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At every level in the biosphere, from the interaction of cells up to and including the interactions of humans, symbiosis—the need to work and live together—is far more significant in the race of life than competition.
The moralist, standing erect and looking at the heavens, is simply out of touch with the need to make a living. Ethics is all very well, but perhaps we cannot afford it. At least with his eyes on the earth the dim mole earns his living. There is something grubby, not only to Kant but I think to most of us, about the excuse that this argument offers us. We have some sense that we should keep our own hands clean, however much others will then dirty theirs. The excuse is not open to a person of strict honour or integrity, however convenient it may be in practice. In many areas, it is not over and
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for human beings, there is no living without standards of living. This means that ethics is not Ethics: it is not an ‘institution’ or organization with sinister hidden purposes that might be better unmasked. It is not the creature of some concealed conspiracy by ‘them’: Society, or The System, or The Patriarchy. There are indeed institutions, such as the Church or State, that may seek to control our standards, and their nature and function may need to be queried. But that will mean at most a different ethic. It does not and cannot introduce the end of ethics.
Stupidity is at least as dangerous as sin.
In the limit, virtue and duty may require us to lay down life itself. So there is no automatic alignment between behaving well and looking after ourselves.
it takes education to instil into the subject the sense of respect and self-respect which will turn a profit made by losing his soul into a loss.
a life lived amidst lies, or in a fool’s paradise, is not a flourishing life. So the ingredients are there to suggest that real flourishing or true human health implies justice. It implies removing the oppression, and living so that we can look other people, even outsiders, in the eye.
Even happiness is not admirable, if it is the happiness of a villain.
The only thing good in itself, then, is a good will.
The core of morality, then, lies not in what we do, but in our motives in doing it: ‘When moral worth is at issue, what counts is not actions, which one sees, but those inner principles of action that one does not see.’
according to deontological ethics
John Locke’s comment on this second stage is well known, but good enough to repeat: As if when men, quitting the state of Nature, entered into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws; but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of Nature, increased with power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.
The happiness and prosperity of mankind, arising from the social virtue of benevolence and its subdivisions, may be compared to a wall, built by many hands; which still rises by each stone, that is heaped upon it, and receives encrease proportional to the diligence and care of each workman. The same happiness, raised by the social virtue of justice and its subdivisions, may be compared to the building of a vault, where each individual stone would, of itself, fall to the ground; nor is the whole fabric supported but by the mutual assistance and combination of its corresponding parts.
David Hume, social engineer
The aim then should be to ensure that our lives have as many meaningful events as possible. We must avoid moods in which everything goes leaden. Anyone suffering from such a mood might sulk at the edge of the carnival, like Hamlet seeing nothing but futility of the world, the skull beneath the skin. It is sad when we become like that, and probably we need a tonic more than an argument. The only good argument, in a famous phrase of David Hume, is that this is no way to make yourself useful or agreeable to yourself or others.
Suppose just a little bit more happiness is obtained by trampling on someone’s rights. Do we have to approve of that? Is justice itself subordinate to the general good?
This highlights a problem with an "the end justifies the means" utilitarianism
A political order cannot do everything: it cannot guarantee a life free from depression or disease or disappointment. But it can give freedom from violence, discrimination, arbitrary arrest, inhuman or degrading punishment, unfair trials, and other evils. It can guarantee that you have the protection of the laws if you speak your mind (on some things) or peacefully demonstrate (sometimes). In this view, the moral or political or social order sets the scene. It can’t help what people make of the scene. Whether people can go on to achieve the life of eudaimonia is up to them. It is not the job
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Echoes Albert Camus' "The Human Crisis": "...The great misfortune of our time is precisely that politics pretends to provide us with a catechism, with a complete philosophy, and sometimes even with rules for loving. But the role of politics is to keep things in order, and not to regulate our inner problems..."
Even in democracies, there are fascinating relics of the Platonic image of the guardians. The democratic United States has its process of ‘judicial review’, whereby the legal mandarins of the Supreme Court oversee and strike out democratically voted legislation. This is done in the name of the Constitution, this being a document to whose meaning the legal mandarins alone have privileged access. The parallel with a priesthood and its private access to the truth of the sacred texts is not hard to detect.
It would be nice if there were a utilitarian calculus enabling us to measure the costs and benefits of permission and suppression, but it is hard to find one.
Epicurus had an argument that death should not be feared. Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.
Often enough the aggressive question ‘Who’s to say?’ can get a satisfactory answer: those who have investigated, calmly, without prejudice or bias, deploying knowledge and care. Children need to understand that science is basically an extension of these homely procedures. Where they have not given an answer, the method is to try again, not to plump for one dogma or another.
