I’ve notice alot of talk about morality and ethics on this website that goes on and on in great detail but during all these conversations there seems to be a loss of focus or clarity.
Here is my articulation of the subject.
The end justifies the means and given the relativity of existence the means can be anything.
What does this mean exactly?
For starters it means that so long as a person’s or group’s projected end and goal is satisfied all means are justified regardless of people’s relative individual conception of right and wrong.
If murder,subjugation, enslavement, molestation, imprisonment and so on is the means leading to the success of an end through actions it is justified since the end of a act with success justifies it as such.
It is naive to expect everyone to agree with some narrow definition of somthing with regards to what is perceived as the right course of action. Since everyone is individuals we can expect differention and dissidence.
Since the world operates on competition and overpowering others we can expect cheaters or those of extreme prejudice.
A realist sees the universe for what it is and the idealist naively can only see the universe for what they wish it to be but forgets that their idealism is just that merely a wish and nothing more.
Sinister - for one thing, even “realists” can desire. Can want. Can wish for change. That doesn’t make them idealists. There are more than two choices.
Perhaps but doesn’t the realist know when to regard their desires as merely wishes in contrast to the idealist who knows not how to regard their desires as wishes in that they impose their wishes as reality onto everybody else?
You may wish existence to be some narrow projection of your own desires but whether it should be there exists nothing in the backdrop of life saying that it must be so.
The idealist reminds me of some creature who wishes existence to curve upon their whims through naivety and then gets upset or emotionally unbalanced when it doesn’t where they call such a irony an injustice of all things.
More or less, yes. Idealists, in the philosophical sense, believe that the ideal somehow exists. Not phenomenally, but in some way. Exactly what way that is has always been a mystery to me.
We beleive that there is potential for the ideal and that we could attain it, theoreticaly. The way it would work in practice is that if we knew everything there was to know we could utilise all that data to determine the perfect form of everything and then cause that form to come into effect thereby creating the perfect universe. On a moral level this would be the life which caused the maximum amount of happiness with the minimum amount of pain. You could call idealism as the search for the path of least resistance if you like.
With regard to it existing there is a bit of an issue. I would say that it could exist but we would first have to determine what it is and put it into practice ourselves. That is why moral statements are built using words like should. Should as in ‘to attain the ideal you should do this’. Of course any should statement is merely a guess at what some of the ideal form might be which is bvuilt out of logical analysis of the world and the amount of hapiness and suffering which exist within it.
For example, it is assumed being alive is good and can lead to happiness so we shouldn’t kill people as that is reducing potential for happiness.
That said this is a basic exploration of ideal not a detailed one as it has a long history which has had many different beleifs attributed to it along the way.
Oh yeah, should probably mention i am an idealist.