[Xmca-l] Re: Anniversary for Sakharov's Essay

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Out of curiosity, I looked up the definitions of the words "morals" and "ethics" and apparently ethics is the system-word to organize morals, the particular-word. It was useful to me, because I had always considered morals as a religiously informed and somewhat arbitrary. Ethics to me always had a more-grounded meaning and I thought more scientific in terms of application. This is just sharing my own projections upon the words themselves.


Now, what if there were a system of laws that have nothing to do with being human, but with being itself? Something pervasive to us and yet beyond us, at the same time?


What if any human construct of morality/ethics (religious, humanistic, bohemian, etc) were in some fashion made of this material system of cause and effect, in a analogous manner that gold can be shaped as a watch, as a coin, a ring, a tooth filling, or an electronic conductor on the motherboard of a computer?


We would say then, if we did not know that these objects have anything in common (that they are made of gold), that these objects are *essentially* different and have nothing to do with each other, because they have different applications and purposes, and consequently, to extend the metaphor, there would be an appearance of instances of morality and ethics being arbitrary and separate, and their values being solely conditioned by culture, history, and so forth, and not determined by something more essential or basic. There might be overlap (some objects relate to one another because they are jewelry), but that also has an appearance of happenstance, arising from historical coupling and human habits of appropriation and borrowing.


And yet, if we were to take these two very different explanations of how a system of ethics/morals is produced or manifests, our perception of them would be identical in the way that to observe a clay pot, looking at the pot and looking at the clay, we are looking at the same objects (pot and clay, plate and clay, vase and clay) in the same lociis (what is the plural of loci? My Latin grammar fails me).


In a religious system of morals, there is an explanation offered that to follow the system has a goal (that is assumed that everyone shares) and this end goal to be closer to god-ness, whether that means as a reward for winning a deity's favor with our good behavior, or as a way of appeasing those in our tribe that we are successfully socialized to perform our duty as a participant with minimal conflict or punishment, exile or banishment.


If we take god-ness out of the equation, and we possess no motivation except to get along with others in order to maintain fitness and survivability, how does it look any different? It's still cause and effect.


Kind regards,


Annalisa








-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20180722/8c715451/attachment.html