Theoretical Foundations for the Equipathian Doctrine

I consider the concept of good versus evil to be arbitrary and counterproductive. Right/wrong, good/bad, and moral/immoral are thoroughly irrelevent and the cause of the moral relativism that is gnawing at the very foundation of human society. We have returned to the condition where 'Every men did that which was right in his own eyes.' I foresee a codified version of the taoist notion of taiji, or yin/yang interplay, as the new foundation of for ethical conduct. A binary morality, if you will. The morality of a new breed of man who will transcend the rift between sense and sentiment and attain the lofty goal of ideal observation; this ideal observer shall be known as the Equiphant.

It comes as a surprise to no one that the primary operations of human mental function are thought and emotion. Thought in its pure form is observation and analysis, while emotion in its pure form is observation and physiological response. Emotion is always a physiological reaction to a thought stimulus. Observation can be understood to be the evaluation of a perceived thing before the distortion of physiological response. What we must discover is why our thoughts tend to descend into the emotion; or better stated, Sense tends to descend into sentiment. What mental operation is responsible for turning sense into sentiment? Moreover, how do we benefit existentially from such an operation?

Now of course, sense and sentiment have been inseparable in man for thousands of years, and all of our most heroic efforts to pry them apart have amounted to nothing. Reasoning from this fact alone has caused most of us to conclude that the ideal observer cannot exist as long as he must rise from within imperfect man. Ironically, it is this very reasoning that is riddled with sentiment. The assertion that man can never be perfect has no bearing on the concept of man as the ideal observer. Therefore, human perfection and ideal observation can exist quite happily without ever having to meet. Moreover, sentiment does not exist in every area of human judgment, and even where it does, it is often overcome in the pursuit of sound judgment. Consider if you will the instance of two sworn enemies who find themselves fighting side by side against a far greater evil than each other, in this way their sentiment is overcome by judgment.

I personally hold no particular sentiment concerning pork. I can take it or leave it. Whereas my Jewish acquaintances might be offended or become openly hostile if I tried to serve it to them. Therefore, I can address the subject of pork with some resemblance to the ideal observer, whereas my Jewish friends might not. We all might despise a certain food, but we all do not despise the same food. If that were the case, we could simply abolish that particular food and we would all be ideal observers regarding unsavory foods!

Now consider what would happen, then, if all humanity were to become ideal observers to a system of ethics such as Taoism or stoicism; if we could truly evaluate this system without the slightest intrusion of sentiment among us and this system was fully functional, logically sound, and was conceived by one who was himself an ideal observer. Could we then embrace this system, integrate it into our society, restructure our government and our education around it, and eventually become a world full of ideal observers?

Who is to say that such a system does not exist? What if it does exist and only remains untested for no better reason than that humanity has concluded that imperfect men cannot design a perfect system?

Let us go further and assume that this system had only one truth to teach us, the realization that a truth that makes us feel bad is no less true due to our pain and that a lie that makes us feel good is no more true because of our pleasure; that the only necessary virtue of truth is that it is true.

If we were open to this ethic, and studied it and devoured it without reservation, we might soon discover that we do not have to hate the stranger who dresses like our enemy, or despise the very food that, in the past, made us nauseous. We would know that truth is true no matter how unpopular, and that popular lies, still deceive.

All these things would occur because we abandoned sentiment in pursuit of one specific source of truth. We did not pursue the impossible by attempting to replace every lie with a truth; rather we looked past a multitude of lies and firmly established the one truth that could be universally applied in spite of all sentiment.

It is this mustard seed that I will endeavor, from here forward, to plant.

The equiphant is the ideal observer of which I speak, and for which I have lived my mental and intellectual life. One might ask what is it that defines the equiphant? What is the purpose that drives and sustains him?

Essentially, the equiphant conforms to the Firthian (Roderick Firth) criteria for identifying the Ideal Observer:

A. He is omniscient with respect to non-ethical facts. (Not inclined to limit access to any relevant facts.)

B. He is omni percipient. (Having no limits to the scope of his imagination)

C. He is disinterested..

D. He is dispassionate.

E. He is consistent.

F. In all other respects, he is normal.

In this case we find ourselves using terms normally reserved for Deity. For example, omniscient is generally regarded as the capacity of a supreme being to know all things or of 'having infinite awareness, understanding and insight' (Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary).

However, Firth manages to redefine its nature while maintaining its operative value. He shows us that the ideal observer 'who is not inclined to limit access to any relevant facts' is omniscient in the sense that he has availed himself of every relevant fact accessible to him. The stoic equiphant Epictetus confirms the value of omniscience when he asserts that it is never an event that makes us joyful or sad it is our opinion concerning an event. When we harbor no opinion we suffer no loss. The more opinionated we become concerning an event, the less likely we are to remain open to relevant data. To take an example from my world. I am an ardent chess player who enjoys solving chess puzzles on the Internet. Frequently I chat with other players, and discuss possible alternate solutions to extremely complex positions. Now, lets assume that I hold the opinion that women possess inferior chess minds; that they simply are not hardwired for that particular type of reasoning. What, then, would be the result if the only person among this circle of players to possess the critical clue to my solution were a woman? I could exhaust every drop of relevant data from my male group of players and have everything I need except for the solution; and for no better reason than that this presumably irrelevant woman is holding the capstone of all of my relevant information. Clearly there are many possible reasons that I might have developed such an opinion. However there is only one possible solution; uproot the opinion that is barring my access to the data. It is evident from this that we never know where vital information might appear from, or from whom. Thus the ideal observer does not limit himself or the scope of his vision. This is the vision and purpose of the equiphant.