The Very Vague, Once-Edited Version of My Oratory on Ethics
It is no more! I've given up. I realized that Colin's last criticism is absolutely correct: I have a strong logical basis support for a compromise between absolutism and nihilism, which obviously seems to be relativism. But that's what we have already accepted, more or less by default.
My true problem has always been that moral relativism falls to the same arguments that kill nihilism. Under moral relativism, the intrinsic value of an action depends not only on the context in which it is made, but the perspective of who is making it. The only real difference between a morally relativistic system and a nihilistic one is that while nihilism says that actions have no intrinsic value, moral relativism says that they do. But moral relativism gives no clue as to how to gauge this value so that we can say, option A is better than option B. Our end conclusion is simply based on a set of arbitrary guidelines that we try to follow.
The problem is that being able to make definitive decisions like: option A is better than option B, cannot be made (here I'm postulating) without having absolutes. After all, we are trying to make a definite (absolute in a sense?) statment. But absolutes result in contradiction. It's a paradox.
The only reason we survive without destroying ourselves in our decision making is because we have a primative set of instinct-morals. My idea was to build off that, making the assumption that the intrinsic value of a decision should be measured by the benefit it has for the human species, recognizing our own personal preservation is beneficial in someway for the larger evolutionary purpose (so as to justify some amount of self-interest). Presumably our instinct-morals are somehow built around the idea that we should make decisions to benefit some combination of humanity and ourselves. Natural selection seeks to do this, so it makes sense that natural selection would also seek to preserve instinct-morals that also worked to preserve humans. But this principle is just as arbitrary as anything else, and doesn't succeed in resolving the paradox at all. Hence, I'm giving up, at least temporarily, to spend time on things that aren't quite so hopeless.
Good speech. Have you timed it? It seems a little long, although my perception on the blog screen is a little off.
The beginning of paragraph 7 is a bit confusing. Fails at what? After thinking about it, it's obvious, but it should be clearer initially.
And the whole thing seems kind of wordy and nearly superfluous, which I know is kind of your style. You might want to work on simplifying you sentence structures and stuff like that, just to make it more accessable. Remember, with a speech, the listener can't re-read a sentence if he forgets how it started.
Not that I should be telling you how to write, though. And my oratory on The Holidays (how they are ridiculous, yet valuable) is coming along nicely.
Interesting, I thought paragraph 7 was the most straightforward paragraph of the entire speech.
After paragraph 7, though, the speech is maze with no finish. One of the reasons I've waited so long to write this is because I still haven't worked out all the details of my alternative ethical system. There are still some contradictions and paradoxes lurking around. I've realized that I'm essentially arguing for a form of the so-called "evolutionary ethics." I'm basically attempting to use Hegelian dialectics with the absolutism-nihilism dualism to generate a new ethics. All the arguments still aren't straight in my mind though.
You're right though, I am a very bad speechwriter. It's a consequence of being too interested in the works of 18th and 19th century Germans and Russians like Hegel, Nitzsche, Dostoevsky, et al., and not enough in people like Hemingway. I end up presenting an unabridged version of the arguments in my mind. A good speechwriter--or a truly good writer, for that matter--would present a selectively abridged version to maximize the work's persuasive quality by making it as comprehensable as possible. Every time I try doing that, the whole argument turns to Swiss cheese before my eyes.
I don't like the terrorist analogy at all. Since it's at the heart of your speech, I'm not saying to take it out, but just for the sake of discussion...
If the government official is thinking about what he is doing unto the millions of people in DC, and what he would want a government official to do if he were one of the people about to be incinerated, the Golden Rule demands he do what is necessary to stop the bomb from going off.
But would the government official only be selectively applying the golden rule? I don't see it that way. When "others" are split up into factions advocating opposing courses of action, the thinker must decide which group it is more important to benefit. This comes down to a decision of where to apply the Golden Rule in the situation, not a problem of being unable to apply it. You are implying more absolutes than are actually in the rule. If it were "Do unto each person what you would want each person to do unto you", I like your argument a lot more.
Likewise, if you switch the example to one of whether or not to blow the whistle on a co-worker (as you wouldn't want to have the whisle blown on you, aha!), the decision concerns what you are doing unto the others who your decision affects. It comes down to a value judgment, which, granted, is what the golden rule seems to be trying to make for you.
I agree with your conclusion that there is no specific checklist to make decisions easy. As much as we want to believe all moral conflicts can be solved by reading a page of text, figuring out the right thing to do is almost always trickier and more complex.
I agree with your argument that the example is inadequate, but only because the moral ramifications of the action have consequences beyond the decision-maker. The core argument is unchanged though.
I was initially trying to incorporate some current events into an otherwise dry speech. But let's pare the example down, and unfortunately make it a lot less realistic. Let's say that you're locked in a sealed cell, and you know that your captors are going to release a virulent form of airborne anthrax into it. There is a significant probability of death. You have one opportunity to call your government, which can torture someone and thereby probably obtain the code to free you from the cell. If you chose to get the anthrax, there are no significant consequences to anyone but yourself. Let's also assume that the risks, pain, etc. associated with the anthrax are comparable to those of the torture. Do you torture the prisoner? The golden rule says "no", if we are rational and prefer safety over danger. So we take the anthrax. The simple fact that we made that conscious choice implicitly says that we indeed wanted to suffer pain ourselves rather than inflict it on another person. This contradicts our assumption that we wanted to live, in the first place. In fact, the golden rule will give degenerate solutions whenever our interests are directly opposed to someone else like this (I think : ) ). No matter which decision we make, we are violating the golden rule. The simple fact that the golden rule collapses, shows that it cannot be an absolute rule.
On could argue that other absolute rules could be established to supercede the golden rule in these degenerate cases, but that would only introduce more inconsistencies for the reasons that I outlined in the speech.
You bring up a very interesting point though, that the golden rule also fails to say anything when the consequences of an action affect multiple people in different ways. This probably a more powerful point than mine, because decisions are rarely "textbook" cases with consequences that can be isolated. Somehow weighing them all with a set of finite, static rules seems impossible. That line of reasoning suggests that there are so few cases in which the golden rule genuinely applies, that it is as good as useless, unless we accept it as a "pretty good" guideline of our intuition.
I don't know if this is relevant, but it reminded me of our discussions on John Stewart Mill (and his treatise On Liberty) in English. He sets up this rule that you can take away personal liberty when an individual's actions affect someone else. Then, he goes on to reject it for two main reasons. One of them is that every action will affect someone else in some way. Although the golden rule is different than Mill's postulate, you're rejecting it for the same reasons that he did.
Interesting. I've never read anything by Mill.
I think I'm going to abandon the oratory, at least for awhile. I really don't want to memorize it, and I don't think it really works very well as a speech anyway.
Yes, I see the example. To make it even more simple, you could just say it's a forced duel, back to back, walk twenty paces spin and shoot your opponent. Letting yourself get shot down is the only option that appeases the golden rule, while instad trying to survive can certainly not be condemned as immoral, even if it means harming the other dueler. Although this is a cop out, I must revert back to Colin's assertion that it's really a Golden Guideline.
However, that falls right in line with attack against absolutism in the discussion of morality. I find this to be a fascinating discussion. There are some jabs at religion here that if I'd fire back at if I could put the words together, and it really is at the center of the question. The question of "Is there an absolute right, an absolute wrong, and/or an absolute truth?" is directly related to the question "Is there a God who knows best?" I have had some really interesting discussions based upon this connection, or, leaving the often tricky discussion of God out of it, the existance of a moral truth beyond our perceptions and opinions of what is right and what is wrong. I would guess you do not believe it exists.
I was just going to say, after thinking your speech over, what you propose really isn't very interesting. Basically, it's relative morality, which has been the prevailing moral system for, well, a while. Although you may be well-versed in the ideas of the thinkers who first wrote long-winded books on the topics, the basic precept (treating absolute morality with skepticism, while still behaving alturistically... or something like that) really isn't very uncommon. Now, if you came to a more interesting or original conclusion, using the same very informative introductions of the concepts, then that would be a much better speech. Because, as you admit, your conclusion is just rambling. But put some more thought into what exactly we should do about morality, maybe propose something a little more concrete, and this will be a much better speech.
I am fascinated as well, so much so that I literally wrote a couple of pages and then scrapped them for a shorter comment. Then I scrapped the shorter comment because it was getting way too complex so that even I had no idea what I wrote. I can't say though that I haven't thought about this stuff before. Actually I think we have all have at one point or another pondered about ethics/morality/right&wrong, though your paradox is an especially interesting way of attempting to dissecting it. I was quite thought provoking for me.
I am fascinated as well, so much so that I literally wrote a couple of pages and then scrapped them for a shorter comment. Then I scrapped the shorter comment because it was getting way too complex so that even I had no idea what I wrote. I can't say though that I haven't thought about this stuff before. Actually we have all probably at one point or another pondered about ethics/morality/right&wrong. Nevertehless, your paradox is an especially interesting way of attempting to dissect it. It was quite thought provoking for me.
Oh yeah, basically I concluded that absolute morality is the way to go. Philosophically its interesting but you're right, in terms of having an end result (a universal golden rule perhaps) its futile. Thats why people find it neccesary or find comfort in belief systems where they can make decisions based on specific beliefs, using rules like the golden rule and their own "intrinsic morality" as guidelines to judge those beliefs and decisions against.
Straying just a little from the subject-
to me, knowing that morality is intrisic and innate is an affirmation of a higher power. I think it was Colin or maybe someone else who was talking about it being natural for man to want to believe in religion and God, I guess for humanities survival. My little addition is that then it makes sense then for God to have instilled the urge into humanity.
Oh yeah, about Colin's oratory on The Holidays, there is one other major Muslim holiday coming up actually. I think its on Monday or Tuesday. Kinda sad that I don't know. It might be better suited for your paper. The holiday commemorates Abrahams attempt to sacrifice his son. That sounds kind of bad but dont worry, Muslims don't sacrifice their kids. The whole thing is about Abraham's patriarchal place in Islam and his dedication to God. It actually somewhat commemorates the end of human sacrifices as he was commanded not to go through with it. Theres this interesting thing sort of about bragging rights. Muslims believe that the son to be sacrificed was Ishmael, and Jews or (maybe Judeo-Christian altogether) believe it to be Isaac--as each people is descended from the respective son. Oh yeah and its called Id-al-Adha or Eid-ul-Azia (all three words are interchangable, has to do with phonetics).
Khalid, I went with Ramadan because recently it has been in the winter holidays time, and a lot of people think of it as Islam's "holiday." Id-al-Adha is just now approaching the Holidays, so pretty soon it'll probably get the focus that Ramadan did. And yes, Christians agree with the Jews on the Isaac-Ishmael thing.