On Ethics

We do not tend to question our assumptions. Upon seeing the daytime sky, no one will wonder if it actually is blue. That is the human condition: we must assume the obvious is true, for otherwise our own thoughts force us into indecision. This is the case with nearly any field, but when morality enter the picture, we become even more blind. Ethics, as we usually think about it, is the field that deals with the distinction between right and wrong, and good and bad behavior. However, there are no absolute moral truths, but only desires and aversions that govern our construction of right and wrong, and good and bad.

At their core, there are things people want and things that they don’t want, and these desires and aversions drive their decision-making processes. We want life, and we do not want death. We want pleasure, and we do not want pain. We want to take warm showers, we do not want to take cold showers. Whether reasonable or irrational, conscious or subconscious, the vast majority of decisions are based on those wants/not want. Thus, I propose a new foundation of ethics: the study of those desires and aversions, and how they relate to the decision-making process.

I realize that my conception of ethics has much has to do with human psychology. This is not an accident. Psychology is an attempt to find the ways in which human mental functions are the same across many individuals. I think that a huge aspect of ethics is that there are many things on which the vast majority of humanity agrees, which as the sadness or death, the importance or beauty, the loathsomeness of rape.

First, before discussing the implications of my theory, I would like to discuss that reasons for our previously misguided foundation of ethics. It is a combination of two factors: one is that people generally believe that the things they want and do not want, to at least a few of those things, should apply as rules to everyone, and secondly people generally believe that some of the things they want/don’t want are absolutely ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Generally, those things people believe to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ they also believe should apply to everyone else’s decisions. For instance, one may believe that life is the highest good, and therefore no one should be killed.

 Values are always rooted in our desires and aversions. Now, one may argue that many of our values and beliefs come from external sources, mainly in the form or laws, but that fact does not disagree with my theory about the formation of those desires and aversions: they must have come from someone. Also, it is possible, and often the case, that we shape our wants/not wants to be compatible with the beliefs and values that are forced upon us. For instance, the law says that suicide is bad, so we generally do not want to commit suicide. However, previously in japan suicide was seen as an honorable act.

There are countless physical similarities in our bodies. We generally develop the same way in biological terms, and so we hold many of the same wants/not wants. We do not want to die in large part because if we did all want to die because that want is a common socially arising one, or that it is programmed into our genes, our species would soon cease to exist. Similarly, our want to have sex is due to evolution: obviously, it is evolutionary beneficial for the process of reproduction to be pleasurable. The common want that my wants/not wants to be universally accepted as rules is a pretty necessary result of one’s desires and aversions. There are many things we want/don’t want other people doing to us, so obviously we would somehow want those things to be things that others are forced to do or not to do to us. Many of those wants/not wants regarding social conduct are codified into the laws that surround and shape us today.

An act that is morally right or wrong is just one that follows or breaks the general wants/aversions of the society it is committed in. For instance, in the us, suicide is wrong because it is something that the vast majority of people do not want, but in japan suicide was morally right.

Now on to some implications of these ideas. It is not that there are no such as things ar right or wrong, but that right and wrong are not as absolute as we usually think them to be. It is a usual, almost necessary consequence of the fact that we wish our wants/not wants to be universally applied that a thing can definitely be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, like there are some actual moral laws in the universe. Instead that which is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is subject to the wants of the majority, or at least those who have the power over others. On a side note, this want for our wants/not wants to apply to everyone explains the existence of government or a king or some ruling body. There are some things that are common among people’s wants/not wants, and the existence of a government allows those things to happen.

The fact that there are no moral laws should fundamentally change the nature of the debates of ethics. Often both sides believe their position to be morally superior because it agrees with some ‘natural moral law’, which does not exist. John mill believed that autonomy was one of the greatest goods, even higher than life. He somehow must have thought that the greatness of autonomy is somehow present in the fundamental laws of the universe or something like that.

Now would probably be a good time to discuss the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (or evil). Good and bad/evil function in a very similar way to right and wrong. The wants/not wants that we also believe should apply to everyone else are things that are good/evil. We want life, so life is good. In the same way, we think that there are some moral laws of right and wrong, we believe that there are some acts which are definitely good or evil. The difference is that right/wrong seems to imply a sense of justification, where good and evil seem to imply a sense of following or breaking ‘moral laws’. Maybe the distinction is subtler than I made it sound, but I don’t think that the difference matters all that much. The important thing is that both are thought to have some value, but none do. It is neither true nor not true that murder evil. It is that people tend to not want to be murdered, and therefore think of it as evil.

If there are any moral truths out there (which I highly doubt), they could, I guess, arise from a statistical analysis of all people that may be in contact with a certain individual. In today’s world, almost everyone is connected through our social media, so this web needs to stretch the entire world. If anyone belief is agreed to by almost everyone, and this belief has not changed in all of human existence, it is safe to call that value a moral law.

I think that a fundamental tension exists in our desire for universal moral laws to exist. On the one hand, they make decisions so much easier. If murder is always bad, I won’t have to feel bad about imprisoning a murderer. On the other hand, no moral laws exist. We will never be able to resolve this issue, but, for what it's worth, thinking about it will make it a little less unclear.