Ethics
I wrote this a few nights ago when I was a little bored. I hope you enjoy.
There's a big problem with ethics that has been bothering me a while and I can't seem to find a way around it. You see, ethics is all about predicting the future. David Hume was right when we said that we can't, but Kant was right when he said we have to try. We take stock of what we know today and try to apply it to the future, hoping that somehow we can make things better. That's the way everything in life works. You take your empirical knowledge, combine it with a little reasoning, and predict what's going to happen. We do this every day. Driving to school I try to hypothesize what traffic will be like and therefore which route I should take. When I ask a girl out, I think back to all my other experiences, combine them with what I know about this particular girl, and try to meet her desires. We do this at work. We do this at home. We do this in church. And hell, we do this when making love. Life is all about prediction.
That being said, let us now consider ethics in general. The purpose of ethics (as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out) is to identify what is wrong and how we can keep from doing that. Well, I've tackled part two, so now it's time for part one. So, what makes an action wrong? It's hard to say really, but for the sake of expediency, can we all agree that an act that causes damage to someone is wrong? I'm speaking in a very general sense here. For example: can we all agree that to sexually molest a child is wrong? That is, it causes incalculable damage to the child and fundamentally fucks them up...I think we can all agree to that. The problem is (assuming cultural relativism to be true - which I disagree with), in New Guinea, homosexual relations between an older man and a young boy are common. They don't mess up the kid either (reminiscent of ancient Rome, no?). The relationship is a necessary one for a New Guinea boy to become a "man". It's honored and treasured. So, maybe it's not the act that is bad, but the harming of another person that immoral (remember, very general here).
So let's review at this point. One, in order to function (as a society, as a world, as any group), we must place emphasis on trying to predict the future. Two, we cannot place abstract normative rules on actions (e.g., "Killing is always morally wrong."). So, what are we left with? We're left with very little in the way of a normative ethic. Therefore, I believe that we must follow instead a code of virtue ethics (similar in function to those of Aristotle). Something along the lines of "Be courageous, but not foolhardy or cowardly.", "Be Fair, but not overly lenient or overly cruel.", and so forth. We cannot hope to abide by some set of abstract standards, it simply does not fit the prediction criteria or the damage criteria. We have to instead focus on a set of general guidelines that hopefully will allow us to be good people. Nothing is bad all of the time (the previous example of child molestation), and nothing is good all of the time either (for example, always being completely honest can cause a lot of pain).
That's my general approach to ethics.
So there.
There's a big problem with ethics that has been bothering me a while and I can't seem to find a way around it. You see, ethics is all about predicting the future. David Hume was right when we said that we can't, but Kant was right when he said we have to try. We take stock of what we know today and try to apply it to the future, hoping that somehow we can make things better. That's the way everything in life works. You take your empirical knowledge, combine it with a little reasoning, and predict what's going to happen. We do this every day. Driving to school I try to hypothesize what traffic will be like and therefore which route I should take. When I ask a girl out, I think back to all my other experiences, combine them with what I know about this particular girl, and try to meet her desires. We do this at work. We do this at home. We do this in church. And hell, we do this when making love. Life is all about prediction.
That being said, let us now consider ethics in general. The purpose of ethics (as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out) is to identify what is wrong and how we can keep from doing that. Well, I've tackled part two, so now it's time for part one. So, what makes an action wrong? It's hard to say really, but for the sake of expediency, can we all agree that an act that causes damage to someone is wrong? I'm speaking in a very general sense here. For example: can we all agree that to sexually molest a child is wrong? That is, it causes incalculable damage to the child and fundamentally fucks them up...I think we can all agree to that. The problem is (assuming cultural relativism to be true - which I disagree with), in New Guinea, homosexual relations between an older man and a young boy are common. They don't mess up the kid either (reminiscent of ancient Rome, no?). The relationship is a necessary one for a New Guinea boy to become a "man". It's honored and treasured. So, maybe it's not the act that is bad, but the harming of another person that immoral (remember, very general here).
So let's review at this point. One, in order to function (as a society, as a world, as any group), we must place emphasis on trying to predict the future. Two, we cannot place abstract normative rules on actions (e.g., "Killing is always morally wrong."). So, what are we left with? We're left with very little in the way of a normative ethic. Therefore, I believe that we must follow instead a code of virtue ethics (similar in function to those of Aristotle). Something along the lines of "Be courageous, but not foolhardy or cowardly.", "Be Fair, but not overly lenient or overly cruel.", and so forth. We cannot hope to abide by some set of abstract standards, it simply does not fit the prediction criteria or the damage criteria. We have to instead focus on a set of general guidelines that hopefully will allow us to be good people. Nothing is bad all of the time (the previous example of child molestation), and nothing is good all of the time either (for example, always being completely honest can cause a lot of pain).
That's my general approach to ethics.
So there.
