On Ethics

Ethics is a theme that interests me a lot.

Both for simple curiosity, but also for professional reasons. Indeed, as neuroscientist I perform animal and human research on an everyday basis. Therefore, ethics is part of my training and a continous evolving personal and public debate. In translational neuroscience we make ethical considerations every time we start a new animal or human interventional study that usually involve technologies that manipulate the nervous system. I take this responsibility very seriously and try to transmit this sense of responsibity to my trainees.

Here I'll write about some thoughts of general ethics, as well as themes that are more specific to animal research and neurotechnology.

An update on this section: as my thoughts keep evolving, I am reading Dr. Sam Harris work and specifically the Moral Landscape where he argues against relativism and on the potential existence of a scientifically definiable optimal ethics/moral values. While I am sensitive to this argument I still did not fully change my mind, so I will leave this on for now and maybe make an update page when I decide

On values and relativism

The fact that I don't believe in God simplifies the problem of values. Indeed, as largely discussed by philosophers much more equipped than me (such as Nietzsche, Shopenauer, Marx, Deleuze) the absence of god implies the impossibility to define objective values. I am very much interested in the concept of indeterminism, relativism and lack of objective reference. Indeed I am a convinced quantum physics enthusiast and have completely internalized the indeterminate nature of the universe. I like to extend this natural principle of nature in the context of ethics. I do understand that some may see physics and ehitcs as separate world (kant for example) where ethics deal with different matters than physics does. But because I am also a neuroscientist I also believe that anything human is also a representation of physical laws. Including love, death and ethics. Within this context, therefore, values must be relative, and large experimental evidence exist for this theory among human societies and groups. The idea of discussing ethics from an experimental (or historical) point of view is deeply rooted in Nietzsche works, for example.

At any rate, my strong relativism creates an important problem. How can one define what's "good" and what's "bad" if there is no objective definition of values? To approach the problem I like to re-interpret a famous aforism from Kant in a completely opposite way of what he actually meant with it: "the starred sky above me, the moral law inside me". The way I use this aforism is to say that physics laws and sice are outside of us and hence the same for all of us because we test these laws experimentally. Instead, moral law, and ethics is inside each of us hence it's personal, and each of us may have a different one. this is not in contradiciton with above, in the sense that I don't mean that the process of generating new values is not science and can't be measured, this would be a contradiction with what I said before. Instead, here I mean that the specific definition of "good" and "bad" are personal, and different between individiuals. What does that implies? it implies that according to my personal set of values, I can say that that another person is wrong. But I can't say that they are objectively wrong, they are wrong for me.

I have struggled with this a lot for two reasons:

1 Disgust for fascism and racism

It was very hard for me to accept that I could not say that fascism and all its representation (nazis) and racism were not objectively wrong values. But at least I needed a way to say that they were wrong to me, because it would give me solid ground to fight this dangerous and destructive ideas everywhere I can. I'll discuss a little bit more about this on the paragraph of "evil".

2 Arguments with animal activits

Less important personally, but important professionally, was the debate with animal activitists. In thinking at how to justify our work I could not find any objective reason to disproof the theses of animal activits. So it's about personal choices that we are all free to discuss and argument. I will go back to animal research in specific paragraphs.

On the concepts of "evil" and empathy

I thought a lot about the concept of evil. Of course, given what I wrote in the previous paragraph che concept of evil has no objective definition.

Therefore, in a way, evil does not exist, experimentally. What do exist are practices that are judged evil by a group of humans.

Indeed, we're still capable to define the meaning of the word and concept "evil" as something that is wrong "to us", more specifically, something that is violating some important ethical principle.

It's an interesting concept because it rapidly leads to the conclusion that nobody is purposedly evil. In the sense that they are evil to other's eyes, but not to theirs. In this sense, pure evil, the one that knows that is doing something evil on purpose and even according to their own principle, does not exist.

This is because of a simple logical reasoning:

Let's consider for example serial killers. Can we say that these people are willingly harming others? I don't think so. I think that, because of particular psychiatric conditions and trauma they have a diminished sense of empathy and therefore they harm "beings" that they do not recognize as "other selves" in consequence of their condition. Therefore, in their eyes, their actions are not strictly evil.

Let's consider the case of religious terrorists/mass murdereres. They are obviosuly acting accoridng to a twisted system of ethical values acoording to which they are actually doing something good. Therefore in their own, devious set of values, they are not evil at all.

Similar arguments could possibly be built for essentially everything else. For example, the nazis were clearly practicing extremely evil actions (at least according to my ethics) at such a large scale that they could not all sociopaths. So how could they do something as horrible as large scale extermination of jews, sintis and other minorities as well germans with disabilities and non-binary geneders.

The reason why we find this really hard to believe, is that humans have a very powerful feature, that is empathy. Empathy allows us to recognize other beings as other "selves" transfering our concept of humanity onto others. They don't even have to be humans, in fact humans are capable of feeling empathy towards animals, and even inanimate objects. Unfortuatnely, together with empathy, evolution equipped us with the resources necessary to disable empathy. I believe that this is a mechanism that is necessary for humans to kill and feed off other animals. Bu talso to kill other human beings that competed for the same resources. Once we turn off empathy suddenlty harming others is made easier by removing the attribute of "self" to another being. That being becomes an object that does not possess our same rights. Nazis, terrorists, mafia godfather, the military and goverments when execute prisoners utilized and use this mechanism to be able to harm others. So this mechanism enable the execution of "evil" by removing, perhaps for a brief moment, the ethical restraints that prevented us to perform an certain action. Thus enabling "evil" actions upon other groups.

Because of all this, in my opinion, the closest thing to evil that exists in modern societies are the ideas and will to awake this mechanisms of de-humanization.

An example that comes to mind is the relentless effort of right-wing conservatives to dehumanize immigrants. These initiatives, violent speeches and carefully chosen political ads, go precisely in this direction: turning off empathy towards other humans to awaken ancestral tribal and violent sentiments.

These ideas are disgusting and extremely dangereous because they quickly spin out of control and must be be fought, because we can and should aim at being better. We don't live in the jungle anymore. This is why I completely agree with Bertrand Russell on the paradox of tolerance: "we need to be intolerant to intolerants to enable a tolerant society to exist in the first place".

Virtue signaling

I really wanted to write something on virtue signalling, because I think is one of the worst human practices.

Virtue signalling is the practice of signaling to others that we are "good people". Example includes uneccessary public discolusre of personal ideology to please certain political or religious groups. It's becoming quite common in the left social justice movement, but is also diffused in the extreme right, although what they call virtue is hardly definible as virtue at all in my view, but still, it's the same mechanism.

Of course, given my almost absolute relativism, virtue signalling is meaningless given the non existence of objective values. However, the reason why I am so annoyed by this practice is that it echoes religious/dogmatic morality. The fact that we feel the need to signals others about our "virtues" means that we want people to think that we are part of a specific, morally superior group. This is exactly the same mechanism that leads to the generation of that "us and them" dicotomy that threatens peaceful living among humans.

Indeed, as I mention before, once humans are convinced of being depositary of some superior moral truth, whatever that is, they are institictively pushed towards labelling non-believers as immoral, sinners, that should repent. This beautiful piece in The Atlantinc (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/social-justice-new-religion/671172/) from Helen Lewis discusses beautifully this issue.

In consequence, I think it's very important to discourage virtue signaling, and in general any ideology that pushes dicotomoy-like thinking I discussed in the section about the ascetic ideal in the religion section. People that believe that they are morally superior than others are dangerous people, wether they are for the left or for the right, wether they say they do it to help underserved human groups, or wether they do it for themselves. Because no, the goal does not justify the means.

Democratic State laws and community ethics

State laws are a very interesting mechanism. They are basically the way a group of people with different moral beliefs can comprise on a set of ground rules for everybody to follow to live in a way that is acceptable to all. This is probably something close to the concept of "social contract" although in reality we do not sign any social contract, as it is very well known, and we're just born in a state with certain laws. So, in theory, state laws can be modified while the society advances to adapt to the changing human societies. This if beautiful in my opinion, because without state laws we would not be able to create diverse communities.

One could argue that a similar role can be attributed to religious laws. But I argue that this is absolutely not true. In fact, religious laws are only good for the practitioners of that specific religion, triggering once again the "us and them" problem. Instead, a laic state can well build a comprise among the moral laws of religious and non-religious people so that we can all agree on the minimal set of principles that is acceptable by everybody.

In this way, each variation of moral laws can implement their additional principles on top of this solid base. Of course, in the practice of democracy, a push-pull between different minorities will always be present to push certain rights or impose certain restrictions. The break down occurs when this process is artifically altered.

For example, in the current state of things in the United States, the Supreme Court is not representative of the moral beliefs of the majority of people living in the United States. This is because the judges of the supreme court are appoitned by the senate (after proposal from the president). But because the Senate does not have a number of senators that is proportional to the population, but is the same for each state, this creates an enormous problem because the majority of the senatory may not idiologically represent the majority of the people. I think this is a dangerous situation because it violates the principle that state laws should represent a compromise among all. In this compromise the majority tends to lead the discourse, and if that's not the case, that means that the majority of people will be in moral conflict with the state laws creating an explosive situation.

My personal ethics: animal experimentation

under construction

My personal ethics: the relationship to others

under construction