On the Nature of Morality

I got to drive for a few hours today on business, and naturally, I spent most of the trip obsessing over one thing or another.

One of those "one thing"s was the topic of morality and how I would teach a class on ethics.

I'd actually been pretty excited when imagining the prospect. Ethics is just such a fascinating topic! You can't have a unified set of laws or principles for ethics; if you could, that's what we would be using to base our laws off of. We have to assume deontology misses the mark because the moral value of actions isn't absolute- it varies based on context. We also have to assume that moral relativism misses the mark since there would be little more than ethical anarchy if we were to admit that it was an acceptable proposition to suggest that all morals vary by culture. If the very notion of morality was malleable between societies, then one society could impose its moral rules on another society without worry of repercussions.

Is culture A allowed to attack culture B to take their land? What if the moral law for culture A is "the strongest is right"?

We're right to hesitate when confronted with a situation like that, since total moral relativism falls apart just as quickly as total moral absolutism.

Let's look at a comparison within the same realm and scope:

1. Is it acceptable to kill someone in order to save another person?
2. Is it acceptable to kill someone in order to save 100 people?
3. Is it acceptable to kill someone in order to save 99.999% of all people?
4. Is it acceptable to ensure the safety of two people at the cost of everyone else, if you're reasonably sure that the alternative was that everyone would die?

At what point does the responsibility to make that choice fall onto you?

An initial inclination might be to simply weigh all ethical issues in economic terms: The cost of one person to save one person is exactly equal. Anything exactly equal or better as far as trades go is golden.
But, then we get into the issue of relative worth. Can I really kill the scientist working on a cure for cancer in order to save the impoverished and uneducated boy who has roughly the same life expectancy?
While it's undoubtedly uncomfortable, we have to issue a cost-benefit-analysis at some point. Are the positives outweighing the negatives?
How do we measure such an abstract question?! This is the intent and function of utilitarianism. A problem occurs, however, when we replace innate human values with the quest for the greater good.

If we can measure the average worth and cost of a human being to society over the course of their life based solely on their first ten years (hypothetically speaking, of course. This calculation would be difficult), then we can, on average, provide for the greater good by killing people who will, on average, "bring society down."
This is problematic in a whole 'nother ballpark. Moral absolutism leaves no gray areas in the middle to be explored by humans.
Utilitarianism forces all situations into the gray area in such a way that people become mere parts of a whole mechanism. Cogs in a wheel. Moreover, utilitarianism ignores the subjective nature of worth. Different people value different things/experiences/ideas to varying degrees respectively.
While the experience of love might be worth a great amount to you, it may be worth far less to Jane Doe, who is more concerned with personal gain.

To avoid breaching too far back into territory I've already covered on The Suffering Tax, I'll hold myself here and just say that ethics is a really interesting and nuanced topic. I kinda' love it.

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Waddles