Introduction

Here are some beliefs, thoughts, perspectives, and arguments of mine on ethics. I was writing what I hoped would be a comprehensive essay on my views in 2019 - I never finished it, and as such this will be quite scattered. I’ve tried to edit this piece a bit such that each idea accentuates its own thread of reasoning and stands as independently as possible.

Utilitarianism

In my view, any sensible person today has realized that we can only know ethics as it pertains to an individual subject, rather than as universal deontological law. Despite its subjectivity, ethics remains inescapable for every individual and as a demanding point of contention in society. There is often no true or false when making moral claims, but we can’t escape holding ethical beliefs personally, let alone as a group.

However, to most people, the notion that ethics is meaning itself, the core of our humanity, and possibly of all sentience, rather than this reality being a mere physics-enabled accident is a radical and difficult shift.

Although each person holds a unique brain and therefore unique psychology, we all share the same fundamental apparatus (some traits being near-universal - ie. the will-to-live, empathy, others not so, and those in common being in general more fundamental). These common traits should give rise to a common, agreeable ethics. Philosophy/rationalization and language are high-level, situational/environmental, culturally-specific processes and are null (nihilistic) in themselves. Consider the numerous exotic moral codes you find in different cultures, which tend to be barbaric and unintelligible. Most ethical theory is like this, it is merely word salad, not true but striking nerves at the psychological level, from situations, human experiences, and desires.

Animal Rights

The rising concern of the ethical implications of animal suffering is a fruitful present-day case study in understanding the generalized nature of morality. Until recently, most consumers have engaged in meat-eating without second thought, as an unchallenged social norm. There simply was no ethical issue - eating meat was normal, there was nothing alarming or questionable about it. However, when the typical meat-eater is informed about the significance of their consumption, they are not passive, but completely shocked by what they see. It’s undeniable that the idea of factory farming strikes a nerve in us all. We can’t watch; it’s pure horror. But why? If our human morality is purely interested in the wellbeing of humans, then why does the suffering of animals so deeply affect us?

Whether or not eating meat is okay is, unfortunately, largely still controversial today, but the point is that regardless of if a person chooses to refrain from eating meat afterwards, at the moment that they do become informed of the very real hell of meat eating, they are almost always shocked and disappointed, often to the point of tears.

What ethics really is

What really is ethics? A common perception of ethics is that it involves distinguishing rights from wrongs, creating systems of deontological law with the eventual aim of worldly application serving the need to maintain a just, or at least ordered, society. The field may be seen as boring, a background study in the grand scheme of things, composed of only common sense, and yawn-provoking scholarly nuance.

Though much of what people think about as ethical philosophizing is adequately characterized in this way, this cultural baggage is far from speaking of the truly deep, personally relevant, life-changing essence and depths that the field is capable of. Understood as broadly as possible, a definition of the field of ethics, including metaethics, puts ethics as the central study imbued in all else. Ethics deals with the real motivating concern behind every surface decision, perception, and judgment. Ethics is the why which is always-present at the heart of every concern, for the decision to do anything at all, personally or within society, can only be an ethical decision; ie. any action or judgment is one that boils down to differing between right and wrong, or worst or best.

Taken to an extreme, and this is largely in the ideal, ethics is the motor and seer of all change and structure within reality as considered by a conscious subject. This is because subjects are concerned with the way things are, and the mechanics of that concern are formed, consciously or unconsciously, on the whim in one moment or life-long after serious thought, as though they were ethical propositions; to work as a doctor because it is a virtuous position in society, or to pretend to find a joke funny because it would be cruel to a friend to allow them to suffer humiliation.

The nuance is that there is a mismatch between our ideal and how ethics actually functions in the world. In actuality, serious, explicit ethics is but a weak concern for most people. It is important to remember that all judgment and decision only matters because it is a matter of ethics, which is on the matter of mattering, but scarcely in the world are matters self-aware of this; at large things in the world are purely process dictated by cause, and individuals take one path over the other due to pure, evolutionarily instantiated, self-interest and instinct.

Some questions

1. Could utilitarianism be universal?

Perhaps there is potential for a very strong perspective - that in fact, ethics is not mere opinion, but specifically utilitarian ethics are universal. Why? Because we might be able to state utilitarianism in a way which is universally going to be taken to be true, without exception – because all human minds likely depend on similar axioms, wind up in confusions or divergent states, but have similar mechanics as to what beliefs are formed in the long-run.

2. What kind of utilitarianism?

How ought we to judge whether negative or classical utilitarianism makes more sense?

3. Is ethics even “real”/valid?

The point of contention for me is that, although it is completely fabricated, we all share this fabrication, and the fabrication presents itself to us as if it were not only real, but the animating and colouring force at the heart of everything else, which in truth emanates from it (not moral thought, but the concern/subject of morality; the experience of pain/aversion and pleasure) We create our own truth, we have created ethics to be something true, in that you will never in any form take hold of a consciousness that is interested in anything but ethics