Research:MDem/5.3r/1999 IBE

I think that everybody deserves housing, health care, and education, says the social-democrat.
"I hold that everyone deserves". "I defend that everybody deserves". "I guess that all people deserve". "I suppose that all humans deserve". "I imagine that all human beings deserve". "I believe" that everybody deserves.

I believe... that everybody deserves.
I believe... that everybody.

Let's stop and think about this arrangement of words for a bit. Isn't this an awfully strange construction? "I believe that everybody"?
To believe something is generally to reflect on the world and think or guess that something is likely to hold true. Or alternatively, to really want something to happen, without necessarily being absolutely certain it will actually occur. To believe something is generally not to know it with certainty, or even to know it in any solid way at all.
But everybody is a concept with a bit more absoluteness or finality to it. If everybody had an office chair, that would be a lot of office chairs. If everybody jumped off a cliff, that would be a terrifying prospect. If everybody was a fan of one specific sports team, it would begin to shift the expected outcomes of a lot of sports matches, because the league would have to re-calculate what kinds of match-ups were even worth having in light of every match having to contain a particular team, and perhaps some teams becoming seen as the "inevitable" or "impossible" pick to win, depending on why exactly people root for the team everyone likes. If everybody stayed home from school or from college lectures it would be on the news. If everybody just happened to have a portrait of Stalin somewhere in their house, you'd immediately ask what country was being talked about other than the United States.

I believe that everybody is a very strange thing to say, were it the case that you were talking about something you expect everyone to do. It's one thing, and probably a mostly harmless one, to say "I believe that everybody should have". But if you said "I believe that everybody should do"? Imagine that everyone in the United States had a copy of Pokémon HeartGold or SoulSilver and you said "I believe everybody should catch a shiny Legendary Pokémon". This task requires a 1 in eight-point-two thousand die roll, and can take anywhere from three consecutive hours to a year. How many people who booted up the game at least once do you think would actually catch one? Probably not all three hundred million people.

This is the thing about making a statement that starts with "I believe that everybody". Whatever comes at the end of the statement, if a statement tries to predict that individual people are going to actively complete some particular action, but it also claims that that action can be completed by all people, it is effectively claiming that the actions of each individual person are certain. Because if someone's belief that every Pokémon player will catch a shiny Entei is indeed accurate, that cannot happen without every individual person arriving at a successful result. The rate of all individuals together catching a shiny Pokémon must become 100%, and as time goes by, the present probability of each individual having succeeded in the past must become 1.

What is truly interesting about these kinds of statements is not what people wish for — not how big or small it is, and not even how it will be achieved. It is the act of reducing big, long, and potentially complicated journeys into a single number where we assume the journey already ended. That the adventure itself is not worth spending any time on, and that knowing the course of the entire incomplete ordeal in advance is something that is easy and simple for anyone to do. If "I believe that everybody" can make it to the end of a Pokémon game, tutorial areas, walkthroughs, and example gameplay footage become irrelevant. If "I believe that everybody" can solve a Sudoku, no need to explain how to do the puzzle. If "I believe that everybody" can learn to knit a sweater, no need to look up any patterns. If "I believe that everybody" can become a class-conscious worker... how? If there was an actual series of events between now and then, or if some unlucky suburban boy summoned up his fairy godparents and wished that everybody perfectly understood capitalism tomorrow, would there be any difference?

There is one particular problem with "I believe that everybody" statements: they appear to have all the content in the world, but they actually say nothing. Almost every printed novel spends hundreds of pages not skipping to the end and saying "a story happened" but going over all the things that happen between "I believe that" and "everybody". To spend time exactly laying out the route to an ending isn't an act of overconfidence. It is, in fact, the only way to have concrete proof that the author has a clear and un-confused understanding of how the characters' lives and accomplishments happened.

A metallic rule corroded

"I believe that everybody" statements are not good at descriptively explaining the world. This should seem evident enough once you have seen an "I believe that everybody" statement applying to any task where there is a less than 100 in 100 chance someone will have either the skill or the patience to succeed within any given period of time. But... what if it was very important that somebody did the thing other people hoped that they would do? Would that prior context of some other person needing the task to be completed change a person's actual probability of success?

If somebody was about to lift a bar weighing 100 pounds, and a coach was either not in the gym or in the gym specifically telling the weightlifter on every failure they shouldn't have not succeeded, the bar would still have the same mass of 45.4 kilograms.

Whether we like it or not, human beings are finite, and each person has a particular level of ability to produce a successful result at any given task, separately from whether anybody believes they can finish it or needs them to finish that task. This creates a very big and very under-examined problem in the field of ethics. How should our mental conception of what an ethical requirement generally is or can be change if it turns out that our mental model of what individuals or groups of people are capable of turns out to be different from what we believed it to be at the moment we created that ethical principle? Surely if we saw someone fail at a specific task in real time, we would simply update our expectations. But what if every single time we tried to predict that someone was capable of fulfilling a moral requirement that prediction was always wrong in every case? What if the entire concept of "should" was not what we thought it was? What if the entire concept of ethics was simply wrong?

At this point, you probably have an objection. The entire concept of ethics... wrong? Incorrect? How could that be possible? Isn't ethics something of a tool or technology as opposed to a descriptive science? Ethics is a bunch of hanging ideas that we float around and test out in various situations and see if they serve us. Ethics is a distant goal to aspire to, or a neat discovery to share with people in a blog post in hopes they will become your friends. Ethics is this. Ethics is that.

What you might not have realized is that if you just objected to the concept of ethics being incorrect, then you implicitly said an "I believe that everybody" statement. I believe that everybody should think that ethics means this and functions in the real world in this particular way. But although someone might or might not believe that, whether the projected outcome someone believes reflects the way the world around them descriptively functions in their own everyday experiences is entirely another story.

For one of the simplest cases, let us examine the golden rule. This proposition takes a few different forms in various ancient religions and well-known secular philosophies, but one of the best known formulations is: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. This abstract sentiment can be further broken down into a series of basic assumptions as follows:

1. People exist within a social setting where they have regular contact with other people.
2. People possess the ability to do kind acts for others.
   
3. People have some idea what other people would want.
   
4. Acts of kindness will be appreciated.
   
5. Acts of kindness will be remembered.
   
6. Acts of kindness will affect the other person's future or general well-being.
   
7. Effects of an act of kindness will be passed on to other people.
   
8. Other people will be affected by the second act of kindness, and pass on the effects to further people.
   
9. The chain of people will eventually create a closed loop which somehow comes back to, if not precisely the very first person to be depicted in the example, at least some of the previous people in the chain, creating the illusion that human behavior is an overall amorphous pool of "culture" that each person simply contributes to and freely takes out of, as if local culture were some sort of magic wishing pond where the "magic" was that the pond was shallow enough to take a coin out.

As simple as this rule may seem on the surface, it is actually rather complicated on the inside. There are many layers of steps where the basic assumptions that cause the rule to be applicable could simply fail to be the case. An ethicist would refer to these situations as a "dysfunctional society". But that is not to say that such anomalous situations and dysfunctional societies do not happen, or that people should not be prepared for them to be what happens instead of the desired outcome.

One of the most obvious ways for this set of steps to be disrupted is for the long chain of people to simply stop in the middle and never come back to the first few people at the beginning. There are a lot of reasons this could happen. Perhaps a few people are genuinely selfish. But even if the vast majority of people are not, the possibility the people in the middle will carry on the chain is not guaranteed.

For a somewhat dramatic example, let's imagine that you live in the 1930s Soviet Union. You are an ordinary person. You get up and go to work every day. You have seen any number of odd, slightly corny slogans around you at times talking about how to build a brighter future. But one you remember, for some reason, is someone saying once that everyone should be proud to be an employee belonging to a business territory and contribute each day to the shared city and town facilities within society so that other people will do the same and your contribution will eventually come back to you. (They probably said it in a shorter, less awkward choice of words.) To you that makes sense. As people put up railroads, there will be railroads, there will be national parks when there are foresters and park rangers, it's the workers that build theater buildings and schools and fire departments. As people cooperate to build industries, everyone will slowly earn money, and however slowly it seems to be going right now there will be more stuff in general and more opportunities for leisure. You wish there didn't have to be so much time spent on tank engines but it is what it is.

Then one day you find out your neighbor got arrested. The investigation recently ended and she was released. The authorities were rather vague about the details. But when you ask her about what happened, she is all too quick to let loose information she probably shouldn't have said. The authorities were looking around for evidence of a conspiracy to attack the government. She showed no signs of being connected to the upper tiers of the conspiracy, so they ultimately let her go. But little did they know, she was part of a diffuse effort to sabotage ordinary workplaces, putting in seemingly valid work some days, other days secretly delivering a big hit to some of the worst decisions this accursed government makes. Fill an engine with sand here, leave a train boiler un-fixed there. She seems to have assumed that you might be interested in joining the "fun", because in her view, nobody in their right mind would actually be loyal to the central party or the increasingly ineffective "bureaucracy".

Leading up to this point, there have been two major ongoing developments: the development of the Trotskyites, an only partially-known faction that wanted to create some kind of second Communist party and take over the government, and a broader sea of people with vaguely anarchist, right-Liberal, or village-populist leanings who have no specific ulterior motive yet are tired of everything and simply want to break it all apart. The central government has been seeing less and less difference between the two each year and persecuting everyone in both of them plus a few ordinarily-sloppy managers just as ferociously. One big sea of chaos, one solution.

Let's compare this hypothetical situation back to the golden rule.

1. ✔ People have regular contact with other people.　 — other than seasonal workers.
2. ✘ People can do kind acts.　 — no, due to the slowly brewing age of cold wars and demanding government plans, some people are drained.
3. ✘ People know what other people want.　 — no, due to political polarization different swaths of people have wildly different goals and desires.
4. ✘ Kindness will be appreciated.　 — only by those who consider wrecking to be acts of kindness.
5. ✘ Kindness will be remembered.　 — no, due to rapid social change and people abandoning plans started earlier.
6. ✘ Kindness will affect the other person's well-being.　 — for complex reasons some people's situations may get worse as the historical situation develops even if other people are nice to them; everyone remains drained and it's hard to fill them back up.
7. ✘ Kindness will be passed on.　 — no, some people will turn against those who are kind.
8. ✔ Further people will be affected.　 — sometimes, to some extent, but only a fraction of outgoing connections will produce success.
9. ✘ Further people will be affected.　 — no, society becomes polarized into some sections that grow and some that disintegrate.
10. ✘ The chain will make a complete loop.　 — no, many people feel like everything they do is for nothing.

The golden rule states that when you do good things for other people just because they are the right thing to do, it will encourage other people to have better behavior, and through the indirect effect of many people chaining against each other perhaps in many directions, you will ultimately be able to create a better society through your own individual actions. But when there are severe antagonisms inside society, the chain is easily broken, and the rule overall fails to hold.

Of course, perhaps the limitation here could be that we have the wrong formulation of the golden rule.

One variation on the golden rule is its inverse, the silver rule: Do not do unto others as you would not have others do unto you. On the surface, this rule appears slightly more appropriate to the situation. People are interrupting their usual patterns of behavior with new patterns of behavior that are causing problems, so maybe if we were to tell them to stop doing bad behaviors, the chain of reciprocity could be rebuilt. But try telling that to your neighbor, and she will probably tell you that when the Soviet government stops doing things to people none of its citizens should do, she'll stop. Your neighbor's idea of what is ethical is completely different from the central party's idea of what is ethical, allowing her to assert that when the Soviet government doesn't follow her ethical rules then society is dysfunctional and not worth upholding. From her vantage point she is the government.

So, the silver rule didn't really work. Perhaps we could try the platinum rule: Do unto others as others would do unto themselves, and others will do unto you as you would do unto you. If you follow this one, you are going to have a lot of work to do attempting to get people's complaints and demands heard through legal channels. With so few people already doing this, it's going to be a severe uphill battle, and you have no real guarantee that any of the people you currently see giving up are going to turn around and stop doing what they're doing right now. You would not want to see the headlines from 70 years later — "Soviet regime defeated, of course it was", and so on and so forth. Giving these people what they want is not the way to get them to stop, as "not stopping" is directly tied to what they want.

There is also the converse golden rule, sometimes dubbed the bronze rule: Do unto you as you would do unto others. This one is not very applicable, unless you consider wrecking to be a moral offense against yourself.

If the golden rule and the platinum rule didn't work out, maybe we could try Kant's categorical imperative, which could be described as combining the golden rule with the silver rule, the bronze rule, and a few other things.

You must act only according to the principle
1) that you would will to become a universal law
2) that you treat yourself and others as an end before a means
3) that everyone's will binds universal legislation onto itself
4) that universal legislation can bind everyone into a society

This one is a bit complicated, but a bit more robust. First, you cannot take actions that you would not want other people taking. (The silver rule.) This will not be effective on your neighbor because she would will wrecking to become a universal behavioral law. Second, you must treat the humanity in each and every person as an end before a means; you cannot use people as your tools. (The bronze rule.) Your neighbor will dismiss this one because she believes the central government to be using people as its tools, and thus believes her power to destroy it to be morally justified. Third, the categorical imperative gains its force to regulate people from people consenting to it. Your neighbor didn't consent to Stalin's government so she is going to exempt herself. Fourth, the purpose of the categorical imperative is to bind people into a society, which is assumed to be an inherently desirable goal. Your neighbor does not find Soviet society inherently desirable, so she is going to try to exempt herself from that too.

Out of all four prongs of the categorical imperative, basically all of them have failed. The most you can get out of it is maybe the second prong, where if you simply say that you believe that everybody should not destroy societies just because they do not understand them, because you said so, you might almost have something to argue. The consent provisions in prongs 3 and 4 haven't served you in getting people to behave better, because they begin with the assumption that everyone is part of one continuous society (the so-called "kingdom of ends", which is conceptually similar to a literal republic) rather than two discontinuous and antagonistic societies. So you are going to have to bridge that blatant trench between two separate populations somehow. Two separate populations with two different goals... Two separate populations with two different "governments".

Wait. You feel like you've seen that somewhere before.
We have been nothing... we will be all... For tomorrow all in place... The workers' International unites the human race.

Right. All of this has always been about bridging the divide between separate populations. Your head is spinning now, but, maybe... if there was such a thing as a Communist International inside the bounds of one giant country, this could still be fixed.

After a little research, you come back with a little information on the Trotskyites. This is... just outdated stuff Lenin said once decades ago? Weird, but at least checking it out from the library isn't going to get you in trouble. It says the provinces of North America were all supposed to combine into one entity. And that Lenin didn't want the state to be an instrument of violence. Fat chance on either of those at this point. The idea is vaguely that the Fourth International is a collection of workers, just a basic one with little more than the International above it. Kind of like that stuff the "Internationale" says. Which is all weirdly outdated now. Did... did they take it way too literally? Like the bourgeoisie in the song are "The Stalinists"? This is a mess. Maybe you can do something with this, if you can get past the urge to stop and blurt out "what kind of idiotic—" in the middle against whoever thought this was a sensible interpretation.

You head back to your neighbor. Because people are revolting against Soviet society to restore the goals of the Russian Revolution, you explain, she is actually part of Trotskyist society, which is a simple chain of workers connected together for the sake of workers, which is the Fourth International, because the Fourth International is whatever government is generated out of the sheer connection of all workers to all workers, but workers cover most of the world, so therefore, the Fourth International joins people together across separate populations inside country areas, because it isn't first defined by the existing boundaries of countries anyway. This is it — she falls under the categorical imperative if she will only agree that she is joined to other workers in a chain of reciprocity on the basis of workers defending workers, because if another worker defends you you have to stand for other workers.

Your neighbor points out that the categorical imperative and the Trotskyist golden rule are two separate unrelated rules.

The chemistry of metallic rules

Within traditional writings on ethics, law, and "freedom", it has generally been assumed that the concepts of "a society" and "our society" are the same thing. When Kant writes about the way to achieve perpetual peace, or Rousseau writes about the concept of society being built on a social contract, they each assume that the act of studying one society, the single society they live in, is enough to understand the entire process of how people form republics and how all republican societies function.

Ever since about 1800, this has been a catastrophically wrong assumption.

The concept of a consensual society put together by a social contract makes some kind of sense when society is perfectly singular. But what if a society that was previously one suddenly divided in two? If a group of individuals inside a society suddenly decides nothing the surrounding society says is applicable toward regulating their behavior, what does the concept of a social contract even mean in that case? The intuitive thing to realize would be that once five or ten people break off from following the "universally-legislating" moral code of a particular countable population of people, there is not really anything stopping three of the ten people from spontaneously breaking off from the other seven. But, on the other hand, you also have no guarantee that every faction that breaks off from a larger population will not stay together. It could be the case that fifteen people break off from a larger group of people but their moral or philosophical code is perfectly consistent, so they only remain together and keep gathering more members who all continue to keep the group stable. In the latter case, what has happened really was just a difference of opinion. Fifteen people all came together and decided on a different moral code designed around reciprocity, which simply happened to be incompatible with the process that was already going but turned out to be fine by itself. How could any particular group of people tell the difference between these two cases, and tell if any particular moral code is materially stable and in that particular sense "valid"?

Before going any further, we need to make sure we understand the situation itself and all of the traditional ethical concepts that have typically been applied to situations like these.

One of the first breakthroughs formally recorded by ethical philosophers was the separation of morality from ethics. Morality is understood to be the various theories of Right and Wrong actions that are understood within particular local populations before populations divide. Ethics is at least traditionally claimed to be the overall study of a world containing multiple moral codes: deontology, consequentialism, and several such specific, potentially-conflicting schemes for how to define ethical principles or testable propositions. In the "Soviet Union" scenario, the populations are technically divided into two different countable moralities, which each may claim they are the only possible study of ethics that rules out others, but which are actually only localized philosophical tendencies inside the overall field of ethics.

Sitting between the fields of ethics and anthropology is the concept of countable cultures. This concept has been somewhat fuzzy at times in different sections of the world's overall body of sociological literature; the entire concept of "culture" has been plagued by the problem of separating material social processes from the notion of abstract populational essences. For one of the simpler examples, how do you know you are in contact with Spanish culture, or Japanese culture? Do you look for things that are arbitrarily associated with that abstract entity, like the Spanish or Japanese languages? At a certain point, isn't this just a squishy, ill-defined heuristic, or some kind of bizarre socially acceptable version of national stereotypes? What if Japanese people spoke English, or Korean? What if you found the only person in Japan who was an expert on Korean manhwa and will talk to you at length about the difference between "manga" from Korea versus Japan? Clearly, if the concept of countable cultures is to be useful, it has to be formed out of something other than abstract "cultural essences". This is a complicated topic, but in short, one way to fix the problem could be to identify "cultures" starting at human populations that already appear to be physically separate and then work inward to what kinds of social processes and cultural values inside the population might be contributing to keeping a particular group of people together or pushing two groups of people apart. Looking at things this way, we can look at the ocean physically separating Japan from Korea and then suspect that because the two populations are largely separate physically, they will have developed noticeably different bodies of local culture. This definition of countable cultures is much easier to apply to a scenario involving two very small groups of people and their small-scale interactions. When two groups of people break apart, they are for some reason forming into two countable cultures. This may be a largely physical process where culture is a byproduct of the interaction of material objects, or it may be a more complex process where culture sits both on the outside of social phenomena and on the inside where actual decisions are being made and interactions are being had. It might be helpful here to break down the broad concept of "culture" into two distinctly different kinds of social practices or understandings such that the different layers of "outside" culture (superstructural "illustrations" of material life) and "inside" culture (conscious, subjectively-processed forms of behavior which are common within a population) are no longer being conflated into the same thing.

Within anthropology and particularly in modern-day "progressive" forms of anthropology, countable cultures are often studied through the lens of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism, despite its misleading name, is not a form of analysis which is relative to current cultural beliefs or traditions. Instead, the "culture" in cultural relativism actually refers to physical populations. Cultural relativism is a method in which events that happen in a particular population are studied specifically within the context of the geography and existing history of that particular population, including the ways that philosophy and education have so far been developed inside a population, but making a point to study the population without interpreting anything it does through any specific set of cultural beliefs, including United States or European moral understandings, but also including the moral or spiritual understandings of that particular population accepted exclusively. Cultural relativism does not imply allowing people to believe mysticism, or even Idealism. To practice cultural relativism is to go to the U.S. state of Tennessee and ask what people already understand about biological evolution in order to present education on evolution in a format they understand rather than first making fun of the people of Tennessee for being creationists.

There is one last interesting concept worth throwing in here, which has not been commonly talked about within the fields of ethics or anthropology at all, and instead comes from the field of computer science: Alan Turing's halting problem. Before modern computer processors were invented, Alan Turing envisioned a simple computer which could read strips of instructions, called a Turing machine. The instructions available on these "tape machines" would be conceptually similar to BASIC, or assembly language. The programs might be able to do things including set bits to 1 or 0, combine bits with "And" or "Or", hold values in an accumulator variable, add or subtract binary numbers, or most interestingly, go to particular labels or functions within a program and do them again. Any programming language which includes loops or "GoTo" instructions inherently starts becoming harder to predict, because you cannot just read the source code of a program from the first line to the last line and guess how long the program will run purely by how many lines it has. This is ultimately the kind of thing that leads to Turing's halting problem. Given two Turing machines where one simply computes the result of a program and the other one has to compute how long the program on the first Turing machine will take or whether it will keep going indefinitely, mathematicians have so far concluded that there is no single algorithm which can generally tell whether every kind of program will halt. Some limited categories of programs do have algorithms that can predict them, but not every program. From here, the question is whether moral codes could in fact be similar to programs running on Turing machines. The "substrate" that computes the results of a moral code is somewhat different from any kind of digital computer — it is the spontaneous social links or lack thereof between the individuals who each perform behaviors. There is something remarkable about social links, as we have seen by fully expanding the golden rule: assuming social links are not conceptualized as stable ongoing relationships they either contain particular behaviors or cease to exist, meaning that when the intermediate chain of people inside the golden rule stops, it is conceptually similar to a computer program which would circle back to a particular label either continuing to loop or halting. Thus, in a very strange sense, the material process of society operating in the form of a particular countable culture composed of loosely-linked individuals taking individual actions is almost like a kind of computation. If people are not computer programs literally composed of simplistic logic and math statements, how can this be?

Here, it is instructive to go back to Marx and Hegel. For Hegel, physical objects were the embodiment of abstract ideas — noble territories sending representatives up to the layer of the king simply meant that the Ideas behind the local-states had fit coherently together and the kingdom was a coherent system of ideas. For Marx, kingdoms could only be formed because material objects collided together in various processes, such as noble territories fighting over land within warring states periods, or the victories of various nobility pushing peasants into feudal manors. Said another way, whenever Hegel might identify two "Ideas" about to collide with each other, Marx asserted that actually, these Ideas could only resolve each other in the material world. The nature expressed within each Idea actually sat within a material object, and only the characteristics of the material objects could interact together to produce the results of various ideas.

Applying this observation back to the concept of moralities and the golden rule, we soon see that a principle such as the golden rule will be proposed as an Idea, but within the real world, the results of that Idea can only be computed through the interactions of the actual material objects it speaks about. Thus it is that a moral code turns human beings into its Turing machine.

The big question that then follows after this is: if moral codes are ultimately a highly regular physical process, up to very nearly being a predictable computation, why is it that two groups of people breaking into different countable cultures containing different moral codes become so difficult for each other to understand and mesh together with? If the physical behavior of a given moral code is somewhat predictable, and the physical behavior of another moral code is somewhat predictable, then why do the two groups of people with different moral codes not suddenly realize that when both of their moral codes are more or less predictable in their own ways, there could in theory be predictable ways to get the two processes to merge back into each other using each other's rules of operation?

To put it in simpler terms: Kant believed that if the Kantian categorical imperative was predictable, it would enable two areas of people both following the categorical imperative to merge together, because if one area of people consents to the categorical imperative and they are all following it, the first area of people will know that if they want to bring down the categorical imperative onto the second area of people, there will be no serious conflicts, because the second area of people already knows what the categorical imperative is and consents to it, and the first area of people knows what rules the second area of people is willing to follow. Of course, when there are two areas of people who both follow their own specific "categorical imperative", such that they each consent to their own locally but they are not known to consent to each other's, then an attempt to merge the two areas of people into one society will not go quite as seamlessly. The first group's ability to determine if the second group consents to their moral code and the second group's ability to determine what moral code is being brought down onto them will depend on how well each group of people first understands the other group's moral code and the way in which the two behavioral processes overlap.

This has ramifications for not just simple matters of morality that appears to be opinions, but also for the process of organizing workers into movements or proletarian citizens into materially-defined workers' states. A stated idea about how workers will behave and what they will physically be able to accomplish will only have an effect in the real world if it matches the physical abilities of workers to accomplish those aims, or in the case of conflicting parties that both claim to apply Marxism, will only have an effect when they accurately reflect the ability of members or allies of each party to do what is needed by other parties without violating their own stated rules.

In one sense, all sufficiently repeated forms of behavior can be phrased as if they were moral rules, not because all repeated forms of behavior are inherently "moral" or "immoral", but simply because morality itself is indistinguishable from mere repeated patterns of behavior — in the end, ethics has been nothing more than the study of the predictable.

[unfinished]