High level philosophy

[Angrboda]

Here’s the interesting part, in this morbid scenario. If I killed myself, there would be no guilt. As well as ending all my problems, that final barrier doesn’t exist. Yet I don’t do it. So clearly it’s not such a simple setup as it may seem. My next idea is that my behaviour has been conditioned to avoid doing "wrong" things for fear of the guilt, to the point where the deterrent itself is no longer actually relevant. Yet I can sit here and analyse myself, to see how I have (so to speak) indoctrinated myself into a certain mode of behaviour, and I can clearly see how the reasoning behind it does not apply here.

So what is stopping me, scientifically speaking? I suppose the power of the emotions of me knowing how much suffering my actions would cause, even though I wouldn’t be there to experience them or feel guilty about them, is strong enough to counter my freely available escape from the misery of my life. I guess it makes some sort of sense from an evolutionary point of view, too. Those who value others to such a degree that they will endure misery themselves will survive and get the opportunity to reproduce, whereas those who "opt out" lose all such rights.

There are several things beyond the practical aspect of the guilt that you would feel, most of them flowing from our evolved nature as social animals. The first of which is our impulse to follow the rules and meet the expectations of the group. We feel compelled to do things which would please the group because feeling compelled to do so, and finding doing so more pleasant than not, was a productive survival strategy. Second, we evolved an instinct for conformity with the group, and being moral is something the group considers important, and so we adopt it as something we consider important as well. Third, we have evolved certain intuitions and emotional reactions to encourage us to behave in certain ways independent of any ability to rationally arrive at the conclusion that we should do so. We feel that we should eat when we are hungry because our brains evoke feelings of desire to eat when we need to do so. In a similar way, nature has imbued us with a desire to act in line with our moral intuitions and to feel compelled to obey them regardless of whether we can see any rational benefit from doing so. And finally, our moral intuitions represent themselves to us as objective facts about the world, and we have evolved to act based upon what we believe to be objectively true about the world, regardless of whether we have any rational way of knowing that our moral intuitions are objectively true. This is similar to our constantly believing ourselves right in our conclusions simply because believing that we are right and our reasoning sound led to productive and survival enhancing behaviors. Likewise, believing that our moral intuitions reflect objective truths motivates us to act in accordance with them more strongly than if we didn't believe they were actual truths about the world, or doubted their veracity.

So from multiple angles we evolved emotional and mental responses which encourage us to behave in ways which we consider moral, independent of whether we can rationally derive some potential benefit from doing so, and indeed, often in spite of clearly foreseeable benefits we would obtain from not doing so. Like always believing our reasoning to be sound and correct, doing so has tangible benefits for us as a species. You may or may not feel that the survival of our species is a good in and of itself, but if you do, then you have a motive for behaving morally and obeying your moral inclinations independent of the possible consequences. So you may consider not feeling guilt to be a good worth seeking, but these other things are also goods worth seeking, and so compel you to behave morally both rationally and emotionally.

(As a side note, you not killing yourself definitely promotes the survival of the species by promoting the survival of one of its members, who himself contributes to the survival of the whole. So, again, if you feel the survival of the species is a good worth seeking, you have an independent reason for not killing yourself aside from specific personal or local consequences.)