Ha, I know you would say something like that, because we've...I think...actually nearly had this conversation in a separate thread.
But let me engage anyway! You've asked what I consider to be the existential question, and I believe the answer is very liberating indeed:
Why should we even live another day?
If you're taking that question seriously, I'm going to hand you a loaded gun, and tell you that you have no absolute, external reason to live. Are you going to shoot yourself?
Seriously. Are you? Nothing is stopping you from shooting yourself, but (in most cases, anyway), chances are that you're not going to take me up on that offer. Whether or not you have to find some reason, be it internal or external, to continue living, is up to you.
However, the insistence that we must have a
reason to live stems from the same fallacious perspective on logic that I pointed out on the previous page. We may inhabit a conscious world that is governed by some form of reason, but reason does not govern the world. We should strive to be aware of the limitations of our consciousness and more broadly, our subjective experience. This includes our minds playing tricks on us and telling us we're more than we make ourselves out to be by virtue of being self-aware.
Furthermore, this view tends to discount the plethora of drivers and influences on our behavior itself that we are not necessarily aware of. To believe in evolution on its own would be to say "we are driven to survival on the whole", and then (if you're being a good scientist) observing the patterns that suggest where we can describe specific mechanisms that govern our behaviors, as derived from how we interact with our environment and others (seeing that the world has parameters that exist
beyond our sphere of consideration!) Again, I argue that we don't necessarily
need the
why and
how to this
what because of the nature of an observation: we've observed that we're driven to survival- not having a reason to support this is not going to change this because you make observations, not control them.
The considertaion of behaviors then leads to a discussion on ethics:
If we have no real "reason" for living, we should not have to abide by any rules whatsoever.
Not necessarily. Well, in the most trivial of senses, yes. We don't
have to abide by any rules, but for some reason we
do, and what's more, we argue endlessly about how to make these rules, and what they should be. I wonder why that could be!
From an evolutionary standpoint, let us consider that aforementioned "drive to survival". What's going to maximises the survivability of any individual of an animal species? A mix of the individual attributes of that individual to work in their interests, combined with a support network that works in that network's interest. We can thus broadly consider ecologies and societies to be consisting of units that must negotiate the balance of working for various forms of self-interest, be it to help themselves or help those who may be helping them. This requires cohabitation, and it requires cooperation.
Ethics, therefore, can be thought of as the guidelines to behavior that has developed in humans (morality can be more broadly applied to other species, I might add), such that we could cohabit. The behaviors have persisted today long past the point where we were merely struggling to survive, hence the complexity and the apparent arbitrariness of the arguments of our ethical system. However, some things remain constant:
We still are living beings with certain commonalities that interact with the various parameters of our environment in common ways. We have variable predispositions to behaviors, but these tend to converge upon a certain balance which has been noted in the majority of prevalent ethical systems, and it is a combination of our tendencies to behavior, modulated by our consciousness that has us making propositional claims upon the value of these observations (and desiring to make
a priori moral judgements, what's more!)
So I've gone and described (briefly and simplistically) one way in which we can think of moral systems and the way people think and behave as a whole. Furthermore, I've kept a constant theme: what we see now is the result of derivations on how we interact with our environment. You're probably thinking "so what?" and here it is:
To me, it's a natural delusion to think of generating an absolute moral system upon values that are necessarily derived from ourselves, and to claim that this actually comes from an external source. If we can consider everything I've said above, there is
plenty of berth for moral behavior, as we are already by definition moral: it is morality that informs our actions and our perception of reward/punishment. In generating ethics, consideration of all the above would suggest that the best kinds of systems are those that exercise an awareness of context, goals and results, and balances. Furthermore they would not resemble a set of rules (universal maxims to behavior, heh), so much as a
way of life, a mindset that strives to understand and appreciate every facet of experience, because it can make judgements and assessments without connotations that unecessarily disenfranchise any being.
I know this is not an easy perspective to adopt, and it's not that easy to hold to, but I've found it particularly rewarding. Perhaps you're right that it takes more faith to be this way, but perhaps...I have that faith.
