Stephen A. Meigs Homepage

This page contains biographical information and links to pages containing my book and some of my poems and ideas.

For browsers that can't handle frames, go here to see my links. (the left frame of index.htm)

News:

I have put Exact Morality for Today on the internet so that all may have free access to it.

I have been seven years in writing this book, which I fully expect to transform the world's way of looking at moral issues. Download it and be amazed. I daresay, you won't find a book more packed with original ideas of the first importance.

Biography and brief description of Exact Morality for Today:

(Photo below of me taken July 27, 2003, at Table Rock, SC. Click for larger, 900kb, version.)

I was born in 1966 in South Carolina. When I was three or four years old, my family moved to Rockville, Maryland, where my parents and I still live. I attended Candlewood Elementary School, Redland Middle School, and Colonel Zadok Magruder High School nearby. Then I got a bachelor's degree in math at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, graduating in 1987. After that, I went to The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for grad school. I stayed there seven years in the doctoral program, passing my prelims in noncommutative rings and basically satisfying all the qualifications for the doctorate except the dissertation. I did not take particularly well to being forced to study a narrow area as one typically must do when seeking a doctorate, so after seven years trying, I gave up and just settled for a masters degree. Actually, if anything, I wish I had spent more time there reading more Bourbaki books and learning other general fundamental areas of mathematics that best improve my mind than having focused so much on one little area. I really feel the best thing one can get out of math is an increased ability to think rationally (without a decrease of artistic ability) rather than a degree, and if by not focusing on a narrow technical area as much as was expected of me, I didn't get my degree, I still improved my mind, which was what I wanted mainly.

I think my mathematical mind is a little odd. If a branch of mathematics is not done nearly exactly right (in other words if the choices of definitions are a good bit less than ideal), I just can't do that branch of math without great difficulty because I can't keep all the excessively numerous definitions straight. When it comes to good taste, though, and at reworking math so it is done more elegantly, I believe I've got that as much as any mathematician. In other words, to risk oversimplification, my ability in math comes from being able to spot what definitions are likely to be important and not from my ability, given a set of less than perfect definitions, to see what theorems or whatever can be derived from them. But it's hard to get original ideas that impress in the soft math that I am more good at. What's more, I find it very difficult to get original ideas by aiming at unsolved problems, the approach typically encouraged. The approach I should have liked would have been to think about math in the order it interests me and eventually I would get, without hardly trying, an original idea who knows where. "Aim-and-shoot" mathematics is not my style, but that is what is expected of you because everyone is trying to get you to hurry up. On the whole, I liked Michigan better than North Carolina, though--probably from lingering effects of slavery, southerners tend to be a little less civilized than Yankees, and more importantly, the food was better at Michigan than North Carolina.

Since leaving Michigan, I toyed with idea of going into computers or the actuarial field (actuary science is profitable and somewhat like economics, which is somewhat like moral philosophy). But then I kept coming up with what to me seems very interesting and original ideas about moral philosophy. I simply could not downplay the discoveries I happened to make. It became clear to me there was nothing to do but to make a decided effort to clarify and to write down and disseminate the moral insights I had come upon. What I came up with was a detailed moral philosophy based on idealism and evolution, which I carefully wrote down in the 300 page book, Exact Morality for Today. I show that it is reasonable to suppose that people who desire for the the world to evolve in a certain "idealistic" manner would likely prosper relative to merely selfish people. Then I describe what idealism we'd most expect to see and give a description of it that I believe corresponds fairly well to the intuitive notion of morality that people have. But the definition part of morality is the easy part, and the part that should not be taken too seriously except to the extent that improved theoretical understanding improves intuitive understanding (your own intuitive notion of morality may well be better than my theoretical notion). The hard part is the rest of my moral system, where I attempt to judge behaviors individually according to my approach, that is, as to whether they are likely to make the world a better, more beautiful place. It is necessary to think very carefully about a behavior to see what the effects of it on the world in the long run will be, and that is what I undertake to answer moral questions about the desirability of a behavior or its alternatives. The first version of my book I finished in 1996. But I am continually coming up with new insights and better ways of looking at old insights. Accordingly, the present 300-page version of my book is about three times longer than the original version.

Most of the moral issues discussed in my book involve sexual relations and biology. Indeed, as it turns out, sexual selection rather than natural selection is what mainly drives the evolution of moral goodness in people. Some of my ideas involve biology. For instance, I argue that the likely signficance of holiness is that it discourages genetic crossover in developing sperm. The important thing to understand in evaluating whether this is so is that compounding giving greater-and-greater returns in the future implies that females are rewarded by there being few new genetic crossings-over in the spermatazoa which fertilize her, a point which should be obvious to biologists, but which isn't, I suppose because this hypothesis more requires a certain amount of mathematical creativity and careful logic to come at it than a thorough acquaintance with biology or genetics. There is so much about morality and even biology that should be obvious, not from doing some experiment, but merely from combining intution honestly with clear, careful thought, the latter of which tends to be lacking in moral discussions. Especially does careful thought suggest truth when it is, as in my book, part of a coherent system. A moral or moral-biological hypothesis becomes much more believable if, as in my book, it is part of a coherent whole of intuitively and scientifically reasonable hypotheses that rather than contradict one another, lend credence to one another and help explain why moral intuition about at first seemingly unrelated matters is as it is. At any level of complexity, moral philosophy is akin to a crossword puzzle --so much of the reason for believing any particular answer is how the answer fits in with the other answers. And each of my moral answers fit with the other answers, to make a logically consistent whole. At any rate, I really believe my book is important. By all means download it, and if you like it, publicize it. You'll not only help rescue important truths (and me) from obscurity, you'll maybe even help transform the world!

Interests:

Basically, I am interested in almost everything of intellectual or artistic merit. Especial interests are mathematics, moral philosophy, and the history of the mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist movement in Massachusetts (the latter a recent interest arising partly from my having learned that I am descended from the abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman's brother). I have decided that moral philosophy is where my talent lies the strongest. That is partly why I decided to write my book, Exact Morality for Today, and offer it to the world.

I like to hike in beautiful places, and I like to write poems.

This year (2003), I have been thinking more about mathematical logic than other parts of math, and I also have been thinking about electromagnetism.