The arithmetic of morality.
It isn't like mathematics. Mathematics is because of itself.
It is because then it is inevitable.
As a way in a way. It becomes a way of asking questions.
And arithmetic gives answers.
So mathematics is easy and arithetic is futile.
Two wrongs don't make a right you know. Ask anybody. Best of all, ask a success. You know how success likes arithmetic. Reliability is called.
Nothing succeeds like success.
Arithmetic answers.
Two wrongs do not make a right. That everything can be one or the other. Or one and one. So simple. Such arithmetic reliability.
Because if you make the world understandable it becomes arithmetic.
Morality is so simple, all it lacks is a meaning.
A reason.
An identity.
Some things are just pictures. A scene before your eyes. So perfect, so ideal.
Two wrongs do not make a right. So wrong plus wrong does not equall right. It tells us what right is not. It is not two wrongs.
Very useful surely. I do not want to know what it is not. I want to know what it is.
Always.
Invariably.
Arithmetically.
What is its value.
You cannot tell.
So what is wrong. Simple arithmetic. Divide by two.
A wrong does not equall half a right.
Or rather, half a right does not equall a wrong.
That is arithmetic.
Let me see. If it is truth, what then.
Half the truth is not a lie. Is that how it would read?
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You see, even the law knows better than arithmetic at times.
But half the truth is half the truth.
You do not lie by what you leave out?
That is arithmetic.
It follows.
It is logical.
So to commit a lie is not equall to omit the truth.
You have seen that strategy used a thousand times or more. So have I.
It is.
Lying is not the same thing as leaving out the truth.
That is arithmetic you see. Arithmetic and its rules. It depends on the objectivity of truth. It has to be absolute.
You know, and I know, even when we choose to forget, that the importance of truth is subjective. I respond to the truth as I see it.
It is an experience.
Do you follow?
It is not a lie, it is an opportunity to mislead experience.
It is not the truth, it is an opportunity to create a coherent experience.
So there are no sins of omission.
Arithmetically.
What you do not do, you cannot be doing wrong.
Though I am grateful always to mathematics, it is only now rarely that I am grateful for mathematicians.
But this is one of those places.
And if two wrongs do not make a right, how many does it take?
It is an obvious question, it is the arithmetic that makes it look fatuous.
Do you start by asking what is right. If it is arithmetic you need not bother perhaps. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. They are fixed a discrete.
Many years ago I was told by a lawyer that things are only true if they are written in latin.
In red ink.
On old parchment.
(Bang goes my credibility)
And lawyers are usually interested in arithmetic. It is their job.
So it was surprisingly honest of him.
Because what he meant
is that the truth
is subjective.
The more authoritatively you write something, the more true it becomes by that.
The more authoritative, the more people believe it, the more it is subjective truth, the experience of coherance.
If it is not absolute, and arithmetic, it is subjective and mathematical. And if that is so, the more people it is true for,
the more true it is.
So the more people believe it, the more it is the truth.
The majority is always right. It is inevitable.
And the concept of the individual
is just so much
mathematics.
It is rarely, but this is the place.
Think about it.
Just think about it.
If your morality is built from two wrongs do not make a right.
So how many wrongs do make a right?
How many people have to believe something for it to be true?
What happens if the answer is one?
The arithmetic of morality.