[Hong Wu]

During my pacing time tonight I got to pondering (or having my "deep thinks" as they've sometimes been called) a conflict between two theories of ethics I was considering.

On the one hand is the rejection of the idea that ethics need to be justified at all. As I wrote in another wall of text that has yet to get any replies, I believe that liberals have essentially developed a form of objective ethics, they just don't call it this because they enjoy attacking a different set of objective ethics, namely those that are heavily associated with Christianity. Even so, the trend is clear that the left has no intention of meaningfully discussing or justifying their new set of objective ethical beliefs.

And something that I was asking myself is, does this have to be a bad thing? The justification of ethics can be more than a little exhausting and yet, the fundamental benefits of ethical behavior are so clear on their face that spending energy to justify ethics starts to seem silly after awhile. And although ethical standards can differ, they are generally so emotionally charged that discussion of them seems to often be impossible even among intelligent people. This may not be true when someone trusts you but when talking to strangers it never seems to go anywhere; if someone thinks something is ethical, it's generally not up for debate, that's just how it seems to be. So I was asking myself tonight, why bother? I have my ethics and they have their ethics. Maybe that is what war is, a metaphysical clash of ethical systems that cannot resolve each other in any other way. Sad! I think we all have the vague idea that war is not just people fighting after all, it is something more than that, although just what it is can be hard to define.

Regarding my own ethical beliefs, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of transcendence and Buddhist cosmology. If someone were to become truly unconditioned, it might be argued that each unconditioned being would be the same as each other unconditioned being and this is probably related to the concept of nirvana, wherein the truly unconditioned would in a sense no longer exist. This is because it is our conditions of various types that define who we are (and one could even define things like karma or the soul as types of conditions). If one chooses to view the world through a teleological analysis, the existence of suffering and compassion might serve as a metaphysical "anchor" for the unconditioned being, creating what one could view as a permissible form of a conditioned existence. The persistence of compassion as a remaining condition would prevent this theoretical, otherwise unconditioned spiritual being from disappearing in any sense that we can understand or perceive, as one might conclude a truly unconditioned being would. Therefore, suffering exists so that compassion can exist; compassion exists so that the unconditioned will not disappear; compassion is the condition of choice because it is free of a hostility that might somehow be disruptive if it were present on other planes of existence.

[Victoribus Spolia]

How much of this came from the "Value of Human Life" opinion poll?

The answer depends on your value of rationality and consistency, and the question of how, given rationality and consistency, an obligation can obtain for more than just yourself (and possibly even for yourself).

If one is content in regarding their own decisions in life, moral or otherwise, as solely in the realm of preference, then justification is not necessary in the sense that they technically never claim that "everyone ought to do X" etc.

When someone says that another person or everyone, or even a set of people, "ought to do X," the question that arises; "By what standard do you appeal to say that I must do X?" and "By what authority ought I do X and where do you derive this authority?" These are questions regarding "justification."

However, whether or not one regards rationality and consistency as important plays a factor in their decisions on such matters for themselves.

Justification nonetheless will always remain an issue when one claims that others ought to believe or do something.

The response to such a command should always be "Why should I?" the answer given to that question is called the justification.

[Sivad]

Justification nonetheless will always remain an issue when one claims that others ought to believe or do something.

It is pretty academic though because with most people andespecially when it comes to politics there's very little rational justification, it's all just post hoc rationalization.

[Victoribus Spolia]

It is pretty academic though because with most people and especially when it comes to politics there's very little rational justification, it's all just post hoc rationalization.

No denial here, but the lack of justification made on either side is nothing more than than the logical and ethical equivalent of an "elephant in the room."

[Sivad]

logical and ethical equivalent of an "elephant in the room."

"What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms."

[Victoribus Spolia]

"What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms."

I shall nonetheless aspire to that higher virtue.

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”

[Sivad]

I shall nonetheless aspire to that higher virtue.

It's not completely futile, the upper-middle professional class just mindlessly assimilates the expert consensus and the working class and the poor are primarily swayed by sloganeering and simple appeals to emotion, but rational argument is effective with some segments of the intelligentsia and they do hold a lot of political power. Intellectuals are crucial to the success of any political movement, that's why the oligarchs not only invest in media and politicians, but also invest heavily in think tanks and universities.

[Wellsy]

I suspect they do in that there are competing traditions/ways of life that situate different views in ethics.
Liberalism is a poverty of thought that has only the illusion of objectivity because the notions it deploys are the minimum reflection of a life under capitalism.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf

MacIntyre convincingly proves that rationality and ethics are inseparable; that it is impossible for the unjust person to think rationally, or for the irrational person to be just. Consequently, the liberal presumption of a shared, ahistorical, “objective” rationality which can be brought to bear to resolve differences in values and conceptions of justice, is a delusion. He further shows that no conception of justice and ethical life is possible outside of some real community in some place at some time, and that liberalism, despite its protestations, is a tradition, along with founding fathers, sacred texts, hierarchy, political power, social interests, institutions, etc., etc., like any other tradition, and he discloses the particular features of modernity which underlie liberal individualism. Liberalism differs from other traditions though, in it does not recognise itself as a tradition, harbours the illusion that it is able to fully comprehend other traditional modes of thought, and subsume their needs within itself, and that it is invulnerable to criticism from outside of liberalism. This self-deception leaves it vulnerable.

Liberal values are objective to the extent that they are already a reality in the way people live as governed by markets and have human relations mediated by property.

Thus, the social bases of liberalism are two-fold: the raising of property to the status of the primary social relation, and the loss of community, the loss of the capacity to appeal to or rely upon shared meaning beyond the satisfaction of individual desire.

MacIntyre uses an analysis of the use of place names in foreign countries to point out the difference between a place name for the inhabitants of an area where the name has multiple shared meanings and connotations, and the use of either same name in the context of a foreign language, or the use of a foreign name. For a foreigner, the place name is nothing but a reference pointing to a spatial location, having lost all the connotations and layers of meaning present when a native-speaker utters the name. He refers to this impoverished kind of meaning as “reference.” Nominalism is thus the characteristic epistemology of liberal society.

“the conception of pure reference, of reference as such, emerges as the artefact of a particular type of social and cultural order, one in which a minimum of shared beliefs and allegiances can be presupposed.” (p. 379)

This observation succinctly points to an interconnection between rationality and ethics, for by the customary use of words simply in the form of reference, all the objects referred to lose their social significance, and one creates the illusion of an “objective” world which can be talked of by means of “pure rationality”, in abstraction from the social relations which have, in fact, created and shaped the thing and given it its social significance. The sole remaining social relation mediating between people is therefore property. MacIntyre believes that English and the other international languages are now impoverished in this way.
...
In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.

And of course an ethics need to be justified because we have differing conceptions of what is ethical and for one to be defended requires reasons as to why it is superior in some form or another. Today there is the sentiment of relativism and perspectivism that denies such a dialoague but the actual history of different ways of life disprove this as the actuality as different traditions/ways of life are open to challenges from competing traditions/ways of life and even on their own terms.

By relativism, MacIntyre means the view that the ethics and rationality of any tradition is valid within a given tradition and cannot be devalidated from outside that tradition; thus one tradition is as good as another, and no tradition can make any greater claim on our allegiance than another. By perspectivism, MacIntyre means the converse view that the ethics and rationality of any given tradition of enquiry is valid, but only from the perspective of that tradition; its adherents cannot perceive the failure of their standpoint as a result of the criticism from any other standpoint; truth can only be the sum of infinitely many complementary standpoints. Both viewpoints deny the possibility of truth and validity as such in any tradition of thought, and equally, deny the possibility of a tradition failing by its own standards.

MacIntyre shows convincingly that neither position can be sustained in respect to the traditions of enquiry described in his book. All traditions of life and therefore of philosophy have standards by which they are able to judge the adequacy of their own account; under the impact of criticism from outside or by the disclosure of new problems from within, all traditions of enquiry, all communities, are continually changing, frequently finding that former beliefs have become obsolete and sometimes undergoing ‘epistemological crisis’, perhaps merging with other currents or collapsing. While no tradition can exclude the possibility that its current beliefs and practices may become outmoded, within its own terms; conversely, all traditions have the capacity to subject others to criticism and frequently such criticisms succeed and rival traditions change under the impact of such challenges.

MacIntyre believes that perspectivism and relativism are post-Enlightenment trends which were only made possible by the Enlightenment’s claim to have dispensed with traditional beliefs. By accepting the Enlightenment’s claim to objectivity, postmodern relativism and perspectivism are blind to their own status as traditions rooted in a very impoverished mode of life.

Only a view of values abstracted from real living people could imagine a system unaffected by competing views. Something typical to postmodernists that isolate language from reality and mark it in a idealist fashion as constituting our reality forgetting that our concepts are derived from an objective reality rather than the sole constitution of that reality itself.

The issue within conditions of modernity though is also the lacking in real everyday life of any basis to ethically compel others to some end.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/subject-position.htm
An ethical claim can only be based on a mediated relation between subjects and where this but only a mediation of property there is but the minimal ethics of the market but not one based primarily on human beings and their desires except as based in property itself.
We are all strangers to one another and if we aspire to more than the minimum oughts of a judicial system of what we should or shouldn't do, but to cultivate actual ethical beings who follow not commandments/rules for fear but because their character is such that they genuinely desire the good.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/brenkert.htm

However, there is another understanding of morality which should not be forgotten. This is the sense of morality in which morality is linked with certain virtues, excellences, or flourishing ways of living. In this sense, morality is not primarily concerned with rules and principles, but with the cultivation of certain dispositions or traits of character. This view has been expressed in this way: ‘The moral law ... has to be expressed in the form, “be this”, not in the form, “do this” ... the true moral law says “hate not”, instead of “kill not”...... the only mode of stating the moral law must be a rule of character.’ [28] This, I believe, is quite close to Marx’s views.

And of course there is war and struggle because when someone forces their way of life upon others, others then resist.
Which is why the making of markets requires the destruction of the social fabric that gets in the freedom of trade.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/flourishing.pdf

When Economics builds its science on the assumption of an independent, individual economic agent who makes decisions to maximise their own utility they take as given a society in which the norms of Utilitarianism are universal. In the event that the subjects of a community do not act as individuals maximising their own utility, then the science fails. But perhaps more importantly, governments and firms which make policy on the basis of economic science, and therefore Utilitarian ethics, are acting so as to foster this ethos in the community, with all the consequences in terms of inequality and social disintegration.

These ethics aren't something directly given by nature and is also why in a view of the world independent of human activity that it makes morality/ethics unintelligible, but ti can exist in quite a stable and real way of how people already live, not as an individual commandment to others but as modes of behaviour as part of some activity/project. Because it treats humans as subject to the causal necessity of natural mechanics, but doesn't actually consider the activity of human beings as both subject to the world and subjects that act to change it and thus change themselves.
An ethics abstracted from any real existing people and way of life is meaningless as is ethics which is posited independent of any real subject position in regards to other subjects. It can only rely on a universal appeal of God or Nature or the State, which have since lost their legitimacy for such appeals to everyone. God is dead is a reality in the sense that modern life is no longer governed in relation to a God, but of property. It is the real existing ethics of our day and to challenge it requires to not only reveal the inadequacies of its idealized form in utilitarian ethics or in political ideologies such as liberalism, but requires pushing back on the modes of life that actualize such values and replace them with new ones.