These are self-explanatory, self-defining concepts. Truisms. If something is good then it is good (for whatever reasons it happens to actually be good). If something is bad then it is bad (for whatever reasons it happens to actually be bad).
It amazes me most people get it so wrong about the issue of morality, right and wrong, good and bad. Good and bad are among the simplest concepts in existence. Morality is easily boiled down to two steps that even a child can understand and apply:
1- if something is good for you then that something is good; if something is bad for you then that something is bad.
2- it is therefore good to do good things, and bad to do bad things.
Yes, it really is just. that. simple. Good and bad are not confusing weird unknowable words the idiotic âphilosophersâ twist up into intellectual pretzels and puzzles to deceive you. Good and bad mean precisely, exactly what they seem to mean. Insofar as they actually do mean that (and it is up to YOU to make those determinations for yourself, as best as you possible can⌠most of the time this is pretty easy to do).
And beneath and behind those two steps above is the premise and undeniable, rational principle and foundation that by gaining this knowledge of 1 and 2 above we now have an undeniable responsibility to act according to it. To this knowledge. To ignore this knowledge amounts to deliberate ignorance, as if someone taught you that 2+2=4 and you decided to ignore than and pretend that 2+2=5 instead. That is what immorality is like.
And beyond even that, is the commensurability principle that allows us to understand that this same morality that applies to ourselves so easily ALSO applies to others and for the EXACT SAME REASON for them as it does for us. From the perspective of morality itself (goods and bads) we have no primacy, all goods and bads are equal as equally applicable to whomever they actually apply to as good or bad. Therefore the golden rule is easily understood. And this clearly goes beyond social contractual stuff. We UNDERSTAND this.
Well, some humans do not understand it, not even intuitively. They may be called idiots, damaged, sociopaths, criminally minded, whatever it may be. But they are the exception and not the rule, because they represent a lack and damage of something that is otherwise naturally and easily there in a normal healthy person with a normally functioning mind, reason and basic standard of self-honesty.
Youâre as much fun as a child. Good and evil (right and wrong) are categories of the brutishness of faith in attempts to analyze with reason. Faith can be easily destroyed with the scalpel of reason, cutting out the lie at its root.
Apply rational practicality to âgood and evil,â and what remains? Evil becomes good, and good turns into evil. Need examples? A child screams when they are dragged to the dentist. Where is the good here, and what is evil? It depends on the perspective and the ability to think. This is to say that the categories of good and evil belong to the level of a believing or faith-driven animal.
Do you want to dedicate a topic to brutishness? How far do people descend into brutishness by applying the categories of good and evil?
So, what if something is good for you, but not most people? Is it still something that can be said to be generally good? Equally, something could be bad for you, but benefit everybody else.
The effect of supposedly doing good things is not measured by how good it is for you, but by how good it is for the recipient.
But then again, in this egocentric and individualist world âŚ
If you ever think about settling scores with life, do the same with Ichthus77. (Just kidding) Actually, never mind. The object of ridicule will disappear, and thatâs boring.
I think morality or ethics myself is more about efficiency and functionality of society more than anything in terms of maximizing both. Of course nothing is objective or universal in that they are artificially imposed, but thatâs because the human innovative mind created them to begin with because the absence of such systems is a much more worse environment to exist in. Human beings create morality and ethics as a sort of appeal to pragmatism.
There are obviously many contradictions or hypocrisies because human reasoning isnât perfect hence why social conflict exists to begin with. Moral and ethical imperfections however doesnât negate the necessity of needing both systems. Nothing is perfect and we can never expect such.
An example of this would be asking your mom if she would be OK with you using her credit card before you use it, and not using it if she would not be OK with it, because you would appreciate if someone did the same with what belongs to you.
Here we see again how this, er, spirited young man still believes in a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. On the other hand, heâs very much a modern and, as such, a liberal, or more precisely a pseudo-liberal (and thereby a pseudo-modern). If he werenât, if he were fully illiberal, he wouldnât be talking in terms of individuals (liberalism is about the freedom of the individual from the collective):
âIn any human or bestial herd, the main concern of herd members always is to get or to preserve what is good for themselves. The âthemselvesâ here are not experienced as isolated, nihilist individuals who are nothing more than a chaos of arbitrary sentiments or experiences. The herd memberâs self-knowledge is political. It is of himself as a father and citizen, a member of his herd. Thus obtaining or preserving what is good for himself is interpreted in terms of communal or political, not private, goods. No real privacy is available to, or desired by, herd members; everything crucial in their lives is political.â (Harry Neumann, Liberalism, âPolitics or Nothing!â)
HumAnIze is, to some extent, a philosopher in Neumannâs sense:
â[T]he philosopherâs main theoretical and practical care is the concern dominating him in his common-sense, illiberal world: To get what is goodâreally goodâfor himself. In this appendix, that illiberalism is also called manâs ânaturalâ orientation.
Unlike non-philosophers, the philosopher is permeated by the sting of the awareness of lacking adequate knowledge of what is good for him, of his true self-interest. Consequently for him, his main theoretical and practical job is philosophy, the striving to secure that adequate knowledge. Since philosophers interpret this striving as manâs most natural drive, no method is necessary to discipline the mind into being philosophic; non-philosophers (ordinary, unquestioning herd-members) need only become alive to their need to know what they by nature most want to know.â (op.cit., âThe Nihilist (Liberal) Discipline of Scientific Methodâ.)
This, then, is the reason why the question âWhy do you seek the truth?â seems completely absurd to him:
A true illiberal, however, has no need to seek the truth:
â[T]he worth of oneâs gods appeared self-evident, subject to doubt only by madmen or fools. To its devotees, this piety had nothing to do with faith or belief. It informed a way of life in which the main concernâthe piety which unified the nationâwas experienced as self-evident truth. This political piety left no room for serious philosophic or scientific questions which became possible only by its discrediting [âŚ]. All moralities or religions informed by this liberal disestablishment naturally are experienced as faith in something questionable, something open to philosophic-scientific inquiry.
Once the pious certainties of the old tribal or civic piety are lost, politics can no longer escape âthe police supervision of doubtâ, however much desperate partisans may cling to the self-evidence of some pious truth. Most men dread the rootless, aimless lives forced upon them by the liberal discrediting of tribal-civic piety.â (op.cit., page 180.)
Itâs actually precisely the question âWhat is the value of truth?â that may turn the philosopher from an illiberal or a pseudo-liberal into a true liberal:
âThe will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respectâwhat questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! That is a long story even nowâand yet it seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? That we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What in us really wants âtruthâ?âIndeed, we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this willâuntil we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?âThe problem of the value of truth came before usâor was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.âAnd though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so farâas if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater.â (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 1 whole, translation Zimmern.)
This is what it means for the ânaturalâ love of truth to make way for the âmoralâ will to intellectual probity:
âBy annihilating any non-arbitrary good or god, science (liberalism) rejects the common-sense, moral-political universe in which a manâs chief care is acquisition of what truly is good for him. Until its farce is scientifically exposed, illiberalism assumes the existence of that real, non-arbitrary good. Science is the insight that the world hospitable to politics, and therefore to philosophy, does not exist. Unlike philosophy which gives full rein to the mindâs ânaturalâ bent, science tyrannically imposes its methodology to discipline that bent into submission to scienceâs âunnaturalâ orientation.
That tyranny is the basic meaning of scientific conquest of nature. Nietzsche rightly observes that modernityâs hallmark is not the victory of science, but the victory of scientific method over science. Here âscienceâ means inquiry deluded by faith in an illiberal universe whose core is the swindle responsible for politics and, therefore, philosophy. Despising that faith, Nietzsche insists that truth is scientific method: insofar as truth is more than liberal (nihilist) insight, it is the tyrannic will to suppress illiberalism in thought and in action. This suppressionâs main weapon is scientific methodology. To subvert illiberalism (politics and philosophy), Descartes and his liberal allies invented liberal science, mathematical physics, grounded in a symbolic mathematics not reflecting, as illiberal mathematics had, the common-sense (moral-political) universe. The mathematical assumptions and consequences of Cartesian liberalism are well described by J. Klein. That liberalism despised illiberal mathematics which âhad no notion of the Zeroâ.â (Neumann, Liberalism, âThe Nihilist (Liberal) Discipline of Scientific Methodâ.)
â[We] shall conquer and come to power even without truth. The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralistsâwe are the most extreme.â (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 749 end, translation Kaufmann.)
â[Walter GramattĂŠâs etched self-portrait titled The Great Dread, a.k.a. The Great Anxiety ] is a confrontation with oneâs death, oneâs nothingness, as the only authentic way of life in a nihilist world. It shows death not as something fearful in the future, something to be avoided or postponed by piety or by medical technology, but as lifeâs nihilist essence now and always. [âŚ] The memento mori of The Great Dread is not âRemember that you will die!â but âRemember that you are dead!â or âRemember that you are death!ââ (Neumann, Liberalism, pp. 133-34.)
I asked you if killing is good or bad.
I can see you are confused, since you avoided the question.
The use of âitâ often demonstrates confused thinking.
