I do think there is a certain something in the air sometimes, what I have termed “non-statistical coherence” that swings things one way or another, that acts as a factor in both large and small events, but there is nothing like a PERSON who is saying: “I want to bless David, for he is holy to me”.
In conceiving of rights as Given, as Endowed, people are more or less taking the analogy of human legal systems and applying them to the divine sphere, in which a morally perfect judge and jury and Congress and King has established rules of behavior which cannot be transgressed without penalty.
I am actually even willing to accept this. I do believe we survive the cessation of breathing, that our consciousness goes on, and that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of this hypothesis. I do believe that the quality of our after-life is affected by our decisions on Earth. I do not believe that we are judged so much as allowed to settle into a realm appropriate for who we chose to be.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that the concept of rights has no power but what we grant it, here on Earth. Even a cursory reading of history will show abundant atrocity. There is no Horror movie that can exceed things that have been actually done by one human to another.
Given this, and given the apparent dependence on words of concepts like “justice”, many modern philosophers have given up on serious moral inquiries. Academic tendencies like postmodernism can be summed up, more or less, as cognitive rituals designed to free tired minds from the guilt attendant upon the murder of reason, and as congenial pathways towards a new cultural order in which totalitarian rulers will free them from the burden of unwanted freedom–unwanted, because they no longer know what to do with it.
Such tendencies, though, depend upon the rejection of moral ONTOLOGY, which is to say the idea that moral values exist OUT THERE somewhere, presumably as a result of God’s Will. Now, I don’t fundamentally reject this idea–the idea that there is a larger arena within which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished–but it seems to me that it is the task of good thinking to create as much space for agreement as possible, so my goal here is to create a morally BETTER system of thought than exists currently, and to do so for people who need not believe in God.
My Goodness system is what I term a moral motology, with motology being a word I invented to connote not what IS, but what direction a given system is moving in. We can’t say what IS in a static, ontological way, but we can plainly observe actually existing systems in motion, and see what they tend to create.
For example, the concept of rights tends to create far more just societies, if we measure “just” by generalized tolerance, freedom from capricious violence and involuntary servitude, and generalized ability to live life as one chooses.
We have the freedom to choose what we want, what affective states we want to achieve, and use varying moralities to achieve them. My core contention is that the highest happiness is measurably, observably, consistent with the best behaviors.
I will add that I feel that the point of reason is getting from one affective state to another. This may seem counterintuitive, but if we posit–as seems existentially valid–that the end goal of human activity is feeling, then reason is the tool we use to get from where we are–presumably less than happy, if movement feels required–to where we want to be. The task is not to kill feeling, but to perfect it.
There is more, but I need to get going.