I don’t believe in morality. I don’t believe in an exterior existential judge that presides over right and wrong. I do take right and wrong seriously. But for me the judge is us, the judge is what can be understood from nature, the true judge. Or perhaps if one thinks seriously enough the platonic ideal of potential outcomes that can be abstracted and calculated from the dynamics of the natural world and our human nature which has evolved to adapt to the wills and whims of mother nature. There is no god, no metaphysical cosmology that as a higher order, possess the right to demand from us a inferior course of action in this world for the sake of what is beyond what can be known.
I do believe in speculative morals, or ethics to differentiate the word. An example is I suspect that plants, and by extension all living things, and perhaps all that exists in the material world participates in consciousness. I have also had shamanic experiences, which purport to reveal another dimension to reality and consciousness. These speculations can be weighted as part of the grand scheme of real world right and wrong, but they do not supersede it. This is what I mean by my lack of belief in morality.
Given that morality, ethics cannot be outsourced to magical thinking; our evil deeds cannot be laid at the feet of god… To right all the wrongs done in his name in the afterlife. Instead we need to apply serious thought to a practical mind for right and wrong. I don’t have a full word for this, both morality and ethics have conventional meanings and personal meanings. I take ethics as being akin to a flowchart of right and wrong. This is not practical, nor can it effectively handle the relativity or the probability aspects of navigating the world, either functionally, or in terms of effective or platonic right and wrong. It is not a scalable solution.
This is the fundamental why of Cultural Philosophy. To conceptualize a process of being that handles the tradeoffs of effective living, happiness, ethics, and the world we make for ourselves. To think in ways that are both sophisticated and human about these problems. To not succumb to delusion, but rather to live in genuine hope and joy!
This has been a short public service announcement, and a reminder that I’m still here, and still working on this project, its just going slower than I’d hoped. In part because I’ve been side tracked by some really exciting work I hope to share soon. Stuff that can make a tremendous positive impact at scale in the coming years!
All the best to you dear readers, cheers and take care!
Welcome back!
Rock on Geo. I feel like every sentence deserves its own essay! I hardly had time to absorb what it means to not believe in morals, then I’m whisked into what it means for every living thing to participate in consciousness (only the living things?) Have mercy on us and rather us through it slowly 😺
I like your phrasing of ethics as speculative morals. I’ll have a think on that one..