The Meaning of Life and Morality - Essay Example

THE MEANING OF LIFE AND MORALITY It is a question that has troubled billions of people since the dawn of time: how should a person lead a good, meaningful life? There are as many theories as there are grains of sand on the beach, but some ideas over the years have been more popular than others. Some people are born into religions where these questions are largely answered for them. They know from an early age what their god tells them is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing. Others question their faith and try to revise their morality, bringing in parts of other religions or philosophies. Still others have no real faith and try to build a moral foundation out of their personal experience adding rules and content to it as the years go by. In this essay I will look at some of the most popular moral schemas and then describe my own view on this vast and important subject. I was brought up in a religious family and was baptized in the church. Not all of my family was very religious, but my mother and my brother and sister were. I was instructed in the Sunday school with the typical Christian moral precepts: the Golden Rule, love they neighbour, the Ten Commandments. But these ideas seemed to me to be much more like common sense then in any idea that needed to be divinely revealed. I didn’t really understand why a god was required to supervise or implement these rules as it seemed to me that most people basically followed them anyway. I did, however, become interested in the way that this sort of morality influenced American politics and how many of the principles of the constitution seemed to be based of Judea-Christian values. I totally agree with the French history Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited American hundreds of years ago and wrote: The principles of New England … now extend their influence beyond its limits, over the whole American world. The civilization of New England has been like a beacon lit upon a hill…. … Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories. …Nathaniel Morton, the historian of the first years of the settlement, thus opens his subject: “we may not hide from our children, showing to the generations to come the praises of the Lord; that especially the seed of Abraham his servant, and the children of Jacob his chosen ( Psalm cv. 5, 6 ), may remember his marvellous works in the beginning … “ … The general principles which are the groundwork of modern constitutions, principles … were all recognized and established by the laws of New England: the intervention of the people in public affairs, the free voting of taxes, the responsibility of the agents of power, personal liberty, and trial by jury were all positively established without discussion.1 I think the presence of religion in the American Revolution was the reason why it succeeded and why the more secular, atheistic French revolution failed. People need to have a bedrock belief to believe in in the middle of all the chaos of a revolution. You can expect everyone to just restart their clocks and begin a new. Only a very few people are capable of doing something like that. Indeed, this leads into a big issue in the philosophy of morality. What should ground morality especially when it comes to politics? Politics is all about morality: what laws should we pass, how should we run our country, what leaders do we want to lead us into the future. When we look at the American Revolution and the French Revolution we can see to strains of morality going forward into the future. The first is successful, the second melds into Communism and leads to the deaths of millions of people. This latter version is now basically dead but has morphed again this time into moral or ethical relativism (as discussed in lecture 8). What is ethical relativism? This is a position believes that no universal standard exists to assess the truth of the world around us. Relativists often see morals as applying only within certain cultures. These people would say that female genital mutilation is okay because it is a cultural practice and an important to a particular culture. They believe there is no standard on which to base your opinion and they live their life under the precept: To each his own. This is obviously pretty useless for politicians who are supposed to lead and find a basic consensus between people so that everyone can work together. If we just let everyone do what they want our civilization would collapse pretty quickly. Some relativists plainly believe that there is no such thing as truth and that almost anything is permitted by anyone anywhere. In moral relativism there are no absolute, concrete rights and wrongs—there are just things people do and a whole bunch of different opinions about ethics. It is pretty easy to win arguments against ethical relativists by talking about things like the Holocaust—since no one believes this was anything but a terrible event. However, a relativist might just say that the event was bad or immoral in relation to their own moral framework, and not claim objectively wrongness. This is obviously a complicated issue that a person can’t really resolve in one day. You can spend hours arguing with relativists and being made crazy by their opinions, but it usually isn’t worth it. Like Alistair McIntyre I don’t really think many ethical arguments can be resolved. When it comes to subjects like abortion, there will probably be no social consensus. People approach the argument with unassailable moral assumptions that debate usually does not approach. Plus the emotion of such arguments clears the rational aspect. It is true that people should keep an open mind and consider the experiences of other people, but if your mind is too open your brain will just fall out. There are some religious people who are very critical of this way of thinking. Indeed, the Catholic Encyclopaedia has this to say on the subject: Where morality is divorced from religion, reason will, it is true, enable a man to recognize to a large extent the ideal to which his nature points. But much will be wanting. He will disregard some of his most essential duties. He will, further, be destitute of the strong motives for obedience to the law afforded by the sense of obligation to God and the knowledge of the tremendous sanction attached to its neglect -- motives which experience has proved to be necessary as a safeguard against the influence of the passions. And, finally, his actions even if in accordance with the moral law, will be based not on the obligation imposed by the Divine will, but on considerations of human dignity and on the good of human society.2 Being absolute about your moral positions when it comes to the meaning of life and how to lead a good life may not be that helpful. If you never change your opinion on anything over the course of 50 years, there is probably a problem. People change. The problem is if every year you are adopting a new moral fad. A lot of this is talked about by the fine philosopher and ethicist Joseph Ellin. There is another important point to make about relativism and morality. Since relativists usually are agnostic or atheists, they might well also call themselves existentialists. This is a very depressing worldview which can mean exactly the same thing as nihilism. There is no meaning to the world. Since God does not exist everything is permitted by everyone. Many relativists might not go this far, but some do. They take as there starting point the idea that humans live in a world devoid of meaning; and they take this as their starting point because they cannot prove to themselves beyond any doubt (not just a reasonable doubt) that there are foundational truths. In the 1950s and 1960s, philosophers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were famous for their thinking on this subject. Part of this thinking suggested that their lack of belief, or exclusive self-belief, a.k.a egoism, inspired the notion that they were free and that they had the will to choose how to live, another part suggested that their lives are circumscribed by things beyond their control. In Camus’ essay about Sisyphus, Sisyphus is a plaything of the gods. Although he has again and again attempts to assert his independence and embrace the passions of the world, the gods consistently foil him. Camus writes, “Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of the earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.” His freedom is really an illusion. This is not to say there are any deistic powers. The gods in this version of the story could simply stand in for the natural limitations of life. He enjoyed many years living by the sea before he died, before he was forced to leave this world. In existential thought, the absence of a god or gods does not in any way connote true freedom. One can choose to do anything, but there are no real consequences to these choices. It is similar to flipping a coin. Freedom is only freedom of being in the world, and this being is sharply circumscribed by reality, which places significant restrictions on what people can do. Indeed, these restrictions are often not even knowable in advance—they come and go and sometimes hide from sight. There are many illusions and we are judged in part on how we deal with them. So we can see that even existentialism which seems to offer the idea that anyone can do anything offers no real freedom either. Camus, more than Sartre, however, offered up a possible approach to this problem. If one chooses to believe the world is empty of meaning, that the values of religion have no grounding in reality, and all we have is our physical existence, how can we stand the tedium and repetition of so much of life? It is indeed difficult. In his books, Camus tries to provide a kind of instruction on how to live. As the critic Lev Braun wrote: The subject of the Myth is suicide—especially philosophical suicide . . . Having rejected all belief in God or in any superior principle, Camus casts a desperate glance at the inexplicable universe around us, at the meaningless routine of social life, at our mortal fate. Then, reflecting on the impotence of our reason, entangled in its own contradictions, Camus wonders why the most lucid among us do not simply finish it all by suicide. Yet, the wish for happiness and meaning is so strong as to sustain a proud and vital man against his fate . . .3 Attitude is all, according to Camus. Being conscious, a person is free—not to do anything—but to choose how to respond to the humiliations of life of which there may be many. With this world view, the key is to be a rebel: to strike out on an attitude of defiance, even if the rock again begins to slip from your grasp. This type of existentialism does appeal to me because it is not so mopey—it actually affirms something and is a lot less emo than many other philosophies out there that I could name. An additional problem for existentialist, relativists, etc, is when they do get into politics and start organizing people they do need to impose a kind of morality on their system of governance. Usually, they choose one that they think is in some way neutral of tradition or value: utilitarianism. This idea comes from a philosophy founded by Jeremy Bentham who believed that only pain and pleasure values to be reckoned with in the world. Out of this idea he came up with what he called the rule of utility: good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The later philospher James Stuart Mill picked up many of these ideas. In his book Utilitarianism, Mill argued cultural, intellectual, and spiritual pleasures are worth a lot more than physical pleasures because the former are valued higher than the latter by competent judges. A competent judge, Mill said, is someone who has experienced both the low pleasures and the high ones. So this is a form of elitism. We can see it is anti-democratic in the end, because the judges would probably be self-appointed and would decide what pleasure you can have and can’t have. Some philosophers, like Peter Singer, think that this idea is innately hardwired into human beings and that it is part of our evolutionary success. He also believes that it is forcing to expand our mortality to include everyone—people in foreign countries outside of our communities, but also other species and living things. If I have seen that from an ethical point of view I am just one person among the many in my society, and my interests are no more important, from the point of view of the whole, than the similar interests of others within my society, I am ready to see that, from a still larger point of view, my society is just one among other societies, and the interests of members of my society are no more important, from that larger perspective, than the similar interests of members of other societies… Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical conclusion means, first, accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all human beings.4 This is an attractive idea on the surface, but it may be going to far. We have yet to establish an ethical standard for people; Singer’s reasoning would lead us to keep going to animals, spreading ourselves too thin morally. There is so much to write about when it comes to this subject. Morality is all around us and affects everything we do, all of our actions and all of our interpersonal relationships. For those reasons, it is very important to study and think about. I personally do not believe in absolutism or in relativism. I like to there is a moral ground where people can live happy lives and have evolve from ideas they once had. That said, I think being too open-minded can also cause problems. Overall, though, people should be able to make up their own minds. Works consulted Braun, Lev. Witness of Decline. Rutherford: Dickinson University Press, 1974. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/camus.html de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Chapter II. New York: Signet, 2001. Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. "Morality". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. Read More