No.304762
"morality is obedience to god, because what god says is good"
"why? is it because good is god and anything he commands is automatically good, or is it because god is good, and he knows what is good and then commands it?"
"lets begin by assuming what god commands is good, and things are good only because god commands them, then we can accept that if god changes his mind and commands anything that was formerly bad to be good, it would become good (and presumably we would experience a shift in our internal moral understanding to see what we once thought badly of as being good)"
"but why would this be? maybe because god is the creator of all things, and as such, he sets the rules about what is right and wrong, similar to how the inventor of anything makes the rules for how that thing is to be used?"
"or maybe its merely because he is eternal, and has had the time to figure out how we should live?"
"or maybe because he is wiser than all of us (whatever that is supposed to mean)?"
"I propose a different answer: that god is the most powerful being and unable to be challenged without defeat, or disobeyed without punishment"
"and humans need god to liberate us from the war of all against all that results from lacking a unifying leadership established by the most powerful and unconquerable"
"but more important is that the consequence for displeasing him is the worst possible pain and sadness, while the consequence for pleasing him is the greatest possible pleasure and happiness"
"the ruling principle for morality then shifts to optimizing ones own personal pleasure and happiness, while minimizing ones own personal pain and sadness, correct?"
"everything else one can say, including the winning response on the game *socrates jones: pro philo" to the philosopher protagoras ultimately concedes protagoras' assertion that personal like or dislike is the true source of all moral or ethical beliefs - why should one consider the collapse of civilization bad if not for personal preference from one who lives in a civilization and relies upon it?"
"but it doesn't mean that one can just impulsively pursue the immediate gratification of ones own pleasures, because pains also factor into it, and additionally one can acquire the greatest pleasure over the long term by abstaining from a smaller pleasure in the short term. contrary to the game, society itself remains stable because everyone pursues their own pleasures and avoids their own pains, and for the sake of that, they keep civilization stable and functioning, commonly agreed upon policies like free(ish) speech or free(ish) expression exists because it is of individual value to most people, and if you bring up someone being in a position where they can get away with something bad without any negative consequences, we can argue that it would be better for them to make it a rule never to do those things, even under such liberating circumstances, because your actions are habit forming, one exception leads to more, and eventually this decision will lead to them making that bad action at a time when they would get the negative consequences from doing it"
"indeed, we all can only pursue our own pleasure and avoid our own pain, it is the sole motivation for everything we do, even when we do something painful it is because we anticipate a greater pain by doing anything else; it all comes down to neurochemicals and electrical signals going off in our brains - we get the exact same pleasures from an act we'd commonly attribute to selflessness that we would from an act we'd consider to be selfish, the category of selfless acts doesn't actually exist since we only do them because we expect it would make us feel good if we did them."
"so the rule is then to get more good feeling or less bad feeling, and if they come into conflict, we usually go with the greater of the two, and if they are both equal we'd prioritize the lesser bad feels over the greater good feels, hence why you can incentivize people better by threatening them with a thing they don't want than by offering to give them something they do want"
"so a realistic take on ethics and morality comes down to that we are all like drug addicts wanting to feel less bad feels, and feel more good feels, but then why do our brains produce the feelings they do in response to the sensory stimuli we get?"
"well, we can then look to evolution, and the selfish gene by richard dawkins, as well as other evolutionary psychologists who explain things in terms of our sets of genes being in competition with other sets of genes, and our individual genes being in competition with genes in other beings as well as with the other genes in ourselves as well"
"the most important thing is therefore to 1. maximally increase the number of organisms with genes identical to our own, and 2. to maximally increase the number of genes identical to our own in those other organisms."
"objections like "why do we have sex then?" miss the point - sex is like when a good player on a bad team wants to join with the players on the better team, its "the selfish gene", not "the selfish genes", singular and individual genes come first, not a plural or collective set."
"so then, we know what god would be referring to if we took the second answer to the eupythro dillema, right? either "its better for us, individually" or "its better for each of our genes, individually""
"but there is something else, isnt there? god likely doesnt exist, and was a sus concept from the start: when a king rules his subjects, he uses those at his command to enforce his will upon them (and each other) by threat of negative consequences (see earlier), but then what happens when someone can break the rules without being caught, how would the king control them then? easy! invent a larger king, who sees all and knows all, and who will punish them with the worst possible punishment (where it is unfalsifiable to claim that the criminal got their punishment at all), its just so perfect"
"so there is no god, it is a certainty, and also, if you were in hell or heaven you wouldnt be able to tell which you were in since all your senses would be gone due to them all being reliant upon parts of your physical body that as we know would stay right here on earth and break down with time after your death"
"this concludes my thoughts on morals and ethics, thanks for reading, i appreciate you"
"btw, what are your thoughts on absurdism? isnt it a good reason to not commit suicide? ive considered the argument that for most of time i wont get to experience anything, and that this life is the only time i get to even be aware that i exist, so even if its really shitty i should stick it out to the end and in fact i should live for as long as i could"
"as for what constitutes *me* and *i*, id say its the part of myself that receives information from mthe rest of my brain, "the great receiver" which is aware of its own existence or that existence is a thing at all, call it consciousness, but it is continuity of experience that i use to define my existence, and so uploading an imitation of my current mental state to a computer wouldnt count as being a continuation of me, it would have to be the preservation of this elusive part of my physical brain (and assumedly parts of my body) to make me truly immortal."
"sometimes i wanna die, sometimes i wanna live forever, sometimes i wanna go back and live my life all over again from the start with all the data i have in my head now, like starting a new game when you remember how the last playthrough went, despite me having had lived through one of the worst lives imaginable to me up to this point"
"other times id go back just as i am now, in order to ensure i was never born (dont "muh paradox" me, we know theres most likely a multiverse if there were a way to go back in time)"
"whatever, intellectualization is my way of copeing without roping"