Friday, July 24, 2020

The Greatest Sum of Pleasures with the Lowest Sum of Pains shall be the Principle of Moral and Legislation!

I always wonder why there are some bunch still interested in boring traditional stuff such as Opera and Poetry, and some government subsidy it. I am rather able to understand those who enthusiastically observe their supporting football team matches with their expense. I am interested in neither side meanwhile I would rather like to support latter and abolish subsidy for the former because it offers interests and pleasures for the majority and produces a higher aggregate revenue if I had to chose either of these two sides.

Our function of body and sense generating pleasures and pains is provided by our creator (You may call God). By contrast, morals, policies, and activities whose policy does not explicitly show the trade off between the calculus based on pleasures vs pains should be heavily criticised with an enormous scepticism, and we should possibly avoid or even counter-act against to abolish.

The example which we should be highly sceptical and try to abolish is monarchism and tribunal traditionalism. The political and moral theories of these two usually ignore the aforementioned calculus of pleasures and pains. They enforces individuals to follow their orders and customs merely because they are long-lived tradition people have looked up and monarchy or tribunal chief are the symbol of stability and longevity of civilisation. It is simply a subjective interpretation of the status-quo which indoctrinates the rest majority individuals with superstition.

There used to be a time when the existence of monarchy was in a high demand. At this time, the community network of the majority individuals was so primitive that it was restricted by obstacle of natural landscapes and communication barriers mainly of language. Then, conflicts between various feudal tribes were common, and people sought a powerful charismatic figure binding people together. Under a threat of frequent conflict, there needed to be someone who has an ultimate power of final decision making processes when the outcome of their discussion was unstable without some enforcement unit stabilising it.

Then, as shown in the algebra, initially introduced by Jeremy Bentham's Fragment on Government, individuals used to demand the strength of monarchy stabilising their living environment while sacrificing utility (pleasures minus pain) drained by monarchy monopolising their resources in their living environment.



On the other hand, thanks to the development of international trades and information technology, the strength which monarchy provides with individuals is insignificant for maximising the sun of the utility any more. The global trade based on the free market equilibrium has enabled individuals to mutually agree with each other through the spontaneously derived market equilibrium force without any physical single authority enforcing the decision making process. The information technology development has enabled citizens to rationally accept and understand pluralistic norms and values of various unique individuals living in various different regions and cultures, and to even start to share new norms and values in a shared cybernetwork.

The aristocrats nowadays mean corporate elites and government bureaucrats. The form of this modern aristocracy is now interpreted as meritocracy. There tends to be a gap between those who are able to obtain talents and skills highly demanded for sustaining modern technologies and trade affairs and those who are in the shortage of them. As long as this gap exist, individuals hardly forfeit the utility derived from modern aristocrats' wisdom even though majority individuals have to accept the economic and social inequality caused by this distribution which these modern aristocrats own a higher share of control-ability.

No comments: