- Don't Be Stupid. Prudence takes the highest category...and the priority is clearly here. IF I'm going to do something that hurts myself...or my family...or my friends...that constitutes STUPID. Don't do that. When evaluating other people...stupidity heavily impacts my evaluation of how to interact with them. The ethical justification here, for the 4th time this week, is David Schmidtz. Schmitzian meta-ethics as short as possible:
- In order to accomplish ANY goal whatsoever, you must be effective in the world. To be effective in the world as a thinking entity, you must (a) correctly predict the consequences of your actions (purpose of epistemology), and (b) operate in a way that maximizes your long-term self-interest in a social setting (prudential, non-predatory ethics -- see iterated prisoners dilemma or golden rule). All actually held goals (+/- 0.03%) lead to good epistemology, and at least basic prudence.
- Be Kind. Avoid harming (or forcing) others...even at some cost to self. (Haidt's categories/axes of harm/care and liberty) If I interact with someone who does not appear to follow this principle...they list in the "dangerous" category...which of the dangerous subsections they land in is evaluated based on the details of the others' action. This is the primary axis on which I judge others...do I prefer to make common cause with them, associate with them, avoid them, or shoot them. People who hurt (force) others are my own, ONLY, definition of evil. On this count...I am pretty distant from most folks. I have 6 rough categories of entities besides myself: Family, Friends, Acquaintances, Strangers, Critters, Plants...and I will prefer to prevent harm to folks in that order. Note the missing categories of race, nation, town, etc.
- Be Admirable (to self). What kind of person do I wish I was like. Be more like those people. In particular, I have an obsession with brilliance -- extraordinary skill in any domain...and with consistency. Indeed...my drive for consistency may occasionally displace #2 as a motivator...and my search for brilliance occasionally over-rules my hurts-others concerns over good/evil. If you don't have a "to self" admirable....then Admirable to others is a pretty damn good substitute. Of course admirable is not strictly equivalent to "liked" or "cool".
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Aretae's personal ethics
Ethics consists in my own life of 3 mostly sequential tiers:
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2 comments:
If after +10 years of reading philosophy all you got is that everyone must figure out his personal ethics, well that's a lot of wasted time. Might as well stop at Hume and go on with whatever you enjoy doing.
On the other hand, scores of people have wasted their entire lives cooking up philosophies whose end point is 'figure things by yourself'. Ain't it grand?
And that's today's mainstream philosophy?
It's been fun, but if Hume is all we've got there's really little use in any further discussion.
I think I said more than that.
We at least all agree on prudence...and there's an awful lot of (imperfect) agreement on what constitutes prudence. And that prudence eats up a lot of the ethical space.
We also all agree that harm/care and fairness/justice are major (correct) components of the universal human ethical response...and mostly, we agree on what harm/care means.
I think that's a moderately large amount of agreement.
The problem that we face is that almost everyone's ethics begin with their unsupported metaphysics.
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