Copyright © ‘Reality’ Doug 2013
To Philosopher to King by ‘Reality’ Doug is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Morality is a behavioral code to regulate one’s thoughts and deeds. Morality is proffered in multifarious forms by innumerable moralists. Each offering is unique to the ultimate canonical purveyor and usually at odds with the other brands and even itself over time. If morality is something specific and explicitly purposeful, then most or all moralities of humanity are bunk. If any two or more brands are correct, that correctness is at most on what they agree and error is assured on what they disagree. The elements of morality must be either theoretically and authoritatively circumstantial or else absolutely purposeful and precise. Since morality is effective at regulating the behavior of social beings, it obviously has secular political purpose at the very least. To discover morality, one must specify for oneself its function precisely enough to define its essence and source.
Let us consider supernatural agency as a source. We are offered specific faith in a supernatural agency à la various flavors of religion and sect. With a faith comes a code of morality delimiting the good from the bad by some divine authority. We already know that most representations of divine authority are wrong, or else pointless if form matters not. It could be that real supernatural agency cares that we humans worship in some way, in which case theology would be style and the ascribed morality would be dressing. A god so capricious would not likely manage eternal rewards worth having.
A credible supernatural agency for human morality must be specific. As a result, the idea that morality comes from religion of divine authority is wrong. Here’s why. Divine authority requires omnipotence. If some God is omnipotent, then (1) we have no free will, (2) God’s intent and purpose for us has included and so must include evolution the process, (3) we don’t have social relevance to God with our worths as mortal beings, and (4) the only known assurance of our immortal relevance is certain theologies, and theology is as mortal as its practitioners because it evolves. I will elaborate.
If God controls everything, we control nothing. If God were to give us control over our lives with free will, he still has completely defined us and our world, and knows what we will do, whether involuntarily and ‘voluntarily’, before we do it, which means we must do it to agree with God’s omnipotence, which contradicts free will. Inconsistency is not possible. If God is omnipotent, we have no free will from a supernatural perspective, period. Mortal free will requires risk incongruent with divine omnipotence. Omnipotence requires every natural, mortal perspective to have no relevance to what actually is beyond its own impression of itself. The extrapolation of reality from one’s feelings is precisely where zealots, broads, and manginas go wrong.
If God is in charge, all of existence, everything that ever has happened or ever will is according to God’s intent and purpose. Advancing science could only be a maturing testament to God’s intent and purpose. We are ecologically bound beings subject to natural selection and evolutionary change. Increasingly sophisticated life is the only trend on record that may be extrapolated as divine intent based on credible evidence. Anything short of a persistent bias toward greater sophistication would make evolution and all change simply divine entertainment, with cyclical evolution going nowhere. Any morality that contradicts evolutionary and selective necessity for humanity contradicts any true God’s intent and purpose for our mortal lives. Our individual forms cannot betray our sins without our God-given designs. Function follows form.
If God is omnipotent, we can be of no consequence to God unless God has some sort of emotional attachment to us. This seems ridiculous. Attributing emotional attachment to God is to personify the supernatural, but it’s more ridiculous than that. The difference between an omnipotent God and a mortal human is much more than the difference between mortal yeast and a mortal human. I don’t judge the individual yeast that leaven my pizza crust for the moral value of their lived lives. I simply enjoy the taste of dead yeast. The universe is some lava lamp in the corner. You are a transient spec in the big scheme of things. Get over it.
Religion doesn’t need to be supernaturally right; it needs to naturally work. It needs to evolve, as from child sacrifice to divine sacrament. Religion is really politics using psychological leverage called moral imperative, but the imperatives that count are natural and individual. Deference is a quality of competitive disadvantage not fit for wild or sovereign reproduction by virtue of natural selection. That is virtue. We have a source of morality based on functionality in our ecology. The individual dilemma of mortal imperative leads to an individual context for defining morality, and the strategy of exploiting others with obtrusive imperatives. Morality is relative to social context and evolves as social strategy. Eureka.
Individual concerns of imperative selection require morality to be individually maintained. Social concerns require distributed consensus. The intertwined individual dilemmas of imperative selection leads to a dichotomy of exploitation by externally imposed morality versus cooperation of internally agreed morality. One flows into the other in the exploratory dance of mortal life.
Morality has natural constraints governed by mortality, by natural selection. Morality must empower its subscribers reproductively, or its mortal practice is naturally terminal. Morality must empower the natural function and well-being of its subscribers, but subscribers have local contexts, local frames, individuality. Therefore, morality for natural beings must be non-universal. Incidentally, women are instinctively attracted to men with bountifully functional frame. The variance of individuality is tremendous, even in the same local area. Therefore, morality for natural beings is niche and population dependent, is fluid with change but fixed by invariants of natural existence. Niche archetypes could be categorized as feral (amoral), sovereign, subjugated, and domesticated. For an example invariant, let P represent production and C represent consumption and observe that the axiom of conservation makes P>C virtue and P<C vice.
‘Reality’ Doug 