The Future of Good: How to Tell Good from Evil in an Age of Distraction, Polarization, and Crisis

By Adam Braus

The stakes for being good and virtuous are the highest they have been in over 100 years. Depending on who you ask, if you make the wrong decisions today, you could contribute to destroying the earth, bring about the end of democracy, or go straight to hell. And, no matter who you ask, saying or doing what others consider inappropriate or evil co

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peripatetic Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986640556

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Adam Braus

The Future of Good

A New Way to Tell Good from Evil in a World of Noise, Polarization, and Catastrophe

First published by Peripatetic Press 2022

Copyright © 2022 by Adam Braus

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

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For my Dad, Anthony Braus

Give me the courage to change the things I can, the patience to accept the things I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

—The Serenity Prayer,

by Reinhold Niebuhr

Contents

Introduction: Morality Is a Mess

I. PUTTING MISERY FIRST

1. Who Killed Karl Popper?

2. Popper’s Irresponsible Endnotes

3. Beware the Greatest Good

4. Understanding Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism

5. Priority and Exchange

6. The Drowning Child Scenario

7. Ethical Dilemmas

8. The Lolly Problem

9. The Benevolent World Destroyer

10. Consent, Crime, and Punishment

11. But Isn’t Suffering Absolutely Evil?

12. How to Divide Up Unavoidable Miseries

13. After All Avoidable Miseries Are Gone

14. Moving from Unavoidable to Avoidable Misery

II. THE NATURE OF GOOD

15. The Goodness Instinct

16. Natural Pity and Natural Goodness

17. The Selfless Gene

18. Carnegie Heroes and Moral Instincts

19. The Brain Science of Being Good

20. Understanding the Amygdala

21. The Brains of Psychopaths: The Right Amygdala

22. Are Psychopaths Moral Exceptions?

23. Is Minimizing Misery Absolute and Universal?

III. PICKING BETWEEN PRINCIPLES

24. Who Is a Great Athlete?

25. Moral Experimentation and Fallibilism

26. The Fosbury Flop

27. Will Being Good Make You Happy?

28. Finding Meaning in the Modern World

29. Misery and Moral Relativism

30. Misery and Cultural Relativism

31. The Misery of Invisible Beings

32. Misery > Harm

33. Selfless is Does Not Mean Good

34. Misery Provides Firmer Footing for Justice and Equity

35. Good Does Not Necessarily Mean Equal

IV. BUILDING A GOOD SOCIETY

36. Minimizing Gross Domestic Misery

37. Promoting Human Rights

38. Paying Taxes and Preserving Freedom

39. Reducing Political Polarization

40. Broadcasting Better

41. Building Ethical Robots

42. Building a Moral Economy

43. Making Good Corporations

44. Fighting Wars and Preserving Peace

45. Misery and the Climate Crisis

Conclusion: The Importance of Institutions, Science, and Technology

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Also by Adam Braus

Introduction: Morality Is a Mess

The stakes for being a good and virtuous person have not been higher in over a hundred years. If we say the wrong thing or act the wrong way we can lose our friends, jobs, and reputation. If we fail to do the right thing, we could destroy the habitability of the earth. If we make bad choices or choose the bad leaders, we could surrender freedom, human rights, and democracy to oligarchy, fanaticism, and autocracy.

Ironically, now when good matters more than ever, our society feels increasingly rudderless. Turn on the news or tune in to Twitter, and you see polarized extremists shouting each other down. Go to church, and you will often find a breed of moral fundamentalism that can lack nuance or even compassion. Go to the movies and see all moral complexities disappear—the good guys are obviously good, and the bad guys are obviously bad. The idea that it is impossible to be a good person is literally the premise of the popular sitcom The Good Place, which ran for four entire seasons.¹

If you think the answer to how to be good can be found in the halls of academia, think again. When I began researching for this book, I interviewed professors of ethics at major universities. I learned which questions and theories dominate the contemporary realm of ethics and morality being taught at the college level. What I found is that academics sling mudballs at each other from various philosophical fortifications, none of which make much sense outside of their textbooks, libraries, and classrooms. I was flummoxed to discover that for the past one hundred years and up until the present moment, one of the most popular academic theories of right and wrong is called fictionalism. For followers of this empty idea, morality is merely a useful fiction for manipulating the unenlightened masses. No wonder it feels as though society’s moral compass is spinning like a top.

Then I interviewed dozens of leaders and lawyers, and ethics officers at major organizations and businesses. I learned how they make billion-dollar decisions while avoiding scandal, liability, and lawsuits. From these interviews, I found that two historical figures, together, dominate the way many contemporary people (and many of those in power) in our society decide between right and wrong:

Jeremy Bentham: Bentham, an English philosopher and social reformer who was born in 1748, taught that an action is right and good if it maximizes happiness and pleasure for the greatest number (even if it harms a smaller number).

John Stuart Mill: Mill, another English Philosopher, born in 1806, liked Bentham’s idea but saw that it was imperfect, so he added a theory of human rights.

The ideas of these two nineteenth-century British men pretty much control how we judge what is good and evil today. Bentham’s idea of maximizing happiness and pleasure is the car, and Mill’s human rights are the rules of the road. People and institutions strive to get from point A to point B as fast—and as good—as possible, but they can’t hop the curb or take a shortcut through someone’s backyard. Cars have to follow the rules of the road as defined by inalienable human rights. We expect people, businesses, organizations, and governments to take action to make society as good as possible, but we also demand that they do not violate people’s rights while doing so.

Although controversy surrounds exactly how to define Bentham’s and Mill’s ideas, there is a public consensus that these two principles, together, are our best option for driving society, as best we can, toward good and away from evil.

But there are a few problems—the check engine light is on, the car is leaking oil, and its exhaust is polluting the atmosphere.

As we shall see, even with Mill’s idea of human rights in place, if we try only to maximize happiness and pleasure, we end up doing evil actions and building evil institutions. What’s worse, because we use these two ideas to judge what is good and evil, we end up believing evil choices and institutions are good. The root problem is we treat increasing happiness and reducing misery as equivalent actions. Treating these two actions the same is making a bargain with the devil, where we agree to trade the misery of some for the pleasure of others. For instance, in the U.S. we have constructed a society in which each night 500,000 people are homeless, and at the same time, there are 16 million vacant homes that function as investments and vacation homes for the wealthy. By enabling trades of misery for pleasure, maximizing the greatest good allows evil behaviors, laws, and institutions to flourish under the cover of increased pleasure and happiness for many or even for a few.

What if we could be more certain that our actions were good now and in the future and that our goals and resolutions will make us into better people? What if we, as a society, could identify and pick good leaders, build good institutions, and write good laws?

There is a solution. There is a way to pick between right and wrong that we’ve ignored for a hundred years that can patch this moral leakage. The first person in the West to write it down was Karl Popper, an Austrian philosopher of Jewish descent who was fleeing the Nazis before World War II. In a nutshell, Popper proposed that we ought to prioritize actions that eliminate avoidable misery and suffering first before taking actions that maximize happiness and pleasure. Actions that maximize happiness and pleasure are not bad; they just ought to come after actions that eliminate avoidable misery, pain, anguish, and suffering. It’s a matter of priorities. The same way that you wouldn’t finish breakfast if your house was on fire.

Put precisely, the principle sounds something like this:

Something is right, good, and virtuous insofar as it minimizes avoidable misery for the greatest number. If no avoidable miseries are available (and you face only necessary miseries), then an action is right, good, and virtuous insofar as it maximizes the happiness of the greatest number.

Although Popper’s moral principle is potentially more reliable and objective, and offers greater explanatory power than the combination of utilitarianism and human rights, people have mostly ignored the idea for the last hundred years. As commonsense as it may seem to simply prioritize eliminating avoidable misery and suffering before increasing pleasure and happiness, the idea has been left out of history and the present-day dialogue of goodness. For the past several decades, the idea suffered under the label negative utilitarianism. As we shall see, this name is misleading, and we must find a more suitable one.

The academics, business leaders, and lawyers I met could quote chapter and verse of various philosophies of right and wrong, but only a handful of professors had even heard of the idea of reducing misery. Why hadn’t these prolific thinkers, educators, and titans of industry ever engaged seriously with this seemingly obvious moral idea? And why did it seem like this simple philosophy of right and wrong, worthy of a place at the table with other ethical principles, was never even sent an invitation to the party? How could such an attractive and commonsense rule be so utterly ignored?

These were some of the questions I asked myself when I uncovered this neglected corner of philosophy and began unraveling its history and importance. I started to wonder how different our offices, streets, boardrooms, and halls of justice would be if leaders knew about this misery-minimizing principle.

What follows is the culmination of almost a decade of research into and writing about a novel answer to a most fundamental question:

How can we best choose between good and evil?

* * *

This book is organized into four parts.

Part I: Putting Misery First—What would you do if you saw a child drowning in a pond? What if you had to choose between saving one life and saving five? What would an ethical rule that requires minimizing misery suggest you do? In this part, we learn the story of Karl Popper and how and why he proposed this new moral principle at a time when he was avoiding the Nazis in prewar Austria. This part builds on Popper’s initial suggestion and defines exactly what it means to put actions that eliminate avoidable misery first.

Part II: The Nature of Good—To be good, do we have to use reason to transcend our baser animal instincts? Or is it the other way around? Do our animal instincts lead us to be good in the first place, and reason can either enhance or detract from our moral instincts? In this part, we examine whether minimizing misery is only a sound moral theory or if it is, in fact, a moral instinct hardwired into us. We are, after all, the world’s most social animals; it makes sense that we would have social instincts. This part reveals new evolutionary, psychological, and neurobiological research that suggests that our sense of what is right and virtuous does not come from transcendent reason or faith but rather from an ancient biological instinct to feel distressed at the avoidable misery of any other being we suppose has a mind.

Part III: Picking between Principles—Many moral principles exist. How can we pick one over another? In this section, we look at how Karl Popper suggests we can scientifically compare, contrast, and judge one moral principle against another. We’ll discuss how personal moral relativism and cultural relativism, though they increase tolerance of diversity, lead to the absurd conclusion that nothing is actually right or wrong—even torturing and murdering children. We’ll discover how many contemporary ethical philosophers run into contradictions and paradoxes because they fixate on the concept of harm and how these paradoxes resolve when we see that harm is only one part of misery. Being selfless does not actually make us good or evil because as many evil acts are committed selflessly as are good ones. We’ll learn that we cannot be fully happy unless we feel like our lives have meaning, and meaning requires more than just pleasure and ease. This part also shows how contemporary theories of justice fall short of the monumental tasks of eliminating racism and bigotry.

Part IV: How to Be Good in Practice—Finally, this new moral rule of minimizing misery leads to surprising and fascinating solutions to the major global moral issues of our times. Minimizing misery can help us accomplish a plethora of good acts: build ethical AI and robots; reduce toxic political polarization; report news that doesn’t make viewers feel numb and hopeless; build an economic system that causes less needless misery and suffering, but that still offers excitement and prosperity; find greater meaning in our technological modern world; provide better tools to eliminate racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry; promote and protect free speech, human rights, and democracy; and even fight an ethical and righteous war if necessary.

The book ends with an important conclusion on the importance of building new institutions and reforming old ones to focus on eliminating avoidable misery.

Enjoy!

I

Putting Misery First

1

Who Killed Karl Popper?

In 2019, I accidentally discovered a murder. Not a stabbing in a home or a shooting in an alley but the long-buried mortal remains of a murdered idea.

At that time, I had volunteered to teach twenty-five college juniors a survey course in philosophy on ethics. I was an amateur in the field, but I felt confident I could show two dozen twenty-year-olds the ethical ropes, expose them to a few classic ethical dilemmas, and review the basics of the most popular theories of right and wrong.

But first, I needed a brushup, so I reviewed the grand sweep of ethical thought over the past twenty-five hundred years. Then I dived into popular contemporary theories. This reminded me of how it felt to read the encyclopedia. The theories were boring and dry. Drier than a sand sandwich in the Sahara. Though I was enjoying myself, I doubted my students would feel the same. To sweeten the deal a little, I created a Simpsons-themed slide deck entitled The Ethics of Donuts.

For each significant ethical philosophy, I made a corresponding statement about donuts.

Divine law: We gain knowledge of good and evil through the revelation of the one supreme Donut.

Categorical imperative: A donut is good if you can make it into a universal law of nature that does not contradict itself.

Aristotelianism: You ought to eat the right amount of the right donuts at the right time.

Consequentialism: We should judge donuts as good or bad on the basis of the consequences of eating them.

Utilitarianism: An action is good if it provides the most donuts to the highest number of people.

The slide deck did not include all ethical philosophies, nor did it delve into the subtle minutiae of each one. Even so, my deck swelled to over thirty slides—thirty different principles for judging good and evil, right and wrong. On the day of the lecture, I brought two dozen donuts to class. With the deck and the donuts, I managed to keep the students awake, engaged, and smiling.

At the end of the presentation, we voted on our favorite way of judging right and wrong. Overwhelmingly, students voted for utilitarianism—the ethical philosophy summed up in the famous phrase the greatest good for the greatest number and invented by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 in his book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

I was not surprised that the students preferred utilitarianism over all the others. It may not be the most sophisticated ethic—that likely goes to Kant and his categorical imperative—nor is it the most up-to-date—that award would go to Rawls and his elegant theory of justice—but the greatest good for the greatest number is easy to understand and pragmatic. It is a blunt instrument. It is the workhorse of right and wrong in the modern age. I have to admit, on that day, I cast my vote for utilitarianism as well.

But that evening, as I sat in my office and guiltily ate two of the leftover ethical donuts, an odd pang struck me. Something was missing. Something about me and my students voting for utilitarianism was not sitting right with me. Even the formulation itself—the greatest good for the greatest number—as straightforward as it seemed, suddenly worried me and filled me with frenetic and electric energy.

The rule seemed backward as if I had stepped through the looking glass and was gazing out at Bentham and his maximizing principle. Why was it formulated to maximize good instead of minimizing what is terrible? What would be the consequences if we flipped the principle on its head?

I had no idea what the answer was, so I did what any self-respecting member of the twenty-first century would do. I googled it. I rooted around in the internet’s philosophical underbelly for a few hours. Though I found a few breadcrumbs, I couldn’t find the loaf. There was no book, no prominent thinker, no complete treatise that fully fleshed out a morality based on misery. A few philosophers had dabbled in the idea, but the trail went cold.

Was the idea nonsense? At first glance, it seems pretty sensible that we ought to minimize misery before maximizing pleasure. But was my gut feeling simply caused by an upbringing that taught me work before play and eat your veggies or no dessert? Or was there something more universal here? Was there something objectively better about reducing the negative parts of being alive before increasing the positive parts?

The first person to introduce the notion of minimizing misery was an Austrian Jewish émigré named Karl Popper. He wrote out the idea in a pair of endnotes deep inside his 1945 magnum opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies. This book is a philosophical attack on totalitarianism on par with George Orwell’s 1984 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. His endnotes form a miniature but tragically incomplete dissertation that neglects to provide enough context and scope to prove the idea and put it on firmer footing. And after Popper, the idea was never further developed.²

Shortly after Popper published Open Society in 1954, a writer named R. N. Smart published a two-page essay titled Negative Utilitarianism. In his paper, Smart tries to put a bullet right between the eyes of Popper’s new principle. Smart concludes that the optimal solution to avoiding misery was for everyone to commit suicide. Then Smart’s brother, J. J. C. Smart, got in on the action. J. J. C. wrote a book entitled Utilitarianism: For and Against. (For some reason, the Smart brothers really had it in for Popper.) The other Smart brother condemned minimizing misery along the same lines as his brother had. Popper was president of the Aristotelian Society for a year in the late 1950s, and even his own philosophical society, which hosted a Symposium on Negative Utilitarianism, failed to promote their president’s new moral rule. More recently, a contemporary ethics intellectual named Toby Ord wrote another condemnatory article entitled Why I’m Not a Negative Utilitarian. Altogether, the total number of pages written about this idea amounts to less than thirty, many of them against it.³

The idea of minimizing misery is the victim of a philosophical murder. I found the body, the weapon, and the suspects with motive, means, and intent. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but the trail went cold.

Why is an entire philosophy of right and wrong almost wholly ignored, misunderstood, and maligned to this extent? I mean, of all the ideas to ignore, why this theory? People discuss and consider far less realistic and more outlandish moral philosophies every day (see fictionalism). For instance, ethical philosophers routinely read and discuss the novels of a French aristocrat, the Marquis de Sade, whose name gives us the word sadism. The marquis openly promoted torture, cruelty, rape, and murder. One of his books is strictly about raping and torturing nuns. Sade suggested that it was moral to revel and take pleasure in these acts and that, in fact, they were not even crimes. He said explicitly (and he is horrifically explicit) that what most of us think is immoral is morality itself. Each year, philosophers and students analyze and discuss Marquis de Sade and his demonic morality. Why don’t we at least discuss Popper’s idea?

Perhaps the first place to open up the discussion is with fixing the idea’s name. The ethic of minimizing misery has suffered for almost a hundred years under the contrived, incorrect, and derivative name negative utilitarianism. Let’s give the theory a new name.

After weighing various possibilities, I chose misericordianism as the name for the moral rule of prioritizing actions that eliminate avoidable miseries over actions that increase pleasure and happiness. The word comes from the Latin word misericordia, which means pity or compassion. Misericordianism is