Bad things happen all the time. That's not news. But when bad things happen, whether they are large-scale societal problems or personal issues, we want to know who is responsible so they can be punished or rehabilitated or make restitutions or whatever we think the appropriate response should be. In general, I think many people are of the mindset that if you broke it, you should fix it.

Many people think of liberty as the ability to do what you want to do without outside interference. Of course that's too simplistic a definition because often what we wish to do may interfere with someone else's liberty. So we adjust and say that liberty is the ability to do what you want to do as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's ability to do the same.

Defining abstract concepts is tricky. What is love? Or hate? Liberty? Equality? Everyone knows what these words mean, yet they mean different things to different people. Inevitably this leads to conflict. When you think about it, it's a miracle that our language works at all.

A few posts ago, I said that capitalism was amoral. That wasn't entirely correct. As a bald friend of mine pointed out to me, economic systems are rooted in morality. They represent how we believe resources should be distributed among people, which certainly falls under the umbrella of morality.

If there is one thing that all human beings share, it is our nearly entirely unmitigated ignorance of the world around us. If you took the knowledge of one person and divided it by everything a human being could possibly learn, the fraction would be effectively zero.

I'm not an economist. I'm not going to pretend I know much about it (though it's an area I plan on investigating in the future). But it doesn't take much knowledge to realize that economics and morality are separate subjects  - even though they often intersect. If modern American society has a failing, it is that we often let our economic system make moral choices for us.

If you know me, you probably know that I have a degree in physics. While I've never actually worked in a scientific field, my background in physics plays a large role in my views in the world. Science teaches us that nothing we think we know about the material world is certain. Time and time again, humanity's view of the world is tipped on its head.

So I'm back from my little hiatus. The worlds seems to be a different place, one of nightmares. But I realize this is a selfish thought. The world hasn't changed, only my view of it. People less privileged than me have been living this nightmare for all of America's history. But that's always the problem. No matter how much you empathize with others, you can't truly understand until you go through it yourself. And I have only experienced the tiniest bit of this pain, vicariously at that.

I have an irrational fear of failure. When it comes time for me to try something new or put myself out into the world, I feel this rising anxiety that freezes me in my tracks. It makes no sense. On an intellectual level, I know that failure is good. We learn more from our failures than our successes. We never know quite how much we can achieve until we reach the point of failure. 

The world is a complex place. Human beings hate that. We like simple stories. That's why we're so susceptible to bias. We're programmed to take the complicated, nuanced world around us and reduce it to concepts our feeble minds can understand. We all do it. We can't help it.

My thoughts are a little jumbled today. I have several ideas for this blog post but I'm not sure how they are going to fit together. So these are just random, unrelated thoughts that I may turn into longer blog posts later. If you'd like to see them, don't be afraid to ask.

All right, this one is going to be a little out of my comfort zone, and maybe a little controversial. It's going to be about bias - how different biases might overlap and become conflated so that one bias may be mistaken for another which may result in confusion and an inability to correctly diagnose the problems our society faces.

So I'm a big fan of empathy. I think it's one of the most important tools humans have. It's the only hope we have as a species of ever ending the millennia of petty hatreds that divide us and hold us back from progress. When we fail to empathize with other groups of people, resentment and hate are the usual results.

What I've come to understand as I've gotten older is that it's not as important what you think about certain issues as compared to how you've come to your conclusion and how you think in general. Being "right" is not as important as using the "right" processes to arrive at that conclusion. Doing the "right" thing is not as important as doing it the "right" way.

I consider myself a patriot. I love America, especially its people. But America is country full of contradictions and, to be honest, hypocrites. This, despite the way it sounds, is not a criticism. It is an inevitability of human nature. The founding fathers set us up. They set the bar so high that they had to have known that we would probably never reach it. They were geniuses.

In morality, context matters. Many of us would probably like to think that what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. But it's not that simple. What is moral in one time and place may be immoral in another time and place. As I've stated before, I believe that the purpose of morality is to learn how to act in our actual self-interest (as opposed to selfishly). What is good for me is good for others. 

In my last post, I concluded that morality is related to self-interest. What is good for me is generally good for everyone else. And what is good for someone else is generally good for me. Of course, people will still disagree on what is "good". I'm not even sure that "good" can be well-defined. It's a little different for everyone. There are certain things that almost everyone wants - security, material comfort, happiness, freedom - but even if we were to agree on those things, the order in which we prioritize them will lead to differences in opinion on what our best course of action should be.

Simple questions are not always simple to answer. If you ask most people what morality is, they would probably say it's about determining right from wrong or good from evil. But that's not really an answer at all because what do we even mean by the words "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "evil"? In one sense, we all know what they mean, but too often they are used lazily in place of critical thinking. For instance, let's say, "Murder is wrong." I, and almost every human being, agree with this statement. But let's ask the question, "Why is murder wrong?"

So in my last post I admitted to being a skeptic. But I am also a pragmatist. It doesn't matter if we can satisfy some stringent philosophical definition of knowledge. I know the sun is going to come up tomorrow. It's just that when I say "know" and when a philosopher says "know", we mean different things. As a wise man once said, "'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings." Most people have never even encountered a philosophical definition of knowledge, but they still make claims of knowledge.

So I'm a skeptic, in almost every sense of the word. Like, epistemology is a trip, man. What is knowledge? I'm not going to pretend I know much about philosophy. My skepticism does not have deep philosophical roots. Or maybe it does. There must be some school of philosophy out there that thinks the way I do. It's just that when I think of possible sources of knowledge, they are all flawed in some way.