I buy that humans have intrinsic value just for being alive. I’m not sure if this is correct, so I’m reluctant to call it a principle, but it was the force that pushed me to be in public policy and is how I find value in being alive. I also enjoy (maybe with some hubris and piousness) this attribute of my psyche, think it’s a helpful emotional bias to have access to that the world needs, and feel that it pushes me to think through logic chains I would otherwise be subconsciously uninterested in that are helpful for public health and personal fulfillment, so I don’t want to convince myself subconsciously that it isn’t a fact. I acknowledge that there are very valid arguments against this, they just fall under a sect of philosophy that is so far from what I observe in reality that it’s not likely they will impact my decision making.
If similar minute moral issues start cropping up in my professional decision making, there’s likely somewhere else with a larger upside that I can pour resources into. For example, when dealing with the housing crisis, instead of debating “deservingness,” we should prefer to agree that both strong mental health and public support systems would be beneficial to some human out there, and take action based on that.
This can be compared to what religious people would call faith, and what startup folks would call optimism.
There are “truths” that can be tied to this value that I believe but aren’t necessarily facts. I believe that, in a scenario where absolutely everything would be the same regardless of the choice, people should not be killed. This is an opinion, not a fact. It’s incredibly unlikely this will affect my public policy negatively, because there will never be such an ideal¹ scenario.
I think it’s important everyone have this core belief. People with a drive to ask and answer questions begin with something like “Should schools enforce mandatory uniform policies,” and follow, for example, the following chain of logic: “Schools should enforce mandatory uniform policies because they increase test scores, and better test scores lead to better life outcomes. Ok, but why is whatever metric was used to determine a ‘better life’ valid? Is staying alive for a longer time better? Is a higher paying job better?”
There are other chains of logic attached to this debate, but it always inevitably comes down to the same question. “What is good?”
Even if this belief is not the truth, it guides us in a “more good” direction, and having more good direction is better than not having any (For goodness reference, there are philosophical arguements for exploding the world⁴ that don’t lack merit but obviously don’t work in a policy/public health context…). If a person writes investment memos not understanding why they are investing, we are more likely to get many investment memos explaining why various companies would “work” and pull more capital. Those companies could work, but they aren’t all good.
Theres nothing immediately stopping us from stealing, lying, and cheating outside of belief. However, in a reality where we listened to our egocentric greed, we would be able to be dragged along by natural universal and interpersonal forces. We would listen to the desire for instant gratification and the fear of rejection, and we would devolve as a society. Diminished trust within a population, decaying senses of duty that contribute to the functioning of our social systems, and less access to the things we want are changes that would drive society in a direction that is very intuitively worse.
We’re seeing this happen in countries and communities that experienced the rapid inset of capitalism or industrialization, and didn’t have the cultural backbone to deal with it effectively. ²
Observing this as an item in most peoples’ belief systems also overturns venture capital’s obsession with “contrarian thinking” and “heresy”³. There’s no inherent advantage to thinking differently than one’s peer groups. The correlation between a person’s opinion being different than other peoples’ and the opinion being correct. That depends on many things. Also, it’s become fashionable lately to be contrarian, and being contrarian among a group that want to be contrarian doesn’t make a person more correct.
It’s much more useful to live densely to develop taste, and let that taste lead us to the correct places.
1 /physics
² future blog
³ https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
⁴ The “is being alive is a state of larger suffering than not being alive” debate can be settled only if we have metric to gauge what “suffering” is, and be able to reach a person in a dead state. There are enough social slopes that exist in the world that this isn’t a can of worms worth opening.