Thoughts on Morality

Recently I was perusing a local Borders and came across Nietzche's "Beyond Good and Evil." I've pretty much avoided Nietzche since I attempted to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra (especially after being such a fan of Strauss' piece and the connections between the two). Ultimately I found it very aesthetically interesting but couldn't make a lick of sense out of it. Since it was my first encounter with Nietzche and I never took a course on him, I immediately kind of dismissed his stuff as too difficult or nonsensical. Well it turns out that Beyond Good and Evil is the actual stripped down argument from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I read a couple passages and as it turned out, I've been thinking of some extremely similar topics, especially on ethics, recently. This got me thinking even more, so I'd like to express, hopefully coherently what I've been trying to get at in my head for the past month or months or weeks, I'm not sure how long.

I've always found morals and ethics really difficult. Most Western philosophers come at it way too logically, like "it must be this, or it must be this." De-ontologism or Utilitarianism! Good or Evil! And I feel when you break down morality in this way it turns out to be extremely empty. I'll continue with this in a second.

First we need to consider what ethics or morality is. So we'll keep it simple ethics will be "a code of action" and morality will be "how you should act."

Now one of the most difficult areas of ethics is where do ethics and morality come from? What makes one action better than another? In the case of Abrahamic religion, for example, there are codes given by god. And goodness and morality are dictated by a higher power. Usually this morality revolves around pleasing the god. The only problem I have with this model is, why please the god? It's probably because I do not have a firm grasp of this kind of religious belief, I imagine their best answer would be "because it's God."

For the purposes of my discussion of morality, we are going to bypass that rout, because frankly, I don't believe in God. I'm not ruling out some kind of higher force or whatever, but we'll look at this from a more rationalistic atheistic point of view. Now from this spot we have much more difficulty explaining morality. As far as looking to some kind of observational way to explain morality, you could go the Dawkins rout and obsess over evolution and game theory. But even evolution leads us to something we don't seem to relate to as far as ethics go. Other observational routs could lead you to relativism, but that always leaves controversial questions about Osama Bin Laden and whether his actions could be justified by his culture et cetera.

The other way to go is look to logic and rationality, go internal. There's the Categorical Imperative, considering whether each decision, if everyone did it, would it be good or bad for the world before you decide on it. But ultimately it's absurdly strict. Also it's dependent on "what is good for the world" which is a debatable topic. As well Utilitarianism often makes sense, it's clearly just a numbers game that determines what a moral decision is. But at certain logical ends it too starts to turn somewhat strange.

In essence the problem with all of these ethical systems is that they are too logical. That's right, our rationality seems to call to us to have one blanket mathematical formula to figure out what is a moral decision. It's extremely tempting, to have such a clear cut straight forward answer. But every clear cut straight answer reaches a point where it runs into a wall with our instincts. When it's a formula, there's always a way to twist it into an absurd situation.

So the conclusion I've come to is that there are layers of morality. This is very similar to Buddhist and Hindu layers of knowledge. What is true to you at one point in your life may not be true later. It is said that the Buddha would lie to his pupils often because it would help them reach enlightenment better than telling them the truth. I think that this system can apply to ethics and morality.

It makes sense to have long range guidelines on a society. Common values shared across people. This allows for stability and gives people the opportunity to live moral lives. These are ethical codes, but they should not be followed blindly. Each person is given their own opportunity to discover their own morality. But this is not a formula. As it says in the Tao Te Ching "The way that can be followed is not a true way," true "morality" is coming in tune with the nature and balance of the world. And it is different for each person. There is no clear cut formulaic morality. Common values an ethics serve more for societal stability than they do as actual moral values. Finding the right actions is a personal endeavor and experience. The world will find a way to balance itself anyway. If you push too hard it pushes back twice as hard. There is an innate value in trying to become part of the balance, but there is nothing spelled out. True morality is becoming a part of nature.

I know this may not be very "answerful" but I think too many people are looking for an easy answer. It's not as easy as "act altruistically" or "be nice." It's finding your way.