Evaluating Ethical Systems
Why?
We can evaluate ethical systems on a meta level. In order for an ethical system to be humane, to be valid for humans, it needs to respect, honor really, life. Because without life this system would be superfluous. We need ethical systems to enable communities, to enable living together. So, an ethical system that ultimately destroys life cannot be moral on a meta level because it would destroy what it is supposed to ensure.
More concretely, ethical systems that center property are immoral. Property does not exist without life; property is a contract between living humans. Unfortunately, the people in power, mostly white men, are driven by such an immoral ethical system. They are merely interested in maintaining their power – and in order to do so build a pseudo ethics that pretends to justify their power. In reality, they are undermining their power from within because they cannot have power over dead people, which is where their system ultimately leads. It is not centered on life, it does not value life (unless it can be abused to maintain their power, such as in the case of an anti-choice stance to abortion).
I am not sure if the meta-ethical sketch above is correct. Probably not yet. I have been grappling with figuring out why I have this strong sense that the philosophies that center property – from Ayn Randism to libertarianism – feel deeply immoral to me. I sense it has something to do with their blatant disregard of life – human and otherwise. Property and power seem more important – and that’s a sand castle because neither would exist without life. So the system is unsustainable and has to eventually collapse on its own – except in reality, of course, it can be maintained by brutal force, intensified by this hallow system. Self-justification.
An alternative ethical system, one that could self-maintain, centers life. Everything is driven by respecting life. Sadly, this system – or such systems – seem to be very vulnerable to the brutal systems. How can we help the inhumane system collapse? And do this without creating more suffering than the system itself? How are we maintain that system every day? By holding onto beliefs that divide us, that make some life more valuable than others. By focusing our work on accumulating power, by making power and money the measure of achievement, of morality itself thus turning ethics into an absurdum.
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Yes! I come from a physics/engineering background; you evaluate models by how useful they are in predicting or building the real world. I think ethical systems can also be evaluated by how they affect people, in particular vulnerable people. On the one hand you can evaluate the logic, but you can find the self-serving disingenuous ideologies or systems if they enrich those proposing them and hurt the poor, children and elderly, you can be pretty sure they are unethical at the root.