06 May 2015

On an objective basis for right and wrong

Many years ago I got into a conversation with someone about ethics outside a Buddhist temple.

They were of the position that, without an external authority to dictate right and wrong - i.e. without Commandments from God - there was no possible way for ethics to have any meaning.

This is an argument I've heard elsewhere, but until then it was only from true believers in one of the big religions (but mostly just Christians).
Of course, if the reason a person does or refrains from doing something is because of the threat of punishment or promise of reward (whether that be in the form of heaven and hell, karma, or 72 virgins), then the ultimate motive is selfish.  If you believe in an ultimate judge or that everything somehow balances itself out, then no action is taken purely because it is the right thing to do.  Moral absolutism, then, is itself actually a-ethical.

This instance struck me because it came from an atheist.  I started to explain the objective basis for ethics which I am about to explain here, but this person interrupted to say that they had explored the debate thoroughly in philosophy class a few years before and they were 100% confident that there simply was no possible alternate conclusion, and so it was pointless to even listen to any response.

So of course I wrote that person off entirely - but the statement did provide me a new insight.



Some atheist philosophy may very well be the source of many religious people's belief that atheists are amoral.

Many pose a dichotomy: either morals are set in stone - literally, on stone tablets carved by God himself, and handed over to one special human who serves as ambassador to God - or, moral relativism.

Of course, if the issue at hand is morals, then technically this dichotomy is an accurate one.

The problem is, we treat the term "moral" as though it were interchangeable with "ethical".

The root of moral is "mores" which refers specifically to cultural standards and expectations.
Obviously those will vary from one community to another, and over time.
So you can fairly claim that consensual sodomy or adultery are "immoral" in Saudi Arabia, but are perfectly moral in San Francisco.

It has become so common for the term "moral" to be used to mean "ethical" that dictionaries have accepted it as such.

But ethics are really something different entirely.  They deal with the abstract concepts of "right" and "wrong".  This is what my debate partner thought could not exist on its own - but of course, if it doesn't exist on it's own, then it can not exist at all (which is exactly what they were claiming).
There can be no "ethical relativism".

Discounting the possibility of an omnipresent consciousness which created everything and has a will and desires and preferences, then the universe consists of a bunch of atoms grouped together in various degrees of concentration spread out over trillions of light years moving which ever way their momentum happens to be going and occasionally interacting with other atoms based on the arbitrary rules of physics.
It is all completely meaningless.

Discounting the possibility that some "higher" being gave us consciousness for some unknown and unknowable reason, then it seems as though life is really not much more than some extremely unlikely chemistry, and the consciousness and awareness of animals (including ourselves) is merely a side-effect of the self-increasing complexity of the chemistry of life.

Lucky for us, we just happen to (for the most part) enjoy being aware of being alive.

Of course, in a purely objective sense, looking at us from the outside it would be meaningless to say that it is "good" or "bad" that we exist, it is simply what is.  It is only from our own point-of-view that it is "lucky".

Ah, but there's the key!

Because we do actually exist - including our consciousness.

It isn't necessary to pretend that our own consciousness doesn't exist and then look at what's left in order to objective.
Being "objective" does not mean "outside of yourself", it just means not seeing things exclusively from one's own vantage point.  It doesn't require excluding the personal - in fact, to be entirely objective requires not excluding anything, which means it requires acknowledging the personal alongside everything else.

Consciousness does exist, and in turn it creates the experience of emotion.  Emotion is not tangible, and it is intrinsically subjective, but it none-the-less exists.

And by that existence, it creates the intangible, abstract - but also real - concept of Good and Bad.

If one particular creature experiences, say, a meteorite randomly crashing into its den, as harmful and damaging to its happiness and well-being, that experience itself, it's feeling of unpleasantness, actually exists.
It may well be nothing more than an indescribably complex series of biochemical pathways triggered ultimately by mindless DNA which seeks to produce copies of itself for no other reason than "that's just what it does", but it exists none-the-less.

It exists only in the mind of that one particular animal, but something only needs to exist in one place to be real.

So the fact that any individual experiences something as "good" calls the concept of "goodness" into being.
True, that only makes it "good" for that particular individual. At first glance this seems to fit into the idea of moral relativism...
The point is only to establish that such a thing as "good" exists in the first place.  Assuming that there are no conflicting claims about the same thing, we can say that something is good if it is experienced as such by at least one entity capable of experiencing.

There are very frequently conflicting claims.  Something which is good for one may be very bad for another.

Just because something objectively exists doesn't mean it has to be simple.

In order to return to an objective stand point, its necessary to step back from the individual doing the experiencing and look at every consciousness which the thing to be judged effects.  Weight the significance of each individual's experience by how much the thing effects them, and then sum up all the pluses and minuses.
That which is good is that which, on balance, brings a positive amount of pleasant experience into being.
That which is bad brings, overall, negative experience into being.

No external authority is necessary to dictate right and wrong.  Deliberate actions which bring negative experience into being  are wrong.  Some religious commandments fit that description, like rules against murder.  Others have nothing to do with right and wrong, like rules against non-reproductive sex related activity.

At the same time, nothing varies from culture to culture.  A particular culture may decide that a certain group of people are pariahs and expect everyone else to participate in attacking them, but the cultural norm doesn't detract from the objective wrongness of harming them without any benefit to anyone else.

The objective basis for ethics does not, however, answer all questions definitively.

It does not answer whether involuntary quarantine for an unconfirmed illness is ethical, or whether its better to kill and eat the weakest survivors while they still have enough flesh to eat so that the others can make it until rescue.  It's impossible to sum up all the positives and negatives involved in fighting WWII and come to a "right" answer as to when and whether various allied nations should have gotten involved.

But the thing is, the real world is really complex.
Having a bunch of easy answers just means you are cheating.  A complex world means there often aren't easy answers, and if we want to come as close as possible to being ethical, we have to be willing to accept that.


17 comments:

  1. I follow the we ARE God train of thought (see Abraham, Seth etc.). We are Creators, creating our own reality. Nothing can come to you unless you are a vibrational match to it. So the robber, and the robbery victim, have both been matched by their vibational realities to participate in the drama of the moment.

    The moral compass comes in as your emotions tell you whether or not you are connected to Source energy. If it feels good and you are happy, you ARE connected, if you are upset and feel bad, your train of thought is disconnected from Source energy, and you are out of alignment. Your life works much, much better when you are in alignment with your Source energy.

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  2. You are begging the question by saying that something can be "harmful" or "damaging" to a being's "well-being." How do you decide what counts harmful and what counts as well-being? Is it merely a matter of preference? Because that truly would be relativism. If I prefer to drink myself to death, is someone who withholds drink from me contributing to my harm or well-being? Your position is exactly that of Sam Harris as he put for in The Moral Landscape, but I don't think it works because he too begs the question by baking morality into his argument through and appeal to objective "well-being. But at least you have popular company :) I am religious and don't think naturalism works philosophically for a whole lot of reasons, but I do think a pretty good attempt at atheistic morality is achieved by "desire utilitarianism" as formulated by blogger Alonzo Fyfe but best presented, I think, in a series of posts and podcasts on the now defunct (but still archived) Common Sense Atheism blog. They do a decent job quickly undercutting Sam Harris' attempted scientific consequentialism and then explain in nice layman's terms the basis for a consistent and non-question begging morality that in my opinion works with or without a Divine source of goodness or law.

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    1. The entity whose well-being is in question decides.
      To hold life as inherently valuable requires an axiom - if it is true that, all things considered, you have a happier life drunk than you do sober, then your well-being is better served by a short, drunk, happy life than by a long, sober, depressed life.

      That example has all sorts of other elements tied into it - short-term reward vs long-term, the physiology and psychology of addiction - so I think perhaps a better example would be allowing voluntary euthanasia to someone in constant, intense, untreatable pain.

      I think this is a form of utilitarianism, it only may have seemed not because you misinterpreted my intended use of the term "well-being"

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    2. Are you saying that a person's preference is the same thing as his well-being, and that to thwart his preference is to do him harm?

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    3. No, preference is the wrong word. It assumes that the decision making part of the human mind is always strictly rational given the available information, and we know for absolute certain that this is not the case.

      I would say that a person's happiness is the same thing as their well-being, and to cause suffering is to do harm.

      Sometimes short-term pleasure leads to overall long-term suffering, so thwarting a preference for immediate gratification may do more good than harm (for example, making your kids study instead of watch TV, or eat vegetables instead of ice cream for dinner.)

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    4. What if someone doesn't want his happiness increased? Or perhaps he just doesn't want it increased by the specific means you believe with full confidence would increase his happiness. Would you be morally right in thwarting his desire to avoid increasing his happiness (altogether, or by some specific means)?

      What do you mean by happiness - is it a subjective emotional experience, a subjective intellectual self evaluation, an objective biochemical state, other? Same question about suffering.

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    5. I mean a subjective emotional experience.

      I would say that by definition, it isn't possible to not want one's happiness increased. One can have conflicting desires, but ultimately, whatever you end up prioritizing is what matters most.
      For example, maybe you really want to take ballet lessons, but your friends peer pressure you into football. Choosing football is what ultimately maximize your utility, because the respect of your peers affects your happiness more than how you spend your after school time.

      I don't think what a person "believes with full confidence" changes anything one way or the other - whether it is the person in question or a third party. We as individuals can never know with absolute certainty the right answers to anything, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
      All one can do is act on the best information available. Sometimes we'll make mistakes. Harm due to negligence is just as bad as harm due to malintent, but a genuine, unavoidable mistake isn't immoral.

      Maybe if you gave me some examples of the special cases you are thinking of (possibly with how an alternative system of ethics would solve them) I'd have a easier time answering?

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    6. Sure. The sort of case I had in mind is wanting to administer psych meds to a mentally ill person. That person may not want you to give him meds (even if he believes it will make him happier), but you may believe with full confidence that giving him meds will make him happier. That belief may motivate you to disregard his will, either forcing him to take the meds or secretly administering them. What this gets at is, maybe morality is about more than just happiness; maybe there are inherent rights that take precedence over happiness such that the rights cannot be violated even if violation increases happiness.

      I'm confused now about your concept of happiness. You said well-being is not equal to preference but to subjective emotional experience, and that is happiness. But then you say that by definition it is not possible to not want one's happiness increased, and that if you choose one thing over another that the thing you choose must maximize utility (which equals increasing happiness?). However, as in the common case of the mentally ill person who refuses meds even if they know the meds will give them a more pleasant emotional experience - happiness? - it is possible to prefer to avoid that increase in happiness as subjective emotional experience. I'd say that preference is the only thing that is literally impossible not to want by definition, only because preference just is whatever one wants most. But happiness, if it is an emotional experience, I don't see it couldn't be just one consideration among many when it comes to forming preferences and acting upon them.

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    7. First of all: thanks for the continuing conversation, I'm finding this both fun and educational.

      OK, great example.
      Mental illness is an extreme example of the irrationality I mentioned earlier.
      I was thinking about a similar question just recently, passing a homeless encampment; what is the best way to approach helping those people who (usually for reasons of mental illness) don't really want to be helped? In the old days they would institutionalize people - it stopped more for funding than for libertarian ideals... but taking away the freedom of someone who isn't a threat seems to infringe on their rights; who gets to decide who is mentally incompetent?
      I don't know what the right answer to that is.

      But anyway
      to your question...

      What does the person in the example feel when he's actually on the meds? If, once on them, he feels life is better and wants to keep taking them, then it was true that taking them made him happier, and it was only his delusional state that made him have a preference contrary to his own best interest.
      On the other hand, if when on them he feels stunted or dull or in any other way that the side effects of the cure are worse than the disease, then the meds really aren't making him happier, and (unless he is a treat to others when un-medicated) I see no justification to force them.

      In other words, it matters the reason they are being rejected. If he thinks you are a government agent trying to poison him, that's very different from
      having experienced both states and making a choice of preferring unmedicated.
      I would say that whatever reason - assuming its one grounded in reality - it shows that the person's subjective emotional experience is better overall without them.

      This is why I reject the notion of preference - it (at least to me) implies an in-the-moment feeling. Its hard for humans to think and plan long-term, (some more so than others).

      I'm not so sure about the concept of "inherent" rights. Rights are something promised by a government. The concept makes no sense without a frame work of constitutional law. Pleasure and pain, selfishness and altruism, love and anger, all these things exist in nature, but there is no equivalent to "rights" outside of civilization (and mostly modern civilization, at that).

      What could possibly make a right "inherent"? Which would those be, and why?

      Moreover, I have serious reservations about the inherent value of freedom.
      In modern western civilization, and the USA in particular, there is an enormous emphasis on freedom, yet psychology finds that other than a certain basic level of choice and control over certain aspects of life, more freedom of choice consistently leads to Less happiness.
      Libertarians will argue for the freedom to, for example, ride a motorcycle with no helmet or shoot up meth mixed with heroin - I grant there is no reason this should be the government's business to enforce, but why would it be valuable to the individual to have to freedom to self-harm?

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    8. What is the connection between happiness and rational decision making? I don't see why a person couldn't say, "Yes, X will make me happier but for Y reason I choose Z."

      On the medication question, are you saying that administering meds against a person's will is the morally right thing to do, and supportive of his well-being, if he is truly happier after the meds have been administered? I think that's what you're saying, I just want to clarify. If so, does that start a slippery slope to any kind of nonconsensual intervention? If I know for a fact that you'll be happier if I inject you with heroin and then provide you a free lifetime supply, should I do it? If the superintelligent AI realizes all humans would be happier if they were anesthetized in their sleep and then hooked up to a permanent orgasm simulator, should it do that? If we discover a brain surgery that makes all people happy all the time, should that surgery be mandatory?

      Where I'm going with this is, I don't think happiness (defined as an emotional experience) is the only important moral good or the only rational aim for a person. I believe the good of a person is to realize the full potential of his nature as a rational animal. I believe that entails having an eternal soul and a relationship with a transcendent being, but putting that aside I think the virtue ethics of Aristotle and, more so, the current virtue ethicists who've worked out some of the errors in Aristotle, do a better job of respecting the totality of human nature than does any utilitarianism. That said, I don't think you can get virtue ethics honestly without also getting the soul and God, and for a committed physicalist I think only desire utilitarianism actually preserves morality. It basically makes morality into a social game with rules and internal rationality, like baseball or economics. It doesn't tell you why should do the moral thing, but it does tell you why humans in general would have reason to create and practice morality as they have.

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    9. This is why I was originally using the term "well-being" and not "happiness".
      All of your examples relate to physical pleasure.

      I think maximizing overall well-being INCLUDES "realizing the full potential of his nature as a rational animal", and, assuming they exist (I grant the possibility) "having an eternal soul and a relationship with a transcendent being".

      If the heroin or orgasm machine conflict with those, then they aren't maximizing utility.
      If Y reason is strong enough to make our patient not want meds (even when they are thinking clearly by being on them), then that means Y reason affects his overall well-being more positively than does the medication.

      The issue with making choices for other people isn't so much that it is intrinsically "wrong" (what instead of focusing on pleasure, you forced someone to realize their full potential as a rational being - against their will?) as much as it is that no person can possibly KNOW with 100% confidence what is best for someone else. Our knowledge is limited first by our senses, then our perception, then our interpretation, all filtered by pre-existing ideas. If the meds really were better for his over-all well-being, then it would be the right thing to do to administer them, but since we can't possibly know that, may as well leave the choice up to him.

      "I don't think you can get virtue ethics honestly without also getting the soul and God, and for a committed physicalist I think only desire utilitarianism actually preserves morality. It basically makes morality into a social game with rules and internal rationality, like baseball or economics. It doesn't tell you why should do the moral thing,"
      Agreed

      "it does tell you why humans in general would have reason to create and practice morality as they have." I don't follow, but I'm interested in elaboration.

      I think the next thing I write will be on the human instinct for an internal sense of morality, and how it supports working in cooperative social groups, but leads sometimes to having strong moral related emotions in circumstances where following the emotion does not lead to the ideal outcome.

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    10. I feel like I am a bit lost in the weeds now. I understand that you think the morally good thing is to increase the well-being of conscious creatures, and that such well-being is a purely physical and therefore scientifically accessible state. But I don't know what you think well-being really is. I also don't understand why you think people always necessarily choose in favor of their own happiness, and how that relates to their well-being.

      Desire utilitarianism is a theory that morality is about increasing the prevalence of desire that tend to fulfill desires and decreasing desires that tend to thwart desires. For instance, a man's desire to have coitus with as many women as possible tends to thwart a lot more desires than it fulfills. All the people whose desire's are thwarted by a man's desire for promiscuity have reason to decrease that man's desire and to increase that man's desire for chastity. That's what desire utilitarianism means by "people generally have reason to create and practice morality" - the "people generally" just means most people have reason, the "have reason" means they have desires that would be fulfilled by practicing morality, and the "practice morality" means using the conventional tools of morality such as shame and praise, punishment and reward, to promote the 'good' (ie desire fulfilling) desires and discourage the 'bad' (desire thwarting) desires. It turns morality into a sort of free market economic system, where everyone just acts according to his own desires (necessarily and inevitably, as the proponents of this system are determinists), but the aggregate of all humans acting according to their desires leads them to develop a system for manipulating the prevalence of desires in the population for the benefit (ie desire fulfillment) of the majority. Interestingly this doesn't necessarily lead to a tyranny of the majority. If for example the whole society had an acculturated aversion to the color orange but one family carried a mutant gene that gave them an immutable desire to wear orange, desire utilitarianism would say that people generally have reason to discourage the desire to avoid seeing or wearing orange because the conflict between everyone else and the orange family can only be resolved by the majority changing their aversion, and since the conflict presumably leads to other desires of the majority being thwarted - desire for peace and harmony, desire to avoid wasting resources on opposing an immutable desire, etc. - people generally would have a desires that would be fulfilled to changing their own desire to avoid orange.

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    11. Hey Zeb, sorry for the delay - I am out of the country (I last wrote using airport WiFi), my first ever real "vacation", and first time off the continent of N. America! No internet in our room, and spending most days doin' stuff...
      anyway...

      I don't think that well-being is a purely physical and therefore scientifically accessible state. I would say that well-being is basically the same thing as happiness (or lack of suffering). The reason I draw a distinction from desire is for most people, most of the time, desire is an In-The-Moment feeling.
      For example:
      The drug addict desires heroine.
      In the moment, it will make him feel good. Really good. Lets pretend (for the purpose of explanation) there is some way to quantify happiness. Feeling neutral is a 0 and say a hit of heroine is +10 good feelings.
      The next day though, when he crashes, he feels like crap. Its a -8 experience. So looking at just the high and withdrawal, it still looks like drug wins. But go a year down the line, when he has lost his job, wife has kicked him out, and he's making a choice between a hit and food. The drug may still be +2 net each time, but everyday life is a -6, day after day. The sum total effect of using is well into the negative.

      The cake and ice cream fulfills a desire, but the long term effect on self-esteem and health is a larger negative than the momentary pleasure of sweetness in the mouth. Being unhealthy isn't just physical, it makes life suck. It makes everyday life harder and more unpleasant.
      This isn't to say that everyone should always live for the future though, either. Right now I'm spending money on experiences that could go to a downpayment. The question is what acts and conditions today lead to the greatest OVERALL happiness, when you sum up today and tomorrow and the next day. That's what I am calling "well-being". The grand total sum of happiness, present and future.

      People always choose what they *believe* will make them happy, at least in the short run, even if they don't think about it that way, merely by definition. I mean that in the same way you could say that no one can do other than what they desire - if you choose a particular choice, that means you must have desired it more than the alternatives you would have chosen the other. Even with a gun to your head, you could choose to disobey, but you desire to live more than you desire not doing whatever. In other words, you believe not being shot will lead to more overall happiness than being shot. When you give to charity, i makes you happy to know you are making others happy. When you go to work, you believe the money you earn will make you happier than being homeless. The schizophrenic may believe he will be more unhappy knowing his sanity is "fake" than the unhappiness his disease brings. Desire is an attempt by the mind to get us to maximize happiness.

      This has all been from the first person's perspective, exclusively, so far.
      But lets extend the principal from one person's happiness, overtime, overall, to ALL people's happiness over time overall.
      This is the same basic idea as " increasing the prevalence of desire that tend to fulfill desires and decreasing desires that tend to thwart desires.", except without any assumption of that happiness being either in conflict or symbiosis.

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    12. I would suggest that no one's happiness is decreased by a man's *desire* for promiscuity.
      First of all, it is his actions, not his internal desires, which affect others.
      More over, if he is honest and upfront about his intentions, women uninterested in a fling can simply avoid him, and those who share his desire for a casual relationship (and are attracted) will fulfill his desires and their own at the same time.

      In your explanation, you are using "morality" just the way I distinguished it from true ethics
      in my original blog post: as in "mores", or social conventions.
      Praise and shame are not tools of ethics, they are tools of social control. They sometimes coincide with ethical concerns, but just as often unethical things are considered morally acceptable: torture of military prisoners or heretics, slavery, spousal rape or coerced reproduction (for example by a woman who lies about birth control). There are also MANY things that are controlled by praise and shame with absolute zero to do with ethics either way, such as clothing style, manners and etiquette, conspicuous consumption... you could reasonably call it "immoral" to go out in public wearing a hairnet and a fanny pack, but there is no way in which it is unethical.
      All morality, then, is based on social control and cohesion. We have a natural innate sense of both harming and helping, and also fairness and justice, and also social acceptance, all 3 developed to facilitate living in large complex groups, and therefor all 3 FEEL similar, and yet compassion, fairness, and fitting in are totally different things.

      I think your last example betrays its own error, because humans most certainly do NOT always give up their prejudice against "orange". Take homosexuality, for example - doesn't directly affect anyone but the individual and their sex partner, but it is against the social norm and while some societies are just beginning to admit its no one else's business, many still make it a capital offense. Public nudity is another, almost universally considered immoral, yet with no ethical justification - the "harm" suffered by on-lookers is CAUSED not by the act itself, but rather by the very fact that society pretends its an issue - none of the pre-civilization tribes who lived that way for 100s of thousands of years had any ill effects from it. Consensual, adult, non-reproductive incest. Food taboos, shell fish for jews, pigs for muslims, bugs for Americans, strictly social conformity issues.
      Following these rules promotes peace and harmony - but not having them in the first place would allow for even more peace and harmony, because no one would be in a place of conflict between internal desires for the color orange, and social acceptance. Within the context of society, following the rules may foster greater overall happiness for the individual, because social acceptance plays a big factor in life, but a society that chose ethics over morality would foster much more total happiness across all individuals.

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  4. People confuse ethics and morals because they really are very closely related in concept space. Their coordinates are only 1 apart. Goodness and rightfulness are equally closely related to each other, though at this point I don't know if they're as closely related to the first two.

    More to the point, what's actually going on is that you fucked up. You understand what morality means because it's been drummed into your head over and over with a mountain of overwhelming evidence. But you don't understand ethics OR goodness since they're outside of your personality type and that's why you project on them absolute meanings when there are none.

    Goodness aka good =/= objective Good. There is an objective Good and you are blatantly my personality type and possessed of a meta-level 6 (cognitive) mind thus concerned with objective Good. But 'goodness' as a concept does not belong to our personality type, not at all, nor does it belong to any Good personality type, thus it's a local phenomenon.

    What goodness means is consistency of values. So in an Evil society chock full of narcissists and psychopaths, it would be un-good to be objectively Good by, say, exterminating the entire society down to the last infant.

    The nature of goodness should be determined by people of the personality type it belongs to, because they are experts at it. Or it should be determined by me since I can consciously think like every personality type and even translate between them. You fit neither of those criteria.

    You're also going about determining objective Good in a really long-winded and roundabout way. It only takes a few hours to reduce it down to a dozen abstract concepts. Try it. I can reduce objective Goodness to exactly 15 words, the first 4 of which are: "My core values are:"

    I'm not asking you to put 5 years into creating a revolutionary theory of the human mind and producing a map of the 3*8*11 = 264 Good concepts. Just a few hours to pick out the fixed points in your personality.

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    1. I can't really tell if you are trolling me, or if you are actually insane.

      You seem very confident of yourself, but you are writing a bunch of nonsense words with good grammer.

      It doesn't make sense to make use of language in a way that you personally unilaterally made up.
      That "good" is different from "objective Good" is not a fact or reality, its not how the words are properly used, it doesn't represent some mystical truth - its just a statement that you are claiming. With no evidence and no explanation. Its like making the statement: "Blue is yellow" or "this statement is false". It may be a grammatical english sentence, but it doesn't acutally mean anything.

      I understand what morality "means" because I can read a fucking dictionary, and because the nature of language means that all of the people who use it have to agree on a single definition per word - otherwise communication becomes impossible.

      The root of "moral" is "mores", which means social norms, or community standards.
      Your "consistency of values", where in an "evil" society doing harm is "good" is an example of morals (not ethics), and that was the entire point of this blog post. One which seems to have been lost on you.

      So far, we are actually on the same page (except that you don't know the proper terminology to express what you are trying to say). But then there is this personality type crap, which is just nutballs out of nowhere.
      You apparently have no clue what the term "personality type" means either, and have just made up yor own personal definitions for it - but you seem to think that other people use the same non-exsistant meaning that you have in your head. You don't. No one has any idea whac you are talking about. Not just "people of my personality type". No one. Not even you.

      Objective good (which at one point you claim doesn't exsist, and later you claim does) has nothing to do with personality. That is autamtically implied by the term "objective".
      Anything other than "objective good" is a question of morality, and therefor it simply isn't relevant, interesting, or important to a discussion of ethics, (except as a contrast).

      But here is where it gets best of all: "The nature of goodness...it should be determined by me since I can consciously think like every personality type and even translate between them"

      So which is it? Are you a complete lunatic, an idiot, or is this just a joke/prank comment?

      I am so honored to have you, Richard Kulisz, the one true sage of the universe, to have found my little blog worthy of your enlightenment. The one who has the ability to see into and understand all minds, and is somehow objective enough to realize that He is doing so, yet noone else can.
      Funny you should mention narcississts and psycopaths.
      Right before claiming to be the single human who can understand all other human's minds.
      Please, teach me some more!

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