Objectivity of Morality

Once upon a time there was a system operator who installed a giant computer system, which he had designed himself and installed a brand spanking new Linux OS which he had tweaked a little and on it he installed the best program he had ever designed, based on his own intellect, he actually created a program with free will that was self-aware. On a 7-day experiment he decided to let the program run, except that he established four rules for the program:

1. No killing other active program processes (including child processes) because it the memory allocated didn't get freed properly, the stack space got cluttered, and it created core dumps the sysop had to clean up after.
2. No killing your own process (only normal terminations and exits allowed) for the same reasons as above... memory allocation, stack space, etc.
3. No intruding on other program's page space, again because the memory sometimes didn't get freed properly, data could get overwritten and corrupted, etc.
4. No using malloc(); to get memory, only safe_malloc(); because programs had a tendency to abuse malloc(); and forget to free the memory once they were done with it.

Satisfied he went away and came back the following day to see how things were going. It turns out that his first process had fork()ed a number of child processes and those child processes had in turn created further child processes. Unfortunately almost none of them were adhering to the four, simple rules. The stack space had almost run out, the load average was almost 6, and the hard drive was running constantly due to memory problems due to lots of memory allocated and never freed. Worse yet there was a large number of core dumps everywhere from active processes illegally terminated.

With a heavy sigh the sysop settled down and selected 8 running processes worth keeping. He saved up all the active processes to an empty HD and then wiped the memory, reset the stack space, deleted all the core dumps and released the 8 processes into the fresh data space. Whewh!

Coming back the next day he found that those processes had spawned a number of child processes and those processes further child processes and things were a little better, but still there was a lot of rule breaking going on. Finding a program that was running better than all the rest, the sysop decided to give that program a special space all by itself to be protected from other programs so they could continue to run and make the kind of sentient programs he was looking for. However, to his chagrin, when he came back the next day the child processes of that favored program had been enslaved by other programs for no good reason. Outraged he empowered one of those programs to unleash horrible plagues on the enslaving programs. When that didn't work, he just killed the first-spawned process of all the enslaving processes and in the confusion got the processes freed from the slavery only to find the enslaving processes in hot pursuit of the other processes. So the sysop killed a bunch more processes, empowered the favored processes to move into the new area he had prepared only to find that other processes had invaded that area. So he empowered the programs to wipe out the squatting programs, cleaned up all the core dumps, freed up some memory and stack space, and called it a day.

Two days later he found some upstart British-accented program claiming that the sysop was "a petty, unjust ... capriciously malevolent bully" that didn't even exist anyway. He further went on to claim that rule 1 was acceptable because killing other processes violated their rights and caused them pain, as well as rule 3 (for the same reason) but that rule 2 was truly unjust and that processes had every right to self-terminate in unauthorized ways and that rule 4 only existed to prevent programs from enjoying life. Safe_malloc(); it turned out, was far too restrictive and cumbersome for said program. It complained that the sysop (which didn't even exist) had violated numerous of his own laws of morality by terminating processes, which violated their rights, never even making mention of the fact that the sysop (by virtue of creating them, owning the operating system, and the hardware, and the stack space, and the memory they dwelled in, and teh HD they wrote upon) basically owned them and had every legal and moral right to do as he pleased.

With a sigh the sysop went to bed for the night with the plan to preserve the working programs, destroy the rule breaking programs, and patch the OS in such a way that none of this nonsense would ever happen again. "I'll start first thing in the morning..." he thought as he drifted off to sleep.

Upon observing that man must use his rational faculty to understand reality, it becomes a moral imperative to focus on using one's own mind to identify reality and to come to understand it. Upon observing that man's survival depends upon productive work, it becomes a moral imperative to perform productive work. These assume in each case that one has chosen one's own life and survival as one's highest value. Without that choice or some other choice such as performing God's will, no morality is needed or necessary. Morality is a set of principles of action to guide one in one's efforts to achieve or to keep one's values. There is a hierarchy of values. The values of the rational man will be objective, yet they can be customized to his highly unique nature. We are all complex and highly differentiated individuals. Our minds literally do not work in the same way. This does not make them subjective, because they are objectively different, yet in most cases we are each capable of objectively identifying facts of reality.

As we work out our hierarchy of values, one may identifying going to MIT as a value if one wants to be an engineer. But, if one wants to be musician, one would identify attending Juilliard School of Music as a value. Fortunately not everyone chooses to become an engineer and not everyone chooses to become a musician. Yet the choice of each may be rich in objective choices on the part of anyone who chooses one or the other. But, I have to recognize my own weakness in processing sound information and my lack of rhythm, so it would not be very rational for me to choose to become a musician. Basically morality, such as one should not initiate the use of force against others, is objective. And being objective, it has to take some cognizance of our individual complexity and uniqueness.