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I've felt like writing another blog for a while now, so I've been trying to find another topic which interests me and which would hopefully interest someone who reads my blog, too. I finally stumbled across one yesterday - the system of morality that I use to control my actions. I do realize that both of my blogs so far have been pretty similar in subject, but it is the only thing that I find interesting to write, and think people will find interesting to read. Suggestions on more topics would be awesome.  I think the next one I do may be on the necessity of driving licences in modern society, and the implications of that, so clearly I need some help in that department haha.
You can find the morality scale I am going to talk about here.
Before I get down to describing my own morality system, I feel that some backstory will be necessary to see how my morality ended up developing out of the "gimme gimme" stage that all child are born with up to its now current state.
I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic Christian in Southern Ontario(which means that I was religiously moderate). For the first section of my life, up until the age of 8 or so, I followed normal moral development patterns. However, after this point my moral development strayed pretty far from the beaten path. There were 3 major factors that really started to play tug-of-war with my morality. The first was the low-level, get-what-I-want morality that I saw my older brother getting away with constantly. The second of these was the fire-and-brimstone morality that I read about in the Bible(they didn't preach much Old Testament at my church because it's out of fashion). The third and final factor that influence me was the multitude of different views and moral perspectives that I was exposed to through my love of reading.
The most prominent of the three back when I was 8 was the greediness of my brother. We used to mow my grandparents lawn along with my third brother, splitting it up semi-evenly in order to allow us to actually finish the job in a reasonable amount of time(their lawn was BIG). My oldest brother, who was around 12 at the time, was an incredibly lazy piece of shit. Despite the fact that he was the oldest of the three of us, he would go inside when my grandparents had left the house, help himself to the freezies and cookies they always stored in the house, and then watch TV for the next few hours. Because my brother and I were good kids at that point we were forced to pick up the slack and mow the entire lawn between the two of us, which normally took us two hours of work each. When my grandparents came back my brother would lie and say he had done his share of work, and through fear of him beating us up, we would agree.
Eventually I had had enough of this and decided to give it a try myself. The very first time I tried to steal a freezie my grandpa came downstairs and caught me doing it. He didn't even say anything. He just looked at me, shook his head and walked back upstairs. Despite the fact that I didn't get any retribution or punishment for this minor theft it really rattled me to my core. I still haven't forgotten it. 11 years down the road it is still my most memorable event. I did a hardcore turnaround after the incident, and ended up turning completely away from immoral behaviour, and got pushed up through the moral levels from Stage 2 up to Stage 3.
The least prominent of these was the effect the Bible reading had on me. I was extremely good at math as a kid, so from grades 5-7 I usually finished the curriculum anywhere from a week to a month ahead of schedule. I used the free 40 minutes a day to do some extra reading. For some crazy reason they didn't want me reading my own books in class. Without any other way to occupy myself at the time, I turned to one thing they couldn't possibly stop me from reading - the Bible. I found myself quickly bored with the New Testament(all the gospels were pretty similar, and my church preached them frequently). However, in the Old Testament I found a very interesting set of mythology that seemed even better than the fiction I was reading at the time. While reading through this I naturally came across a lot of the "I AM THE LAW" from good ol' Yahweh, and it ended up rubbing off on me, pushing me up to Stage 4. However, at the same time I realized that the morality he laid down wasn't anywhere near perfect - it still allowed for atrocities and immoral actions, so I was left to wander along in search of a better system.
The final stage in this journey was my exposure to alternative systems through my voracious reading appetite, combined with the subject matter I was reading. For the most part I read the best books of traditional nerdy book genres(in particular, High Fantasy and Science Fiction, such as LoTR, WoT and Ringworld), almost all of which tended to explore moral systems either through explicit conversation(such as the Aes Sedai rules) or through character and plot development(such as in Ringworld). By reading through all of these different sources I was able to pick and choose the segments I liked from each and combine them all into a system that worked for me. There's really not to say about this segment, but it was the longest lasting of all of them. I spent the whole time trying to develop a good working system, but never managed to complete one until I stumbled across the criteria that the Kohlberg system states. I finally realized at that point what I was looking for in my system, and it allowed me to get over the hump. I was stuck in between Stage 4 and 5 for around 5 years(from 13 to 18) and then it all came together almost at once.
And here I am, with a fully working(although I'm sure some smarter TLers than me will shoot holes in it for me) moral system:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Nah, I'm just messing with you. Mine is surprisingly simple considering how long it took me to come up with:
The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many. For example: I am considering littering a pop can. According to my system, should I? Well, the answer is subjective. If the nearest garbage disposal is 5000 miles away the inconvenience of trying to throw it out outweighs the negative effect on the ecosystem and nearby people. However, if you are walking by a garbage can at that moment, the inconvenience is outweighed by the negative effects.
And... that's about it. It seems stupid in hindsight, but I had thought the leadup would be a lot shorter. Instead 90% of this blog is explaining the backstory for the actual important part haha. Hopefully next blog will be better.
Thanks for reading!
  
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I think I understand what you are getting at, but your "system" is far too subjective to be really useful as guidance in an absolute sense. All morality has a degree of subjectivity, but really deciding what an individual need vs a group need can be incredibly difficult, and you could easily slip into pure selfishness that would be "morally" justifiable with your system.
Take the example of you and your brothers, for example. Your oldest brother could justify not doing any work by saying his need to not work and stay inside and eat snacks easily outweighs you two doing his share of the work. You would be hard pressed to defend that to a group, but a truly selfish person could make the argument.
I'm not suggesting that is what you intend to do with your system, but it could be done, which sort of leaves you with the question of what is really guiding your moral actions (i.e. how do you personally decide what is an individual need vs. a group need).
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The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many.
All the world's evil is derived from this simple line. We have let loose unimaginable horror on our fellow man, simply because of the belief that we must act in accordance to, or in defense of, the needs of the many.
Imagine if both your brothers refused to work, and only you did any real work. Could they both steal 1/3rd of your earnings, for the good of the collective?
What if you and your other brother decided to beat up the brother that doesn't work? Are you not curing the "group" from its most unproductive members?
People should pay no mind to what "the collective" wants of them. People need to focus on their own needs, and work to see those needs fulfilled.
You have no obligation to other people, and other people have no obligation to you. Just because you are many, and I am few, does not give you authority over me, be it practical or moral.
People are entitled to what they earn, not a cent less, not a cent more. Other than that, we are all individuals, born with no obligation to anyone. Not our family, not our nation, not our "fellow man," not any of these abstract concepts demand that we curtail the person that we are.
The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many? One of the most depraved things I can imagine.
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If you want to do philosophy then you have to read it first. What you've thought about has come up, was refuted, was refined, was refuted again, was refined even more through centuries of people thinking about all of this who were hundred times as smart as most TL forum posters taken together.
PS: zalz is wrong in everything he says, don't listen to him.
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On September 30 2012 17:26 Sauwelios wrote:
If you want to do philosophy then you have to read it first. What you've thought about has come up, was refuted, was refined, was refuted again, was refined even more through centuries of people thinking about all of this who were hundred times as smart as most TL forum posters taken together.
PS: zalz is wrong in everything he says, don't listen to him.
Well the OP's system seems to boil down to Utilitarianism which is one of the leading normative ethics systems in most university courses in the English-speaking world.
If you take a normative ethics course the systems you will likely talk about are:
-Kantian Ethics
-Virtue Ethics
-Utilitarianism
But if you mean that his idea isn't new and that thousands of brilliant people have wrestled with it then you are right.
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On September 30 2012 15:50 zalz wrote:All the world's evil is derived from this simple line. We have let loose unimaginable horror on our fellow man, simply because of the belief that we must act in accordance to, or in defense of, the needs of the many. Imagine if both your brothers refused to work, and only you did any real work. Could they both steal 1/3rd of your earnings, for the good of the collective? What if you and your other brother decided to beat up the brother that doesn't work? Are you not curing the "group" from its most unproductive members? People should pay no mind to what "the collective" wants of them. People need to focus on their own needs, and work to see those needs fulfilled. You have no obligation to other people, and other people have no obligation to you. Just because you are many, and I am few, does not give you authority over me, be it practical or moral. People are entitled to what they earn, not a cent less, not a cent more. Other than that, we are all individuals, born with no obligation to anyone. Not our family, not our nation, not our "fellow man," not any of these abstract concepts demand that we curtail the person that we are. The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many? One of the most depraved things I can imagine.
Isn't this basically #2 on the morality scale?
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On September 30 2012 14:37 HardlyNever wrote:
I think I understand what you are getting at, but your "system" is far too subjective to be really useful as guidance in an absolute sense. All morality has a degree of subjectivity, but really deciding what an individual need vs a group need can be incredibly difficult, and you could easily slip into pure selfishness that would be "morally" justifiable with your system.
Take the example of you and your brothers, for example. Your oldest brother could justify not doing any work by saying his need to not work and stay inside and eat snacks easily outweighs you two doing his share of the work. You would be hard pressed to defend that to a group, but a truly selfish person could make the argument.
I'm not suggesting that is what you intend to do with your system, but it could be done, which sort of leaves you with the question of what is really guiding your moral actions (i.e. how do you personally decide what is an individual need vs. a group need).
I know it is subjective in terms of evaluating which effect is more important to you. I haven't really thought of a way that I could get rid of that, so I just went along assuming that people would evaluate things approximately to the same level as I would. My system would still work for some situations even for an exceptionally greedy person, though. For example, purely by numbers sacrificing your life for 5 others would still be required, because it would cause a greater good for the group than the negative effect it would have on you. However, you are right with your example, and for less strictly comparable effects. I'll be thinking about trying to resolve this for a while, I'm sure. Thanks for bringing it up!
On September 30 2012 15:50 zalz wrote:All the world's evil is derived from this simple line. We have let loose unimaginable horror on our fellow man, simply because of the belief that we must act in accordance to, or in defense of, the needs of the many. Imagine if both your brothers refused to work, and only you did any real work. Could they both steal 1/3rd of your earnings, for the good of the collective?
No, because that would bring down the good of the collective. Not only would that lower output, resulting in a lot less money earned, but it would also provide disincentives to work. Why would I mow the whole lawn for 1/3 of the money. I'd just leave and mow other lawns or not work. It would cause no good because it would simply redistribute the wealth, not lead to any more of it.
What if you and your other brother decided to beat up the brother that doesn't work? Are you not curing the "group" from its most unproductive members?
No, this would require a lot of effort from us, leave him beat up, and he still would be an extremely poor worker. Additionally, there are much better ways that we could achieve an even better effect with less effort(for example, talking to him, at the very least to ensure that we earned what we should be earning).
People should pay no mind to what "the collective" wants of them. People need to focus on their own needs, and work to see those needs fulfilled.
You have no obligation to other people, and other people have no obligation to you. Just because you are many, and I am few, does not give you authority over me, be it practical or moral.
Humans as a species have always been set apart by the extent to which they work together. If you truly believe that we should be individualistic forfeit your modern technology and weapons, and go live in a cave hunting with spears. Even if you did that you'd be at a disadvantage from earlier humans because you can't hunt in a pack.
People are entitled to what they earn, not a cent less, not a cent more. Other than that, we are all individuals, born with no obligation to anyone. Not our family, not our nation, not our "fellow man," not any of these abstract concepts demand that we curtail the person that we are.
The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many? One of the most depraved things I can imagine.
On September 30 2012 17:26 Sauwelios wrote:
If you want to do philosophy then you have to read it first. What you've thought about has come up, was refuted, was refined, was refuted again, was refined even more through centuries of people thinking about all of this who were hundred times as smart as most TL forum posters taken together.
PS: zalz is wrong in everything he says, don't listen to him.
I have read it quite a bit, but never in a formal setting. I have, unfortunately, never been able to take a course either in high school or university on philosophy, so my knowledge of it is spotty, and filled with some important gaps. I wrote this blog in order to determine whether my moral system is actually well-developed. It is likely that I had missed a key point when I was growing up and messed it up.
On September 30 2012 19:20 Fyodor wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2012 17:26 Sauwelios wrote:
If you want to do philosophy then you have to read it first. What you've thought about has come up, was refuted, was refined, was refuted again, was refined even more through centuries of people thinking about all of this who were hundred times as smart as most TL forum posters taken together.
PS: zalz is wrong in everything he says, don't listen to him. Well the OP's system seems to boil down to Utilitarianism which is one of the leading normative ethics systems in most university courses in the English-speaking world. If you take a normative ethics course the systems you will likely talk about are: -Kantian Ethics -Virtue Ethics -Utilitarianism But if you mean that his idea isn't new and that thousands of brilliant people have wrestled with it then you are right.
Ahh, you are right. It is essentially utilitarianism. It's a bit different in that it emphasizes well-being as well as happiness, but otherwise it seems to pretty much fall in line with it.
You are both right that many smarter people than the three of us have argued about this before us, and that this thread is probably worthless. However, I don't know what those people knew, so I wanted to make sure that I was kind of headed in the right direction. Considering I ended up developing a moral system extremely similar to one that already existed, I suppose I was...
On October 01 2012 00:35 HardlyNever wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2012 15:50 zalz wrote:The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many. All the world's evil is derived from this simple line. We have let loose unimaginable horror on our fellow man, simply because of the belief that we must act in accordance to, or in defense of, the needs of the many. Imagine if both your brothers refused to work, and only you did any real work. Could they both steal 1/3rd of your earnings, for the good of the collective? What if you and your other brother decided to beat up the brother that doesn't work? Are you not curing the "group" from its most unproductive members? People should pay no mind to what "the collective" wants of them. People need to focus on their own needs, and work to see those needs fulfilled. You have no obligation to other people, and other people have no obligation to you. Just because you are many, and I am few, does not give you authority over me, be it practical or moral. People are entitled to what they earn, not a cent less, not a cent more. Other than that, we are all individuals, born with no obligation to anyone. Not our family, not our nation, not our "fellow man," not any of these abstract concepts demand that we curtail the person that we are. The needs of the one must be balanced with the needs of the many? One of the most depraved things I can imagine. Isn't this basically #2 on the morality scale?
Yuppers.
In hindsight, this thread was kind of pointless. I don't really know what discussion I had intended for there to be... there's really not much to discuss here. :/
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Your system has no worth. The result of your moral system is ultimately subjective. What use is that? It gets you nowhere.
I took a first year class about moral philosophy. We started with moral relativism. We learned that what a culture considers moral is a result of their environment, traditions lifestyle. We learned that although moral laws are a product of our culture, it does not mean there is no common morality.
We learned how aristotle and the greeks believed the order in nature meant there must be some moral order for humans and that practicing doing "good" was the way to become better at doing good.
Utilitarianism which is what your view is a bastardized version of has two varities (or so we learned probabl over simplified)
the one is that a person's actions must always be good for the greatest number.. it runs into a lot of problems and is not really useful in a lot of situations. theres a an entire article about it. one counter argument is "a kid mows your grass for pay but with utilitarianism you could not pay him if you have a better use for the money for the gerater good.
the other is that there is a set of rules are all that matters. the set of rules is supposed to make the greatest good for the greatest number.
and then Kant takes this type of thinking to a more sublime metaphysical level. he says an action is made good not by the results but by the good will of the act. It is good if it is performed out of duty for the natural laws. He says the principle of the action must be such that if you made it into a universal law it would not contradict the natural order.
His example is if you want to lie to get out of trouble your "maxim" to become a universal law would be "i will lie to get out of trouble" and its not possible for this to be a universal law because then language and communication would never have any value..
And then Nietzche comes along with Beyond good and hes like "fuck that. you people are serving old ideas that were put in place for certain groups to maintain power and thats stopping you from being in harmony with how life actually is. life actually wants power more than it wasnts logic.
So basically you have a lot more reading to do if you want to actually get in the loop with moral philosophy
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On October 01 2012 00:53 WarSame wrote:
No, because that would bring down the good of the collective. Not only would that lower output, resulting in a lot less money earned, but it would also provide disincentives to work. Why would I mow the whole lawn for 1/3 of the money. I'd just leave and mow other lawns or not work. It would cause no good because it would simply redistribute the wealth, not lead to any more of it.
So, doesn't that already undermine your first claim?
The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many, but you are against re-distribution, which already puts you firmly in opposition of the people (left-wing) that would appreciate that position.
No, this would require a lot of effort from us, leave him beat up, and he still would be an extremely poor worker. Additionally, there are much better ways that we could achieve an even better effect with less effort(for example, talking to him, at the very least to ensure that we earned what we should be earning).
So beating people into line is only a problem when it is too much of an effort, so when the task is delegated from up high, the task becomes morally rightious in your system.
It isn't so much that you are against beating people up to make them fall into line, it is just that you don't want to break a sweat. Not my idea of paradise.
Humans as a species have always been set apart by the extent to which they work together. If you truly believe that we should be individualistic forfeit your modern technology and weapons, and go live in a cave hunting with spears. Even if you did that you'd be at a disadvantage from earlier humans because you can't hunt in a pack.
You are confusing individualism with isolationism.
You cannot force me to work together, but I will most likely do so out of my own free will, because it provides me with advantages.
By seeking out my own best interests, I end up working together with other people, by my own choice. The freedom to live your life as you see fit is the crucial element. Society is not some demi-god to which you feed human lives in order to establish some unspecified "greater good".
If all humans seek out their own interests, society will be better off than when someone gets it in his head that he can control and steer society, engineer it to "perfection".
When I say that I have no obligation to society, and society has no obligation to me, I mean that nobody has to pay for my housing or my food out of charity, nor should others expect me to do the same for them. It isn't some tinfoil notion of wanting to live out in the wild, away from any human contact.
I don't have a right to a car, a vacation, a giant mansion. I am entitled to what I work for.
What I don't get is how you can talk about valueing the many over the few, but meanwhile argue that re-distribution isn't something we should strive for. I know why I don't believe in it, but you not believing it just runs counter to the very premise of your belief.
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EPT
