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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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I think it's rather self evident, but I'll share a logical outline which resonates with me. To be sussinct: Most sentient beings kinda like being alive. Where possible, it's morally preferable to let them continue in that state.
It's basically an application of the golden rule. You can get in to game theory or utilitarianism for more thorough arguments to show that killing is generally wrong, but it then still has to come back to life having value which is quite hard, if not impossible, to logically prove.
So then you need to refer back to philosophy to find arguments that life has intrinsic value. I personally prefer using Camus' acceptance of the absurd as a basis for intrinsic value, but there are lots of other potential arguments that lead to the same conclusion.
Ultimately, though, it's impossible to even prove that other beings simply exist (e.g. solipsism) or have experiences, but at some point we mostly all look at the evidence and accept that they do.
The issue I see with these theories is that this idea of inherent value they all arrive at is very abstract in a way. What does it even mean for something to have inherent value, and why is it wrong to destroy it?
Another problem is that we talk about destroying life without even fully understanding it in the first place. What if life (in the sense of consciousness) is indestructible?
The way I see it, people accept that life has some inherent value because our self preservation instinct tells us that we don't want to die and empathy allows us to extend that instinct to other living beings. Both are easily explained as products of evolution, not rational or objective, but simply evolutionarily favourable. All these theories are attempts to rationally explain this feeling, but they all inevitably fail, as they're (in my opinion) trying to prove something that simply isn't objectively true.
Anyways, I feel like even if you accepted any individual theory that seems to confirm our current understanding of morality and stuck with it fully, you would come to conclusions which are completely conflicting with it. For example in the case of utilitarianism, you could easily come to the conclusion that not donating most of your money to charity is immoral, as that would be the course of action which would result in the largest total amount of pleasure.
I think the inverse problem is more troubling. If you accept that nothing has inherent value, then isn't everything morally permissible? Maybe it is an emotional decision, or perhaps a leap of faith, but I find that idea so repugnant, I couldn't believe it and continue functioning as a person.
I think in terms of consciousnes, Occam's razor leads me to suspect that it's tied to brain function, and when that ceases, so does it. Of course, once again, things like this are very hard to prove. I do think, though, that science and philosophy will eventually unravel it. (Incidentally, there's actually a book by Dan Dennett I've been meaning to read about this topic which was suggesting we're quite a bit closer to figuring it out than most people think.)
One of the problems with philosophy is that there's never any smallest part, beyond perhaps Descartes's "cogito, ergo sum". You can reduce any argument more and more and they all start to not make sense and eventually crumble. You can pick at their semantic foundation or the thousands of years of preceding thought until they unravel, then that nice sweater is now just a bunch of fibres. If you refuse to view philosophical arguments as a whole, then there's nothing there to view.
It's like an actual sweater. Does it even exist in the first place? After all, it's just a bunch of stuff arranged in a particular way, and it's called a sweater because it has some sort of human utility and we decided to give it a name. You could go about your life and believe that sweaters don't exist, and it'd be quite hard to prove you wrong.
Or you can accept that it's a useful human construct, so they do. Maybe you could even go further, and believe there's some idealised concept of sweaterness that exists in some meta-reality, which all sweaters share a property of.
I think this is essentially the realist viewpoint.
And you could be right, maybe all our current moral theories do run into contradictions, so perhaps they're all wrong.
Heck, we're running into similar problems in astrophysics. When we learn more about our universe, and things stop adding up. But that just means we go back to the drawing board and find a better model until they make sense.
Same for philosophy. When you reach a contradiction, you go back and come up with better ideas. It's a process of slowly uncovering the truth.
After a few years of philosophy in university, I think it's like software development. You can always go to a lower level but doing so won't bring you forward in most cases. You can ask these meta questions on every single argument but there are no satisfying results. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's fun :D