I am generally not fond of the habit of many philosophers to attempt to explain all morality in one simple concept, i.e. happiness, power (Nietzsche), or the categorical imperative (Kant). It seems like these kinds of theories are usually poorly founded and ill-defined; i.e. everything depends on how you interpret the central concept.
Not withstanding these limitations, I am nevertheless inclined to reduce most of human morality to the idea of survival. After all, the only reason people have the sort of judgments they do comes down to their basic instincts, which evolved and are what they are simply because they could survive. Of course, nothing forces us to use survival as a rule of thumb in judging the ultimate moral value of a thing, but it seems futile and contradictory to do otherwise. If you invent a moral system that leads to the death of those who adopt it, for example, you might just as well have killed your followers.
2 comments:
i think it's important to make a distinction between determining values based on survival, and making survival your ultimate goal. there is no point in surviving in itself if it didn't carry a potential for something else. if all your followers did was to survive, it would be like filming the grass growing in your backyard.
but then, maybe simply by surviving you're letting more stuff happen by itself.
agreed. still, i think survival is such a big factor that it tends to overshadow other goals. this perhaps is not as strikingly evident in a period of relative abundance and lack or competition as we live, but this is the norm, i think, in life, and one we will return to.
to speak somewhat metaphysically: if the universe has a meaning, then that meaning is in life's meaning. and if life has a meaning, that it can only accomplish that meaning in the time-frame of the universe. i imagine this accomplishment of meaning as requiring life to evolve into more and more "interesting" forms: i.e. homo sapiens is a step forward from other creatures on the way to the meaning of life. but to evolve, all life simply needs to do is focus on surviving, in fact, if it focused on anything else, it would risk making itself irrelevant. so in a way, life may accomplish its ultimate purpose (or get most of the way there at least) simply by adapting and surviving, and leaving the rest to time to sort out.
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