Tonight I am thinking specifically of Wittgenstein’s famous dictum that “whereof we cannot speak, must we pass over in silence.” Now, I am by both inclination and history a very amateur philosopher, in the sense of reading people who describe themselves as “philosophers”, but my understanding, based on having read something like Wittgenstein for Dummies (I’m not joking: it was a serious comic book) and Wittgenstein’s Poker, is that we can only speak intelligently about things which exist empirically. This does not mean everything else is constructed, but that we cannot speak about it. It does not mean God does not exist, but that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation about something which is not tangible.
In my understanding, morality, too falls in this category. For a very long time we were told by philosophers and the keepers of religions, that moral law was God’s Law, that it was woven into the very fabric of Being. We were taught moral ontology.
Then we were taught that all the rules of morality could be had through Reason, and reason alone.
Then we were taught that we were basically highly evolved animals with no inherent purpose in life, and that “morality”, whatever it was, was in all cases used by those in power to keep power; that believing in the “existence” of morality was tantamount to being played for a chump. This claim, too, of course, constitutes a morality, a bad one.
My rules are that the task of human life is learn to become happier by oneself, and to learn to take greater pleasure in the happiness of others, in a progressive and theoretically unlimited way.
My system for judgement is simple. I assert that people who are capable of moral judgments are on balance better able to defend their sense of self, but that people who only judge are on balance unhappy people who are stepping over the bounds set by others. Some judging is good, but too much is bad.
Proper moral judgments are necessary, local, and imperfect.
Necessary because the sense of self of one or more people is involved and some sort of emotional resolution is required, which may involve an empathy based negotiation with someone else.
Local in the sense that the “rule” is not understood to exist permanently, in an unchanging way in all places, but that where it may not be possible to speak of A rule, one can speak of endless rules, endless possibilities, endless permutations of valuation.
Imperfect, because if you say perfection is possible, you again lapse into useless arguments about pedantic minutiae. There is only relatively better, and relatively worse. This would, for example, allow me to say it is relatively better to have drunk sex, and relatively worse to gang rape a sex slave. This might appear a general principle, and likely it is, but I am not stipulating it is, merely that comparisons become possible.
Ultimately, I am arguing you CAN speak about morality as something tangible and empirical, and which properly exists within the broad domain of what we can call science. We can speak to the effects on the metrics we care about–happiness–of varying courses of action, varying moralities, varying decision patterns.
It might be the case–I would argue it IS the case–that allowing people to struggle with difficulty for long periods of time is ultimately the only way for them to build self respect and happiness.
It may be the case–I believe it is the case–that using violence to suppress honest public dialogue in the long run hurts the social fabric, the levels of trust, the ability of people with differing views to interact harmoniously, and overall levels of satisfaction with life.
It is always possible to mortgage the long term for the short term, and always possible to help one group at the expense of another. But people concerned with the general welfare, with all of human kind, in decreasing bands of loyalty, must work to build as much happiness as possible. I do not help you by sacrificing myself, and if you are good, you do not ask me to.
We can do so much better.