This is something I’ve held for a while now, and that I’ve had difficulty expressing in a way that makes sense here on LW. When I went looking at the various ethical systems to try to find a word that describes mine, they all simply fell flat; none of them describe it, and all of them feel like prefabricated labels.
To be specific, I don’t subscribe to ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ at all. From my standpoint, both of these things are what we call “best practices for functioning in our current society”, and every single aspect of them could change should the underlying society change. Both could even be the empty set for certain societies.
I think this also helps me understand why there are so many different types of ‘morality’ - the territory is a complex terrain that has originated over millennia of human interactions, millennia of trial and error. The various types of morality are the maps—people slapping labels on that complex landscape and trying to declare that the label is comprehensive. Small wonder in retrospect that they all felt shallow and incomplete to me.
This is something I’ve held for a while now, and that I’ve had difficulty expressing in a way that makes sense here on LW. When I went looking at the various ethical systems to try to find a word that describes mine, they all simply fell flat; none of them describe it, and all of them feel like prefabricated labels.
To be specific, I don’t subscribe to ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’ at all. From my standpoint, both of these things are what we call “best practices for functioning in our current society”, and every single aspect of them could change should the underlying society change. Both could even be the empty set for certain societies.
I think this also helps me understand why there are so many different types of ‘morality’ - the territory is a complex terrain that has originated over millennia of human interactions, millennia of trial and error. The various types of morality are the maps—people slapping labels on that complex landscape and trying to declare that the label is comprehensive. Small wonder in retrospect that they all felt shallow and incomplete to me.