What is the role of memory (or knowledge or epistemology) in ethics? Is learning or knowing necessary in being ethical?
Here is a thought experiment on memory and relations or interactions. Going about the day in a mall while waiting for a particular time, you started feeling thirsty. You decided to go to a coffee shop to get coffee—but which kind of coffee? The immediate answer is a regular-sized cold brew. You feel thirsty for something fresh like water, but you also do not seem to want plain water. You want something cold and refreshing but not heavy like a milk-based drink might be. You are thinking a light iced green tea would be nice as well but in this particular mall you are in, such an option is not available. Never mind. I will get the cold brew. For whatever reason, you felt like choosing the cold brew instead of the iced americano, why that is so does not seem to really matter.
In any case, your primary options reminds you of an identity you have: the coffee drinker, the one who drinks strong black coffee all day long, the one your friends tease as a caffeine addict, the one whom people you know associate with ‘coffee for coffee’s sake’. You remember interactions with others in which they come to associate you with the drink as your ‘favourite’ or something essential to you. And further, with moments in which someone gifts you coffee because you love it and it has become their way of showing their affection for you.
You go about the day and you have the memory of coffee and its ‘connection’ with yourself. The people who ‘know’ you have similar knowledge as well. Hence, when they think of you, they think of the things that are associated with you. Then when it comes time to interact with you, the actions are influenced by those things that they know. They gift you coffee when they want to make you happy, for example.
But what if one day, as you go about your day, you feel thirst, pass by your favourite coffee shop, and think—I do not want coffee right now. Or we might go further: I dislike coffee, as though it is a fundamental thing now, the exact opposite of liking or loving coffee. What happens then? In this simple case, perhaps you go somewhere else where you can get something that you prefer instead. But fundamentally, did anything change? Are you no longer the person you once were when you preferred such a drink?
Or how about this case: you are going about the day, you feel thirst and subsequently pass by the coffee shop that you use to regularly go to. That is all before you lost your memory. Now you have no knowledge of ever going to this place or of even liking coffee. You do not even know what coffee is. Are you still yourself?
In that last example, not knowing anything, it might be easier to say, well, yes of course. It is the same person—body and mind and all—right? Why should something like that be so fundamental that I would have to be a ‘different’ person altogether. Essentially it is still me.
Yet let us imagine that self as an other—maybe a loved one, a friend, an acquaintance, a colleague. You come to associate them with this one thing—coffee, in this case. You build that relationship with them through this thing as you talk about coffee and share drinks with each other. You feel admiration towards them because of their persistence with this preference. Yes, that is my ‘coffee-drinker’ friend. Their role in your life becomes ultimately tied with this idea.
What happens when all of a sudden, they ‘change’—they no longer like coffee, they can no longer fulfil that identity of theirs that you have come to associate with them?
Let us go back with being the subject again: when I first came to think of this idea, an immediate feeling that arose within me was fear. If I am no longer the same person that people come to know me with, would they still like me? Would I still be loved? Granted, I still love coffee, but what if everything that they have come to know about me truly has changed—what then?
I propose a method of reflection where we start with the fundamental level—on the form of love. This time, we are the other again. I think about the people that I love that most. The knowledge I have of them are hard to quantify. If you ask me what they do regularly, I have some ideas, but to me as someone who loves them, I perceive them not as just a ‘coffee-drinker’ or this or that kind of person. To me, essentially, they are just themselves.
Sometimes this is a point of concern for me somehow. I do not really know what this person likes or dislikes. I know what they do and sometimes what they think and often what they feel. But their preferences, their patterns, are quite unknown to me, on an epistemological level. I might say, well, they wear blue often so perhaps they like that, but had they never told me directly that “I like blue” I never would have known that.
At the same time, on a kind of subconscious level, I seem to intuit ideas about them that would go against what could be ‘known’ of them. For example, a loved one might wear black all the time and so the other people around them perceive that as them having black as their favourite colour, but for some reason I know, I just know so clearly, that they actually prefer red. This is not because they told me and made me privy to such a secret, but I just somehow knew. Whether that is because of small interactions that I had just concluded, well, it has always been red.
I give that example as a way of showing that on the ‘highest’ level of relations, it seems that knowledge—at least the conscious, data-based one—is at best extraneous; it seems to be more inconsequential than I as the subject might have thought previously.
I think if we try to answer the question ‘What is the role of knowledge [of the other] in ethics’ as simply as we can know, we might just say: nothing, one does not need to know the other in order to be good towards them. Hence, we might enquire further: so should it simply be knowledge of the actions or the circumstances or of the good so that one can know what act of good can be done? Yet that still does not seem right, for a lot of actions that we do on a regular basis are dependent on the other. One might do a particular action because it is kind but is it ‘ethical’ if the other to whom it is directed towards perceives it as negative?
Let us go back to our examples. Say our loved one changes completely, so much that they no longer have any memories whatsoever. Would I still love them? Of course, one might say, for love (somehow) is more than just those things that can be associated with memory; one is loved just as they are and not because of arbitrary things associated with them.
Yet if we turn this around, back to ourselves, let us say I change completely with absolutely no memory of what is going on so much that when someone says, “Hey, have this because you like this,” you might respond, “No, I do not think I do”. You no longer do the things associated with and expected of you because you have completely forgotten them.
Because you had forgotten them, there might be a milder response—“it should be fine, something forgotten can be recalled again; things can be learned again”. But what if it is something different—what if you ‘choose’ (or so it seems) to no longer associate yourself with that thing. Let us say the leader of the group says to their members—I am no longer your leader, I no longer want to do so. Their leader who pledge themselves to the group, the leader who had always been ‘consistent’, is suddenly this stranger that the group cannot understand.
It seems so scary, does it not? Whether you are thinking of this in the perspective of the leader or the members. Everything you held fundamentally ceases to be, at least with regards to this thing, the group. Hence, it is no surprise if the way it plays out in ‘real life’ is that the leader tries to not change so as to avoid such a scary circumstance and the members, if the big change does happen, keep on trying to make sense of it. Why, what is the cause, what does this mean? If it is a matter of forgetting, I think it seems ‘easier’ because they might simply say, well let us help you remember. Other seeming causes too—let us solve the problem, let us get rid of it, etc. But the challenge, and what I think is more realistic, is when the response to those enquiries is simply: no reason. Whether that is because the subject/the leader in this case does not know or that there is some hidden thing that cannot be discovered (although other fields of study might say that it is just reality—that there are too many variables in existence to be able to definitely and truthfully explain the cause of one thing), does not matter. What matters is: what is the ethical response?
What do we mean by ethics anyway? For the purpose of this reflection, let us work with ‘simple’ concepts and their ‘simple’ conceptualisations: truth and love. Hence, the ‘ethical response’ cannot be for anyone to ‘hide’ the truth whether they can explain or not the changes that they are experiencing. Or at least to not continue in a path which they no longer align with.
Let us just to the idea that is the inspiration to this reflection: imagine a world in which there are no beliefs, hence, memory becomes more arbitrary. You go about your day and you see people you ‘know’, you know their names, you know what they ate yesterday, you know what they are doing at the moment, and likewise they ‘know’ you. But when they greet you, “hey so-and-so!” You say, “please call me as ‘this-and-that’!” They simply say, “Okay, this-and-that” and your interactions continue similarly. “Do you want to get coffee?” they ask because they have a ‘sense’ that it would be a ‘good idea’ (how they found out—whether because they have some memory of you drinking coffee and being happy or perhaps it had been discussed in a conversation before—does not matter; they cannot verify it, hence verifiable truth is out of the question, and belief, again, in this universe does not exist). You might say yes or no, the ‘right answer’ just eventually brings itself up.
In a world such as this, is truth possible? Is it then possible to be ethical?
Though of course, I want to go back to the primary enquiry: is love possible? How so? What would love without beliefs look like?