I think it's pretty freaking bold considering how constitutionally ignorant humans are. Our limited perception makes the claim that there is no basis for ethical first principles in reality groundless as the positive claim.
Yeesh, do ethics even exist? It's a manufactured category, elevated to something spiritual-sounding to give it more weight and thus inspire people to follow them.
Let's go right back and determine why we even have ethical values.... and the answer is to basically "manage social behavior" and maybe "feel good about oneself." If there was just one sentient being in the universe, would there be a need for ethics? That is the purpose that "ethics" serves.
So some productive rules can be derived in a particular universe where the other rules are rather uniform and we're talking about a particular species (again introducing some uniformity)... and they are all meant to manage the group's behavior. But they don't exist as "things" in themselves, apart from the group they are helping to manage or the individuals that comprise the group.
I think the onus has always been with choice, and that we have always had a purpose whether we're aware of it or not, if and only if that purpose exists. If no such purpose exists, there is nothing to worry about and no reason to do anything.
Exactly. "There are no reasons, there are only choices."
If you make shit choices and hurt yourself, most people don't care. If you make choices that negatively impact others, then the group is going to intervene to modify your behavior. And if you accept that value is equivalent for all members of a group, then your perceived value hinges on the value you attribute to others in the group... so that's where "live and let live" comes from. Or when you give to other individuals in the group and they give you back in turn -- reciprocity. But this is all very functional and prisoner's dilemma in makeup -- it's a way of managing our interactions, not a tangible noun/entity in itself but a verb? If you want an absolute, then we need to find an eternal absolute source; if a set of ethics exists outside of humanity so that we can't even perceive it, even if it exists, then I posit that it is
irrelevant to the human condition and living, so who even cares? Like I said, ethics are specific to a time, place, species, etc., because they guide the behavior for that species in those conditions for specific ends.
The proper response to this is not the contrivance of some principles to agree with one's own constitutional attitudes to keep warm at night or even suicide. There is no proper response at all. A mediocre, unaspiring life is entirely permissible because everything is permissible.
it sure is. In four billion years (or however long the universe has), there won't even be any awareness of what a "mediocre human life was" anyway. Death and the passing of time beating things to dust makes things not matter in the universal long scale.
The shared recognition of such a purpose, even if it is only possible and undefined because beyond our grasp, is the sole thing capable of uniting people to strive for something better by design and not by the accident of flawed, vulgar popular ideology. This has led me to my conclusion that one's first duty, if there is any duty, is to seek out the rest of one's duty and assist others in doing the same.
That's good you have found your purpose. Because we're right back to where we were before. Either you create a purpose for yourself in a world that seems without purpose, or you terminate your search for a purpose. This is absurdity, right? You are making the choice to live and continue to seek a purpose with hopes of finding one, when rationally it seems unlikely you have one.
This isn't a bad thing. Because we can talk about "universal purpose" but we also have to consider "quality of life." You are alive right now, and you experience things right now, and you either suffer or experience pleasure right now. So there's another question: Does that fact that everything eventually dies mean that the moment doesn't matter? Do things have to be permanent to matter to an individual?
Maybe I'm not convinced in the long run that anything lasts; but in the moment, I realize I do feel things, and value certain things, so I decide to act on those things regardless; and if people want to destroy things I realize I care about, then I choose to respond to stop them. I also equate that, because of my own internal experience and my being human, other humans also are in the same boat -- and even if the world makes no sense or seems to have no purpose, I decide to honor others as I would honor myself. "In the end, through all the searching, all we have is each other." That's about the best I've got, sorry.
Well, if God wants me to laugh, I've got bad news
I was hoping that god was more like Steven Wright or George Carlin, but I have a growing fear that god is more Three Stooges.
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