So, I’ve been chatting with my buddies lately, and it’s turned into a bunch of debates about right and wrong. I think I have a pretty solid moral compass, I’m not bragging haha, but most people I know can’t really explain why something’s right or wrong without getting all circular or contradicting themselves.
So, how do you figure out what to do? No judgment, just curious. I’ll share my thoughts below.
Thanks!
Edit: Oh, all you lil’ philosophers have brought me a cornicopia of thoughts and ideas. I’m going to take my time responding, I’m like Treebeard, never wanna be hasty.
Most other animals develop rapidly from birth to self sufficiency, while humans are born so very unfinished - totally dependent on others for our most basic needs, for years and years. If any values can be said to resonate with “human nature”, it’s prosocial and community-building values.
Just about every major religion glorifies some version of The Golden Rule - do unto others as ye would be done by.
Yep, that all tracks for me, is there anything underneath the golden rule, a more base rule, if you will.
Like what about people who have different lines over what would trigger a physical response to hostility? One guy might only respond to direct physical attacks, and another will respond to verbal threats of physical attacks. Who’s right?
I don’t think you can boil it down further, and that’s why Western law is an evolving patchwork of codes and penalties that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Too many nuances, situational factors, edge cases and value priorities that vary from persn to person (and culture to culture) to decide every imaginable scenario consistently.
If you’re not familiar, you might gain some perspective from a summary read about Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Goedel’s Proof deals with systems of logic, where logic is something we hope for in systems of law. Goedel’s Proof shows that a “sufficiently powerful” system of logic is necessarily incomplete - that is, we can pose problems in mathematical-systemic terms that have no solutions under that system.
In mathematical logic we have “axioms” like “1+1=2” or “a triangle is a plane figure defined by exactly 3 lines”. In law, axiom-like propositions are called “maxims”, often stated in Latin, and convey foundational legal principles like “contracts must be honored”, or “people can own things”. In a hypothetical properly Communist society, and by “proper” I mean to exclude failed would-be Communisms like the USSR or PRC, “people can own things” isn’t necessarily a maxim; they might instead have a maxim that codifies “things belong to the State” and exclude any notion of individual ownership.
The implication for legal systems is that there are inevitably legal disputes that can’t be decided strictly by the letter of the law, so we have to fall back on fiat of judicial opinion.
I think you might be approaching this in the wrong way. There is no objective right or wrong when it comes to ethics. Life and humans are simply too complex to create simple, objective rules that would be interpreted in exactly the same way by a decent number of humans for a reasonably complex situation. And you don’t even have to include ethical dilemmas for that, like deciding whether to shoot down a plane hijacked by terrorists or interrogating a kidnapper via torture.
Nonetheless, many homogeneous groups get to a decent degree of ethical alignment, and asking people for their ethical rules or guidelines is an interesting question to get inspiration and to find out how others try to navigate the complexity of the world. Just don’t expect these rules to be objective.