Here's the deal: Ethics is the aspiring discipline that seeks to speak about moral imperatives; but, as of today, it has not risen to the level of "true Science" that Benjamin Franklin hoped it would. It is certainly not a highly-valid analytical discipline, and worse: its topic shares some overlap with just such a highly-valid analytical discipline: Game Theory. Game Theory's conclusions are true based on the definitions; the answers to its questions are necessarily so. Because we must default to the system of reasoning that has the highest standards, this means we default to Game Theory in issues where it may overlap with Ethics, and they do overlap. Game Theory can model every strategic situation in the universe—including moral situations. As one might imagine, modeling moral situations is quite popular within not only the field, but across academia; and the famous game that does it is called "The Prisoner’s Dilemma". It may even be the most popular game to formally dissect in the discipline; and it’s well that it should be. Lying, cheating, stealing, littering, and absolutely all other kinds of moral situations can be modeled by either the Prisoner’s Dilemma or a variation of it.  

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Now, let me spend a paragraph on an important definition. Any and all moral situations are moral by nature because they’re all in the same structural form, which is to say that there’s a deeply definitional thread that runs through them all and allows us to group them together according to their nature—they’re not just moral by nature because humans or a deity threw them into a box together.  There’s a REASON they go together.  And here is that deep, underlying structure to these situations: everybody in such a strategic situation does better if they choose to do a thing that they're collectively better off doing, yet they have a real, rational incentive to sell out the other guy(/s) and can make the choice to, even though it leads to a collectively worse result if that latter sell-out reasoning is applied by all.  Individuals who are not used to the ideas popular during The Age of Enlightenment; thus not used to the idea that there’s a deep, analytical reason connecting the things society generally designates to be “moral”; may have to let what I just defined sink in for a moment.  Or I can repeat that there’s a REASON they go together: when you model them in Game Theory (to use modern language about it), they share essentially the same form; they’re reduced to the mathematics (so to say) and all join a family of games that are, simply put, variations on The Prisoner’s Dilemma—including the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma itself.  Check the definition that I gave three sentences ago—it’s true. 

 

So Game Theory, being an analytical discipline, produces answers that are always true when it does find those answers. This doesn't mean that just because we can model a game, it has an answer. And so one might here reasonably ask if it does more than merely model moral situations—if it does find the answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma—realizing that this is suddenly an incredibly important question since finding the answer to one Prisoner’s Dilemma means finding the answer to them all—in turn, finding the answer to this means finding the same kind of answer to all moral dilemmas in life. One can easily surmise there to be a kind of person—a kind of person we might identify with—who is horrified, therefore, by the following truth. Game Theory—one of the analytical disciplines of academia—has indeed been developed so far as to have produced a method of solving these very games;; and this method finds what is called The Nash Equilibrium; which, when the method is applied to moral dilemmas, the answer—the particular Nash Equilibrium here, being well established—is this: that each player sells everyone else out, leading to a less-than-optimal state of the world.

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The plot thickens. Remember (from the "clear picture of Game Theory" page) that all formalized reasoning on strategy is—by definition—the realm of, or discipline of, Game Theory.  The "Nash Equilibrium" is not synonymous with "Game Theory", but is a tool within it that is used to find out a strategy that is "rational" to do, and no other method for finding answers to these types of situations (non-cooperative games) has ever before now been found to be reasonable in all its aspects, even though debates within the field have been long and lively about what it really means to be rational.  In the end, the Nash Equilibrium method, which is an algorithm whose definition connects various coherent ideas, has withstood attack and won out on its own merits; whereas, other notions have fallen under the weight of their own ineptitude, not having been able to stand up to the close scrutiny that Game Theory requires.  The fallout has seen many scholars, who were initially drawn to Game Theory because of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the prospect of deriving truths about ethical reasoning, nevertheless continuing to yearn to make the case that the answer to the Prisoner’s Dilemma is the ‘moral’ answer; but, failing, they eventually go off mumbling to themselves, still sure that the ‘moral’ answer is right, so turn their backs on Game Theory.  But Game Theory, like Ethics, is ultimately a discipline meant to discover how to respond to complex situations.  If they diverge, either one should stand and one should fall, or they can be reconciled.  Logically.

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One way or another, if I succeed, my work will change just about everything.  That's not an exaggeration, and it's not meant to brag nor make promises; I'm writing this to be more open about my work.  My work is to use Logic—not mere mathematical equilibria—to find the correct and incorrect—RIGHT and WRONG—answers to strategic situations, including moral situations.

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How can this be?

Well, when we start with different axioms, we produce axiomatic systems yielding answers different from each other in response to the same prompt; and I can see now that using Logic will indeed produce different answers than the Nash Equilibrium method, the latter of which has its basis not in Logic, but in the concept of mathematical equilibrium, hence it's based mostly in Mathematics. Realize that even though any game/strategic-situation can be modeled, neither system produces an answer to every game just because it's modeled, so in a lot of games—probably the majority of them—Logic will reveal there is an answer, and that it's the same as the Nash Equilibrium.  For a minority of games, however; the Nash method will produce an answer (or answers) where Logic finds no answer at all; and there are some games I've kept in my pocket that I'm quite certain Logic will reveal to have a lone, true answer, even though there is no Nash Equilibrium.  And of course, there are the games where both systems actually declare a winning answer, but they contradict each other (such as with The Prisoner's Dilemma).  All of this is to be expected, of course, because the foundations are set in different places.  But before you begin to think of these two approaches as being 'on the same shelf' with each other in terms of validity, let me nip that moral relativism in the bud.  The Nash Equilibrium method of finding answers is simply a proposed solution, unless it also relies upon the assumption that 'because an interesting mathematical feature (an equilibrium point) is found in the game, then we can't expect better than to say that the point in question is the right answer'.  In terms of validity, that's kinda weak.  So there's a little logical leap there after finding an interesting equilibrium in the mathematics of it.  Logic, on the other hand, obviously doesn't make logical leaps.  There are no gaps in reasoning like that when using Logic.  Logic reveals the truth.  Logic also won't point out multiple answers to one game, as the Nash method does; if Logic says something is correct, it is correct—a mutually-exclusive other thing will not also be correct.  So to sum up, the Nash method IS derived from a self-consistent axiomatic basis of inter-relatable ideas that ultimately exhibit desirable qualities, but it—technically—doesn't deal with "right or wrong"; to apply it that way to a game would depend upon a dubious proposition/additional-axiom.  You could say that finding this equilibrium is merely observational of an amusing feature.  If, on the other hand, the application of symbolic Logic (the language of truth) were to produce conclusions about a game, then it would be a world apart from that: what it determines as right or wrong really are right or wrong. 

 

But the most highly-educated people on earth are convinced that Logic only gives answers about propositions (statements)—never about behaviors; how can Logic produce answers for behaviors?

 

The quest I’ve undertaken, to be able to articulate and solve strategic situations using Logic, has been more difficult than I could’ve ever imagined, and I won’t go too far into it here.  It has required creating a whole new branch of classical symbolic Logic that is simultaneously able to articulate every truth and theorem derivable in the lower, existing branches, plus a host of new truths beyond, but not anything untrue, even unto the infinite furthest reaches of the ways the concepts can be combined.  

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There are numerous other reasons why expanding classical Logic by constructing this new, entire branch as an all-logic-encompassing universally-valid system and language, with a revolutionary grammar, ... is harder than it sounds (I mean, it should already sound at least as hard as inventing Algebra or inventing Calculus; in fact it is a ways harder).  There are also numerous reasons why building it in order to achieve the specific purpose of solving games presents immense difficulties on top of merely constructing it.  For one thing, one must strike upon the correct way to write all games in the notation… before the notation is known to work…  so all is up in the air throughout the entirety of the time inventing it.

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In any event, I’ve made enough strides that I feel highly confident of being able to complete what I’ve set out for myself—confident enough to say so publicly, as I now do here for the purpose of finally starting to roll back the curtain on my work (though I'm not saying I've done all of it yet, and I'm technically not promising to, even though this is what I work on).  And though I've been questing so long in the land of a thousand corpses, I say that where I am now, there are no more corpses;; not only has no one made it this far (not even conceptually); but my classical system seems to be working: able to prove, step-by-valid-step, the important derived rules and equivalences in Logic, without ever leading to contradiction, plus an ability to produce theorems that cannot be proved using the simpler branches of Logic.  In fact, I've made so much progress that I would even say that after hundreds of years of humans trying to discover this very thing, no one individual—no matter how brilliant—has ever had, or would ever have, any hope of succeeding at it if they weren’t to at least walk in my same footsteps—unwittingly or not.   :)

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Speaking of the length of time that humans have been trying to discover this; it has indeed been at least hundreds of years, even by the most conservative measures.  (Thousands of years if you go back to some of the discussions had by the Ancient Greeks or Romans; such as Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics;; for the thing they spoke of, which is the thing later thinkers gave the placeholder term, "Natural Law", to; is what I'm doing with Logic—in other words; once my work is complete, it will provide the system that determines the truths of what they, in the previous eras, called "Natural Law".)  The public discussion about the possibility of discovering the right and wrong of behaviors ramped up immensely during the Enlightenment.  Back then, a new flame of hope was lit in the hearts of vast many gentlemen (and some gentlewomen) who had seen what Isaac Newton had done with mechanics: he discovered the immutable laws in a staggering way—laws that unified the “heavens” with the earth and with all mechanical things whatsoever.  The educated turned to each other and many of them began to think that perhaps everything does add up with our language, and Nature, and our laws, and Reason: perhaps “rights” do really exist, and perhaps these are not just Whig talking points.  If that were true, then John Locke would be right, and Natural Law would be true, which, among it’s multitudinous ramifications, would mean that those two odious political evils, ‘Might Makes Right’ and the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, are actually, provably, wrong.  It would mean so many more things.  It would mean that unprincipled behavior and immorality are provably wrong and that REASON has achieved the discovery of it.  It would mean the existence of inalienable rights.  And as the Enlightenment went on, the philosophes in the salons slowly worked out a sort of consensus that, somehow, Natural Law entails the Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech.  That these are virtually absolute.

 

Many Enlightenment thinkers impatiently declared these things to be true already, “self-evidently” derived of Reason (before they were proven); and many jumped to applaud those who said or implied they’d ‘done the deed of proving it’ (like Kant), though they really hadn’t.  In time, however; it was seen that nobody had done for Ethics what Newton did for Mechanics, and the Enlightenment faded… or perhaps it went the other way around.  In any case, the flame of hope died out more and more with every passing generation afterward. 

 

Today, we live in a global society where, even though one must admit that ‘Might Makes Right’ is either something that can be countered by valid reasoning or not, society has embraced intense hypocrisy about the topic: to act outwardly like that dictum can be proved wrong, meanwhile scowling at the prospect that it might be possible to actually do so.  The educated decry others’ immoral behavior for being “wrong”, then turn the next moment to try to use the pitch and volume of their insistence to twist the arms of others to get their way, knowing their own clamor to be invalid argumentation, yet nevertheless using their speech (and even thinking of it) as if it’s mere might—which is a deep hypocrisy that they also know and keep to themselves.  The elites and power-brokers of society are taught what it is to act rationally along the lines of the Nash Equilibrium, and when questioned about making or promoting immoral choices, they call upon that ‘rationality’ as a verbal smokescreen to justify themselves; and all the while, those who are truly good, who eschew hypocrisy, and who hold themselves to high standards have their lips stitched shut … for what can we say?  

 

It’s my aim to undo those stitches; to give, instead, a powerful bullhorn to those on The Side of Good—one that will pierce and dissipate any smokescreen that any sociopath could possibly construct, and one that can easily hound, expose, and give chase to wrongdoers (without the fear of ever stumbling) as only Logic can: to the ends of the earth.  I estimate that this newfound ability to finally validly speak and prove—with formal proofs if need be—the rightness or wrongness of actions would not only loft the culture and finally validate our Enlightenment bedrock, but would even change the balance of power in the world between The Sides of Evil and of Good.  

 

That is my main work, and that is why I’ve worked so long for it.

 

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If you’d want to help support this work through Patreon or somehow, it would help.