Pakistan develops cruise missle technology. Their comment?
"Mr Ahmed said the "milestone" launch had been a success, adding: 'The nation is proud of its team of scientists who have raised the country's prestige in the comity of nations.'" --BBC article, here
This statement I don't understand, actually it's really kind of silly. What do weapons have to do with "prestiege"? I also laugh that developing long range weapons capable of carrying nukes falls within the "comity of nations." Which, by the way, means "Courteous recognition accorded by one nation to the laws and institutions of another." (reference: dictionary.com) Riiight, [sarcasm] I am sure that everyone will be pleased to hear that their neighbour is stalking up on weapons, "legally" [/sarcasm] . Unfortunately, in reality this is a result of tit-for-tat relations between India and Pakistan and their long standing rivraly. Understandable that Pakistan wants weapons to provide India with more disincentives for war.
But this idea got me thinking about pecking orders, morality and stable systems.
Pretend that you have a pecking order based solely who can beat up who. Suppose that you have person B that can beat up person C, therefore person B can have their (I use the word 'their' because it is gender inspecific) way over person C whenever they please. Is this fair? Let's ignore this for now until I introduce person A which is stonger than person B. Assuming this the laws of "morality" holds true for this society, then person A should have every right to smack person B around whenever they chose to have their way.
What if person B complains about rights to "sanctity"? In this case, that statement is a non-argument-- person B didn't adhere to them in the first place, thus it is perfectly "moral" for person A to smack B around. There is a reason why people at the most fundamental level (I'm talking about individuals, not companies or perhaps even countries-- companies, atleast, follow a different set of rules) don't out right push each other around based on how powerful they are-- society is large and there is almost 100% certainty that there are people more powerful than you.
I should talk more about "morals," atleast my interpretation of them, so here it is: Morals is a conceptual set of rules of behavior equally applied to all persons in a system.
This definition of morals is not hard set and I am obviously welcome improvements to my definition or discussion. If you think that my definition of "morals" is incorrect or another word/concept is more suited feel free to post comments.
The point about morals I want to make is that morals do not define what is "good" or "bad" conduct, but rather what is fair conduct. Using the former example that people higher up on the pecking order can have their way, it is perfectly fair for someone that pushed another around to be pushed around. Sure they might not like it, but that's fair, this is a moral system.
Consider the absurd case to illustrate this point further. Suppose the same situation, B tells A that A cannot retaliate (dispite A being more powerful). B then proceeds (or shall I say attempts?) to push A around. This does not work, because it is silly. It would be like saying that given 2 identical particles in a physical system that one obeys a different law of physics compared to the other. This case of behavior is immoral and like inconsistent laws in physics, immoral (inconsistent) systems are often short lived. Result: B gets busted.
I said earlier that morals do not determine what is "good and bad," but to have a system of morals without knowing what is good and bad is somewhat useless. I will introduce the concept of "self interest" here. I define self interest as "what you want." What is good lies within your self interest, what is bad is outside of your self interest. The person that defines your self interest is you. I want to present the idea that the moral code we follow are the products of self interest.
Again, let's consider the A,B,C model. Let's extend the model such that for every person that exists, there is a person that is more powerful than the last. In other words, suppose that there is a person that is stronger than A, let's call this person Z and there is a person more powerful than Z who is X... and so forth, the pattern continues. Suppose that all persons are carrying the same amount money and it is not in their interest to lose it but everyone is interested in having more. Assume that stronger persons can forcibly take money from weaker persons. Now consider the question, will the stronger person take the money from a weaker person?
The answer is no, but this is obvious. But I did not drag you through all this to come to an obvious solution. There are more interesting things if we take a closer look at the results, shall we?
Let us look at both cases, both of which are moral but one is prefered. It is clear that 2 equally fair systems exist. The case where all persons took from each other (assume that the pattern continues forever and we approximate the system as having "no strongest person") and thus have nothing versus the system where no one takes and everyone has money. The reason why the latter system is chosen over the former is because of self interest, which I assumed that all persons within the system would rather not go without money. The implication I make here is that self interest governs what moral system we choose... and that I argue that there can be more than one moral system. I thought that was interesting!
I want to take this further, I want to also say that this system is stable and say that this is a "nice" system (in more ways than one). Suppose that immoral conduct did occur within this system. Suppose that B is a delinquient, B takes money from C, what happens now? A realizes that this is not fair (immoral situation), A could take the money and keep it, but it is not in A's interest to do so (else Z could take form A, a new moral system would be selected but this is not in the interest of other members of this system). The system is self restoring-- A takes the money stolen from B and returns it to C. The system is "nice" because it is self restoring; in Engineering and Mathematical systems, we call this a "stable system" or a "stable state"... the action of B would be considered a "perturbation" (deviation from stable state). Isn't it wonderful? An aside: the origins of niceness at the most selfish level can derived purely from self interest-- Niceness is self-supporting! (A comment like this was published in 1999 in Time Magazine' s Millineal Edition which had an article "On the Origins of Niceness")
What I described isn't something new. I think it is well understood and this concept falls under "Game theory," which is a discription of an "incentive based model" (definition taken from Wikipedia)... I prefer to explain game theory as a model of "self interests" in a system and how the system evolves over time as "self interest dynamics." But I'm running away on a tangent...
These ideas are not new, actually Nobel had similar ideas over 100 years ago when he invented dynamite:
"My factories may make an end of war sooner than your congresses. The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops." --Alfred Nobel
Nobel thought that if he could make weapons so powerful that it would inflict terrible damage to everyone for anyone to go to war. He understood well enough that he wanted to provide the world with enough disincentive for war to end. Could this be what Pakistan be doing? This probably is half true. The world is going to be in a lot of trouble if everyone decided to take the other "moral" system and blows everything up with nukes. I seriously hope humanity isn't that stupid.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. " --Albert Einstien
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