My ethics
This post is about my personal morality or ethic systems. There's a good chance I'll iterate it. Like a modern antihero of pleasing complexity, I reserve the right to change my morality at any time.
Since becoming an atheist in 2010 I haven’t tried to articulate a personal morality for myself beyond be nice, have fun.
This is still what I'm about. However now I'm making the system I follow more explicit. My hope is the clarity should make it easier to follow, as I'm doing less figuring-whats-good-out on the fly. So the theory is that I act differently (as you might hope for a moral system!)
Or to put it differently, I'm hoping this will make me less of a tw** in daily life.
I'm a natural optimiser, so a more explicit reward function - a more explicit moral framework - may benefit me more than others.
One way of framing morality: under what conditions should one feel good about oneself? Ideally one would transcend this and feel good all the time, while also abiding by the morals. As the poet says in Wild Geese, you do not have to be good. Far preferable to choose to be good. I'm working on internalising this...
I treat my ethics as a coexistence of moral systems, which give clearer criteria for how I want to live. I don't think a single moral system is enough.
So, you might ask, which systems made the cut?
Great question:
- Utilitarianism. By the numbers morality: help the most conscious beings, regardless of distance in spacetime and species.
- Ahimsa. Avoid direct harm
- Local kindness. Do nice things for the people you know.
- Seek the divine. The transcendent, the subtle, the ecstatic, the deep, the true.
What are my criteria for including these?
- Easy to tell when at action does or doesn’t work for each system.
- No or very limited overlap.
- Collectively they cover all the things I care about
Are these really moral systems?
My main consideration on whether they count as such: is it helpful to make the system its own end? This is similar to the saying all models are wrong but some are useful. I don't know which moral systems are the correct foundation, but treating kindness as an end not a means makes it more accessible day to day. That's worth something. You might say that's virtue ethics, but I prefer this more explicit form.
How to decide how much weight to put towards each ethical system? I don’t know - and I'm in good company on that front! Knowing there should be at least some weight to all of them, without knowing the perfect amount, seems to do some heavy lifting.
One ideal is to live in a flux of the systems, where all are considered at once without assessing their relative value too intensely. Everything everywhere all at once. A kind of intuitive vibe-based assessment which factors them all in. One reason it's ideal is it doesn't require thinking.
Three enablers
If the moral systems are the final goal, the guiding star, then the enablers are traits to lubricate the journey. These traits, these ways of being in the world, can be cultivated.
The three enablers I very loosely associate with past, present and future. I don't think there's any practical implication of this association, and I noticed it after I settled on them, but it's poetic no?
They are:
- Gratitude (past)
- Curiosity (present). Both inward and outward
- Imagination (future)
There are lots of traits one might cultivate for moral goodness, so why these? I think they are overpowered relative to the effort to acquire them. Gratitude is well known, I have a post (and an app!) on imagination coming soon, and I may write something on curiosity too.
Practical things one might do to live by this
- Make each system one's theme and attend to it, rotating every 7 days. The enablers could be included in the rotation.
- Create a community, however small, of people with similar systems. This explains much of the success of religious moral compliance and there's a lot to like about such communities.
Other candidates for ethical systems I considered
Virtue.
Balance. An almost physical feeling of all things being in balance. Vaguest but I have a good enough sense of what it’s pointing to that it feels consistent, clear and relevant. Excluded because it risks nudging one away from doing crazy things.
Flow. A feeling of life flowing. Close to balance conceptually.
Win-win-ism. Finding win-wins in life. They are everywhere.
Love.
Peace.