How to Choose a Creed ?

Doc, thanks for your last comment (Tuesday 8:54 pm). You ask the right questions and I think you put them the way they should be.

Now how to answer them ? I may indeed come up some day with an "synthetic a-priori" or "ethical system" or, as I would prefer to call it, a belief system. But this is not essential here as many other people can do it and there are many other such systems around already (See for example the God-u-like site, which, by the way, includes an entry on Logical Positivism).

What matters is how you choose one, and, in a way even more vital to one's own survival and suffering avoidance, how do you notice and reject those like militant Islam, Nazism or (in my view) Logical Positivism, which are really toxic. Making the right choice is important because, as I said earlier, it is impossible not to have a belief system (more on this later if you like). It is also fiendishly difficult because, unless you have a massive event like WWII, the link between a faith and its impact may be hard to pinpoint.

Because a belief system controls you in large part, and not the other way around, it cannot be deliberately manufactured nor fully analysed. Otherwise, it would mean you are in control, and the thing under review would certainly not be your true belief system. So no one can construct a belief system. Beliefs emerge in a continuous and largely random process and eventually combine into systems of varying degrees of tightness. People who "come up" with fully explicit systems rarely invent anything. They are assemblers and rarely manage to encompass really complete systems. If you want to see them you have to take a larger view through history, litterature, etc.

So I am not going to construct anything, but yes, if I do come up with something, it will be according to my own feelings and preferences because what else do I have ? Your own feelings and preferences are what drive you to like Logical Positivism.

So, what I say is that belief systems are given, they are not built (no engineering here please). But I do not say that, once a given system is there, in front of you, you have to swallow it in one gulp or run away. You may discuss it and, that is what philosophy is about. Philosophers are like the accountants of beliefs (perhaps this is why they may be so pusillanimous and irritating at times). They count points in the battle between systems. Because it is a battle. Since beliefs control people, defending or attacking them engages the whole of yourself, ego, feelings, education and all. Therefore, the process of "discussing" beliefs is a necessarily messy affair involving all kinds of human postures like cool, rational, discourse but also appeals to sensitivity, to authority, to poetry, art, you name it. In some cases, of course, it may have to involve threats and even violence. WWII, as we said, was largely a "discussion" about beliefs and values.

All this is bad news. But pretending that it can be avoided is either foolish or deceitful. There is no nice way to synthesize cleanly modular ethical building blocks that people could assemble in various ways according to their needs, while being fully aware and in control of the process. It is a little bit like the Gödel Theorem : you cannot build a belief systems whith those very hands it is its purpose to control.

The last question is that of human nature. Well, I do not know what it is. If certain belief systems seem to work well and produce desirable results (like 'Be free so trust but ensure you can verify'), we may surmise that they have a good fit with human nature. But there is little else we can say. So if "human nature" changes (and I see what you mean here), belief systems will have to as well. But this need not worry us since there is a constant supply of new systems. So we are always guaranteed that at some point in the future one will emerge that will have a better fit with the changed circumstances than the one we had previously.

So, and to summarise, there is no point in talking about 'a priori ethics' since all ethical/belief systems are a-priori. Yours no less than any other.