is this a homework blog?

Personal Ethics Statement

I have not yet worked out my personal ethics to any extent at all. Actually, I had one quite developed, but I had to abandon it. So I'm just going to state my principles.

There can be no ethics without morality. So what is morality? I have not quite figured that out yet. However, I am approaching this problem from two directions. That is, how our biology grounds our morality, and how morality is played out in social interactions. Ethics to me is a framework to translate primitive (not in a derogatory sense) hunter-gatherer time dynamics of moral interaction, into our current socio-economic framework. Pretty much how Capitalism, is a translation of barter trading, or more likely, looting and plundering.

But as there are problems with Capitalism, there should also be problems with Ethics. The same kind of problems. An economic and ethical system, are rational systems based on principles. Principles which we tend to formulate based on our thought, rather than The Laws of Physics. It is entirely possible that, and I think, highly likely that morality is irrational. And if so, so will the Ethics derived.

What now?

The damned vestiges of our evolutionary past. We were blissfully in ignorance of it. Now we know that there can be no Ethics like we always dreamed of.

The little girl cried when she lost her marbles in the desert.

She searched the desert for one hundred years.

The little girl cried when she thought she might've lost them in the sea rather than the desert.

She searched the depths of the sea for one hundred years.

The little girl cried when she thought she might've lost them in the mountains than the sea.

How long will it take till she begins to doubt whether or not she actually lost them to begin with?

-Frederica Bernkastel

What am I? A pessimist?

Logic is empty without its Premises. Emotions and Feelings and Instincts are its premises. Unfortunately, so do we want Happiness. The conclusion-premise? The premise-conclusion? Well, unless the solutions to the Greatest Problems are tautologies, it cannot be so. General-Theoretical-Optimum Happiness is impossible.

paraphrasing from vague memories;

Calvin : [some complaint]

Dad : The world is unfair, Calvin.

Calvin : I know, but why is it ever unfair to me?

The feeling of disgust can be learned-associated to stool, mud, blacksmiths, Untouchables, gay people, etc. The Moral Circle has been expanding. from Tribe. to Clan. to Townsfolk. to Race. to Nationality. to Genetic Lineage. to our Entire Species. to Animals. Next is perhaps, plants, fungi, extremophiles, Gaia, aliens, maybe God.

Brilliant.

However, not every connection in our brain is biased or unbiased to each and every stimuli in the environment. It is easier to love a dog than a cockroach. Something to do with, eyes, and imagination.

Irrational?

Are emotions Information-Processing? YES! And rational thought is NOT (at least not the proper-noun version). They will tell you that we need emotions because we cannot have Complete-Information (whatever that is). We tend to think of evolution as a ladder. As if its purpose is to achieve and progress Intelligence. Pathetic Anthropocentrism. Evolution is random. Or there is no evolution at all. Bacteria are perfectly content to be bacteria forever. And there are as successful, if not more successful, than Humans.

But the point is not Something Absolute. We have been thinking too Big. It is time to return to the Small.

"Perhaps that's what the 21st century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small Things." - Arundhati Roy, on Big World Problems, alluding to The God of Small Things

With the Economy Of Scale. We have drastically reduced Fixed Costs. And lower per-unit price. And lower per-unit satisfaction. Lower per-unit Meaning of Life.

We cheated.

Less for More didn't work. We need Customization on a Large Scale. Give each individual, their unique Small Thing. Their Custom-Made Meaning of Life.

The Meaning of Life is simply the lack of its absence. Physically merely a pattern of dancing neural symphony. There are no Big Things.

Where does that lead us?

Back to where we came from. Emotions.

Now all we have to do is formulate something I call the General-Specific. The Mass-Produced-Custom-Made. A toolkit of Ethics, for every Experience rather than that overrated Situation.

Every Human is A Human, not just Human. Differently-Similar, but also Similarly-Different. There can be more than one item on the menu.

There is this so-called Problem of Other Minds. A classic theoretical absurdity. Father of illegitimate children such as the caste system:

The laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.

They used to make pickles, squashes, jams, curry powders and canned pineapples. And banana jam (illegally) after the FPO (Food Products Organization) banned it because according to their specifications it was neither jam nor jelly. Too thin for jelly and too thick for jam. An ambiguous, unclassifiable consistency, they said.

Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question.

And so-like, we busy ourselves in the definition of what a Human is. What Morality is. When we already know.

There is one definition where Human is the Soul. And Morality is, The Word of God. And so we went ahead to empathize with souls, through The Word of God. And Bodies suffer, and the Conscience is sedated.

In The Theory of The Firm, in Perfect Competition. It is assumed Homogenous Products. Ethics is The Theory of The Firm. Homogenous Products are Humans. In an Ideal Market, there are no Brand Names. Only potatoes. And they're all organic. Consumers treat them all the same. Supply and Demand. Equilibrium Price. Normal Profit. i.e. just barely covering the costs.

There is a God That Only Exists On Wednesdays. Either He/She doesn't exist, or there are no Wednesdays. Or maybe it has always been Wednesdays. Is there a God? Do Wednesdays exist?

God loves us. We don't understand Him. He is out of our Moral Circle. Everything is in his. What a conundrum! We must therefore have Faith. The comatose patient's soul is in Heaven. We can pull out the life-support.

A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were himself performing the action. These neurons have been observed in primates, in some birds, and in humans. In humans, they have been found in Broca's area and the inferior parietal cortex of the brain. Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade

Wikipedia

Face it. A cockroach is not Human. Neither is God. Or Rationality.

Humans are Humans. Morality applies to Humans as Humans, as we understand, as we empathize with, other Humans.

The Greatest Truths are the Tautologies.

They are everywhere.

Maybe they are God.