And also Drag, wouldn't you also push the button if the conditions were that you would kill your whole family in order to save yourself ?
Even put your whole family, say your wife and two children on 2 and 8, through torture for the rest of their lives to save your own life ? Everything for yourself, and no claims about it, because that is perfect society.
Even if this made you get bad feelings, I don't think you would want to tell your family you would do this choice, would you ? So you could only live with them by lying.
Originally posted by drag
Ethics is designed to preserve society by telling an individual how s/he should act in it to preserve him/herself.
But isn't this absurd ? Put others into the button dilemma. You're saying that they also should do everything in order to preserver him/herself to preserver society. So they would push the button and possibly kill you. But that wasn't what you wanted. You wanted a rule that was good for you.
You're naming a rule that would only work if you were the only thing who existed.
Thinking shortly, if everyone whould live by themself, wouldn't everyone end up by themself ? That's not actually preservering of society.
Put in a perfect everlasting society where everybody follows what you say we should:
Everyone is always doing what is good for themself.
Everyone would kill another if they would steal their lolipop, because the lolipop is good for themself. Sure, some would think longer, but as society gets less and less existent intelligent fails. Also we know how stupid us people can be sometimes.
Couldn't really raise up any children either. Everytime they asked you for some guidance or food, you would only give everything to yourself.
Society would simply be non-existent.
Why? Because society
is doing something for others.
Another thing is that I simply don't believe you do everything in order to preserver yourself. You cannot refrain from doing something for external things, either creatures or items, simply because you are not alone in this world, and you will never be. Your certainty that something exist around you is aboutly equal to yourself. But at the same time I believe you cannot do anything for pure external reasons. i.e. I don't believe you can do anything simply because you ONLY want to help someone. You always do something for yourself, whether it's small or large. It reminds me of one of the buddhist rules; that the thought of total individuality is an illusion. There's no wall that separate you from the rest of existence.
Another thing is that every thing existing lives in a society! Take grass, bunch of things together. Trees, they feed each other. Galaxies, which melt into each other. Noone is free from existence. Free to choose, but not totally free of cause.
It's the same with good and evil I think. Noone is simply good, nor evil. We all carry both, some are just badder or better.
If you rather changed your 'society' with 'him/herself' I would agree. But it would end with everyone by themself, and every time anyone met someone else things would be lethal. Forget children. And you would start cursing everything that got close to you. Everything that aint yourself! Curse existence? Why aint I God?!
What I feel you are doing right is that you look into yourself when looking for ethics. It would imply that you should THINK for yourself, and that I agree is a very good thing.
It reminds me of another very famous quote previously stated by famous moral philosophers like Confusious, Jesus, and Immanuel Kant:
" In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. "
This clearly puts yourself in the chair. You only have to look within yourself to decide how one should live.
Maybe that was what you sought ?
You would also have millions of friendly people around you who would do everything they thought good against you. They wouldn't even push a 'kill 10 million people'( possibly killing you or people you know) 6 billion times if they found it
What's funny, is that if you blend social-darwinism(evolution) into some christian morals you will find empirical proof that the christian morals are right. Get it ?
Through all these years it was the societies with these ethics that were the best, they had the strongest social ethics to go by, a lot of religions was sorted out and now gone from memory. Talk about survive of the fittest eh?
Survival of the fittest. But what does fittest mean ? Should it be revolutionary ?
Should it only mean 'the strongest' ? But why not 'the most intelligent' ? Surely we are very intelligent, and we clearly rule the planet now. And why not 'good' ? Every species on this planet want to have it 'good'. Fittest means best. But isn't that pretty obvious, that everyone want to have the best of things to chose from ?
And thus, I don't know if I can say it enough times, historically the theory of Evolution has played a big part as against creationism!
Not in philosophy, ethics, or metaphysics!