The danger of misguided attempts to make everyone “good”
On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with having a zero tolerance policy for “bad” people. They spread misery. They set destructive precedents. And they’re selfish. Or, at least, let’s agree that these are common traits of bad people. Note that I draw a distinction between bad people (morally deplorable people, based on the stipulations of a given orthodoxy) and criminals (people who break the law and are subject to punitive measures as determined by the judiciary). This article is about the moral coordinates of “good” and “bad” (virtuosness), not the legal statuses of “legal” and “illegal” (criminality).
Even with this in mind, would Earth not be better off with only good people? Why should we not force every human who is bad into becoming good? I don’t think that we should… but why not? I don’t like to assume that something is correct simply because it makes sense or feels right to me—especially when that thing has universal implications. So, I went about unpacking my thoughts.
What does changing (by force or persuasion) a person’s moral character entail? And what happens if we scale this process to all qualifying members of the set (i.e. all bad people)?
This exploration of my cognitive constructions led me to the centre of two disciplines I believe to be fundamental to answering most of humanity’s questions—physics and systems theory.
Physics is “the natural science that studies matter and its motion and behaviour through space and time, and that studies the related entities of energy and force.”
Systems theory “investigates both the principles common to all complex entities, and the (usually mathematical) models which can be used to describe them.”
How do these relate to moral goodness? Answering this entails my diving into a sea of abstractions, but stick with me—it all comes together in the end.
You see, everything is physics—even biology and chemistry. The universe is filled with matter—liquids, solids, gases and (some would say) plasma. Every state of matter comprises atoms (neutral or ionised), organised into objects spanning different orders of magnitude (from the atomic to the universal scale). This excludes sub-atomic particles, which I won’t go into as they require an analysis of particle physics and quantum mechanics. But, in short, your brain is just a certain arrangement of atoms. An illness can result from the physical proteins in your body (which are made of atoms) failing to fold into the right shape, such that a cell surface receptor is unable to bind to the required ligand. Though at a very small scale, this is just another manifestation of a certain arrangement of atoms.
So is your skin. Your eyes. The table. The sun. Sand. Faeces. Everything.
How can this be, that all the unique and wonderful objects in the universe are simply complex arrangements of the same thing? Well, (some of) the answer lies in chaos theory and complex systems.
In physics, a system whose configuration can change with time is known as a “dynamical system”. For example, our galaxy does not have the same configuration it did 100 million years ago, so it can be said to be a dynamical system (or collection of dynamical systems). A person can also be seen as a dynamical system. In short, certain things have the capacity (and propensity) to change with time. But, “a dynamical system also consists of some ‘variables’, and some ‘equations of motion’ or ‘dynamical equations’. The variables are any things which can vary with time.” And the set of all possible configurations of the system is known as the “phase space”.
When you observe a complex system (such as a person) as a whole, its current configuration can be defined as one position in the phase space. As the system moves through time, all the variables in that system change in an interconnected way and the point (i.e. configuration of the system) moves through phase space.
There is also the concept of “sensitivity to initial conditions”, described as follows:
“It [sensitivity to initial conditions] says that, if you have two sets of initial conditions, or two points in phase space, extremely close to each other, the two ensuing trajectories, though close to each other at the beginning, will eventually diverge exponentially away from each other.”
(An oversimplified version of) this concept is known as “the butterfly effect”. An infinitesimal change at a small scale leads to massive, unpredictable changes in configuration at a greater scale. This is (conceptually) how a universe comprising atoms can end up organising the same essential object in exponentially different ways. Metaphysical lego, if you will.
But there are other factors in this scenario—the universe is also governed by certain fundamental forces.
These fundamental forces of the universe are 1.) gravity, 2.) electromagnetism 3.) the strong nuclear force 4.) the weak nuclear force.
All of these interact across different scales of complex systems, to govern how atoms (and sub-atomic particles) are organised within those systems.
I’ll illustrate using a question—if gravity pulls matter towards its source, why doesn’t it pull your heart out of your body? Well, for one thing, the strong and weak nuclear forces are also working on the subatomic particles within your cells. So, gravity is “communicating” with the other forces to say, “The heart belongs in the system of the body but the body belongs in the system of the planet”. The forces have a hierarchy of organisation and communication, across different scales of matter, as (partly) explained in this talk by the brilliant Richard Feynman. This hierarchy expands indefinitely in both directions (the infinitely small and the infinitely large), as explained in this article by the brilliant Alëna Iouguina.
So, we enter the realm of systems theory with 3 key questions:
- Can you change one unknown variable (moral character) within a complex system (a human), such that the change will *always* (predictably) result in the same outcome (moral goodness)?
- Can you make this change without inadvertently changing several (or all) other variables within that system, given the sensitivity of variables across all scales to changes in any one variable at a given scale?
- Can you make all future configurations of a complex system perfectly predictable (i.e. no longer changeable with time) without making all variables within that system uniformly defined constants (i.e. non-varying values)?
Let me translate these questions into (potentially) more relatable terms:
- Is there some proven method of making people *objectively* morally good?
- If there is such a method, can it be reasonably expected to affect only the moral aspect of a person’s character (without interfering with all other aspects of their being)?
- Can we make all bad people good, without making all people exactly the same?
Like me, you may be inclined to answer, “No,” to all these questions. As illustrated by the fundamental forces, there are hierarchies in systems too (especially in systems biology). And there’s a concept known as “emerging behaviour” or “emergence”:
“A certain behaviour, observed at a certain scale, is said to be emergent if it cannot be understood when you study, separately and one by one, every constituent of this scale, each of which may also be a complex system made up of finer scales.”
This means that what is “true” at one scale of a complex system may not be true (observable or understandable) at a higher or lower scale of the same system. This is (partly) why quantum mechanics baffled us for ages—we did not appreciate the fact that quantum objects (like gluons) do not behave like objects at higher scales (like human cells). There’s a lot to learn from this. For example, something that is objectively true and useful to one human (e.g. certain definitions of good and bad), may not be objectively true or useful to the human species.
If all this sounds complex, that’s because it is—and that is my point.
When we say, for example, that social justice warriors (SJWs) or classical liberals are bad people (depending on which side you’re on), and try to impose measures which force the other side into conforming to our moral codex, we display a shocking lack of appreciation for how complex a person is. Let alone a group of people. Let alone a group of people being influenced by a large, interrelated set of multi-dimensional factors.
And I contend that this is why all attempts to sanitise human existence and culture—through religion, political ideology, social movements or anything else—eventually devolve into forceful crusades to exert total control.
These issues of morality are not simple—no matter how much the media (and your heart) wants you to believe that they are. If they were as simple as say the cure for polio (which is a complex thing in its own right), we’d have solved them ages ago. But we haven’t.
It is a humorously predictable mark of the unbridled human ego that we think we can divide groups of humans into “my side” and the “other side”, and make accurate and final moral judgments about people based on this.
It’s even more arrogant to think we can overlook all the foundational principles of the universe, take a system as complex as a human being, and change its configuration to match our desires and caprices. It’s particularly destructive and unnecessary to adopt the same mentality when dealing with groups of complex systems (i.e. human society) influenced by groups of complex endogenous factors (e.g. culture, time, family and more).
We can’t change an unknown and unpredictable variable (moral character) within a complex system, into a known and perfectly predictable constant (moral goodness), without changing and standardising the entire system.
The opportunity cost of trying to identify all bad people in the world, based on some necessarily simplistic attempt at an “all-encompassing” theory (e.g. intersectionality), is far too high. As is the case with the noble (yet misguided) aim of trying to make all those people “good”, by any means necessary. These two goals are not only humanly impossible, they’re unnecessary.
Maybe our approach to dealing with this complex issue is already spot on. Or, at least, the best we have for now. Maybe drawing a line to delineate where moral deplorableness crosses into criminal illegality is the reasonable approach—given we have so little control over and understanding of the complex variables influencing a given individual’s moral locus.
And maybe it is enough to say that the job of society is to manage criminal behaviour, while the job of the individual is to manage immoral character (whatever they define it to be)—without encouraging one to take responsibility for the other’s domain. This maximises the agency of the moral adjudicator and that of the morally judged. After all, a problem that’s already unmanageably complex (the moral code of an individual) should not be scaled to a higher degree of complexity (the moral code of a species).
In short, we should be responsible for things we don’t agree with (morality), and the government or governing bodies should be responsible for things that cause substantive and demonstrable harm (criminality).
Humanity is complex and morality is complex, and we should not pretend either (let alone the intersection of the two) is simpler than it is just so we can justify our attempts to control both.
