Can You Be Moral? (III)
How on earth does one go about choosing a morality? What makes this a really good question is the fact that the question asks about “choosing.” Morality and choice go together. Recall that we called “morality” a code of values chosen by a person to guide his life properly. Recall also that we said that anything outside the possibility of choice was outside of morality.
Whatever you are compelled to do or have no option over, you can make no moral decisions about. “Sophie’s Choice” did not involve morality; Sophie was forced into only bad alternatives in which choice was entirely irrelevant. Storms which threaten you and those you love as well as wipe out all you have worked for are bad, in fact, very bad, but they are not “evil.” They are products of nature over which you have no choice. These are but two of zillions of situations which may or may not involve choice.
Then how do you choose morality? By what means do you decide that something is for you or against you if it is not obvious?
As with measurement, morality requires some sort of measuring stick which relies on some sort of standard. Roughly speaking, what is “for” you is the good, and what is “bad” for you is the bad, even the evil. But that means of measurement is so primitive that it is almost useless beyond knowing to keep your hand out of fire, etc.
Something better must be used for a standard, and the key to finding what is better lies in dissecting that term “value.”
What is a “value”? A value is something you want to retain or to obtain, and virtues are those actions needed to retain or obtain those somethings we can now call values.
But, you should ask, how do you know you want to retain or obtain something? You can’t just grab something randomly, can you? The very clear answer is, NO, you cannot. You will retain or obtain something only if it is important to you, and to be important that something has to meet some standard. The object is to have morality meet an objective standard (or standards).
On a personal level, that standard is your life which you live concrete moment by concrete moment. What furthers your life, you regard as good, and what does not, you regard as bad.
Yet, you may well ask and should ask, how do you know what is good for you and what is bad for you? This is not something we all just feel or have some instinct for, is it? Of course not, our feelings are no guide, and we have no inborn knowledge. What is good or bad for us has to be learned and measured against some more fundamental standard, and that standard in the most basic form is life itself.
Life is conditional. That which is non-living just exists until something acts on it to make it do something. It can go on in perpetuity, but life has really stringent requirements if it is to exist. Those requirements come from its nature. Whatever kind of life it is determines its requirement, and if that life form fails to meet those conditions, it dies. No such possibility exists for the non-living. In the broadest sense, then, that which furthers life is the good, and that which endangers it is the bad.
We are specific life forms as humans. Meeting the conditions of life for frogs does us little good, and we cannot live like bacteria, worms, squirrels, and so on. Because we are humans, we are something very specific, and we have very specific requirements for life. Optimally, humans live by means of conceptual consciousness by which they direct their actions on behalf of their lives. This is what it means to be human, not just living in some cave man subhuman mode, but living to the full realization of our nature. Man’s life, then, becomes the human standard.
Whatever furthers man’s life optimally is the good, and what endangers it is the bad. Man’s life becomes our standard for the good and the bad.
We, the specific humans, need to live in accordance with our nature as humans. That is our overarching standard of value. We seek to retain and obtain that which makes the best life possible for us.
The purpose of our lives comes from our own specific lives. We must fashion what we do with ourselves in accordance with our lives as conceptual beings, and that is an awesome responsibility. We have to discover what we need, and we must choose to pursue those values which further our lives optimally as human beings. To do this, we have to become intimate friends with reality. We have a never-ending process of discovery and choice, and we have every potential for error because we do not know in advance what to seek or what to do with what we discover. Immorality lies not in making mistakes but in accepting mistakes without making efforts to correct them.
Note that this is an objective approach to morality. We are in constant contact with reality, of which we are part. We think our way through life, and this thinking determines what we should do, and it lets us figure out how to do it. We make the choices that we think we should to further our lives, ideally, and we choose by non-thinking means, such as emotions, if we don’t do this right. We may make mistakes, i.e., errors of knowledge, but these are usually not cataclysmic as the mistakes made by following emotions or codes of values imposed on us by religious bodies or by group-think.
Note also that we have an objective standard: the nature of life itself in general, and the requirements of man’s life in specific. These standards are knowable, discoverable, and applicable, but we have to choose to seek them out and to apply what we learn.
The subjective approach says that there is no such thing possible as an objective ethics, and so does the intrinsic approach. The first applies personal hedonism or some form of groupism to which one is to conform. The second applies some body of regulations to which one is to conform. Your “I” is not part of either, nor is your choice, nor is reality.
Morality is our friend, if accepted objectively. It is our means of us guiding ourselves through the good and bad of life really well. If morality is what the subjective and intrinsic advocates say it is, then it is not our friend—neither position has our lives as our purposes and by no means has man’s life as the standard. Note, please, the alternative to life, whether man’s life, or any form of life: If you do not advocate life, as objectively defined, you advocate its converse—and that is death. And that is the basis both of the subjective and intrinsic choices.
O.K., what about the book you keep mentioning? We are about ready for it.
Whatever you are compelled to do or have no option over, you can make no moral decisions about. “Sophie’s Choice” did not involve morality; Sophie was forced into only bad alternatives in which choice was entirely irrelevant. Storms which threaten you and those you love as well as wipe out all you have worked for are bad, in fact, very bad, but they are not “evil.” They are products of nature over which you have no choice. These are but two of zillions of situations which may or may not involve choice.
Then how do you choose morality? By what means do you decide that something is for you or against you if it is not obvious?
As with measurement, morality requires some sort of measuring stick which relies on some sort of standard. Roughly speaking, what is “for” you is the good, and what is “bad” for you is the bad, even the evil. But that means of measurement is so primitive that it is almost useless beyond knowing to keep your hand out of fire, etc.
Something better must be used for a standard, and the key to finding what is better lies in dissecting that term “value.”
What is a “value”? A value is something you want to retain or to obtain, and virtues are those actions needed to retain or obtain those somethings we can now call values.
But, you should ask, how do you know you want to retain or obtain something? You can’t just grab something randomly, can you? The very clear answer is, NO, you cannot. You will retain or obtain something only if it is important to you, and to be important that something has to meet some standard. The object is to have morality meet an objective standard (or standards).
On a personal level, that standard is your life which you live concrete moment by concrete moment. What furthers your life, you regard as good, and what does not, you regard as bad.
Yet, you may well ask and should ask, how do you know what is good for you and what is bad for you? This is not something we all just feel or have some instinct for, is it? Of course not, our feelings are no guide, and we have no inborn knowledge. What is good or bad for us has to be learned and measured against some more fundamental standard, and that standard in the most basic form is life itself.
Life is conditional. That which is non-living just exists until something acts on it to make it do something. It can go on in perpetuity, but life has really stringent requirements if it is to exist. Those requirements come from its nature. Whatever kind of life it is determines its requirement, and if that life form fails to meet those conditions, it dies. No such possibility exists for the non-living. In the broadest sense, then, that which furthers life is the good, and that which endangers it is the bad.
We are specific life forms as humans. Meeting the conditions of life for frogs does us little good, and we cannot live like bacteria, worms, squirrels, and so on. Because we are humans, we are something very specific, and we have very specific requirements for life. Optimally, humans live by means of conceptual consciousness by which they direct their actions on behalf of their lives. This is what it means to be human, not just living in some cave man subhuman mode, but living to the full realization of our nature. Man’s life, then, becomes the human standard.
Whatever furthers man’s life optimally is the good, and what endangers it is the bad. Man’s life becomes our standard for the good and the bad.
We, the specific humans, need to live in accordance with our nature as humans. That is our overarching standard of value. We seek to retain and obtain that which makes the best life possible for us.
The purpose of our lives comes from our own specific lives. We must fashion what we do with ourselves in accordance with our lives as conceptual beings, and that is an awesome responsibility. We have to discover what we need, and we must choose to pursue those values which further our lives optimally as human beings. To do this, we have to become intimate friends with reality. We have a never-ending process of discovery and choice, and we have every potential for error because we do not know in advance what to seek or what to do with what we discover. Immorality lies not in making mistakes but in accepting mistakes without making efforts to correct them.
Note that this is an objective approach to morality. We are in constant contact with reality, of which we are part. We think our way through life, and this thinking determines what we should do, and it lets us figure out how to do it. We make the choices that we think we should to further our lives, ideally, and we choose by non-thinking means, such as emotions, if we don’t do this right. We may make mistakes, i.e., errors of knowledge, but these are usually not cataclysmic as the mistakes made by following emotions or codes of values imposed on us by religious bodies or by group-think.
Note also that we have an objective standard: the nature of life itself in general, and the requirements of man’s life in specific. These standards are knowable, discoverable, and applicable, but we have to choose to seek them out and to apply what we learn.
The subjective approach says that there is no such thing possible as an objective ethics, and so does the intrinsic approach. The first applies personal hedonism or some form of groupism to which one is to conform. The second applies some body of regulations to which one is to conform. Your “I” is not part of either, nor is your choice, nor is reality.
Morality is our friend, if accepted objectively. It is our means of us guiding ourselves through the good and bad of life really well. If morality is what the subjective and intrinsic advocates say it is, then it is not our friend—neither position has our lives as our purposes and by no means has man’s life as the standard. Note, please, the alternative to life, whether man’s life, or any form of life: If you do not advocate life, as objectively defined, you advocate its converse—and that is death. And that is the basis both of the subjective and intrinsic choices.
O.K., what about the book you keep mentioning? We are about ready for it.
posted by George Mason @ 4/05/2005 06:45:00 AM
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