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If you take a look around you, you will probably find all means of technological devices that were not available 20 years ago. For example, the cell phone in your pocket, the laptop sitting somewhere near you, or that sleek LCD screen you’ve got sitting on your desk. Even more mundane, what about 1000 songs in your pocket? Was that possible 20 years ago? What about the plasma TV you’ve either got sitting in your living room right now or sitting somewhere at Best Buy’s just waiting for you to buy it?
Technology moves fast. We are finding more and better ways of staying digital, staying connected. But is that really innovation? How do you define “innovation”, and do you find it to be inherantly different from “technology”? In my opinion, innovation is something that is decoupled from technology and, relatively speaking, innovation moves slower than its more tangible counterpart.
Better. Thinner. Faster. Prettier. These are characteristics of technology. Technology makes available all sorts of possibilities to our world. As a result, we have so many more ways of doing the same thing. We’re able to make our computers run faster, make our monitors sleeker, make our batteries last longer, and make our world spin just a bit more hectically. We can now carry gigabytes in small capsules rather than megabytes. We’ve got GPUs outdoing one another almost monthly. When it comes to technology, there is no such thing as pace. Humankind is on a tear and we cannot stop ourselves from outdoing our current status with bigger numbers, smaller delays, and better devices.
But that does not mean we are innovating. All the characteristics of technology are orthogonal to the characteristic of innovation: Difference. Surprisingly though, as the pace of technology picks up, the pace of innovation is more or less unaffected. I like to attribute this to simple reasons, the most obvious of which is that cultures simply cannot adjust to a fast rate of innovation turnover. Instead, we as humans are more comfortable with incremental changes that, in the overall picture of things, lead to an annuity of innovative income. Fortunately, we are usually open to innovation as we are generally happy to embrace change when it is beneficial. However, the way I see it, innovation is not at a premium in our society. Sometimes we’re just stuck in a rut trying to make it faster, thinner, or smaller that we forget to make it different.
It’s hard to qualify in words exactly what we look for when we search for innovation - all we know is that when we see it, we say, “Wow, that will change the way I live.” If not to that extreme, innovation will general open some channels in your mind when you encounter it. With the pace of technology setting such a open canvas, here’s to hoping we’ll begin to see the artists of innovation pick up a brush.
Believe it or not, there is a still a large percentage of people out there who are computer illiterate in the United States. Of course, nothing needs to be said about the world in general — we are far away from a completely digital world. However, I believe the problem of “computer illiteracy” is really a misconception and there are alternative angles to view the issue. The problem really is: Why should it be something so hard to learn in the first place?
Why should learning to use a computer be a challenge? Why is there even a question of illiteracy? Computers are not math equations, they’re not languages — they’re tools, and as such, shouldn’t even require the label of “literacy.” They shouldn’t require some specific intelligent insight to operate. From the invention of the mouse to the abstraction of files and folders to dawn of the web, there had always been a general trend of turning that PhD made microprocessor into a device suitable for your everyday American. Maybe its just my impatience, but I feel that this trend has faltered and stumbled a bit in recent years.
This is where I feel Apple has really stepped up the game lately. From the use of huge visual icons to smooth interface features coordinated into the “aqua” interface, the Mac OS clearly outshines Microsoft’s OS in the “newbie” factor. It’s just so easy to start clicking away with that mono-button mouse that the otherwise computer illiterate population is beginning to understand: I shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to use a computer, it should beg to be used by me. Intuitive and smart, the entire Apple package of hardware and software appeals to the average person. This begs the question: Are we witnessing the start of a new age in computing?
Pundits have given this user-friendly approach to selling chips trend names like “Home Media Computing” inferring the computer’s rightful place as a media device alongside your TV (or HDTV if you’re cool), your VCR (or DVR if you’re cool), your PlayStation (or your XBox 360 if you’re, once again, cool), and your Audio System (read: iPod). Basically, from this point of view, your computer should really be no harder to figure out than your remote control. To me, there is really no fault in that idea. If there are still people out there who can’t figure out what a scroll bar does, why should we burden the general public with atrociously complex interfaces?
This blog entry has so far been littered with rhetorical questions, but really, these are fair questions to ask. I guess I’ve taken a long path to get to the point: Apple’s hardware will continue to fly off the shelves as long as they are as simply to use as they are now. Because of how they are able to integrate powerful functionality with a fresh-n-clean look, they will be able to get the market share that corresponds to the segment of America that doesn’t believe in needing “literacy” to operate a mouse. Also, Apple’s new partnership with Intel, a household brand name if there ever was one in the high tech industry, will certainly bolster sales and allow Macs to slowly creep up in market share.
I’ve mentioned Microsoft’s OS of course, and I suppose this is where I really want to end up. My concern is whether or not Vista can one-up Macintosh. Will we see an OS that is powerful under the hood with a polished clear-coat finish? Or will this just be another complicated bore along the veins of Win95, 98, and XP? The good news is: from what I’ve seen of Office 12, every indication tells me that Microsoft is aware of the need to make power as transparent as possible. I suppose that’s good news considering the first leap a “computer illiterate” person makes into the world of computers is usually with Windows.
My blog has been quiet for awhile. I guess that’s the benefit of having a blog where there isn’t much traffic. It’s just me and my notes and there is no real pressure for updates unless I’m feeling like formally expressing some thoughts. Anyway, it’s finals time here at Stanford, and that means it’s time to draw conclusions from a quarter of experiences. (Yeah, I know temporal comments and statements make a page age faster than usual.)
All the science and mathematics that gets the attention in formal computer science sometimes just doesn’t do justice to particular area of computer science/engineer - the UI. Of course, there is the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) with their ideas and reasonings, but none of that seems to be concrete. Maybe that’s how it has got to be. The user interface, being a topic where metrics can only be subjective, should perhaps stay intangable, abstract, and, in a way, volatile.
In the end, the biggest indication of success for any project is the reaction of the audience. Whether the benefits of a happy audience mean monetary gain for commercial projects, or whatever the underlying cause, there is no doubt that no project should get that seal of completeness until it has been through extensive end-user testing and feedback. In a project happens to find itself in the public’s good graces in the factor of usability, that project is bound to find successes (financial or otherwise).
Take any number of current digital successes and it’s immediately apparent that the prior statement holds by empirical observation. In fact, it can be said that the most intuitive, most fluid, most customizable, and most understandable user interfaces will draw success given that all other factors remain constant or equal. Take the iPod and compare it with other DAPs in the market and you have one example of how UI can be the sole factor for success in special circumstances. (Of course, the other big factor is price, but let’s leave that for the economists.)
However, as the measure of a good UI is such a subjective thing, how does a programmer or developer - one who necessarily thinks in 1’s and 0’s translate logic and computation into art - into something that is beautiful in design, something that transpires engineering in numbers? Conversely, how does an artist or designer - one who necessarily posits art in some non-engineering medium help translate design to concrete development? How does a team know when they have something that is canonical in its interfacing - when they’ve created something that handles the user’s every whim like a telepath? Those who can answer these questions are certainly those creating all the magic. Those who cannot are doomed to one dimensional development. Approaches to bridge the gap between artistic design and system design certainly vary from site to site, project to project; but, we should recognize that such an approach must be explicit for any project to be successful. One thing is certain: when the perfect design is achieved for a given project, its success is self-evident. As if some magic phenomenon of optimization has been reached, the end-product begs to be used, and we will all beg to use it.
- LW
The boom around search has come in large part from the financial success of search pioneers like Google. In celebrating this newfound interest in the web, it’s always interesting to step back and look at the nascent industry and reflect on how it got to where it is now and perhaps draw inferences to where it might be going.
It all began with the first “spiders” or “crawlers” that automated the process of exploring the unknown of the web. The first crawler based engines used classical information retrieval techniques to identify documents with search phrases. These techniques used some components of the infamous “tf.idf” measure (as it is referred to in IR circles) to score documents based on a frequency of a term and the rarity of the term. These scores, being cached for each document/term pair provided a basis for the earliest web ranking techniques, but were too generous to overly “optimized” pages. Being a classical technique, standalone tf.idf was suited for older applications, where there wasn’t necessarily as dynamic an environment as the web. But because the web offered such an opportunity for anyone looking to publish content, the search engines began waging what would be an uphill battle against the spamming (aka optimization) community intent on making a buck via the gaming of search engine results.
Enter “Backrub”, now known as Google. To fight off the gross irrelevance being returned by the search engines of that time, the founders of Google looked at how the link structure of the web could be exploited to produce more relevant results. The intuition was that pages with a high count of backlinks are pages that are generally considered more popular (also known as the random walker argument), and thus, more likely to be authoritative on any given subject, provided that the page was relevant with the subject in the first place. Combined with the classical techniques of identifying key terms in a “secret sauce”, this new PageRank system proved to provide astoundingly accurate results for most queries and skyrocketed Google to what it is today. Of course, the generalized idea here is that this success was largely in part because of the way the PageRank system mitigated the local optimization efforts of spammers on their webpages.
Thus, if you look at the success of PageRank, you’ll see that really, it was an arms escalation on the part of the search industry to fight off the spammers. This has essentially bought some time for the industry, but it is very apparent that the spammers have caught up. Using a combination of tricks to farm PageRank for pages, “search engine optimization” efforts have, to a large degree, closed the gap on Google. The battle has yet to be decided, and it is hotly debated in the IR circles whether or not there is even a true solution, short of human intelligence, that can deal with the rising sophistication of gaming techniques. As one would expect, new methods are being research and developed in both the industry and academia for fighting off search spam.
But what really needs more reflection is whether or not PageRank is still as relevant to the success of a search engine as it was when it was first invented. Of course there will always be something to be said of the democratic backlink model because its just intuitive that a page is about x if everyone says its about x. But the converse is not true. That is, it can’t necessarily be said that a page is not about x, just because no one recognizes it as x. The idea can basically be summed up in the fact that because PageRank so heavily weights the importance of backlinks, it might be ignoring what can be referred to as the long tail of search. In the IR industry, this of course known as sacrificing recall for precision.
If PageRank was effective in fighting off spam in 2000, it can not be recognized as being just as effective today. In fact, it is quite clear, even to an outsider, that the issue of spam has to be handled in an entirely different manner for Google today. That said, it begs the question whether or not new models of search can be built that diminish the role backlinks play and instead focus on a “smarter” way of categorizing pages, and in one fell swoop, solve the problems of topical ranking and spam. From what I here, (and I could be totally wrong) http://www.kosmix.com/ is one such project that is focused on high recall by not necessarily letting backlink pageranking be the major ingredient of the formula.
To sum up, what is evident to me is that search has to gradually change as consumer expectation changes. And as time goes on, it is worth reflecting and re-evaluating ubiquitos techniques of the day to see if they would still be relevant tomorrow. However, I trust the guys at Google are well aware that resting on their laurels, especially in a dynamic and nascent field, is not an option.
If computing were a snake, it would have two heads. On the one side would be the business world, driving, pushing the snake toward the automation model. On the other would be the academic, focused on the core definition of computing and its mathematical heritage. As a computer scientist, computer engineer, software developer, or what have you, I often find myself conflicted in finding a unifying theme, a universal purpose for what computing really is.
Ask the economist and he/she will tell you that the two forces of our world are gravity and currency. The latter force is the one that drives our innovation, because, as fate would have it, capitalist societies encourage those who give back value in the form of money. This basic driving force for innovation is key to the technological golden age we are in today. Here, for the reason of financial gain, is where we find the birthplace of a lot of software computing ideas. CRM, ERP, Help Desk, and generalized financial software are all forms of software innovation that had risen to face the challenges of a world ever increasing in its demand for automation. Software products succeed and fail on the central criterion of: “Does it solve my problem, and can I afford it?” This is perhaps why, if you read material intended for the industry, you’ll often find it 90% business and, if your lucky, 10% technical. For example, you can ask, in a typical company, how much of the CIO’s roles are business related? How many are conversely technical? What backgrounds and experiences are important for a CIO/CTO?
On the flip side, you have academic computer science. Being research based, the primary actors might or might not be motivated by immediate financial gain. Most of the innovation here comes from a deep down passion for the subject and for a will to make a change to the technological landscape, however big or small. Unfortunately, the lack of monetary stimuli leaves much of it to the personal desires of the individuals involved. As a result, you will typically have few students of computer science interested in the theories and the fundamentals. Having much experience in this matter myself, I can tell you not many people go into the computer science degree expecting to learn what it is they learn. Where they expected a practical curriculum mirroring the demands of our external society and industry (like implementing solutions in a multitude of languages) they instead find deep mathematical theory involved in no one concrete, intended application. Even those who check “Computer Engineer” instead of “Computer Science” on their applications are typically in for a surprise. Look at each school’s degree conferal summary and you will find something like: “A degree in Computer Science from (insert school here) is a guarantee by the school that you are well prepared in the breadth of knowledge to tackle problems faced in a computer science occupation.” Is that so? Many understandably doubt it, and as a result, many people simply do not see the point and drop out.
Computing has come down to two threads of existences. One survives to automate - to solve practical problems in the business world and find financial reward. The other survives to truly further our world through innovation. While the former certainly has played a big role in our world (just think of all the big software businesses out there), the latter thread is the one that, at the end of the day, creates the great leaps we enjoy as a society today and in the years to come. Just think of the internet and its roots as a military/academic project to provide a way to decentralize computing. With it came email, and then the web. These are the truly essential technologies that even the automation world depends upon.
We have been given the gift of technology - but this gift is no promise. When it comes down to it, it’s up to the many brilliant minds out there toiling away in the land of academia to create new ways we can change computing. Perhaps an interesting question is then: can we find a blend of computing that is both viable as an academic pursuit and as an industrial success? To that, I’d have to point out that the Google boys did. They are one example of how an academic innovation can bear both intellectual gain (in the form of benefitting our society in knowledge) and financial gain. In the end, I believe that perhaps the reality is that there will always be financial success guaranteed in a truly brilliant leap in technology, but conversely, there is not always a leap in technology guaranteed for every financial success.
- LW
I came across this article while looking over tech news: http://special.msn.com/msnbc/technologywireless.armx?GT1=7204
I find it just re-iterates what people have always had a trend for: technological replacement in a parallel fashion. The opposite of this is replacement in a direct fashion, such as replacing casette with CDs, VHS with DVDs, Desktops with laptops, fossil fuel with hydrogen, where the replacement is clear, obvious, and most importantly, intended. While the latter strategy works in most cases, there are just many instances where people hesitate to “upgrade.” For example, tablets haven’t replaced laptops, computers haven’t yet replaced books, and PDAs haven’t replaced anything.
I think it comes down to core usefulness. People can smell gadgetry. When you try to sell things like PDAs at hundreds of dollars, people expect a fundamental improvement in the way they perform some fundamental task, which the PDA can’t offer for most of the world’s common people. On the other hand, people flock to technology that touches the fundamental aspects of our lives. These are the billion dollar products, like the mp3 player, the car, and heck, even bottled water. (Yes, bottled water is an invention, though now a commodity.)
Enter the cell phone. It’s not a gadget (though some companies would like to stuff them with gadgetry), and it really provides a change in the way we conduct our daily lives, because of the way it has bridged what was a gap in social connectivity. With connectivity, we have information. With information, we have knowledge. Of course, this is sounding awfully familiar to the same basic service a computer provides. When two fundamental tools, in this case cell phones and computers, start finding areas of commonality, we begin to see what I refer to as technological replacement in a parallel fashion.
Replacement in a parallel fashion happens slowly and steadily, but surely. It is how word processing, a software innovation, replaced the typewriter, a hardware innovation. It is how the internet has replaced libraries. It is how cell phones have basically replaced wristwatches (actually, more like displaced wristwatches to a true accessory). And in the future, it will be how cellphones will replace mobile computing.
Because the two functionalities are so similiar, my prediction is that we will start to see the conquering of the PDA first. Slowly, “smartphones”, with software headed by Microsoft, will begin to meld with what we know today as the PDA. Then, as the smartphone gets beefier in function and as the laptop begins to get smaller/thinner in size, I think we’ll start to see the merging of voice and computing into a single, consolidated solution for humankind.
Will it replace the desktop? It’s hard to say. Deep down, I just don’t see the desktop as a fundamental paradigm that is inherent to humankind. It’s just not natural the way we sit down in front of a monitor and consume/produce information via a keyboard. Humans were meant to be mobile, and I think that’s where computing ought to be headed.
AJAX. That’s the buzz around the web these days. So much a buzz, in fact, that some people are pointing it out as a major part of “Web 2.0″ or “The second coming of the web.” Regardless of where you stand as a developer - webdev, desktop, server-side, what-ever, you will probably need to keep an eye on this emerging trend as it is a real desktop killer. Never before has software deployment been as easy as typing “www…” with all the rich benefits of desktop applications. It’s like the browser is becoming an operating system on its own, and many companies are lining up their developers, hoping to bank on the concept of rich applications delivered via the browser. It opens up a whole new gateway to the SAS (Software as a Service) business model for salesforce.com wanna-be start-ups and even established companies as well. And the biggest company of them all, Google, seems to be at the forefront of the AJAX campaign, leading the way with apps like Gmail. With such promise, what concerns can there be?
Well, for one, there are still drawbacks to browser apps. Latency will always be there, and you can bet desktop-based apps will continue to one-up the browser apps with snazzy GUIs and rich features hard to deliver over a text medium. One thing that really irks me personally is the lack of the right mouse button. I know, this is probably some trivial matter, but as a society, we’re so used to using the right mouse button for quick access, that sometimes, I find myself right clicking away in Gmail to no avail. Without the emersive feel of rich-clients, AJAX apps will find themselves as merely a mean to the “zero-footprint” end. In many ways, there are just some things, some processes that can’t be taken from “my desktop” to “your server.” The hope here for Microsoft is that rich-clients continue to be a viable business - and thus Windows continues to be a viable business. The only way this hope becomes a reality is if the desktop outpaces the browser somehow (if that is even possible).
Secondly, what’s up with Adobe/Macromedia? Ever since the merger announcement, the company has been laying low. AJAX is Flash’s competition, because there can only be one standard for cool rich browser application development platforms. When you consider the ubiquity of SWF on modern browsers, you realize there is still room for flash to move in and take away some mindshare in terms of developer loyalty. The combined force of PDF + SWF can make for a whiz-bang client-side development platform even considering the fact that on the server-side, ColdFusion is almost non-existant in deployment.
While I couldn’t call these concerns “challenges”, they are probably the only roadblock for massive AJAX adoption. That and the fact that AJAX development requires understanding a huge array of languages and concepts including CSS, HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP/Perl/Python, etc. Given that I am partial to LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) development, I won’t hesitate to mess around with AJAX on my pre-existing websites. But as I’ve already experienced, the programming environment is not as cozy as the ones well-supported by bigtime vendors like .NET and Microsoft for example.
Only time will tell, but my guess is that within the next few years, our idea of what a web-app can be is in for a fundamental shift. The next paradigm is the rich web and it looks like the industry of computing is in for a ride.
- LW
I often ask myself what technology means to our lives at a fundamental level. Is the human thirst for ease, innovation, and knowledge a never-ending quest? Is computer technology, especially software technology, a means to some fundamental end necessary for the growth of humankind?
Our current line of progress seems to indicate that our global society is obsessed with making data available faster, more transparently, and in readily available forms. To understand our problem, let’s take a look of the root of knowledge collection and our advances in this area. Take the digital camera – a device with which our world can now capture visual data and translate it into persistent binary – and compare it with traditional cameras where the output is a physical object with all the negative properties associated with it, like the properties of decay. The gain we’ve had in the “language of binary” is that data forms are readily transferable and forever preserved. These advantages and the impacts that these advantages afforded by digital media have on our society are probably not immediately apparent to most people. With time, I think people will realize that the amazing rate at which digital media aggregates in our modern civilization yields output to rival our physical ability to archive this everlasting data form.
I’m confident that no official estimate on the volume of data that people put into our networks has been measured. In fact, such a measurement might not be possible. With the increasing popularity of data collection devices like digital recorders, digital cameras, camera phones, PDAs, smart phones, even sensor nodes, etc. it’s easy to imagine our collection of data growing exponentially as time goes on. Even the minute fraction of digital media that gets published publicly is a great deal of data moving into our human collective. As this data is pushed into the web (humankind’s ad hoc Library of Alexandria), our technology must scale to sort, index, analyze, categorize, and archive the never-ending stream of input.
“But isn’t the situation controllable for now?” some may ask. After all, according to studies, the rate at which web pages are appearing is slowing down almost to a point of manageable convergence. Well, the truth is, while textual HTML pages may be growing at a manageable rate, other richer media forms are emerging as the mainstream content of the web and the net. As these media forms, like music and movies are immortalized in the prism of binary, our society is burdened (or blessed) with the duty of maintaining the work of all of human history. For now, this duty seems to have been picked up by the oh-so-popular search engine market. Companies like Google have understood the fundamental role that software technology plays in humankind’s everlasting quest for organizing knowledge.
And yet, to think of this possible future granted to us, it’s almost regretful that we’ve already lost so much. Think of all the knowledge that humankind has lost up to this date for the trivial problems of physical space and physical delicacy. Think of the books or articles that have been unpublished up to this due to economic reasons. Think of all the art that has been lost due to lack of appreciation or lack of interest. Then think of how our digital network affords authors and artists of today the many ways to preserve their works, from the insignificant to the needle in the haystack.
Fifty years from now, due to our recent well-treatment of digital media, I may just be able to look up “Friends” season 5 episode 4 on some media network and be offered the chance to buy it a la cart. But in order for that to happen, our society has to realize the importance of this data and its challenges in space and time. Fortunately, it seems that this is just what is happening on the hardware (space) front, as hard disk technology advances to the point where we can stuff gigabytes of data into a few square millimeters. Even as I write, scientists work diligently reducing the space/size requirement evermore. Going back to the digital camera case, can consumers continue to be offered free space for their ever growing collection of photos? The size at which mailboxes grow for Gmail accounts gives great hope – it seems hard disk space technology is outpacing our ability to produce media for now. But on the software (time) front, our media indexing technologies are lacking. There is no standard for media indexing to speak of, other than what search companies deem to be a reasonable web indexing schemes. These textual schemes like the popular “inverted indexes” were not designed to handle richer media forms, nor are the many algorithms that crawl for data. Instead, we have to turn to companies like Apple and products like iTunes who have a vested interest in only providing spaces for the most popular tunes.
The “Long Tail” of media grows ever longer as we speak, and it is doubtful that these companies have the spirit to keep up. So really, the question and challenge remains: as our space and media grow, can our software keep up? Google’s PR rhetoric seems to be optimistic in this regard, but I fear the perfect solution has yet to be discovered. - LW
I often find myself in the position of wanting to looking into thoughts I’ve had in the past and their relevances to here and now. Looking back at some of the sites I once frequented, I stumbled across an old article I wrote on a Xanga site about morality and its meanings in our society. I found it interesting that so many years ago, as an undergrad, my interests in human morality came to such a decisive conclusion - a conclusion I can still relate with even to this day (although I may not agree with it). Here is the article for the benefit of those who can understand it:
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While I’m not entirely partial to philosophers or their ilk, I’ve come to accept my fate as a student, and in having enrolled in Philosophy 6-Introduction to Political Philosophy, I have been subjected to the thoughts and minds of the “greatest thinkers of all time.” What have I come to find? That the common thread of humanity in thought and perversion and morals and even in persuasion are much less a thread than a rope, and in this metaphorical rope are tied society, history, culture, and other influences of environment are so closely gripping the conclusions of these minds.
Just my luck, as I happened to be taking a classes in Engineering History, its topic of course being the history of engineer from a moral and ethical perspective. What happens if the great philosophical standpoints on morals could somehow be merged into a coherent idea universally applicable to all of human kind? Well, let us first touch on the idea of egoism - the egocentric code of morals that states humankind should act upon their own passions (motives in 18th century english) without regard for the consequences it might bear upon their immediate society or perhaps even global society in general. Many philosophers suggest that such a state of existance would bear fruitless savagery that could not have lead to the great civilization that lay before us. Having this thought to hold, we embark on Utiliatarianism, the great teleological idea that humankind should act in favor of that which best benefits the greatest amount of people through various decision processes like that of “cost benefit analysis.” To this Kant responded by adding that humankind must act in a way that is universally acceptable amongst all of its kind, that is, to act deontologically.
Of course, I am no philosopher, (perhaps because I see that philosophy is more the politics of persuasion than the art of reflection) but I do sense a function of humanity that might somehow fit through all these historically accepted ideas, and to beast explain my idea, let me now suggest the following equation:
MORALITY = EGO = UTILITY
Who am I to bring up such a conclusion? I am one unit of a species of countless reflective creatures with the skill and authority of mind to be partial to any belief I will so, but not so to impose such an idea upon any other unit. This given, I here concede to objections but will not object to concession. To follow, let me draw a sketch for those who are adventurous.
(Here I follow what as been popularly done in classical works, but only briefly.) Suppose that in some natural state of order, (here I assume that nature is in order as most scientists would believe) man has found himself with the ability to live left to his own devices and as such is able to defend himself against the beasts of nature that are set to prey on him. Suppose that in this precarious situation, he were to stumble upon another of his kind in need of assistance, let’s say this one other were being chase by a wolf. In this situation there are two obvious possibilities: 1) He sees the wolf is stronger than himself but nevertheless risks endangering himself or the faculty of health that he is so reliant on to assist is fellow man. To this man we would deem the word “courageous,” in in satisfying his ego for courage, he benefits the weak and in a way deemed morally correct. 2) He is intimidated by the wolf and flees, hoping to spare himself of danger. Here, it shall be objected by most that in his passion for life, in his satisfaction of ego, he has sacrificed the well-being of another and has therefore forfeited any possibility of morality. To this I ask what would this fleeing man then do? Pick fruit and wander the forest as if the event were somehow inurgent? No. He would of course flee to the nearest village or gathering of his kind. (We know humankind is capable of society by experience and the chicken and egg question of morality and society will be avoided here.) In fear of another ambush by wolves, he would alert the village and in a cooperative effort, he would have slain the beast through the assistance of others. Here ego is satisfied, morality is so in the warning of others and utility of his society is then so reached.
Morality is acting on the premise of that which benefits man is that which benefits his society.
- LW
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