THE TRUTH ABOUT RESPONSIBILITY
IN THE
AGE OF THE PROBLEM OF EXTRAORDINARY, EVER INCREASING POWER
Part 1
The Fate we must avoid
One dictionary defines “power” as the “ability to act or produce an effect.” merriam-webster.com/dictionary/power. Under this definition, the word “power” includes many things. Some examples include the ability to build something like a bridge, the ability to achieve happiness, the ability to warm your feet on a cold day, the ability to cure sickness, the ability to experience beauty, the ability to obtain knowledge, the ability to control or influence people, the ability to save a species from extinction, the ability to eliminate crime or the ability to perpetrate a crime, and the ability to make a nutritious or tasty meal. This list of what could count as “power” could go on and on.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, humanity has undertaken the pursuit of power on a scale that has never previously been achieved. At any given moment, there are great numbers of people at work around the world developing new ways of controlling things, new ways of controlling or influencing people, and new ways of organizing ourselves into more powerful groups of people. It is the proud accomplishment of humanity that we have unleashed this great engine of innovation.
The expansion of our power does not continue at the same constant rate. The purpose and effect of many of our innovations is to increase our ability to generate innovations more quickly. As a result, we are constantly increasing the rate at which we gain new powers.
While the growth of our power has many benefits, it also has a dark side. Our malevolence, our carelessness, and our ignorance become increasingly more destructive. Our own imperfections increasingly threaten to destroy us entirely.
We are eager to obtain each new benefit that each new innovation offers. As a consequence, we have become generally committed to the pursuit of beneficial powers. But, we find that the beneficial powers we seek are accompanied with destructive powers.
As a consequence, our destructive powers are growing at an increasingly rapid rate. We now have the power to intentionally, or unintentionally destroy ourselves and much, if not all, life on our planet. We have already unintentionally caused the extinction of a large numbers of species of plants and animals.
Thus, we live in the shadow of a growing threat: the threat from our own growing destructive powers. The most significant question of our time has become the question of how to prevent the horrors which become possible, and more probable, because of our ever increasing extraordinary power. Thus, it has become appropriate to think of our period in history as “the age of the problem of extraordinary power”.
The problem of extraordinary power became apparent when some people began to understand and fear the possibility that countries had the ability to destroy our world by building and using nuclear weapons. Scientists warned us of the possibility of a “nuclear winter” if we should ever use a significant number of nuclear weapons.
Now, scientists are warning us that we can unintentionally cause our own extinction by causing other significant changes in our environment. When humanity first discovered it could make and use fire, the amount of fire used was small in comparison with our use of fire today. In ancient times, the use of fire had relatively negligible effects on the world’s atmosphere. But over time, population increased and, especially in recent centuries, more and more uses of fire have been discovered. We now use fire to power our cars and other methods of transportation, to generate vast amounts of electricity, to heat our buildings, and to perform various functions in factories.
Fire is a chemical reaction. Every fire brings about some small change in our atmosphere. Scientists warn us that our greatly increased use of fire, when combined with certain other things we are doing, is significantly changing our atmosphere resulting in significant climate change. As a consequence, our world may become a place where we cannot survive.
It appears quite likely that we will fail to fully respond to such warnings. The political will to respond, and respond wisely, appears to be very difficult to generate, since a wise response will place extraordinary demands upon us.
We sometimes feel that it is unfair and unreasonable that we should now be subject to such revolutionary and extraordinarily difficult demands. We feel we should be able to be quite satisfied if we can succeed at living in accordance with the more limited demands that morality has traditionally placed upon human beings.
However, we chose to create the technologies that have made us much more powerful than we once were. Thus, we have chosen the greatly changed circumstances which now subject us to the new and extraordinarily difficult moral demands.
While power brings benefit, it also brings the responsibility to use it wisely. Extraordinary power brings extraordinary responsibility.
Consider what it would mean if the way we choose to live our lives has the consequence of destroying the possibility of millions of future generations of humans and other sentient animals. Nothing humans have ever done before would be as evil or horrible as that. We must strive to comprehend and feel the horror that we could cause, so that we can be motivated to do what we must in spite of all the motives we have to ignore the horrible consequences our choices may have.
You might disbelieve the warnings of global warning, nuclear winter, or that we are on the verge of using up all of the resources that make modern technology possible. If you are right and we survive, then our power will continue to grow. Eventually, every single person will be able to intentionally, or even unintentionally, destroy the world in a moment of anger, carelessness, ignorance, or mistake.
Given that prospect, terrorism is a very frightening part of the age of the problem of extraordinary power. Small numbers of people have the power to kill, injure, or otherwise harm ever greater numbers of people. As our technology continues to advance making each of us more and more powerful, terrorism will become even more frightening.
However, while terrorism is very frightening, allowing ourselves to focus more or less exclusively on the politics of eradicating terrorism would be a mistake. The problem of extraordinary power cannot be resolved by merely blaming some defined group of other people. We cannot solve the problem of extraordinary power by eliminating certain groups of other people.
Once each person has extraordinary power, every one of us is a threat to the security of everyone else. Thus, the solution to the problem of extraordinary power rests in the question of how we can change ourselves, each and every one of us, so that we can trust ourselves to properly use, or limit our use of, power.
This will be extraordinarily difficult. But, it is our only reasonable option. We cannot afford to fail.
It might seem that we could choose to return to an earlier way of life that uses less of the power we have accumulated. However, since the technologies of earlier periods are not adequate to sustain our enormous population, a broad, voluntary choice to return to the ways of an earlier age would result in widespread famine. In such desperate circumstances, people would probably resort to desperate measures to secure their basic needs. The survivors would probably be the people who most completely reject any limits on their own use of power.
Thus, a broad, voluntary return to the low power way of life of an earlier age does not provide an adequate solution to the problem of extraordinary power.
Nor will it be adequate to merely freeze our technology at the current level. We are already destroying our world with the way we live now. Even if you do not believe the scientists about global warming, you must admit that we will eventually use up our nonrenewable resources if we do not change our way of life. That will then result in widespread famine.
If humanity survives that calamity, it will be at a primitive level. The establishment of the machinery and adequate procedures to recycle materials on a large scale, and to make significant use of renewable energy resources, will be much more difficult, if not impossible, once we no longer possess functioning factories, methods of shipping large quantities of materials and products, or a functioning electrical power grid.
Thus, we should not respond to the problem of extraordinary power by merely putting a stop to the development and use of new technology.
A successful way of responding to the problem of extraordinary power will have to involve much more careful determinations as to which of our powers we shall use, which we shall avoid, and which new powers we should seek to obtain.
The unavoidable answer to the problem of extraordinary power is that as our power becomes more and more like the power of a god, so too must our wisdom and benevolence become more and more like the wisdom and benevolence of a god. This is true for every single one of us.
The Bible quotes Jesus as saying, “Seek to be perfect even as God is perfect.” If we do not succeed at following this recommendation, we shall most likely perish.
Part 2
The Pillars of Humanity
How shall we seek to become perfect? Is perfection something that will just happen if we continue living our lives without directing our attention to the pursuit of perfection? Must the pursuit of perfection become all consuming? Is there an appropriate middle way?
Perfection is a very specific state of existence. Only a tiny percentage of all of the possible ways of existing constitute perfection. Thus, in the absence of some process tending to result in perfection, it is unlikely that perfection will just happen.
Nature has not supplied us with a process that has proved itself adequate to have already resulted in the development of perfection. If nature had supplied us with such a process, the problem of extraordinary power would not exist at all. We would already be perfect. We would already be exercising our extraordinary power with perfect wisdom and perfect benevolence.
If nature has not supplied us with an adequate process for making ourselves perfect, then we must invent or discover and implement such a process ourselves. We need an adequate plan regarding how to proceed toward perfection and we need the adequate capabilities and commitment to implement that plan. Part of our plan will have to include how to obtain those adequate capabilities and commitment.
Consequently, the perfect plan for our time would tell us how to get from our current level of capabilities and commitment to a level of capabilities and commitment from which we could invent or discover and implement a more perfect plan for becoming more perfect. Thus, we should expect a progressive development in our plans for becoming perfect. We should not expect that the best plan for our time, or some past time, will in fact be the ultimate perfect plan for obtaining perfection. We must be open to, and seek, a genuinely progressive development in our plans for pursuing perfection.
The development and implementation of progressively better plans for the pursuit of perfection requires a number of things:
(1) knowledge of past plans and proposed plans,
(2) commitment to implement or deviate from those past plans or proposed plans to the extent that the best current plans or proposed plans require it,
(3) commitment to developing better plans and proposed plans,
(4) commitment to implementing the best currently available plans or proposed plans until better plans or proposed plans are developed,
(5) factual knowledge (knowledge of what exists and how things work) that is adequate to provide the basis for a better plan,
(6) commitment to developing more accurate and complete factual knowledge,
(7) imagination and creativity sufficient to imagine and create better plans for achieving perfection (which would include imagining or creating strategies or ideas that would strengthen each of the items in this list),
(8) commitment to developing greater imagination and creativity,
(9) reason adequate to accurately evaluate plan proposals (with as much accuracy as can be had at the current time),
(10) commitment to developing more accurate, more complete methods of reasoning to accurately evaluate plan proposals,
(11) the wisdom that is achievable in our time (and by wisdom I mean the accurate understanding of perfection and what it is required to achieve and maintain perfection),
(12) commitment to the pursuit of more perfect wisdom,
(13) the currently achievable level of self control, courage, and other virtues necessary to most appropriately fulfill all of the commitments identified in this list,
(14) commitment to perfecting our self control, courage, and other virtues necessary to fulfill all of the commitments identified in this list
(15) an economy, adequate and well suited to support the development and implementation of better plans,
(16) commitment to developing the economy in such a way that it will support the development and implementation of better plans,
(17) infrastructure adequate to support the development and implementation of better plans
(18) commitment to designing, building, and maintaining infrastructure to implement the best current plans and to support the development and implementation of better plans,
(19) public and private investment in developing and maintaining each of the items in this list
(20) institutions and social organization that supports the maintenance and continued progressive development of each of the items in this list, and
(21) commitment to the development and maintenance of institutions, social organization, and infrastructure that supports the maintenance and continued progressive development of each of the items in this list.
Each of these twenty-one elements of plan development and implementation are essential to the development and implementation of progressively better plans for the pursuit of perfection. The absence of any one of these elements will retard or defeat the development and implementation of better plans. Given their importance to securing a future for future generations, we can refer to these twenty-one elements for the pursuit of perfection as the “pillars of humanity”.
We must decide how to distribute our resources and efforts between developing each of the pillars of humanity. Thus, the pillars of humanity rest on a foundation: the set of principles and/or procedures that we use to decide how to distribute our resources and efforts.
This foundation has two parts which we could think of as layers. The top layer is our current concept of the good as worked out in our current best plans for the pursuit of perfection. Generally, we should use this foundational concept of The Good to identify the proper distribution of efforts and resources between the various pillars of humanity. Although there is debate about what exactly is included in the current foundational concept of The Good, it would generally include such things as ideals of what a perfect person, a perfect God, a perfect society would be like and would include moral theory and ideas of social justice, egalitarianism, democratic repulicanism, sustainable interaction with the environment, avoidance of causing unnecessary suffering, willingness to submit to the requirements of the pillars of humanity and the foundation for those pillars, etc.
The deepest layer of the foundation of the pillars of humanity is the intention to live in accordance with The Good, or in other words, to live the best lives we can. This intention necessarily includes the intention to live in accordance with the most accurate foundational concept of The Good available to us, and therefore, also includes within it the intention to conceive The Good as accurately as we can. Since our current foundational concept of The Good may not yet be entirely accurate, our fundamental intentions may eventually push us to a revision of our current foundational concept of The Good to a more consistent, more all encompassing foundational concept of the Good.
Conclusion
Humanity has developed extraordinary powers. The growth of our power is accelerating daily. Having such power affects the extent of our responsibilities. Customary moral standards are inadequate to meet these extraordinary demands of our growing responsibility. To survive, we must seek to become perfect.
Perfection is not something we can achieve immediately. Rather we must seek to design and implement progressively better plans and strategies in pursuit of perfection. Each progressively better plan should position us to design and implement even better plans and strategies for the pursuit of perfection.
In order to design and implement progressively better plans for pursuit of perfection, we must go to work to ensure the existence of the twenty-one pillars of humanity listed above (there may be more) and the foundation that supports those pillars.
This will require both extraordinary cooperation and extraordinary effort.
Clearly, the question of our age is the question of how we can succeed at moving ourselves to embrace our extraordinary responsibilities. Our survival is a stake.