Good and Evil

[Mudhammam]

I very much agree that morality isn't a matter of individual whim, for reasons given in this thread a while back:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-33164-po...#pid935583

Thanks, I hadn't read that post. You make really excellent points with regards to Harris' position. One of my biggest issues with Harris, and why I think many consider him a philosophical lightweight, is that he doesn't seem interested in seriously engaging arguments that have been made in opposition to his views, and that's not limited to his ethics, but pretty much every topic I've seen him broach. 

Although I can sympathize with feeling that way, do you have any reason to suppose that that is correct?  Or is it just that you have a very strong feeling, a feeling that is deeply ingrained in you?  If the latter of these, that fits very well with Hume, going back even further in the thread:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-33164-po...#pid934918

Although I presently feel as you do, if everyone really did change tomorrow (which is implausible in reality; or, rather, impossible, as not everyone's brain can physically change like that magically), then both you and I would feel differently about it tomorrow.

In fact, it is so deep in human nature, it, like many other traits, are shared with other animals.  See, for a start on this:

http://www.livescience.com/24802-animals...-book.html

The issue to me is whether "the Good" is something that really exists as a part of this experience that we, as rational animals, understand to be the world. Are there things that are really better, for their own sake, i.e. because they do exist, as opposed to a world without them? Now, I wouldn't want to put human beings on an artificial pedestal and make the claim that we are special because we possess a superb faculty of logical reasoning, but I do think we could start by asking something like the following: Is any experience of life, however brief and whatever quality, better than none at all? Or perhaps, are some types of experiences, as opposed to others, better than none at all? Or is it incorrect to even try to make a value judgment between existence and nonexistence? On the one hand, it seems absurd at face value to say nonexistence can be anything, such as better or worse; and that’s probably valid. On the other hand, if we grant that everything that exists has a physical substratum, whether or not it’s imbued with some abstract quality, such as mind, or goodness, or none at all, then while mind may exist for a very short duration (understanding duration in the sense of Newtonian time since we have no other grasp of what it actually means in relation to everything), the physical parts that it is derived from are, for all intensive purposes, eternal. So then, there are these minute components that exist (one could add "period" but I won't as it leads to my next thought), that perpetually form and dissolve spatially separated bodies, and the question is, is it possible that these, on account of some feature that forms the basis of their nature, can intrinsically contain more of this vague notion of goodness than others? Is not the very opportunity of a physical body which possesses the power to contemplate whether something that it calls "the Good" exists delineate a quality of being that is, on account of being part of that body, actually good in some sense? Are there things that are more worth preserving in a definite state than others because they possess this quality we identify as goodness? It’s difficult to translate this idea into terms that don’t seem too vague or contrived and yet in experience it seems like an obvious aspect of the world, and moreover, one that transcends feeling and is a necessary fact in that it informs virtually every decision beings with some notion of goodness make.

For me, if this can be grounded in some way (and perhaps it cannot, but I lean more towards the possibility that it can), then duties to the Good naturally follow. Now, I’m not suggesting that this at all touches on what the Good (or the True or the Beautiful) in fact is, but at least it’s a start from which we can reason further. And if the Good as defined as, well, let's just say whatever you please at this point, cannot be grounded, is it any worse off than anything else? Didn’t Aristotle rightly realize that all demonstration must assume first principles, i.e. definitions? Does logic justify itself? Does science? Does truth? Or do we---must we---start from self-evident facts about the world, which are derived from the intellect and the senses (which, of course, are highly prone to error), and work our way from there (basically what Harris says when posed with the question of ontological grounding for his moral theory, that in everything we must pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps), with not only morality but essentially all else that is not indivisible (and have we established indivisibility with... anything?)