Conclusions About Morality

Note to the reader -these conclusions have been drawn from my general inquiry into morality as a philosophical problem (one that exists inherently within moral philosophy), and the premises for which I have arrived at these conclusions may be found in the following articles published on Associated Content:

*The Probability of a Metaphysics of Morals
*What is Rationality A Brief Summary
*Why None of Us Can Know God
*The Basis for Moral Experience
*Denying Metaphysics Questioning Knowledge
*Another Possible Account for Moral Experience
*The Amoral Explanation of Morality

So what may be taken from our inquiry into morality? Namely, I think that we have moved in a direction that liberates moral discourse from the chains of appeals to the abstract notion of the Good (and conversely the Evil) and sets the pathway for constructing a more suitable, workable, and indeed practical system of ethical statements that are both justified within the realm of the knowable world and may be binding upon all those whom are subject to it.

This version of morality attempts to avoid the pitfalls of relativism which is in itself an incoherent and fundamentally unintelligible system for prescribing moral claims. It also rejects the subjectivist construction of morality as unfounded, whereas our goal was not to transfer the realm of truth from the objective to the subjective. Instead, my focus has been to transfer the truth aptness of metaphysical morality (which is inherently contradictory) to the truth aptness of the empirical which we can make reasonably justified normative claims regarding how people ought to act, and use the means available to us through the physical (experiential) world in making moral claims binding through law. This conclusion is phenomenalogically descriptive, rather than normative; the evidence that I have used in my previous essays (mentioned above) has dictated a morality as we experience it now along these very same lines; my objective here then is to demonstrate the practicality of turning this function of moral experience into justifiable claims as to how we ought to act in our everyday lives. This form of morality is neither based on metaphysics nor abstract concepts of the unknowable, but a wholly human construct of morality as it serves teleological goals for human endeavors insofar as they may be observed socially, economically, and politically.

Using the empirical evidence for a system of morality may seem counter-intuitive, and this initial intuition may in fact be justified in itself. However, this claim regarding the morality based on empirical structures is not altogether any different then what we've been doing insofar as man has been able to work out a system of arrangements instructing his collective to behave in one particular way or another.

The interesting aspect of this conclusion is that it does not radically alter our own affect towards morality in general. It may however lead to radically different conclusions as to what we may define as morally permissible and morally impermissible, but the change is wholly dependent upon removing the metaphysical or rational aspect of morality (by rational I am referring to the rationalist concept of morality).

Hence, by transferring our understanding of morality from one based on the metaphysical to one based on physical evidence will aide individuals and society at large towards living lives that are objectively better for them, pacify relations between individuals with the common interests that are natural to their existence insofar as we can know them collectively, and perhaps most important, can be utilized towards the achievement of some socially accepted goal or objective (teleological). One criticism may be that this may create a problem of motivation - but I do believe the motivation can be sought wholly within the material rather than the metaphysical. For, the belief that man may only act in accordance with the Good through the fear of eternal damnation (the Judeo-Christian view) subscribes to its own assumptions regarding human nature at odds with the Good. My view is the direct opposite - not regarding human nature for which my empirical concept of morality is not dependent, but rather it denies the necessity of the metaphysical for constructing social morality as it applies to individuals within given social, economic structures. The difference between this and relativism is that this view may uphold that some normative moral systems are empirically more true than others, and that these less morally true claims are altogether incorrect insofar as they are either unjustified due to a disproportional dependence on the metaphysical rather than empirical, or that they have misunderstood the empirical which has given them false normative statements.

This is entirely cohesive with my denial of the metaphysical component of morality for the construction of morality solely on pragmatic grounds. Indeed, this morality is teleological and thus consequentialist for achieving other goals (akin to the socialist meta-ethics I described in another article). Thus, the Good no longer exists (or at least insofar as something we can generate any knowledge about) and is replaced by socially desirable ends which are dependent upon empirical facts of knowledge generated through the rigorous examination of scientific processes. We can call this scientific morality based on its procedural undertakings, and pragmatic morality as it is useful towards achieving some desired goal dependent upon the base and super-structure of a given society, and teleological in that it has some varying outcome for which the base/super-structure has determined it accordingly.

This becomes a matter for morality in several ways; namely, it can be used to construct claims that tell people how they ought to act, rather than merely how they act. It is also compatible with morality in that instead of aiming towards the Good or influenced or necessitated by the Good, it is in tune with some sense of predetermined good that results from the preexisting social, economic, and political arrangements already existent upon society and produced through a scientific means of explaining and supporting these justified moral claims. It would conclude from these premises then that this is really the only justifiable means of making moral claims that could have yet a semblance of truth-aptness in their forms, and be reasonably generated as facts of knowledge dependent upon systems and relations for which mankind finds himself existing within (and dependent upon).

This is not a philosophical account of morality, rather, an attempt at describing an anti-Philosophical account of morality using philosophy to detach itself from the burden of metaphysics and the unknowable. The pretexts were essentially pre-philosophic, and that philosophy was used was solely for the purpose of denying the philosophical aspect of morality in general was done so on the grounds of its own usefulness. In other words, it was most convenient for me to adopt a philosophical argument for solving a philosophical problem (whereas philosophy was the problem itself!).

Thus, by denying philosophy's role in morality we can also recognize the insignificance of philosophical problems as they relate to morality. This can only be done through the detachment of philosophy from morality, which is exactly my point throughout this entire inquiry. We no longer need to resolve the problems of transcendental freedom and duty that plague the moral rationalists; we need not be troubled by the questions of transcendental God (or its secularized concept of the rational Good) that accompanies all forms of divine command theory and objective universal morality in the traditional sense; we also need not worry about the problem of truth and knowledge as it relates to morality because we have rejected the metaphysical component to morality itself (the key philosophical problem to begin with). Thus, we have freed ourselves from traditional moral inquiry, and made the first move towards constructing a solely pragmatic concept of morality that may be applied universally (objective) without the misapplication of cognition to the realm of which we cannot cognize.

How this morality may look is a question altogether dependent on many factors for which the role should be relegated not to those interested in philosophical inquiry, but rather politics and the engineering of society. Hence, morality is merely political (as it has always been) and thus dependent upon all the factors for which politics itself is dependent, and the only application of truthfulness may rest in the empirically proven (science). The benefits of such a concept of morality lies in its accessibility, plausibility, reliability, and practicality in regards to the wholly human existence.