Argument against conventional humanistic morality: Take 2

In my last post, I illustrated why logical actions should be pursued with earnestness by everyone, regardless of the actions' pertinence to the realm of human morality. There is a second reason to broaden one's scope of decision-making indicators, however: the potential for non-human agents to cause harm to themselves, to other non-human agents, and to human agents.

No one frames nature in moral terms, but we can tell when something like the AIDS virus is negative. You can't put the AIDS virus in jail, but it's still bad.

Can you put an earthquake in jail? No, because, while bad, earthquakes are not immoral activities, or entities perpetrating immoral activities.

Morality only takes us so far; logic, in the most general sense that we can fathom, currently takes us farthest -- even if this is ultimately a relative statement.

On logic and morality once more

I've sort of gone over this before, but here's the basic premise: We should strive to take actions which appear logical,* regardless of to which arbitrary realms of agent interaction they belong. I've devised an extremely simplistic way of looking at this here. Consider the following two statements:

1. Mass murder is acceptable.

2. 2+2=5

As noted previously, there is no such thing as mathematical data uncoupled from empirical observation; there have to be empirically observable objects which can be added or subtracted in order for arithmetic to even exist.

So, then, is there a difference between the above statements? Consider their inverses:

1. It's wrong to commit mass murder.

2. 2+2=4

Do you agree with 1.? Do you agree with 2.? Great, so what's the problem, and why are we placing one in a different category from the other?

And technically, no, I can't "prove" that either statement is true, contrary to what some mathematicians and scientists might allege. With this limitation in mind, if I were to use the logic of most people, I'd have to declare 2+2=4 a "subjective opinion" in the same sense that that term gets applied to things like morality. This is where the pragmatic element comes into play: we have to make decisions. Period.

Note, however, that I bring this up not just to demonstrate that all truth claims should be measured by the same metrics, but also to elucidate my take on what's worth promoting. It's a statement both to those who view suffering as too subjective a phenomenon to care about addressing, and to those who are gung ho about ending suffering, but who are coming at things from a "moral" perspective, which probably isn't fundamental enough. If we want to end suffering, we can't just teach people that it's not a good thing; we have to make them into logic machines for any kind of situation.

* In this context, "logical" refers to any action which appears more logical than all competitors, thus relegating the competitors to being "illogical," given that none of them were or will be opted for.

"Logical" vs "moral"

Another short entry for today

Something that a lot of modern people get wrong: the idea that, so long as an action is not "immoral," it doesn't matter how "illogical" it is -- it's everyone's "right" to take it, should they so choose. This kind of faulty reasoning should lead us to remove "morality" from our philosophy, because that abstraction is unnecessary in the first place (logical is logical, regardless of to what part of life it applies), and, additionally, it allows people to sidestep real, society-wide problems. It wouldn't make sense for me to neglect my health, for example, by gorging on fatty foods all day, but that action is not immoral (meaning that it doesn't directly harm anyone else, and doesn't interfere with the principle of consent) -- it's merely illogical. This distinction allows the majority of people in today's society to completely ignore the problem of their thoughts and behaviors, and to live irresponsibly -- in a phrase, "because it's not immoral."