Michael Miller

As Aristotle noted, every art aims at some good, it has some purpose. Morality is the master method by which you guide all your choices and actions; it is your art of living. What is it to be its aim? What is to be the purpose of morality? 

The ancients identified the purpose of morality with the chief good. Whatever chief good they proposed--happiness for Aristotle, non-pain for Epicurus, apathy for the Stoics, heavenly afterlife for Christians--they took that chief good to be the moral purpose. We can suspect that they actually worked the problem back-to-front; first they chose a moral purpose, and then they declared that purpose to be the chief good. In any case, the ancients didn't distinguish between the chief good and the purpose of morality. 

But those who uphold life as the chief good must distinguish it from the purpose of morality, for there are fatal objections to taking life as the moral purpose. The concept of life is much too broad for a moral purpose; it includes barest survival, and that is much too paltry an aim. Furthermore, it wouldn't help us to make important moral distinctions; after all, both good men and bad men are alive.

We saw in The Philosopher's Stone that life is the universal means and the last end, and that life's most fundamental measure is leisure. Your leisure is the means to all your ends and the end of all your means, the very "stuff" of your life. Leisure is your chief good. 

So is leisure the purpose of all moral action? No, not directly. Even if we leave aside the error of those who define leisure negatively, and who would therefore imagine that we were exalting idleness to a moral ideal, leisure is subject to the same objections as life. It doesn't allow us the distinctions we need; good men and bad alike have 24 hours in their days. Nor is it clear what it might mean to set leisure as a purpose; I defy anyone to be so virtuous as to achieve more than 24 hours of leisure in his days, or to be so inept as to achieve fewer! 

With this as a statement of the difficulties of choosing the fundamental moral purpose, let us proceed to solve them. 

Begin by stating our purpose as platitudinously as we possibly can: the good life. 

This may seem a giant step backward, but it is the essential clue; for it tells us to define our purpose as some species within the genus "life." I.e., the good life will fall within some range of measurement of life. Life is a certain kind of action, so we must investigate the ways in which that kind of action can differ in measure.

What are life's mathematical possibilities? The key to enumerating them is a fact that we noted in The Philosopher's Stone, namely that achieved ends are means to further ends--that valuing is a feedback process. A feedback process is one in which the result of the process is "fed back" to the beginning of the process and causes future results, which are then fed back again. And so on. Round and round and round goes the causal chain--in a loop. Feedback loops have well understood quantitative properties; we need only apply that knowledge to valuing. 

Feedback loops with their circular causation may sound vaguely magical when you first hear of them, but they hold no mysteries for engineers, who design and use them routinely. The mathematics of feedback loops can be as complex and convoluted as you wish (or as some tricky application demands), but the essentials are simplicity itself. There are two kinds of feedback loop, negative and positive. 

In a negative feedback loop an increase in the output feeds back to cause a decrease in the output. Yes, you read that right; negative feedback is arranged so that an increase in a certain quantity causes a decrease in that very same quantity. Once you overcome the common initial suspicion that that's a contradiction, you may surmise that negative feedback loops tend to reach a certain level of output and to return to that level when disturbed. Good guess! Negative feedback loops are the heart of automatic control systems, which have freed countless thousands of men from such dreary tasks as continuously fiddling with a valve to keep some flow rate constant. Your household thermostat uses a negative feedback loop to keep your home at a cozy temperature. 

In a positive feedback loop an increase in the output feeds back to cause an increase in the output. So any increase in output causes a sequence of further increases, and any decrease causes a sequence of further decreases. If the system changes it can have episodes of increase followed by episodes of decrease, but so long as it remains a positive feedback loop it will be increasing or decreasing at any given moment. The remaining formal possibility--that it never changes in the slightest--is merely a boundary between "blowing up" and "fading out." An unchanging positive feedback loop is unstable; the least change will push it to one side or the other. Thus, a positive feedback loop will "run away;" its output will either blow up or fade out. Under quite general conditions, it will run away exponentially.

Achieved ends become means, so an increase of ends increases one's ability to achieve ends; an organism and its values make up a positive feedback loop. Valuing has only two stable regimes, one of increase and one of decrease, as well as an unstable regime of no change. We expect to find exponentials in any positive feedback process; can we find them in valuing? 

Yes! We saw in The Leisure Theory of Value that leisure is a measure of values, so you can calculate their increase or decrease. This calculation, no matter how complicated in detail, is straightforward in principle--a mere job of work. From the perspective of valuing as a positive feedback process, we can grasp the long term implications of such calculations. 

The following bit of algebra is mathematically trivial, even downright pedantic, but please humor me. Its meaning for men's lives is very far from trivial, and there are hosts of men who will have trouble believing the conclusion even with the proof before them; they need all the help they can get! 

In each period in which one's values increase there is some ratio, call it k (>1.0), between the means one expends and the ends one reaps. In a sequence of n such periods there are a sequence of n such ratios, call them k₁, k₂, ..., k_n; all of them greater than 1.0. So, over the n periods one's values will increase by a factor equal to the product of all these ks. One of the ks will be the smallest, call it K (>1.0). So, over the n periods, one's values will increase by more than a factor of K to the power n, i.e., by more than a factor of Kⁿ. 

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a proof that if an organism strings together a series of profitable periods (as measured by leisure), its values will increase at least exponentially with the passage of time. Valuing's regime of increase is an exponential regime! The hard-won little profits of life needn't merely add up like the steps of a journey: they can compound like compound interest! 

We can draw this stunning conclusion from trivial math only because we have the use of a stunning philosophical discovery: a perfectly general measure of value, a measure of all ends and all means. The concept of leisure enables us to define the ratios which are the nerve of the mathematical argument. After we've grasped leisure's role as a measure of value, the arithmetic is plain sailing! 

The use of mathematics here is completely independent of volition. It applies equally to deterministic organisms and to man. The ratios, the ks, measure the outcome of an organism's actions, and a man chooses his actions. The ks do not determine a man's actions: his choices determine the ks. 

The exponential possibilities of human valuing are open to man's choice.

We can easily identify the three regimes of valuing in the organisms around us; they are so common that we have words for them, even if their moral significance has been overlooked. 

Valuing's unstable regime of no change is what we call "living," in the sense of merely living, barely living, just getting by or rubbing along. Less kindly terms for this regime include stuck in a rat race, in a rut, on a treadmill--and stagnating. 

Valuing's regime of decrease is what we call dying. This sense of dying is broader than the physiological sense which is limited to the last few days or weeks of life. In this broader sense, some organisms spend much of their lives dying. But even physiologically, dying fits the pattern of exponential decline to a tee. As each organ weakens, its diminished action undermines the actions of other organs, which undermined actions feed back to a further weakening of the first organ. There is no lack of near-synonyms which refer to this regime: decline, decay, corruption, etc. 

Valuing's regime of increase has not gone unnoticed. It is expressed by such terms as getting ahead, flourishing, progressing--thriving. I adopt "thriving" to name the exponential increase of an individual's values. 

To thrive is to have one's values--and thus one's power to win values--burgeon exponentially. 

So the good life--the purpose of all moral action--must be either: 

1. the stagnating life, or
2. the dying life, or 
3. the thriving life. 

Here's a hint. The stagnating life is impossible as a way of life; stagnation is unstable. To pick stagnation is actually to pick either dying or thriving--and to abandon the choice between them to chance. Try again! 

Here's another hint. If you pick the dying life, all your problems are over. You will need no morality whatever! Just sit still in one place, refrain from all action, and you'll have achieved your purpose. But if you do nevertheless seek moral advice, you will find it easy to come by--in the form of helpful suggestions involving ropes, knives, poisons, high places and deep waters. Bye bye-ee! 

Did you pass the exam? The right answer is that the good life is the thriving life. And so .... 

Thriving is the purpose of morality. A thriving man's values grow exponentially; so his life gets better and better--and it gets better faster and faster! Thriving is the happiness of man; you gotta love thriving! The distilled essence of all moral advice is contained in a single word: Thrive! 

And now we see in what sense leisure is the moral purpose. You can't win more hours in your days, but you can win values which will yield you more leisure than they cost; you can profit. It is only by profiting that you can invoke exponentials in your valuing. Thriving implies profit, as measured by leisure, but in the form of other values. To set leisure as a purpose is to set leisure profits as a purpose. 

Through trade, each man's thriving helps other men to thrive. More positive feedback! Thriving implies progress; a society of thriving men is an exponentially progressing society. 

The fundamental right is the right to thrive.

Wasn't that easy?

But what of those who oppose a morality of thriving? Not everyone welcomes human thriving; it has enemies. Plato declared that true philosophers make dying their profession. Plato has been echoed by a long line of mini-Platonists right down to today's Greens who inveigh against human "growth." Aren't they a threat? 

No, they're not much of a threat. Thriving is no fragile flower; it's quite capable of defending itself. It is a big strong ideal, and was born fully armed. It answers its enemies not only by the arguments of its theorists, but above all by the actions of men who live it! They defeat its enemies by the costless tactic of out-thriving them and reducing them to irrelevance. The enemies of thriving are refuted by action. (You may recognize this as Ayn Rand's principle that evil is impotent, proved in a brand new way.) 

The code of thriving may lose some battles, but it wins every war; time is ever on its side. This is no pious wish; it is a theorem. Those who follow ideals opposed to thriving do not thrive; their choice of ideal condemns them to decline and decay, to continually diminishing means. Thriving men enjoy exponentially growing means; that's what thriving is! Means are power. Who thrives, wins! Who thrives faster, wins sooner! Enemies of thriving regard this as unfair. Heheheh! 

Moralists through the ages have lamented that the wicked thrive and that good men are cast down. They had no right to that lament, for they taught codes that were aimed at everything under the sun but thriving, or at supernatural figments, or even at nothing whatever. Men who follow such codes disperse their efforts; they squander their means. It's no surprise that they fail to thrive, nor that others surpass them. The fault lies with the codes; they produce men who may be good after a fashion, but who are not good enough. 

Good guys always win, provided that they are good enough by the only code that counts, the code of thriving, the only system of morality that's on the leisure standard. The code of thriving implies radical optimism.

There is something radically new about this concept of the good life. The concept of thriving is independent of man! It is independent of consciousness! This is new, and I claim it. 

All previous attempts to define the good life have brought in considerations specific to man, usually reason. Thriving, however, is vastly broader; it applies to all living things, to living things qua living things. A microbe, no less than a man, may die, stagnate or thrive. In ways specific to themselves, cats and countesses alike may live the good life! 

You may reasonably ask, "So what? We are men after all, and we thrive or die by our use or misuse of reason." That is perfectly true, but to express it you had to use the concepts of thriving and dying. First things first; beware the fallacy of the stolen concept! 

The principle at stake here is that of proving each thing at its right level of abstraction, of attributing things to their precise causes. Man has the capacity of a good life or an ill one--of thriving or dying--not because he is a man, nor because he is rational, nor yet because he is an animal; but because he is alive. To attribute this capacity to any of those narrower causes is therefore false, and therefore it cannot be proved from them. This helps to explain the futility of the debates that have swirled around the question of the good life. 

So, is reason to be despised as of no account in a morality of thriving? Not hardly! The essential role of reason in man's thriving is beyond the scope of this essay, but here's a hint: rationality is thrifty thinking.