the title), because he is the one who wants everyone else's freedom restricted. What I'm saying is that this case has to be something more than that you just want to do the act in question.

So you can interfere with someone if he's violating the rights of someone else. Actually, not even the New Moralists disagree with this; but now you can see what it's based on, and why it's legitimate.

But what about the restriction of our freedom based on the fact that certain things we choose are beyond our genetic capability, such as a change of sex? Can others prevent a person from trying to act on such a choice, which in fact does damage to himself--i.e. gets him into a self-contradictory state?

It has traditionally been thought legitimate to restrict people's freedom to do actual damage to themselves, on the grounds that you're not really "free" when you do these things--and therefore, you can't claim a right to do them.

But frankly, I don't see the validity of this. True, if a person in ignorance does damage to himself, then he certainly should be informed of the consequences of what he's doing; and if I refused to inform him I'd in effect be doing the damage--on the grounds that if I informed him and he stopped doing it, then the damage wouldn't be done. In this sense, a person has a right to be informed of damage that he is apt to do to himself in ignorance, and my refusal to supply this information is a violation of him as a person.

But if he knows what he's doing and is aware of the damage, then he is free to make of himself what he wants. In this case, what he wants is to be more or less crippled in some aspect of himself. True, he would like to be a human crocodile; but if he realizes that all he can accomplish is to be a human being who swims around in muddy water, and that's what he wants to be, then as long as he knows this and he's not doing damage to anyone else, what real grounds does anyone have for preventing him?

Similarly with the transsexual. If he is informed that he can't really be a woman by having this operation, and all he'll be is a mutilated man, and he prefers to be a mutilated man than what he is now, do we really have a reason for preventing him from mutilating himself?

This is connected with the notion of goodness as subjective that I spoke of earlier. Your goal in life is the set of acts that you conceive of as "yours" distinctively; and what your freedom implies is that you have the power to set the goal and to change yourself in the direction of achieving it. The goal that you would like to achieve may be impossible, because it involves a contradiction; but if the actual resultant state is one you find preferable to your present condition, then this truncated, partly frustrated state is the "true self" you are trying to achieve. And it seems to me that it contradicts you as a goal-setter and goal-seeker if someone else can prevent you from achieving even this miserable goal.

Thus, the most reasonable position on this seems to be that if a person wants to do damage to himself, and knows what he is doing, then he can only be prevented from harming himself when he is also violating someone else's right.

Let me add this, however: no one ever has an obligation to help another person do harm to himself; in fact, we have an obligation to withhold assistance from such a person, even if it means that he is prevented from doing what he wants.

The reason for this is that when I help you do something, then the goal you are trying to reach now also becomes the goal of my actions; and so if you want to do something damaging to yourself, I can't help you without wanting the damage. Sure, you want it, and maybe you don't even think it's damaging; but I know it's damaging, and hence I'd have to choose your damage if I helped you. And that's wrong.

Thus, for example, a person (unless he's insane) has a right to commit suicide, and therefore mustn't be stopped (except by trying to persuade him); but he has no right to expect anyone else to help him kill himself--for the simple reason that he's asking another person to commit murder, and it's inhuman to kill another person. So yes, the "assisted suicide" laws are evil, because they turn doctors into murderers. All you have to do is look into "Dr." Kevorkian's eyes to verify what I'm saying.

--But wait a minute. If people mustn't be prevented from doing harm to themselves, shouldn't we be letting insane people cut themselves and burn themselves and do all sorts of things to themselves? No, that isn't what I said. The assumption is that a person who's insane is blinded to what the facts actually are, or is incapable of doing what he chooses to do. In the first case, simply telling him is not going to help him, because his insanity won't let him believe you; in the second, he doesn't want to do the act. Thus, for instance, if you explain to a paranoid person that others around him aren't actually trying to kill him, then in his mind, you just become part of the conspiracy against him. In that case, the person can't make an informed choice in the first place. I'm talking about a person who knows what the situation is, and says, "I don't care. If it's crazy to you, so be it. I want to do it anyway." That kind of a person should be let alone, unless what he's doing does damage to someone else.

Similarly, children think abstractly (yes, they do, they ignore what's inconvenient) and aren't practically aware that unintended side-effects can alter what they want to happen with their acts. In this case, they can't make an informed choice of what to do; and so, until they can, they have the peculiar right to be forced to do what the parents think is good for them. When Johnny's up in a tree walking along a branch, and Mom says, "Come down; you'll fall and hurt yourself," and Johnny answers, "I can't fall; I've been reading Harry Potter, and besides, I've got on my heel-gripper sneakers," then Johnny can't be allowed to follow his own choice.

This control parents have over their children, of course, lessens as the children become more concretely aware that good intentions don't lead to good outcomes, and learn to take into account all of the possible consequences of their actions, accepting the consequences as "theirs" and not just the act and its intention. (That's called "maturity.")

Now then, as I said, this view of when we can interfere and when we can't, if you discount what I just said about children, is pretty close to what the New Morality's position works out to in practice. We shouldn't interfere with others unless someone else's rights are being violated. But now instead of basing the rule on the silly notion that "no one has a right to impose his moral standards on anyone else," which contradicts itself, it's based on an objective characteristic of human beings--that we can in fact direct our own lives, within limits.

Values and morals.

This leads to a further distinction we can make, and allows us to clear up a confusion in contemporary moral thought: that values are not the same as morals.

A value is a means toward reaching a goal you have chosen for yourself. As such it deals with the future, and with your freedom to make of yourself (within your given genetic limits) whatever you want. Morals deal with the condition you are now in, and say that you must not act inconsistently with this "given" self.

Modern thought, particularly existentialism, is right in saying that there isn't any given goal for us; we can be whatever we want to be, (within the range of our genetically determined possibilities); and in this sense, as I was saying in the preceding chapter, "good" is a term that is fundamentally subjective. What is "the good" for you is that set of acts that you freely choose as distinctively "yours," and no one can make that choice but you (because you create it by your choice; you don't discover it).

We can now add that your emotions and talents don't force that goal on you. All your talents do is indicate what types of actions "come easy" to you (what you're "good at" in that sense); but they don't tell you what you have to do. If you decide that you're going to be a doctor, even if you have to struggle through medical school and even if you're really talented as an auto mechanic and you enjoy working with cars, then there's nothing wrong with fighting your way toward your medical degree. There is, of course, nothing wrong either with chucking the whole thing and opening a garage. It's all up to you; that's what it means to be free.

(For those who say, "But the will of God for you is what's good for you," I answer, God created you to be free, and therefore, that's his will for you, and to be free means to choose for yourself what your goal is. If God made you free to choose your goal in life--and he must have, because you can--then he would be contradicting himself if he picked out some other goal that you were supposed to choose. No, his goal for you is your freely-chosen goal for yourself, even if it means eternal frustration; in that sense, God's will for the sinner is that he go to hell. There are complications in this--there are complications in everything I've said in the whole book; but trust me, you believers, there's no incompatibility in my view of freedom and God's purpose for my life. I actually passed a heresy examination on it once, I kid you not.)

Now the values you have follow from what goals you set for yourself. If you have being a doctor as a goal, then a medical school is a value for you; if you decide you want to be an auto mechanic, then medical school for you is valueless, and a set of wrenches has a value it wouldn't have if you were only interested in being a doctor. Of course, you can choose to be both, and work on cars on weekends, say, in which case, both the school and the wrenches are values.

We compare values when we have a complex goal, and we have to give up (either permanently or temporarily) one aspect of our future self in order to have the other. The goal you keep is more important than the goal you give up; and so the object that leads you to a more important goal is more valuable than the object that leads to a less important one.

But notice this: Importance is no less subjective than goodness. There is nothing that is objectively important, for the simple reason that goals are free, and which goal you rank above another depends on your choice, not on objective factors.

We may be able to say that some acts are "greater" or "higher" than others: that studying philosophy, for instance, is a "greater" act than tinkering with cars (because thought is spiritual and physical acts aren't). But it's not more important, except for those people who want philosophical knowledge to be part of their "true" selves.

Does this mean that honesty is less important than making money? Yes it does. But the real question is, does that mean that it's okay to lie as long as you get money for it?

No indeed, and here's where the confusion comes in. Morals, as I said, deal, not with goals and the person you want to be, but with the "given" self you now are. Dishonesty, by definition, means acting as if you weren't what you now are. This isn't important, it's necessary.

Morals and what is necessary deal with what you are at the moment. Necessities are means toward living a minimally human life. Thus, it isn't a goal in your life to breathe; you take this for granted as a human being; it's part of what is genetically given, and no matter what lifestyle you choose, it includes being able to breathe. So breathing isn't important; it's necessary.

In other words, as far as our goals are concerned, necessities are just presupposed and taken for granted. You are human, and so you take the minimal human acts as part of what you are, and what you care about and work for is the particular lifestyle or goal that is your freely chosen meaning to what "human" will be in your case, over and above this minimum that's common to us all.

Hence, breathable air isn't important for anyone. If you have it, you take it for granted as something you have a right to have. If you don't have it, it is beyond all values. You can't compare it with values, as if it were "more valuable" than medical school, for instance; because you know you'd have to give up all values to get it. What good is medical school if you're dead?

I'll spell out the economic implications of this in a later chapter. For now let's just recognize that there is this distinction between goals and their importance and the values that lead to them, and the genetically given self that's presupposed, and morals and the necessities implied in it.

Once we've made this distinction, something absolutely vital is implied.

The real moral issue.

Let me approach this by looking at the person struggling to get through medical school. Let us suppose that in order to get into medical school in the first place, you have to get good grades in all your undergraduate courses, including philosophy. But you're not talented in philosophy at all, and you can't seem to pass the tests, let alone get A's in them. What do you do?

Well, you can cheat on the tests, which will give you the A's you need to get into medical school. But if you cheat, then you're acting inconsistently with yourself as a test-taker. Tests, obviously, are devices by which you tell the teacher how much you know, not how well you can read the fine print on the floor beside your foot; and so if you fulfill your goal as a doctor by cheating on your tests, then you have violated (contradicted) the given reality of yourself as a test-taker.

Now there's a certain sense in which you do have as a goal to be consistent with yourself as a test-taker, since if you were able to get the grade on the test without cheating, you'd do so; and so there's an aspect of yourself that you'd like still to have (you'd like to be an honest doctor) that you can't achieve. In other words, if the choice were open to you of being an honest doctor or a dishonest non-doctor (or even an honest non-doctor), there'd be no contest.

But we're supposing that the "honest doctor" option isn't in practice available to you; so you have to choose between being a dishonest doctor or an honest non-doctor.

Here is the real issue dealing with morality. It doesn't even depend on how you define right and wrong; no matter what you mean by "morally right," you will run into situations in which you can't be what you really really want to be unless you deliberately do what you know is morally wrong.

The moral issue is why you should do what is morally right if it keeps you from the goal you have chosen.

In other words, is honesty the best policy? There's been enough propaganda saying that "Of course it's the best policy" to make anyone suspicious that it might not be all that obvious. Even Parson Weams, who told the story of George Washington and the cherry tree ("I cannot tell a lie") told a lie (the event never happened) to get kids to be honest; and the probable result of admitting you chopped down your father's tree would be an extended trip to the woodshed, not a pat on the head. Let's be realistic here.

Thus, if Bill Clinton could get away with what he did with Monica and Gennifer and Paula and all the others, as well with as the FBI files and all the rest of it (and didn't he get away with it? What bad thing happened to him?) why shouldn't he have done it? Well, he shouldn't, because it's wrong. But so what? If he did the right thing and resigned, then he would have lost the Presidency--which obviously he wanted in the worst way. Why should he be a person who admits guilt and lose his cherished dream, when he can have the dream and all the chicanery too? So people don't like and respect him. Okay, so being where he is and respected would be better; still, being where he is and not being respected is a hell of a lot better than not being where he is at all--respected or not. (And let's face it, if he resigned, would people respect him? It is to laugh. Look at Nixon.)

What I am getting at is this:

It can be good (in the sense of a value) to do wrong.

Granted, it ought not to be this way. It ought not to be the case that you can better fulfill your reality (achieve more of your goals) by violating some--unimportant to you--part of your given reality (your given, present humanity); but "reality" has two senses here, and there's no contradiction in this happening.

A conclusion we can draw from this is that no amount of "values clarification" will solve this problem. It's not a question of mistaking what your values are or where your goals in life are; it's a question of recognizing that morals are not the same as values, and that being immoral (violating your given reality) can sometimes lead you to where you want to go.

All you have to do is open your eyes, and the problem is all around you. It's good to do evil, sometimes. Of course it is; otherwise why would people do it?

--And here I leave you, for now. I plan to handle this issue at the very end of the book; I just want you to be aware of it here. (If you want an extended treatment of it, I recommend going back to Plato; for instance, my Plato's Republic for Readers: A Constitution, where you will find the strongest case ever made that honesty is the best policy--a case which, as I say in the Afterword, ultimately fails as Plato presents it. I think, however, that there is a solution.)

So what I want to do now is go on to the rest of the Ten New Commandments, and show how they follow from Darwinism, in what respect they don't (or do) fit the facts about what we are, and so why we ought not (or ought) to follow them, and to what extent.