What gives a scientific approach to ethical issues: the source code of political correctness

    Ethics is a science of morality invented by Aristotle. However, the reputation of both ethics and morality is difficult to bear the burden of centuries, more and more associated with something unnecessary and unimportant. And yet, ethics does not want to quietly go into night silence, following the example of others - say, astrology contains the root of the “logos” and appeared to study the connection between the position of celestial figures and the fate of man. True, since the beginning of the application of the scientific approach, no traces of such a connection - and therefore no reason to consider astrology as a science - have been found. "Everything immaterial is immaterial." And biologists do not wait for the desired position of the planets in order to cut the laboratory rat. But how and whom they can cut is still regulated by bioethics.

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    So what, but Aristotle knew how to raise the question correctly

    Why then do scientists not listen to astrologers, but allow themselves to be limited by moral requirements? In the West, according to tradition, religion is blamed - the Catholic Church is only happy to take on this responsibility: "Yes, yes, we forbid you to do such experiments here."

    But this did not stop science in the Renaissance, when digging out fresh corpses to study human anatomy was more terrible than experiments on people - the church in those days was not embarrassed to disembowel living people. Science has a lot of experience in overcoming obstacles - it all lies in this. Neither the Inquisition, nor superstition, nor bonfires, nor persecution could ever stop her. And now, when all this is behind - science suddenly stumbled upon a glass wall.

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    Those who blame morality for the inhibition of science, and dream of freeing science from it, do not notice, usually, as with the logic "if there is no god, then there is no morality" turn out to be on the same side with religions for which the postulate of the divine nature of morality is fundamental; and on the other side of science, because it is scientists who are one of the most ethical people in the world. The glass wall of morality is not an obstacle surrounding science, but the inner border of every scientist, with the manifestations of which - ethical issues emerging from advances in biology and medicine - science decided to deal with in the framework of bioethics.

    And ethics itself was bashfully hidden under the roof of philosophy, which, like the Hufflepuff of the world of sciences, takes to itself those who are not useful anywhere else - not too ethical behavior towards ethics.

    And not very scientific behavior on the part of science is as if Isaac Newton, instead of the law of gravity, would formulate the law of the fall of apples.

    If morality, at a minimum, is real enough to be one of the concerns of science, it is the concern of science to clarify what is behind morality.

    What is moral


    The word “morality” comes from the Latin word mos , which means a person’s way of behaving and leading, then transformed into moralis, meaning “proper behavior”, “following customs”.

    Hence, “morality” arises in the meaning of morale - a visible manifestation of the sentiments of soldiers, expressed in their behavior. By the way, the word “immoral” also occurs only in the context of behavioral assessment. In other words, the word “morality” does not mean a person’s value system as such, but how a person expresses it (acting out) by his behavior.

    What is logical: there is simply no other way to get an idea about someone’s value system, about someone’s ideas, what is good and what is bad, except for their actions, the way they act in a situation of moral choice.

    That is, morality is a system of values ​​of a person, expressed in his behavior. Morality is not an abstraction, but a very real behavioral phenomenon observed in every person; which makes the concept of social morality material, based on the coinciding manifestations of morality in the behavior of the majority.

    Two important features of morality, without a mention of which will not work forward:

    1. There is a moral component in the behavior of every capable person, regardless of whether he is aware of it or not. Life constantly throws up a moral choice: how to behave with someone who depends on you, how to behave towards another in the absence of witnesses, what to do in case of danger threatening someone else, etc. - any choice in a situation of moral choice expresses the moral of the person who made it. Morality is a choice that a person makes in a situation of moral choice.
    2. Man's actions reveal his morality not only to others, but also to himself. Many people know the difference between their own ideas about how they will behave in a particular hypothetical situation - and how they actually behave if they find themselves in a similar situation already in life. It is this phenomenon that Dr. Phil speaks of when he talks about how a person gains self-esteem . Often a person’s behavior turns out to be a surprise for himself, and it doesn’t matter whether it is pleasant or not: it is important that the moral of a person is not only inherent in him, but also unfamiliar from the very beginning.

    This is exactly what Aristotle saw in the 4th century BC: that every person, from nowhere, has a laid-down program of behavior in a situation of moral choice - for example, at the sight of the falling one: who will push the falling one, someone will extend his hand to him, and tried unravel what is behind this, highlighting the study of morality as a separate discipline called ethics .

    His attempt to cognize and describe the device, logic and laws of morality turned out to be one of the long mysteries and seemingly hopeless riddles in history, because the task he set himself was obviously unsolvable without knowledge of genes and natural selection - that is, , at least another 2200 years.

    In Darwin's standby mode, ethics turned into a battle of fanfics - for lack of data, gaps were filled with speculation, for example, about the divine origin of one or another moral norm, taken as a constant.

    • In other words, having appeared in order to unravel the nature of morality, ethics in its explanations did not go beyond the bounds of speculation.
    • However, the real value of ethics lies in the development and study of man-made ethical systems.

    This means that all currently known systems of ethics, value systems and norms, for the most part, are man-made. Moreover, regardless of the goals of its creation - whether it is composing a new ethics from scratch, or another attempt to unravel the structure of morality - none of them takes into account the discoveries of genetics and evolutionary psychology, without which it is impossible to explain morality or develop an effective model from scratch seems possible.

    1. The right to claim the finality and fidelity of a system of ethics has not yet been created, nor was there the very possibility of doing so;
    2. ethical constants do not exist. Moral is possible - but not proven, and without it, any ethical postulates are nothing more than variables;
    3. in other words, there is nothing sacred;
    4. therefore, putting any ethical postulates into question is not only possible, but also necessary.

    But what exactly does “question” mean? This means to understand the secrets of ethics - a scientific approach is needed. That is, ethics must be pulled from the back of philosophy and approach the question of its study as scientifically as possible, that is, once again making it a science (science is knowledge in a certain field, obtained using a scientific approach).

    Ethics is one of the sought after sciences of the beginning of the XXI century.


    Even those who study it or face ethical problems in their work are not sure that ethics is a science.

    The contribution of science to human life is equated with their significance: the increasing speed of technical changes increases the sense of importance of the natural and applied sciences behind them, while the effect of discoveries in the humanities is less noticeable, some of them have not brought news for so long that they become synonymous with futility.

    And ethics in a scientific context for many is also an irritant. If ethics were officially among the sciences, a crowd with torches would definitely come for it, demanding sacrifice to pay for Pluto.

    The image of the crowd with torches, although metaphorical, is also relevant in an era when people are busy discussing how to organize a visit to Mars, as well as at a time when they were afraid to sail too far into the ocean on ships so that they would not inadvertently cross the Earth’s edge washed away. Because the crowd has not gone away: instead of torches, there are flashlights on smartphones, from which the crowd gathers now online.

    And this is no less important indicator of the dynamics of the development of sciences than Martian plans.

    Accelerating technological progress shows the potential of the natural sciences, and stagnant social and cultural development is the price of stagnation of the social and human sciences.

    Ethical problems have always been part of objective reality, influencing it, leaving consequences and even economically expressible ones - money is poorly combined with morality, and it is quite realistic to calculate the cost of ethical costs, for example.

    One of the most pressing examples now is the policy that guides online mass communication platforms (primarily social networks and social media), regulating the relations between its users, with its users - and even internal relations in its teams.

    The general state of affairs can be described as a deep split in the conditions of the ideological monopoly of political correctness. The situation is similar to getting stuck in quicksand, when each movement leads to a worsening of the situation - and begins to look hopeless; although it never was.

    The problem of political correctness arose entirely due to the approach to the phenomenon of ethics as a political phenomenon. This is a problem of an erroneous description language, not the indescribability of the phenomenon itself.

    What is political correctness


    Political correctness is a secular ethical system based on the defense of the weakest, oppressed in the fight against inequality, which arose in the political movement of the new left.

    The new left is the western political movement of the struggle for social justice originating in the late 1950s.

    The new left became an attempt to rebrand socialism - a term whose sought-after meaning had been replaced for a long time by nothing that had nothing to do with either socialism, Marxism, or the left idea of ​​Stalinism in general .

    In the late 50s, the first generation, which did not cause the World War, at least at a conscious age, grew up among a huge number of other conserved problems of society, the struggle against which was destined to become a war of the post-war generation.

    On the other hand, the consequences of Stalinism - including both the Hungarian uprising of 1956 suppressed by the Soviet Union and the condemnation of the personality cult of Stalin at the 20th CPSU Congress that same year - pushed the “new left” to return to the ethical sources of Marxism - the humanistic ideals of the 18th –XIX centuries, - and restarting the left idea from the saved version, which preceded the way “the old left” “something went wrong.”

    The new left turned out to be an eclectic movement: they united activists fighting for civil and political rights, women's rights, against racial discrimination, against persecution for sexual orientation, police brutality, colonial wars, the outbreak of the war on drugs, etc. These were the original Social Justice Warriors.

    There was no unity among them regarding the idea of ​​the class struggle, nor regarding the Soviet symbols, although the hammer and sickle were, de facto, a symbol of Stalinism - that is, just the same, a symbol of the substitution of socialism for its complete opposite.

    It was a struggle against the rule of moral ethics of inequality, reinforced by the hierarchical structure of society, the answer to which was a mirror interpretation of the manifestation of any inequality as a form of oppression - the cornerstone of the ethics of political correctness.

    Political correctness is the ethics of social struggle, the ethics of the movement of the new left, developed in the course of a clash with the ethical system of their fathers and grandfathers.

    This is ethics based on the moral values ​​of the movement that committed the sexual revolution in the 60s, defeated racism, homophobia, militarism, etc. This does not mean that in the 70s there was nothing of this anymore - it means that ethics, which were dominant in the 50s, in the 60s had enough defenders on their side, convinced of their moral correctness, in the 70s were marginalized - for example, the ideas of supremacy of the white race (white supremacy) continue to exist to this day - but their carriers do not run the risk of openly claiming moral superiority or equivalence to the ideas of equality of people of all blood and skin colors.

    This is the difference between a struggle between two positions - and a reduction in the distance between them. Even when the front line separating people disappears, the distance between them does not go away by itself. But this is the concern of the post-war era, requiring a value system that encourages cooperation and tolerance.

    In these circumstances, the ethics of the struggle - even for a just cause, for social justice - becomes destructive, because when viewed through the prism of political correctness, here it is, the front line is in place, and has not disappeared. As a result, the ethics of the party that triumphed in the struggle of value systems is transformed from an instrument of victory into an instrument of split.

    In the absence of a real struggle for real ideals, the scenarios in which the scenario of social conflict is reproduced are becoming more absurd: political correctness already functions as a cancerous tumor that launches metastases in the form of new self-destructive conflicts.

    In a movement that began with Stonewall, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, the very notion of Social Justice Warrior is now self-parody, mocking SJW, and their front is tweets from zero and photos from the eighties.

    Political Correctness in the 21st Century


    By all indications, by the turn of the millennium, political correctness was already beginning to disappear, but then a revolution happened - the best present for every leftist is Web 2.0, a social network revolution that suddenly turned out to be a fertile ground for a renaissance of the ideology of political correctness, with new energy tearing communication fabric with contradictions already in 21st century.

    The dismissal in 2017 by Google of James Damore, an engineer and biologist by training , because in an analytical note compiled at the request of colleagues, he mentioned the biologically caused difference in the psychological predisposition of people of different sexes to different occupations - in other words, turned out to be a big scandal. that women are a minority in software development, because most of them found something more interesting for themselves.

    In a similar situation, Twitter, and with it YouTube: bloggers are banned, videos are demonetized - and all this happens in a very nervous atmosphere, because for every user who agrees with what is happening, there is a user who unjustifiably reproaches the policies pursued by the services for different sins against common sense.

    The Internet, which until recently was a space left to itself, largely organized by self-organization, suddenly turned into a battlefield between the holy inquisition and heretics, who are almost literally trying to ban it in Google.

    This reversal would have been extremely dramatic if it had not been so ironic: the creators of most social networks are pretty asocial people.

    And Jack Dorsey, who invented Twitter, suddenly found himself in the situation of an actress engineer who designed a new stage for the Mariinsky Theater, who was suddenly informed that from that moment he would give two concerts a week, replacing Gergiev as a conductor.

    How did he get into this situation? After all, for a long time Twitter, like Facebook, as well as YouTube, and many other platforms perfectly felt themselves in the role of a platform, and interventions in the life of the community, for the most part, were limited to resolving copyright claims.

    In a sense, these were carefree pagan times akin to the lives of the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands before the landing of Columbus on their shore. In the face of political correctness, the anarchic space of eclectic pagan beliefs first encountered the power of an organized ethical system.

    Political correctness is not a problem, but a symptom


    Blaming political correctness for what it is is stupid.

    Even ideas undergo natural selection, as a result of which value systems acquire certain evolutionary mechanisms of survival (not directly, but through their carriers, of course).

    If inequality itself is the enemy, it’s not enough just not to give weaknesses to offense, not enough of them through positive discrimination, to raise affirmative action higher in the hierarchy — you need to shame any desire for success and growth of those who are already higher, who were less oppressed or not considered at all for the oppressed - because it also increases inequality.

    Actually, this is the key difference between political correctness and the usual tact: it’s not enough to behave decently without earning your success at the expense of someone else’s misfortune - when the goal is equality, not freedom, then it’s impossible to be free from the oppressor’s guilt arising from the fact of inequality, the white privilege , for example, or complicity in the patriarchy.

    The paradox of political correctness. Political correctness arose in the struggle for social justice - this is a wartime ethic based on the values ​​of social struggle - therefore, any situation through the prism of political correctness looks like a confrontation, which turns out to be absurd in peacetime.

    For example, if fat shaming is recognized as a social evil, then political correctness guards oppressed overweight people who suffer, for example, from inequality in the field of personal life, sex and dating - against, it turns out, everyone else.

    And from this point of view, the simple absence of fat shaming and a body-positive attitude to people of any shape and physique is not enough - normal correctness would be enough for this; in the paradigm of political correctness, evil is any exacerbation of inequality, so pumping up your own press is also fat shaming, because it is increasing the distance → exacerbating inequality → the even more sad situation of the oppressed on the dating front.

    The ethics of equality requires someone who is “more equal than others” to crouch a little bit, to tighten in order to reduce the distance, and not exaggerate it.

    The real reason for the growth of this cancerous tumor is the complete lack of healthy ethical immunity. Fascinated by technical progress, people did not notice at all that ideological progress in many aspects froze in the 19th century - the whole modern left idea that grew out of the “new left” who tried to reinstall the idea from scratch, that is, from the philosophical foundation on which Karl still stood Marx, losing sight of such trifles as the 200 years that followed the development of ideas about human nature from the point of view of biology - which, in theory, should be included in new releases of ethical systems, but this does not happen - because there were no new releases: about 21st century society went online, endows robots with the legal subjectivity, solves cloning dilemmas, guesses,

    How political correctness found its way into the field of uncritical perception of companies


    Using an ideological vacuum with respect to the atomized structure of the community, Social Justice Warriors began to rock the boat, creating both demand and supply at the same time: the entire public network space turned into a continuous generator of righteous anger, indignation and insulted feelings directed outwardly, speaking out, not without the assistance of the media , no matter how little, as if on behalf of the whole Internet: the Internet, the Internet - for any activity outside it - and inside, in full accordance with the paradigm of ethics at present, turning any communication space into one on this side of the front, involving more and more users, until they reach a lot of users, causing them an emotional reaction to their activity - and it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, it’s important,tribalism in a person is so fundamentally rooted that even such an unobtrusive invitation is enough for primitive social instincts to take control of behavior upon themselves.

    As a result, a space in which ethical discussions did not go beyond private showdowns turns into a Verdun meat grinder of value systems - and SJW, finding more and more perpetrators before the political correctness tribunal, create, at the same time, demand - a huge, catastrophic, ethical appearance problems: discrimination, harassment, hate speech, harassment, slander, disrespect, insults - as well as an ideological threat that raises its head - an awakening fascist reptile, anti-Semitism, ultra-right activism; and a proposal - that is, its own value system as a model for organizing relationships between the community and the platform, a constructor of elements and principles from which it was already possible to assemble the necessary policies governing content, user relationships on the platform and the platform with users.

    And to make the hint clearer, of course, the platform itself should also be subjected to merciless criticism for moral connivance as complicity, pushing to the inevitable choice of a value system, guided by which the platform will be able to proceed to active actions.

    And then it turned out that, with the exception of the chthonic horror of the ultra-right idea and the triumphant anarchism of the ultra-left Anonymous, the ideals of political correctness under the protection of the soldiers of social justice turned out to be the most reminiscent of “generally accepted moral norms”.
    The privilege of holiness is the assignment to certain ideas of the attribute of holiness, which suppresses critical thinking, providing sanctified ideas with unhindered movement under protection. Either a bug, or a feature of human consciousness, in all previous eras, ensuring the well-being of the priestly estate.

    Having begun to notice how triggers work that translate people's reactions into the “holy” mode, turning off critical thinking, you notice an alarmingly large number of options for the triggers still in use - however, old values, such as “patriotism”, are already clearly exhausted.

    The success of political correctness, in particular, lies in the fact that she, too, somehow managed to penetrate the "holy of holies" and gain a foothold in the privileged field of uncritical perception.

    The geeks had nothing to oppose their pressure - and there was no reason to do it: they knew that there was some kind of moral norm, and, in the absence of alternatives, they decided that political correctness was this norm. And one by one, industry giants opened their gates to SJW, taking their faith, values ​​and side onto the eternal battlefield for social justice.

    It is, in fact, about access to the ethical DNA of these companies, which allowed political correctness to edit their moral genome: the basic principles of service policies in managing the community - what behavior is considered acceptable, what content is considered acceptable, what complaints of users and what sanctions to respond.

    Perhaps the secret of the newly successful exploitation of this vulnerability is the use of the “sanctity” master key on organizations, rather than specific people — organizations, on average, tend to be shy and afraid of noise more than loss, because the organization’s behavior is just a function of the behavior of individuals decision makers; and in the corporate environment, a rational choice between decisiveness, when all attention is riveted on one top, and the whole burden of responsibility is on his shoulders, and cowardice, which can easily be ignored, in other words, the choice between accepting responsibility and dumping it with smearing it on the whole team - often the choice is to drain.

    Nevertheless, the scale of the drain of both dynamic and demonstratively horizontal decision-making companies like Google, Twitter, and traditional corporations like Coca-Cola still looks, at times, grotesquely exaggerated - the ability to drown out critical thinking and readiness to exchange the psychological atmosphere in a team and even, partially, a public reputation, allowing sellers of invisible goods to perform their rituals to encourage diversification, drag out inequalities and expel evil spirits of micro-aggression right on the territory of mpusa looks frankly frightening.

    In addition to damage to the reputation, the atmosphere in the team (especially Google was distinguished by this, in which employees were caught between training on gender diversification and the launch of the censored Communist Party of China version of the search), companies also literally poured huge funds to maintain an insane staff of moderators. Now Facebook holds the record for the distance of the roof that left by a large margin - however, in their case, it is not so much SJW’s witchcraft as an attempt to drown out the voices from the US Congress reproaching Zuckerberg for conniving the propaganda of foreign countries conducted by Facebook advertising tools: la la, I don’t hear anything, a lot of new moderators have added, thousands of them. ”

    At the same time, in order to confront this valuable “explosion from the past”, one does not even have to try hard and create a new idea or a new philosophy: it is enough to cast doubt on the one that is already being dealt with. Unlike real DNA, ethical DNA is completely decipherable and editable - so as not to bring into the business of the 21st century any old ideological sore from the 19th century.

    Science comes to the rescue: ethical consulting


    Any ethical system from the time of Aristotle to this day is full of flaws. And it can and should be subjected to critical analysis, not taking on faith a single postulate or a single commandment - moreover, the depth of the dopilka of the value system depends on desire, skill and imagination - like “Wheelbarrow for pumping” in the garage of a good tuning studio: what if to drive away the same values ​​of political correctness (and at the same time conservative and ultra-right) through the discoveries of the last 150 years in psychology, genetics, behaviorism, mathematics (by checking how old ideas will react with game theory, for example) and economics?

    So you can inadvertently get a set of ethical attitudes that take into account the fullness of current knowledge about the nature and behavior of a person who will no longer split the audience into camps by the very fact of their existence - and even, go and help to improve the quality and level of user communication on the platform.

    If you approach the development of a moderation policy, and the value system based on it consciously and methodically, and not like a leap of faith - it’s scary, but there was no choice, then the result will be an instrument for the development of the community, and not a sacrifice to the gods of egalitarianism.

    You can generally throw away political correctness and take any other philosophy or system of values ​​to choose from, even at random - an audit, taking into account the scientific information received from the time of its founding, from any obscurantism can make a completely adequate and useful working system of values.

    Every business that at some point is faced with the need to take into account not only the laws of the country, the economy and physics, but also the ideas about what is good and what is bad, can assemble its own value system, because constants are moral very few, and in ethics there is not a single one at all - the fundamental nature of the principles is replaced by their grandiloquence: all the postulates that hide behind the aura of holiness are the first candidates to leave the temple.

    But few businesses may need this. But what everyone needs is to take a critical approach into service; even having accepted the ideals of political correctness as a corporate system, you can always cross out or rewrite a couple of rule points, even at the risk of consistency, for the sake of their better digestibility.

    As soon as businesses begin to look at proposed moral imperatives with the same eyes as commercial offers, evaluating them according to the same criteria as commercial offers, and not by the brightness of the righteous fire in the eyes or the hardness in the voice of the righteous, the number of salespeople of pure ideals will sharply go to It’s declining, only by this one has sharply improved the psychological climate of any community.

    PSNow mankind already has enough knowledge that, if the Aristotelian task of explaining moral behavior is not solved, then at least offer a complete hypothesis about the nature of morality, based on evolutionary psychology. But the prospects for the development of ethics as a science do not end there.

    The scientific theory of morality, which gives a complete picture of the nature of morality, is the foundation for the true development of ethics, as a science that no longer explains morality, but develops it.

    Publication Plan:

    1. This is the first part of an ethical analysis of the problem of political corruption - PC and business.
    2. In the sequel, we will talk about what should replace political correctness.
    3. The biological foundation of ethics. The hypothesis of the evolutionary origin of morality.
    4. Ethical methodology. How to formalize morality.
    5. The future of ethics. The Prospects for Conscious Moral Reassembly

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