Hey guys, this is an introduction to a new essay i’m working on, please tell me what you think!
All my life I have been susceptible to the doubt which I think grips most people from the moment they come to have any real understanding of the elemental dichotomy, between good and the ungood, that we see as ordering human life. To have some concept of good, or goodness – be it through religion, humanist ethics, societal laws or institutional rules, or familial reproach etc. is a fundamental experience in the life of most of us and it brings with it a variety of questions for those who attempt to truly understand it. I think that most people have at one point in their life then struggled with coming to terms with their idea of what makes a good life, or what to be good is. For some this will be answered by a party line or by a religious doctrine, or by innumerable other external dictates which once selected are furnished strict adherence by the individual, defended until death commonly on the intellectual and at times in the extreme cases even the physical level. Under the prevailing view of the physical scientific human self, goodness can be nothing more than a human construct except where we believe those foolish enough to suggest that natural selection and survival can provide us with some kind of ethical ontological principle for ordering human conduct. I won’t argue with that here but I make it clear that while I do think evolution is not ontologically insignificant, it does not need to be relevant to discussions in ethics.
Scurrying around this gaping chasm we return to the idea of goodness as a construct. When treated in this fashion we are faced with a particular question, whether it is valid to attempt to preserve the concept itself after acknowledging its artificial nature or whether we are best served by abandoning the terminology of goodness and with it the nosology of evil. Many thinkers have given us reason to question how valuable such distinctions are to human life, in one sense we see a clear history of the use of such distinctions to (in our modern conception) unjustly stigmatise and persecute various ethno-social groups and classes. Consulting Foucault or others about say, the plight of the homosexual in history, or for me on home turf – the plight of the horned Jew, and we can quite clearly see how such a discourse has negatively influenced people and the way societies and individuals have responded to each other. Yet I feel as though, and maybe this is too much a Bentham Consequential argument for many to stomach, that the idea of a better way of living, a good way of living in all its utter romance has probably also furnished our world with its greatest human achievements on almost any metric of valuation that the vast majority of people would subscribe to (which is apparently an effective argument because… democracy?).
This is an empirical bet. I make that very clear, I think, I bet, I gamble that the idea that there is a better way of living to strive towards is ultimately something that is beneficial to the human race. Accepting these odds, leads us to the next question: how do we approach this task – what does living a ‘good life’ mean? I see this as a fundamental question of philosophy much as Plato did in his Republic. This essay is for me a cursory examination of my approach to this vast subject. In what follows I want to outline my theory of Existentialism (which no doubt will bear resemblance to other theories and which I will likely rename when I am better informed by an appropriate person) and outline some reasons I have for thinking that this represents the most valid and desirable approach to ethical questions in the contemporary setting. Having done this I will discuss my theory of human agency and ethical decision making, advancing the proposition that if human beings can act with any real morally relevant agency then they can only do so in virtue of the values they hold, providing an attempt at the necessary account of exactly what I think values are. From here I will move to less firm ground, combining my existential realisations with this theory of ethical action to suggest that in order to justify our ability to act we are under a self-assumed obligation to act in accordance with the best values available to us. Finally I will consider some ways in which we may be able to reflect upon our own value sets and argue that in order to “live a good life” we will need to attempt to consider other’s values’, where they come from and how they are defined – and attempt to adopt or reject values where appropriate on this basis. I will suggest art as the primary vehicle by which this can be done – though I intend to write more extensively on this in the future.
thethinkingantman 