Back in 2000, when the founders of Google were discussing
ways to express their core philosophy, Paul Buchheit (employee No. 23)
suggested “Don’t be evil.” At the
time, he was simply trying to contrast the way Google did business with the less
salutary practices of some of their competitors. Nobody dared to disagree with the principle of not being
evil, so the phrase was adopted and down to today remains one of Google’s
official core values. Along the
way it has acquired another phrase, so the complete statement is “Do the right
thing; don’t be evil.” In
promulgating this notion, Google has (perhaps unwittingly) taken a stand on the
side of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and countless other ancient sages
against much of what today passes for acceptable moral principles. It would surprise me, however, to discover
that more than a few Google employees are aware of this.
Many of them, in fact, would probably subscribe to the
notion that no one should impose one’s moral principles on another person. Even Google doesn’t explicitly
recommend their “do good, avoid evil” principle for everybody; the most they
are saying is that Google employees will try to live up to it. If you like doing evil, fine, just
don’t go to work for Google. But
as physicist Anthony Rizzi points out in his book The Science Before Science, the advice to not impose one’s moral
views on another, is itself a moral view.
If I see an adult male in a shopping mall beating up a
two-year-old, and I rush to intervene, and the man says, “Leave us alone,
you’ve got no business imposing your morality on me,” I could respond with,
“Sir, that itself is a moral principle which you are trying to impose on me.” (What I would really do is call the cops, but that’s another
matter.) And in any event, as
Rizzi points out, no one consistently acts as though all moral principles are
simply matters of personal preference, even though they may give lip service to
the idea in academic papers, for example.
If the chair of a philosophy department read a paper by one of his
philosophers claiming that all morality is relative, and called the author up
one day and said, “Because all morality is relative and I don’t like your
looks, I’m reducing your pay by half,” I seriously doubt that the philosopher would
calmly accept this as a logical consequence of his own philosophical
position. So even if some people
say morality is relative, on matters that affect them personally they usually
don’t act like they really believe it.
So where does that leave us? It begins to look as though there really may be some
objective moral principles “out there” so to speak, independent of whatever we
say or think about them. And behind
them all, at the head of the logical chain of reasoning where first things must
always be, stands the principle embraced by Google: “Do the right thing; don’t be evil.” You can’t derive that principle from
anything else. It is one of those
self-evident statements that can’t come from another more basic notion. As it stands, of course, it needs development
before it can help you live your life.
But all other moral principles can be logically derived from what Rizzi
calls “the first principle of ethics”:
do good and avoid evil.
Ah, but what is good and what is evil? In a thousand-word column, I obviously
can’t do justice to that question.
The short answer is, good is that which fulfills one’s purposes, and
evil is the absence of such good.
One reason there is so much evil in the world is that, while every
person does what seems good at a particular time and place, what seems good at
the time may not really help one to fulfill one’s purposes. It may seem good to an alcoholic to
take one more drink, even if it’s the one that makes him so drunk he gets in
his car and causes the death of another driver. It’s not always easy to figure out what the true good is,
which is one reason why ethics can get complicated—so complicated that the
analytically-minded tend to throw up their hands and say it’s all hopeless.
But it’s not hopeless. Most people figure out what good to do, and what evil to
avoid, with a good bit of success every day. The lapses happen when our emotions or our hasty judgments
lead us astray. It requires just
as much thought and attention, if not more, to be a good person as it does to
be a good engineer. But the
technical and the ethical sides of engineering start from different
foundations.
When Mr. Buchheit hit on “Don’t be evil” to guide what
would become one of the greatest corporations of the twenty-first century, he
was saying more than he knew.
Neither Google (through whose facilities this blog appears, by the way)
nor any other firm can completely live up to their core principles, including
that one. But having it out there
to shoot for is a start. And in having
that core principle to live up to, all the Googleites are following in the
footsteps of medieval thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who clearly saw that
the first logical step in being good is to admit there are such things as
universal moral principles, and that the one to start with is “do good and
avoid evil.”
Sources: Anthony Rizzi is a practicing research
physicist at the Institute for Advanced Physics at Baton Rouge, Louisiana
(www.iapweb.org) and author of The
Science Before Science: A Guide to
Thinking in the 21st Century (IAP Press, 2004). Of all books that I’ve read about scholastic philosophy
(which is the term for the type of philosophy done in the High Middle Ages by St.
Thomas Aquinas), Rizzi’s does the best job of defining terms and explaining
concepts in ways that the average non-philosopher can understand. I also referred to the Wikipedia
articles on Paul Buchheit and “Don’t be evil.”