(Portions of this post are taken, in modified form, from Chapter 24 of The Motive Power of Fire.)
I’ll start this post with a Spinoza quote that is perhaps characteristically perplexing:
The endeavor to preserve oneself is the first and unique basis of virtue.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
Given that this sounds more like the law of the jungle than a basis for virtue, does he really mean it just like that? Or alternatively, should we consider salting, smoking, or pickling ourselves?
Luckily, we can get some clarification with a couple more ideas from the same treatise. Spinoza’s logic can be broken into two steps, and for this post I want to reverse his order. My first step will be to point out that he defines virtue, or goodness, as what we desire:
So it is established from all this that we do not endeavor, will, seek after, or desire something because we judge it to be good, but on the contrary we judge something to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after, or desire it.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
My second step is to note that this desire, which Spinoza defines to be good, is fundamentally rooted in perseverance:
Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being. This endeavor … therefore, is nothing other than the very essence of man, from the nature of which there necessarily follow those things that contribute to his preservation, and so man is determined to do those things.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
Putting these two steps together logically, perseverance in being must be good. Admittedly, however, we Spinoza fans still have a little explaining to do.
For example, one might immediately question whether everything we desire really contributes to our preservation. I’m going to say yes it does, provided we take a wide enough view of preservation, so that it includes various forms of social capital which may be useful for our future persistence.
Critics of atheism are fond of pointing out that it cannot explain altruism. But for me this is nonsense. Altruism is one of the main evolutionary advantages of our species; a niche existed for an altruistic animal, and we filled that niche. Concern for the well-being of others (within our species at least) is part of our essence, and part of the reason we have been able to persevere so well. If you don’t believe me, consider how well our society would function if we all competed like gorillas in the wild, fighting for territory, driving away our male juvenile offspring, and keeping harems by whatever powers we possess. And I mean consider everyone doing this all the time. How long would we live? What kind of future would we have?
I can therefore expect Spinoza’s approval when I say that altruism is good, because altruism helps us to persist, and to keep improving our persistence.
Adapting this thought to Pirsig’s moral hierarchy, I can say that society is good, because the purpose of society is to preserve human beings. Furthermore, knowledge is good, because the purpose of knowledge is to preserve society. In this way, all of those species of good that perhaps came to mind when you protested Spinoza’s definition of virtue above can actually be included in that definition.
This post would not be complete without contrasting the essence of man as envisioned by Spinoza with the same thing as envisioned by Nietzsche:
A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
I am going to point out immediately that Nietzsche has it backwards. Self-preservation is not the indirect result of other drives; it is actually our essence. And thermodynamically speaking, such perseverance is the only drive that includes a built-in mechanism of operation. On the other hand, the discharge of strength as a primary goal would be completely unexplained. Yet such discharge makes perfect sense as an occasional aid in preserving oneself, considering the competitive nature of survival.
Nietzsche, armed with his proposed law, believed that knowledge and science would lead not to virtue, but only to tyrannical power. But such power tends to be short-term and local: If its essence is merely the discharge of strength, then how much perseverance could we expect it to have?
I believe that knowledge and science must eventually lead to a different kind of power. An enlightened society with the additional virtues of popular cooperation, respect for the diversity of individuals, and most importantly some capacity for restraint, will have greater underlying strength, and can be expected to eventually reduce any tyrant’s sphere of influence. It turns out that enlightened, long-lasting power is virtue. But Nietzsche did not arrive at this conclusion. And historic regimes who thought they had learned something from him, and chose to discharge their strength in dramatic fashion, have proven to be not all that powerful in the long run.
I hope I’ve answered the main objections to the definition of virtue that Spinoza provided at the beginning of this post. I maintain that whatever persists in an energized state, when that persistence is considered at the appropriate level of complexity, is good by definition.
The Motive Power of Fire 
This post is practically bespoke, and I must reply. Unfortunately I’m distracted on the one hand by the need to write about Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age before I lose my train of thought again, and on the other by the challenge of getting closure on certain persistent threads at my own blog.
I want to avoid getting bogged down in an exegesis of Spinoza or Nietzsche. Spinoza scholars are still discussing what he meant, and combing through the issues his philosophy raises. Interpretations of Nietzsche’s subtle, unsystematic thinking are faceted, to say the least. There may be room to challenge your views of the relations between virtue, power, knowledge, and reason as these thinkers understood them, but that would lead us into arcane and archaic scholarship. I will try to stick to the point, which is whether what persists is good by definition.
In anticipation, I offered some time back a sideways commentary on the idea, in my Castalian series under “The Last Moral Philosophy.” What this highlighted is that, at its simplest, the proposition voids the meaning of morality or ethics. If what persists is good by definition, and nothing with which it can be contrasted is left standing, then all we can contrast with the good is what does not persist; but this means there is nothing we can contrast with good in the long run, and so the concept becomes empty. This is all very metaphysical, but in practical terms it means that ethically we have nothing to talk about; we can just do whatever it is we do, and not worry further, because whatever comes out of our attempts to persist is guaranteed to be okay by definition.
That would be the logical or analytical objection to the proposition. But in practice, the proposition tends to be augmented, or watered down depending on the spin one puts on it, by qualifications: for example, “that whatever persists in an energized state, when that persistence is considered at the appropriate level of complexity, is good by definition.” Here is the admission that persistence is not necessarily good; we have to consider something else before we can say that. The original, satisfyingly simple claim needs some modification; and this is because the simple statement, taken at its face value, is not true. At least, it is not the whole truth.
What, then, must we add to the initial misleading formulation, to make it the whole truth? That depends on who is giving the account (for you are by no means alone in suggesting it). In your case, you make the case that altruism, which is literally the failure to act towards one’s own perseverance, is transformed through the complexities of evolutionary mechanisms into an act of perseverance; only what perseveres is a higher thing. But now we have competing candidates for perseverance: me or my children, perhaps. Recall that whatever persists, is good. Therefore, if I persist, it’s good by definition. But if my children persist, it’s also good. If, for them to persist, I must cease persisting, then—considered at an appropriate level of complexity, of course—my persistence becomes bad. But this is not possible, because to persist is good by definition.
When this sort of conundrum follows, I’m inclined to look for a less problematic philosophy. If you were willing to withdraw the oversimplified account, and assert instead that whatever persists is good, not by definition, but in view of more complex considerations, we might be able to salvage a workable ethics.
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Thanks very much for this comment, AJ, which I am not going to argue with.
You’re right, the answer to the post title is “No.” Significant qualifications are required.
Because of those qualifications, whatever comes out of our attempts to persist is NOT guaranteed to be okay. Instead, we need to follow the three categorical imperatives found in Law 6. And that law, in turn, requires the leap of faith that the activity described in Laws 2-5 is good, by definition.
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