back to the beginning: morality

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Nella Leontieva

However, [Kant’s] conception of reason is different from that of the utilitarians, who view human beings as capable of only instrumental reason. The job of instrumental reason is to figure out how to maximize satisfying our desires for pleasure and happiness.

Utilitarians believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good things (such as pleasure and happiness) in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things (such as pain and unhappiness). IEP

Kant’s conception of morality is, in my view, just that: a theoretical construct broached, examined and judged up in the obligatory clouds.

As for utilitarians, no categorical imperatives perhaps but still the conviction that mere mortals in a No God universe can somehow “figure out” what would – should? – make mere mortals happy and pleased?

But for Kant, reason is not just the ‘slave of the passions’ as David Hume called it, but of ‘pure practical reason’ – “which legislates a priori, regardless of empirical ends.” If reason was simply an instrument to achieve our desires – “if that were all reason amounted to”, Kant says, then “we would be better off with instincts.”

Indeed, and how often has one of us noted that crucial distinction between animals compelled almost entirely by biological imperatives, oblivious to both morality and death, and human beings? Other animals don’t have to weigh any number of complex social, political and economic variables…ever evolving and changing culturally and historically.

And all those my of ilk can do is to ask the Kantians among us to bring their theoretical constructs out into the world of, among other things, all those newspaper headlines. Headlines that exist precisely because neither philosophers nor scientists nor theologians have been able to provide mere mortals with anything in the way of one or another optimal consensus? Let alone a deontological assessment able to be demonstrated other than in a world of words.

Instead, in my view, it’s just more of the same…

Moreover, unlike individual feelings, emotions and desires that are chaotic and based on self-interest, reason is universal and so establishes our moral duties as categorical imperatives that must be demanded of all rational beings. Therefore, I believe that morality can be justified only by reason, regardless of how many people we make happy or unhappy. And our moral duties are… Well, every reasonable person knows what they are!

Moral duties and obligations. And everyone here knows what they are?

On the other hand, as with those like Ayn Rand, it seems the duty and the obligations of Kantians is to insist that it is the duty and the obligation all reasonable men and women to think like they do. Only, unlike Kant, Rand didn’t think up a “transcending font” – God – able to provide the ultimate assessment. And on Judgment Day no less.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

If you admit you are a person, and you admit I am a person, and you don’t diverge from the law of identity (p=p) of indiscernibles, then your thinking, acting, and interpreting/valuing/purposing will be in accordance to person=person (self=other).

And you will wonder about its existential import, since not a single one of us is always aligned with that reality — a reality in which “reality divergence” (and reconvergence) is apparently baked in.

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Colin Brookes

These rational grounds [above] are undermined by those who deny free will, claiming that all our motives and behaviour are determined and best understood through reductive scientific explanations, from the psychological to physiological, then chemical, and ultimately to those of physics.

And in regard to morality, nothing seems more important than in being able to establish that we do indeed have free will.

Well, other than the fact that we still have no way in which to establish that. Other than [here] philosophically in a world of words.

To logical positivists, for example, the claims of metaphysics, ethics, and theology, were meaningless.

Not so much meaningless from my frame of mind as [historically and cuturally and individually] awash in conflicting and contradictory meaning rooted existentially in dasein.

However, their disdain for mystery and metaphysics was met with a joint “No!” from those Metaphysical Animals featured in MacCumhaill and Wiseman’s recent book (2022) – Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. This group of four Oxford friends are credited with breathing new life into philosophy and ethical thinking.

In that case, for those who are familiar with their conclusions, please note how they breathed new life into your own philosophy and ethcial thinking. Given particular contexts.

In ambiguous contrast, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty, though eschewing the relativism simplistically associated with him by critics, nevertheless implies a version of moral relativism when claiming that “belief is caused by nothing deeper that contingent historical circumstance” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 1989). However, this claim presumably applies equally to his own position, too.

"Ironism:

She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;

She realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;

Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself."

Which seems clearly to be more applicable to the is/ought world, in my view. His own rendition of my own rendition of contingency, chance and change. In this Benjamin Button universe.

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Rose Dale

Western philosophy offers three major justifications for morality, associated with three well-known philosophers. Followers of Plato would say the basis of morality is self-interest; those of Hume’s school of thought claim it is other-regarding interests, wants or intentions; and Kantians argue it is justified in terms of the requirements of practical reason. Of course, every moral theory claims that its method for determining right and wrong is correct.

On the other hand, do not Plato and Kant ultimately predicate their own moral philosophy on either God or “the Gods”?

Then this part: “Of course, every moral theory claims that its method for determining right and wrong is correct.”

Objectivists, I call them.

Kant argued that reason must be at the heart of any moral action, despite any natural desires to the contrary. His categorical imperative is a necessary and non-negotiable principle.

Just out of curiosity, how did Kant connect the dots between that and God?

Henry Quirk [from the PN forum] argued that the Deist God created us in order that we embody, “the dictates of Reason and Nature”. Particularly in regard to “life, liberty and property”. But then He skedaddled, leaving us to grapple with what that actually means “for all practical purposes” on our own. With Deism there are even doubts about immortality and salvation.

How about Plato and Kant? Did or did not their own “categorical imperatives” revolve “in the end” around one or another Judgment Day?

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Rose Dale

Moral relativism further complicates the issue by denying any universal moral values; saying, rather, that different cultures and sub-cultures often have markedly differing values, and these can change depending on opinion, social context etc.

Cue the moral objectivists among us, of course. What complications, they ask. It’s all so simple. If only all of the other moral objectivists would recognize they are necessarily wrong then everyone would come around to the One True Path. Their own.

On the other hand, some of them will insist this is only applicable to white Anglo-Saxon straight men. The rest? Final solutions?

Nietzsche challenged that there is no objective or transcendent justification for moral claims. A kind of moral relativism first arose in ancient Greece, but didn’t really take off until Montaigne’s writings in the sixteenth century.

Moral relativism, maybe, but with Nietzsche you still have the possibility of embodying the closest thing to God on Earth…the Ubermensch. As for immortality and salvation? Nope. But the Ubermensch will often actually take personal pride in being able to accept that. Each of them “dies like a man”.

If one is religious, then God/Allah/Jehovah lays down absolute moral truths to live by. Other moral absolutists argue from a non-religious standpoint that there are universal principles that ought never to be violated, regardless of context or consequences.

Oh, indeed, lots and lots and lots of folks [philosophers or otherwise] believe this. All I can then do is to ask them to note how they go about demonstrating [to themselves] that what they believe “in their head” does, in fact, reflect the essential truth for all mere mortals.

Or is it taking just one more leap of faith? Placing one more wager? Quoting one more chapter and verse from Scripture?

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Rose Dale

I think we each have our own moral principles based on our individual upbringing and social context.

In other words, the part I root existentially in dasein…the part pertaining to human interactions that often result in both conflicting goods and conflicting renditons of behaviors either to be rewarded or punished.

Thus, if philosophers were able to transcend the contingency, chance and change emanating from the historical and cultural interactions of homo sapiens, we might actually have a moral philosophy that all rational men and women are obligated categorically and imperatively to embody.

However, I would argue that the majority of people in most cultures would agree on some basic morals, such as treating others how you wish to be treated, do not hurt or kill others, etc.

Okay, but why one culture at one historical juncture rather than another culture at another historical juncture? Why ours and not theirs? Why yours but not mine? After all, how many of us here would have wanted to be aborted in the womb? On the other hand, how many here would want to be forced to give birth against their will?

I would defy anyone to argue that murder, or child abuse, for example, is not universally wrong. (I allow that it’s not always clear cut : I’m firmly pro-women’s rights in the abortion debate, but it could be argued that termination of a foetus is murder, and thus wrong).

I would argue that in the absense of God, all things can be rationalized. By sociopaths, for example. Or by the particularly hardcore moral objectivists among us who rationalize a “by any means necessary”. Or an “or else” mentality.

Then back up into the general description philosophical assessment clouds…

My personal morality is not based on religious belief but on humanism – the principle that every individual has an equal right to live a full life and be free from harm. So in that sense I am somewhat of an absolutist, although I also feel that many aspects of moral relativism are valid. Moral principles of some kind are clearly needed for society not to descend into anarchy. But there are many shades of grey between right and wrong.

Let’s run that by some these folks:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of schools of philosophy

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Lawrence Powell

I start with the premise that organisms such as ourselves have been formed via a process of evolution by natural selection, and further, that any altruistic tendencies we possess have been formed due to the complex of behaviour including those tendencies having a net benefit to our ancestors.

In ways that philosophers have been examining now for centuries, “somehow” nature and nurture combines in each of us as individuals from the cradle to the grave. And in such a way that “somehow” some of us choose one moral assessment of human interactions, while others choose among hundreds and hundreds of what can “for all practical purposes” be very different and conflicting assessments. The part I root in dasein while recognizing that “I” am no less the embodiment of this particular set of assumptions myself.

Thus:

If you were born and raised in a Chinese village in 500 BC, or in a 10th century Viking community or in a 19th century Yanomami village or in a 20th century city in the Soviet Union or in a 21st century American city, how might your value judgments be different?

How about this…

For those philosophers here who do believe in an objective human morality, let them try to imagine for us how they would go about attempting to convince the folks above to abandon their own One True Path and embrace another instead.

Given a particular moral conflagration of note.

Back, perhaps, to Ayn Rand arguing that Karl Marx was an idiot for not recognizing that the capitalist means of production itself inherently and necessarily reflects the most rational assessment of political economy.

If one adds the further premise that morality has arisen due to an attempt to rationalise or formalise our sense of altruism, this leads to the conclusion that morality is grounded in our nature, formed through evolution by natural selection.

We all come into this world hard-wired by nature to experience emotional/psychological states such as altruism, selflessness, compassion, generosity, charity. But we also come into this world hard-wired by nature to experience egotism, selfishness, greed, opportunism and vanity.

Though clearly the part about memes reminds us that down through the ages, naturally selected genetic components that come to be embedded in one’s sense of identity can readily be reconfigured into any number of conflicting moral and political philosophies.

Then the part about “selection” itself. Yes, in a God World we have something to come back to here: God! An actual entity able to select things that, while seemingly incomprehensible “here and Now” to many, are all part and parcel of an ultimately loving, just and merciful Supreme Being.

But in a No God world? Who or what does the selecting then? And who or what set it all into motion?

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Lawrence Powell

Someone might argue that morality was arrived at purely rationally or, notwithstanding the origins of the moral sense, that there is a rational grounding and justification for morality, or perhaps morality is a diktat of some sort of supernatural agency. However, the acceptance of such reasons or diktats would itself still need to be grounded or justified.

No doubt about that, right? Lots and lots and lots of philosophers have insisted there is a rational grounding and a justification for morality.

They argue that there is over and again. It’s just that any number of them insist over and again that we can’t take our assessments down out of technical clouds until all are in agreement regarding what the words actually mean. And that can go on for page after page after page. And not once will there be a mention of anything that pertains to, say, the lives we actually live.

And if it is derived from one or another “supernatural agency”? Well, that can signal practically anything, right? Which one? What does he, she or it have in mind for us? Oblivion, perhaps? Or Paradise?

Then the part where hundreds and hundreds of religious communities all vie to persuade us that they really are the one true path.

Then the denominations insisting that unless you do come over to their own congregation, well, expect to to be…damned?

As for grounding or justifying it all…how hard can that be in a world already accomodating the countless denominations that already have?

Then: pick one:

The rational approach articulated by Kant, is the idea of a moral imperative that any rational intelligence would acknowledge. Or as per utilitarianism, might there be a moral imperative to consider the maximising of a measure such as general happiness or flourishing?

And then all of the other moral and political philosophies articulated over the centuries? On the other hand, if there are actual moral imperatives, where on Earth are they?

And, of course, they are everywhere. All you need do is merely believe in one of them.

Another attempt at asserting a rational justification for morality is Aristotle’s contention that being moral or virtuous will tend to lead to a better life. Thus, morality becomes rational on the premise that wishing for a better life is rational.

With those like Aristotle, however, the first thing you need to explore is the extent to which he factored God, the Gods and/or religion itself into all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCJFl-0HY0

Hope that cleared things up for you.

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Roger S. Haines

Morality would have no meaning in a universe without conscious beings.

Whatever that means? Still, the further out on the metaphysical limb we go here [philosophically or otherwise] the spookier “reality” becomes. Mind over matter? Matter over mind?

Suppose there is no God, and human beings are the only intelligent lifeform in the universe. Next year, out of the blue, a huge asteroid smashes into Earth wiping out the human race. How then to wrap your mind around a universe that is now reduced down to the brute facticity of existence itself.

Whatever that means?

A thermostat might be faulty, but we do not literally claim that it lies. A forest fire may be all-consuming, but it is not actually greedy. Hence, morality is absent from a strictly objective account of the world.

Though, lucky for us, subjective accounts abound. All we need do then is to…to pin down the least subjective accounts? On the other hand, how many already insist that, in regard to almost everything, they’ve already come to embody objective morality.

Rather, morality is something that arises from conscious experience.

Think about that. Down through the centuries, individuals become conscious of many very, very different things. Why? Because of an accumulation of many, many very, very different experiences. Then the part where down through the centuries, any number of philosophers have propounded any number of moral philosophies. On the other hand, what hasn’t changed is the part that revolves around human lives awash in contingency, chance and change.

In this sense, morality is necessarily ‘subjective’. However, that does not for a moment mean that moral right and wrong are a matter of personal opinion or taste. If it did, there could be no moral debate, or indeed any possibility of revising one’s moral judgement, since according to the subjective view, whatever one judged to be right initially is therefore right by definition.

Actually, for most of us, morality is intersubjective. Meaning that depending on when and where we were born and raised and who we did in fact interact with from day to day can make all the difference in the world regarding what is deemed to be good and evil.

A similar objection applies to the more widespread view that morality is nothing more than the current collective preference of a community. The way we debate moral questions implies necessarily that there are grounds outside our current communal judgements to which we need to refer. So where in our experience can such grounds be found?

Yes, the way we discuss and debate morality often involves the assumption that there is – must be? – something beyond ourselves…a transcending truth to fall back on. Which most call God.

[iambiguous]

wrong thread

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Carl Strasen

Like it or not, religion is morality’s anchor. It grounds morality, and tells us what we ought to do.

That’s my own assumption, as well. There may be an objective morality in a No God world. And some day philosophers may actually be able to differentiate good from bad behavior deontologically. But even if that day were to come, there’s still the part about immortality and salvation. Not to mention the fact that philosophers are neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

There is, in my view, no comparison whatsoever between the two. Unless, of course, someone here can provide me with one.

Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus argued for moral skepticism by introducing the concept of isostheneia or ‘equipollence’ – the idea that every moral argument point has an equally rational counterpoint. This concept was never disproven.

My own rendition of this revolves around the assumption that over and again in regard to any number moral conflicts, both sides are able to make reasonable points that the other sides are never really able to fully refute.

Start here: https://www.procon.org/

As for “disproven concepts” does this reflect just another philosophical assessment…dueling deductions…or is the concept itself taken down to Earth and examined given the actual lives we live.

. But moral skepticism, like an ultra powerful solvent, dissolves categorical imperatives and utilitarianism calculations alike. Once applied, the skeptical critique cannot be unlearned, leaving no moral absolutes, and morality merely becomes taste.

Be honest: do you reject this because you do in fact believe – beyond a leap of faith or a wager – that your own moral presumptions reflect the best of all possible worlds deontologically? Or do you reject it because if if were in fact true that objective morality is a social construct revolving around dasein historically and culturally, what of the “comfort and consolation” you sustain by having convinced yourself that you are on the One true Path?

[boagie1 (james boag)]

To understand morality, one needs to understand what life is, and what life is, is experience, so morality is concerned with living things, the experiences of an organism within a collective, for in isolation morality is meaningless. Life has many forms but only one essence, when one identifies that essence of self in other creatures compassion arises. and compassion is the essence of morality. The sufferings along life’s journey concern one’s compassion as suffering is reflected back upon the essence of life, the self. This becomes problematic when one has to measure, read compare, the suffering of the agents of life one against another. Which organism in the here and now is most capable and is indeed suffering, relative to the sufferings of another? Our sense of morality is then challenged is it not? It’s a morality judgment call and the measure is suffering. Biology is the measure and the meaning of all things and as such is the creator of the narrative of life, in a harsh world of life lives upon life, for in the physical world outside the self, there is no morality. Morality’s fulcrum is then an expanded concept of the self, and the self is a suffering reactionary creature, and as such has no free will. This follows logically from the acceptance of the idea, that all organisms are reactionary creatures governed by the larger reality of the physical world, as evolutionary biology teaches us.Your thoughts?.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@boagie1

the self is a suffering reactionary creature, and as such has no free will

From vherence comes this concept of free will?

Was proactive planned diversion from the norm … part of the plan?

Do you have an aversion to fun?

Go smell a flower, grumpy gus.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@boagie1

experience, so morality is concerned with living things, the experiences of an organism within a collective

experiencer=experiencer

Yes.

Results/preferences may vary.

[boagie1 (james boag)]

Ichthus,

That is kind of a drive-by-shooting response try something a little more cerebral.

[Ichthus77 (Ichthus77 (formerly She™))]

@Ichthus77

A very proactive presponse, Boanerges. You have anticipated and parried all my rejoinders.

lol jk

x5!

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Carl Strasen

Secular readers scoff at the idea that God gave the tribe of Israel eternal moral truths codified as the Ten Commandments on a mountaintop in the Sinai desert millennia ago, or that Jesus Christ reiterated as the Son of God that we are to ‘love the neighbor as the self’ (Leviticus 19:18).

Actually, where any number of secular readers scoff is when confronted with the threat of eternal damnation. Accept Jesus Christ as your own personal savior or you are toast — roasted 24/7 when He sends you down.

On the other hand, if the Christian God is shown to exist – He reveals Himself for example – what then if you worship and adore another God? One that, in fact, does not exist. Or what if by and large the Christian God does turn out to be a rather sadistic sort? He just sent Helene to Florida and He has many more “acts of God” coming down the pike. Many of these ghastly calamities He pummels us with infuriate you…but you come around to them because, well, the alternative is Hell or Purgatory or Oblivion. And, of course, those “mysterious ways”.

Yet divine communications to the sages through the ages has had a huge impact on morality. Moral truths cannot be proven, but they resonate through our lives, since we always act or try to act as if they are true.

Yet even here most of us acquire our understanding of God as children. The Divine communication is derived from Mom and Dad and other family members, more or less reflecting the will of the community or, in some cases, the theocratic state

As Rupert Shortt notes in God is No Thing (2017), “Christianity’s stress on the radical equality of all, and the founding of hospitals, schools and other philanthropic institutions, were [sic] genuinely revolutionary.”

Coinciding over and again historically with the Protestant Reformation. Coinciding over and again with the historical evolution of mercantilism and capitalism. The Catholic hierarchy with its “other world” mentality had their own way of accumulating comforts on this side of the grave…

“Bankers’ best guesses about the Vatican’s wealth put it at $10 billion to $15 billion. Of this wealth, Italian stockholdings alone run to $1.6 billion, 15% of the value of listed shares on the Italian market. The Vatican has big investments in banking, insurance, chemicals, steel, construction, real estate.” time magazine

The Protestants on the other hand not only rendered unto Caesar but are eagerly prepared these days to render unto Trump as well. And not just the Evangelicals.

A sailor was asked what the most important piece of equipment on a sailboat is. They replied, “A good anchor!” When the wind blows hard in the wrong direction, you need a source of moral absolutes and a good anchor. And as Henry Bergson writes in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), “through religion all men get a little of what a few privileged souls possess in full.“

That is basically how it has all unfolded alright. And the good news for many is that there are so many different privileged paths to choose from: List of religions and spiritual traditions - Wikipedia

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Guy Blythman

Guidelines ruling out negative behaviour between a society’s members, are justified and grounded both in practical considerations and in those one might call spiritual or emotional.

Here, for example. Guidelines that may or may not be pursued and then enforced. The part about politics, of course. The part about objectivism. The parts embodied in dasein and in philosophical prejudices.

But then down through the ages, the part where some philosophers avidly championed sets of behaviors that other philosophers just as avidly eschewed. All of the different schools of philosophy that focus not so much on what they believe is rational and moral but in insisting that there is, in fact, the best of all possible technical methods in which to pin that down: deontology, consequentialism, utilitarianism, contractualism, pragmatism, metaethics, postmodernism, deconstruction, “realism, relativism, and nihilism”.

It is less likely people will respect you and seek to do you good if you do not respect them. It is therefore prudent to promote moral behaviour.

Then the part historically where, in particular communities, rewards and punishments tended to revolve either around one or another rendition of right makes might or democracy and the rule of law. Not to mention those theocratic thugs which were and often still are often little than “might makes right” autocracies.

But morality is of even more value when derived from virtue, that is, a genuine desire to benefit one’s fellow creatures. Practising benign emotions leads to happiness – your own or others’ – whereas the negative emotions, or indifference, lead to unhappiness through their harmful effects. And happiness gives purpose to life, being therefore rational. One can only either ‘just live’, or have a reason for living which one is seeking to actuate. So to live without a reason, a purpose, would be illogical.

Right, right. As though down through the centuries we haven’t encountered any number of communities that understood happiness in very different ways. For some happiness revolved around capitalism, for others socialism. For some big government, for others little or no government at all. For some everything comes to pertain to me, myself and I, for others it’s we, the community, “our people”. For some it’s God, for others ideology.

In fact only a lower organism could simply live. A fully conscious, sentient being would seek a purpose for living and identify it as emotional gratification. That gratification should include the uplifting feeling we experience when treated to the milk of human kindness, and the sense of wellbeing from knowing you have saved a life or done something to improve a life’s quality.

Indeed, and if we could somehow create and then sustain a world that revolves more around “they’re right from their side and we’re right from our side”, replacing government edicts with moderation, negotiation and compromise…?

Alas, in nation after nation, the world now seems more intent instead on putting so-called “strongmen” in power.

You do the math when they are in charge. Or else.

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Stylianos Smyrnaios

Why should someone be moral if they know that by breaking the law they will be able to escape the consequences? If I’m sure that by robbing a bank I’m going to get rich and that nobody’s going to arrest me, why wouldn’t I?

Or, sure, you accept the possibility of being caught, but roll the dice. After all, you may not get caught, and even if you are, what’s a few years in prison compared to all of eternity in Hell? That’s why it doesn’t really surprise me at all that…

In the Republic, Plato says that even if they escape human law, an offender must face the possibility of punishment after death.

Of course! God and/or the Gods have always been around for the deontologists to fall back on. And fall back on Him/Them, they did. In droves. And why wouldn’t they when even a cursory understanding of crime and punishment reveals the enormous gap between laws and moral commandments.

Some philosophers agree with Plato that when one follows the dictates of reason and conforms to the moral law, one acquires a form of inner harmony, a mental health that makes happy.

I suspect however that philosophers of Plato’s ilk wrapped their mental health around the assumptions they made about God, and in regard to such things as “Theory of Forms” and the “allegory of the cave”.

Talk about general description intellectual contraptions.

Otherwise, inner imbalance makes one deeply unhappy.

Actually, in my view, what makes any number of philosophers here experience imbalance is when others refuse to share their own assessment of what that “inner balance” means. And we all know those in particular here who can get really, really unhappy if that happens.

Aristotle for example considers that only by observing the moral law is a person led to happiness, as people reach their telos, completing the purpose for which they were created.

Then the part where whose like me ask those like him to bring the Moral Law and Golden Mean down out of the theoretical clouds and note their applicability to actually human interactions.

So for Plato and Aristotle, moral behavior contributes to the life of humans in harmony with their inner world and their fellow human beings, identified with happiness or mental balance.

Of course, it’s been thousands of years since Plato and Aristotle advised us on things such as this. So, “here and now” how are philosophers doing in the quest for a deontological morality.

[iambiguous]

Question of the Month
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
Stylianos Smyrnaios

Morality also guards the coherence of societies, outside of which we cannot live. Selfish motives are not always predominant: very often there are positive feelings of compassion, sympathy and love towards others. This comes from a mental need for communication and solidarity amid the hard trials we face in life. This is the most essential answer to the question of why one should be moral.

Then Marx and Engels came along and suggested that human motivation revolves as well around the nature of political economy…as it too evolves over the centuries sustaining one or another means of production.

In other words, as though the means of communication and solidarity have little or nothing to do with either political or economic power.

Now back up into the clouds…

Since we accept that we must maintain a moral attitude to life, we must consider the following principles. Any moral judgment has a practical character. In essence, it guides us on how we should act in our lives.

Cue the pragmatists?

Moral judgments are universal by nature. The same principles apply in similar circumstances, and to people with similar characteristics. In making and acting on moral judgments we must consider the rights and interests of other people, as our behavior always affects them too. We must understand certain values as essential components of justice; for example, the common good, impartiality, equal treatment, and respect for basic individual rights and freedoms. Finally, we must cultivate the virtues which will allow us to act correctly in situations of moral dilemmas.

See what I mean? All up and down the moral and political and spiritual and philosophical spectrum there are those who will embrace this frame of mind. Only to tack on a proviso:

List of religions and spiritual traditions

List of political ideologies

List of philosophies

Chances are your own is among them.