The Ten Commitments
July 29th, 2009
Bertrand Russell‘s ethical and modern replacement for the Ten Commandments (Deut. 5):
- Do not lie to yourself.
- Do not lie to other people, unless they are exercising tyranny.
- When you think it is your duty to inflict pain, scrutinise your reasons closely.
- When you desire power, examine yourself carefully as to why you desire it.
- When you have power, use it to build up people, not to constrict them.
- Do not attempt to live without vanity, since this is impossible, but choose the right audience from which to seek admiration.
- Do not think of yourself as separate, wholly self-contained unit.
- Be reliable.
- Be just.
- Be good-natured.
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Nicely put
Bertrand Russell and ethics don’t go together very well when you consider the following quote out of his book ‘ The Impact of Science and Society’, commenting on how the banker created wars are not killing us quick enough:
“War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect but perhaps
bacteriological war may prove effective. If a black death could spread
throughout the world once every generation, survivors could procreate
freely without making the world too full. This state of affairs might be
unpleasant but what of it.”
Russell is expressing a view, long held by many who might be considered “oligarchs”, and who, for many generations, have held themselves to be superior to the vast majority of the population of this planet.
Bertrand Russell ethics? = genocidical maniac!
I’m not entirely sure that paragraph provides enough context. Very few topics are out of bounds for theoretical discussion by philosophers, so to vilify someone for that kind of statement is probably a little disingenuous. Still, I’ve not read that book, so I can’t realistically have an opinion on his intent.
If I were to ask someone to provide the simplest way to remove world hunger borne of too many mouths to feed, the answer would probably be the removal of those mouths. It’s also true throughout history that numerous wars, poor or non-existent healthcare, abysmal nutrition, low value of life and other factors have contributed to keep the world’s population fairly balanced. It’s only in the last 80 or so years than populations have just exploded, with contributing factors including increased longevity due to medicine and nutrition, fewer wars (or how we wage war), and of course religious dogma.
In that context, wars really aren’t killing us quick enough: particularly if we keep insisting that every sperm is sacred, life at any cost, and it’s the duty of all good [insert religion here] to breed for [insert god here]. That doesn’t make me a genocidal maniac, nor an advocate of it. Merely a pragmatist in the face of population multiplication.
Bertrand Russels stance on ‘over-population’ is quite clear,
committing Genocide by launching bacterial warfare with the very purpose of killing mass numbers of innocent people.
Now question yourself if you think poisoning the planet with disease with the purpose of killing millions of humans is acceptable as ethical.
I don’t for a moment think it is ethical, but nor was I arguing that it was.
@fabian
Russel never made any such statement in terms of a suggestion or proposal. He merely points out the logical approach to our inability to limit our own population in order to drive home our stupidity. The whole point is that the ethical solution must be realised by the reader; As with good teaching practice, you don’t give the answer, you let the student find it for themselves having guided them through the facts.
The horror of the easy answer immediately brings feelings of revulsion and reminders of Dictators and Wars that make us actually think about the problem rather than being spoonfed AN answer.
As much as it pains me to say this, he did mean what he said as a proposal.
Bertrand had a very keen interest in Eugenics and social engineering.
Bertrand Russell
(The Scientific Outlook, 1972)
…impregnation will be regarded in an entirely different manner, more in the light of a surgical operation, so that it will be thought not ladylike to have it performed in the natural manner.
in a letter to Alys Pearsall he wrote:
“Thee might observe incidentally that if the State paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child- this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”
And early editions of his book Marriage and Morals (1929) asserted:
“In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another…. It seems on the whole fair to regard negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from questions of humanity) would be highly undesirable.”
In all fairness he did change his racist stance:
in New Hopes for a Changing World (1951):
“It is sometimes maintained that racial mixture is biologically undesirable. There is no evidence whatever for this view. Nor is there, apparently, any reason to think that Negroes are congenitally less intelligent than white people, but as to that it will be difficult to judge until they have equal scope and equally good social conditions.”