Reflection

 

Writing my last post, 'Thou Shall Not Kill', prompted a great deal of thought on my part, a very great deal of though. I thought about that post enough that over a year has passed between that and this, my next post in the series. Mostly I thought about how many things were wrong with it. The assumptions and scope of applicability are not encompassing enough, I didn't discuss how it would work as a rule in life, and it did not lead into any greater discussion. I have come to some conclusions, however, and am now ready to continue this journey. After this long, I think that just getting into the habit of posting again is more important than making sure my posts are of sterling quality. So, with that in mind, I am just going to share my thoughts and conclusions from this last year however they may occur to me.

The first problem that I have with 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' is that it is written from a self-interest based perspective. I think it is a safe assumption that most parties will have some self-interest, and the logic is sound from there, but I did not know if I wanted to continue to develop the rest of my ethical system based on the principal of self-interest or not. Having thought through the matter for a long time I think that I will. The primary reason for this choice is that the system must be practical. A system based on altruism, where each person places the welfare of others before themselves is just not practical. You could, in theory, create such an ethical structure, but it would not stand the test of reality. Such a system would only work if all beings were altruistic rather than selfish. It is inevitable that some people would choose to be selfish and would take and take from the altruistic without giving back. The needs of the altruistic would not be met while the selfish few hoarded the majority of the resources, and the altruistic would be eliminated by attrition. We would then be left with a selfish group, and ethical rules based around being altruistic. It just wouldn't work. Even a system based on valuing others equally to how you value yourself would collapse under its own weight. The only safe assumption is that each person will work to their own best interests, and then build a system of ethics to govern living in such a society. Additionally, there is the fact that a person can only truly control themselves, only take responsibility for their own actions, and are (in most cases) the most able to meet their own needs. I may devote a full post to this idea later, but for now I think that it is safe to continue to work from self-interest in building my system of ethics.

Another problem that I have with 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' is the limitation that nothing is worth dying for. It seems like a rather constricting limitation when discussing when it is / is not moral to kill, since it seems to me that in many situations when a person might consider such an action there is a great deal at stake, and the condition may not hold true. Indeed, many of the posts that I had planned had similar caveats, and this disturbed me. What I have decided is to expand on the idea of 'Conditional Ethics' being conditional. In addition to the primary condition, that we agree on our base values, all ethical rules will have conditions under which they hold true. This makes a lot of sense given that doing a thing may be the best action in one circumstance, but an atrocity in another. Indeed, even in 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' I have a sort of conditional statement: It is wrong to kill, under the condition that your life is not being threatened. Realizing that it would quickly become cumbersome to have to sift through all of the potential conditions for any given statement I have decided to change the perspective a bit. Rather than place conditions on a statement, I will use the word condition as meaning a state of being, and build out an ethical system for each condition. For instance, the condition with which I will primarily concern myself with I am going to call the 'Generic Condition', and was used in 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' In this condition all people are equal in all relevant ways, there are no extraordinary circumstances afoot, but each being may reason differently and come to different conclusions or choose different actions. Once I have created a system of ethics governing the Generic Condition, I can then proceed to build systems of ethics for the myriad other conditions, for instance when large differences of power are present. These systems would be layered to cover all (*most.... eventually) of the varied types of situations in which we find ourselves. When I think on it, this approach really does make the most sense from a practical perspective. No one rule can be universally applied to all situations, and humans are already very adept at evaluating the situations they find themselves in and realizing that it may not be appropriate to say or do the same things in front of their mother-in-law that they might say or do in private company with their friends.

Finally, I was worried about how I wanted to focus my writing, and how I would go about the process of building up the system. Again, having considered the issue, I have come to a conclusion. Ethics is all about interactions between people, and it is these interactions which a system of ethics should govern. A group of people who live regulated by a common system of ethics (more or less..) are a society. So I will focus on how interactions between people should be conducted, and how the rules of ethics I establish could be used to craft a stable, healthy, and happy society.

Well, that is all for now. I just wanted to get writing again, and share my thoughts over the last year. I hope to have another post out sooner than later!