Ethics for a better life.

The Fragmented being:

Much of Western history follows the concept of something constant that exists at our core. Sometimes it is a soul, or the natural version of ourselves beneath the artificial layers put on us over time. I would say there are some things that stay constant, like our personalities. No matter how much our morals, habits, and characters change, if a friend from the past we always had good chemistry with talking appeared, we would be able to continue talking with them as if hardly any time passed. There always has to be at least one constant or set of constants beneath all the relative things that exist afterward; sort of like an anchor, or standard things must stem from that we choose to base things off of. Two plus two always equals four. The law of gravity is constant, and we who are always changing are constant as a living being until we die. Life in general is constant, even though there a many relative lives that compose, and replace life in general. A tree is always a tree, even though trees come in many sizes, shapes, and species.

We are individual beings, but within us are constant changing cells, habits, ideas, and though we are individuals, we come in and out of groups, and groups are in institutions, and institutions are in societies. Each of these layers is an individual unit, but they are made up of more little units at each level. Heraclitus said, the only constant in life is change. It is this constant that sets the standard in his statement that all other things keep changing relative to, which is change itself, which is a constant concept. If we are made up of these constant changing parts, then the only things that could possibly be argued to be good are the constants, because they are dependable. For some this is personality, for others god, and for others scientific laws. Everything on top of these things is not dependable though.

If you contrast this with my concepts about why morals don not matter in another writing I did, you will find that since most things in life are not dependable, we can only do what feels good in a given time, and feelings are one of the best guides to personal actions. It is because life is always changing, that feelings are always changing, and we are always changing too. Rationality in itself is inseparable from emotions, and if things are always changing, rational things are changing too, and we cannot just exist on a rational model that things would always change in contrast to. Even Kant's Categorical Imperative is flawed when it claims we should think if our actions toward a person in the way we would treat all people. If we treated everyone the same, there would be many cases others would harm us, or take advantage of us, or not care for how we are treating them in some cases. Each person we interact with is a new unique situation we have to feel out, and all we have is our experiences to contrast them with.

This is perhaps an ethical writing. In “Why Morals Don't Matter”, I talked more about how we interact in daily life, but ethics is slightly different than morals. Morals are more about traditions, interpersonal relationships, codes of conduct, and character traits we develop from existing in the middle of these things. Ethics is stepping back from our daily moral life of how things are, and stopping to examine how they ought to be. The deontologist would argue the means justify the ends, so for example lying is always wrong. The consequentialist would say the ends always justify the means. You would probably contrast my writing on morals more with virtue ethics. Since life is always changing, the means or ends may be more beneficial depending on the situations. Being that there must be a constant beneath any concept do deal with relative changes, let me say we are always constant in our lives till we die. Although we are always changing, and so is life in general, we should be the constant standard that all decisions are based off of. We cannot base our ethics on what benefits others, because their lives are always changing relative to ours, and they just like us are always changing. This is why my ethics fit my morals. Where my morals state we should do whatever feels good, my ethics state we can only do this by doing what benefits ourselves first, and others secondarily.

We have to live this way because life is fragmented and always changing in contrast to us and with us. What feels good is always changing. In some cases, making more money feels good, but then our health may fail us, so getting healthier becomes more important than making money, or maybe we have enough money to feel comfortable, and then want company, but the priorities are always changing. The one thing that is constant is we want to do what benefits our desires in all those cases, or we are worthless to ourselves and others till then concerning any aspect related to our unreached desire at the time being.

Just like any law of science that is constant, the desires we have are always to benefit ourselves. No matter how we try to cut it, the world of constant change cannot be benefited by us seeking to help it primarily, and ourselves secondarily, because it will keep changing in contrast to us. Therefore, we should only do things for the world we think will benefit us by doing them, because we are the constant in our lives. If we make our primary focus helping others before ourselves, we are likely to have our own lives fall into decay, or help them in a way that may not be best for them, but if we help them in a way we think will help us, we are more likely doing something that will satisfy us more long term, because we are the constant in our lives. Teaching a man to fish helps feed a man, and keeps them from begging for our fish. Giving a man fish will keep them coming back for more fish, which keeps taking away from us. However, maybe we are giving fish so they give us company, which may be our current desire. The constant change in desires, toward a constant changing world, with constant changing people, means nobody can truly care about us as individuals. We can only care about ourselves, and what others can do for us, because we have nothing at our core constant enough that they can love us. They love the parts of us that currently compose us, and when those parts of us change, they change relative to our fragment's current composition, or they find someone else who has a composition of fragments that they desire more at this time.

People can only love us for things that are constant. There appear to be three layers to a human being. The first is attributes. Attributes are the physical outer layer people view upon initially crossing us. I may have good looks, musical talent, mathematical abilities, and these are all surface things people see. Some attributes fade over time, such as looks, or even memory of skills. Though they may be appealing up front, they are only good for initially luring people in, and may be good for status when we stand with someone for a given time. The next layer is character. Character is the moral habits we incur over time through our interactions with others. In most cases we make choices based on feelings, that are based on experiences and memories. These create reflexes we use to decide right and wrong in given situations. Characters change slowly over a lifetime, and change even more slowly the older we get. Character is a series of emotional reactions to our numerous environments over time. The last layer is personality, and personality is fairly constant throughout life. We inherit levels of interoversion and extroversion, levels of neuroticism, and environments can turn certain personality traits on and off, the same as character traits. Personalities are a little less flexible than characters though. They are born with us, and die with us, and since they do not change much in themselves, it is important to find environments that reflect them best in our favor. Since environments are changing all the time too, we just need to keep moving where it feels good.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with ethics, and now that I have laid the groundwork, I can explain. If the world is in a state of constant change, we are the only constant in our lives to base all these changes off of, and the only thing that matters is being able to calculate our long term desires to feel good, then how do we do this? In order to find happiness in things that are always changing, we need to build our happiness off of things that can build on themselves with over time. There are three layers to the self. There is the biological self, and the cultural self, and the individual self. The biological self gives us natural desires. They are food, sleep, sex, and I would go to argue, a desire to alter consciousness through physically extreme acts like drugs, or intense bodily struggle with the environment. The thing with biological desires, is they are recurring. You will always get hungry, sleepy, horny, and a desire to get consciously altered again. These things cannot be made priorities, because in themselves, they are always reaching deprivation quickly from their last time filled. Instead, they should be sought moderately, and secondarily in order to support the priorities that can be built upon over time. Those things we may want to build on of course, are given to us by culture. Culture will give us art, music, writing, knowledge, and all other desires we could want. Where culture gives us WHAT we desire, our individual decides HOW we desire what culture has to offer, and where these two meet, is how we figure out what we can build on, and keep coming back where we left off, unlike the biological desires that only fill us once, and must be chased again for one more filling. The desires we can chase that keep filling us up more without going into deprivation as individuals are things like knowledge, musical and artistic talents, fitness, and friendships. If we eat, sleep, and do conscious alterations moderately enough to give us the strength to chase these priorities, then we will be healthy enough by not being fat, have more time due to not over sleeping, and be with the program with new conscious insight more than always be high for the sake of it. Sexual appetite is also only a single serving in itself, but when accompanied by a friendship we can maintain longer, it is merely a secondary moderated activity for a greater activity – the activity of friendship. When biology is moderated, the priorities can be more highly optimized toward giving us a more satisfying life, because we can keep expanding on them to have more variety for more changing situations in the future.