My only axiom
By the time 12 [sic] Rules for Life became a well-known book, Jordan Peterson was already showing the first signs of intellectual decline (“I eat beef, and salt, and water. That's it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not even a little bit”). Or maybe not yet (“There's no such thing as ‘climate’. ‘Climate’ and ‘everything’ are the same word”). The thing is, I never bothered to read the book.
Not because I thought there would be nothing valuable in it — I had admired Peterson in the beginning, found myself in agreement with a lot of what he said back then, and the man is actually a good writer. But I considered myself sufficiently acquainted with his ideas, having discovered his earlier public lectures, his first interviews, etc. to read the book.
After that, it got only worse (the MAGA apologetics, the Biblical nonsense, the irritating ambiguity around the “God question”, the gratuitous attacks on individuals), and I definitely did not read the book.
But since I'm now going through old posts and essays that I had “saved for later”, the other day I finally read Scott Alexander's review of 12 Rules, where the following quotes from the book caught my attention:
“What can I not doubt? The reality of suffering. It brooks no arguments. Nihilists cannot undermine it with skepticism. Totalitarians cannot banish it. Cynics cannot escape from its reality. Suffering is real, and the artful infliction of suffering on another, for its own sake, is wrong. That became the cornerstone of my belief. Searching through the lowest reaches of human thought and action, understanding my own capacity to act like a Nazi prison guard or a gulag archipelago trustee or a torturer of children in a dungeon, I grasped what it meant to ‘take the sins of the world onto oneself.’ Each human being has an immense capacity for evil. Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not. And if there is something that is not good, then there is something that is good. If the worst sin is the torment of others, merely for the sake of the suffering produced — then the good is whatever is diametrically opposed to that. The good is whatever stops such things from happening.”
And:
“Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering. You have now placed at the pinnacle of your moral hierarchy a set of presuppositions and actions aimed at the betterment of Being.”
This surprised me, because I wouldn't have expected “alleviation of suffering” to be the pillar of Peterson's metaethics. Knowing the guy, I would have bet on “God”, “the logos”, “balance between order and chaos”, or even some off-the-shelf answers such as “virtue” or “honesty”. But never “stopping unnecessary pain”. Peterson is definitely not a consequentialist, let alone a utilitarian. (I suspect the majority of the population, if asked about their root of morality, would not use “pain” or “suffering”, either. They would rather appeal to opposites such as “goodness” or “niceness”, or to their own version of common-sense morality.)
But not Jordan Peterson. Apparently, in his core, he is all about “suffering”. How to square that with the virtue ethics and the deontology he so fiercely defends, it's a question I couldn't begin to answer.
In any case, and according to those passages above, I guess I can consider him a fellow negative utilitarian now…? Rejoice!
Peterson and I are in good company, including the great Karl Popper and contemporary thinkers such as David Pearce (“our overriding ethical obligation is to mitigate and prevent suffering throughout the living world”).
If I have one axiom on which to base everything else, one belief as close to certitude as possible, it is that: that suffering is bad, and therefore that alleviating suffering is good.
Or, as Manu Herrán summarises beautifully:
“Less suffering, more happiness, and more life in the Universe. But in that order.”
So much so, that I host the strong intuition that someone more intelligent and more determined than me could (should) be able to reason from first principles, starting from that single axiom, all the way down to the most mundane of decisions. In other words, there's an unbroken logical chain linking the ethical imperative to alleviate suffering (on one extreme), and the convenience or not of taking out the rubbish tonight versus leaving that chore for tomorrow (on the other). If I were more intelligent and more resolute, I would make that a life project.
But I am aware that everyone loves a good Theory of Everything — in physics as in moral philosophy — and so we are biased in that direction. The temptation is strong, and it's very easy to be fooled.
There, too, I am in good company.
Portrait of Peterson by Gage Skidmore; portrait of Popper with no known copyright restrictions