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To be brief, I would say that the basic yardstick as to what’s right or wrong is – Doing for others what you want for yourself and not doing to others what you won’t like to be done to you. However, as I have said in another discussion topic – Does absolute truth exist – all this is hard to preach unless one develops oneself to a stage where one sees ONE in ALL and ALL in ONE and is able to rise above individualism and actually sees one’s own interest in the interest of all others and one’s own harm if one harms others.

Rkmittal, you bring up an excellent point – the ‘golden rule’ – Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Thank you for bringing it up…I have forgotten about it. The ethic of reciprocity is crucial to the common good of ourselves and to all.

I think the golden rule, as it’s usually called,”do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is definitly useful as a tool to keep fairness and objectivity in interactions, but I don’t think it stands up as an ultimate ethical principle. It doesn’t give us a basic reason why we should treat others with fairness or tell us what we should want have done unto us or what one has a right to demand be done unto us by others.

As for the “rise above individualism” thing, I think your view of how relationships should end up “one’s own interest in the interest of all others and one’s own harm if one harms others” is quite valuable but that a fundamental epistemological and ethical betrayal of individualism is harmful to that end. The human means of knowing truth is reason integrating sense perception, which requires independent judgement. In ethics, we are fundamentally acting as agents for ourselves and must value our own lives in order to pursue anything else, and if we don’t appreciate this we will turn it into a dog-eat-dog world. Ultimately we have to be self-interested, and the only way to have harmonious relationships, is to create an ethics of rational self-interest that (as it would, if created rationally) integrates the fact of harmonious, fair relationships as part of that. If we advocate ultimately living for others or ultimately using other’s as our onus of proof, we will all destroy ourselves, and ethically end up simply trying to exploit others, as morality will be impossible to practise (which actual altruism is), causing us to merely hedonistically trying to exploit altruism. Real truth requires us to see beyond ourselves in the sense of using reason to see things objectively and understand that the universe is not centered on us as opposed to a short-sighted “me right now” attitude, but that reason is not collective either. “It’s true because I feel it” is no more wrong than “it’s true because I think other people would want me to.” The real onus is: “it’s true becuase I can prove it. It’s true becuase it makes sense.”

Ethics is not relative, but it’s contextual. What I mean is that ethical truth is not a random, undefinable, subjective play it by ear type issue, but it’s not handed down in pre-packaged commandments. A system of ethics needs to be (and in my belief has been in part by Ayn Rand) created based on the objective needs of human life, and that will include respecting the rights of others. And only via this can we live harmoniously, or at all. And these ethics cannot just be followed blindly, but must be justified and understood, to be properly implimented, and they will be objectively derived, but understood and contextually applied.

Fundamentally what do “right” and “wrong” mean? They must refer to a right or wrong for something, and the only something which can cease to exist and which can pursue goals is life. Life is the only entity that pursues values which, if it fails in, it will destroy itself in that failing; life is the only means of evaluation, the only thing for which anything can be “right” or “wrong.” So life is necessarily our standard, and seeing as we are our selves and that’s how our minds are divided and all action we take is via our own lives, whose life is necessarily our own. So it stands to reason that any system of ethics we create must be for living our own lifes here in reality. And yeah, harmonious relationships are definitly integral to that, but they are not an end in themselves, as ubiquitously necessary as they are. Taking living for others as an ultimate justification will just make people cynical, in that they will believe they must sacrifice themselves in order to be moral, so they’ll just stop being moral or use morality as something to hedonistically exploit, as most people take the altruism we clamor about today.

GOLDEN RULES

I agree with the thought that it is necessary to find and define a “right or wrong for something” and that this one something could be “LIFE” but… but joined this point of thinking we are still at one starting point for having a clear vision of things, a clear vision of “life”. What is life? Is it a defined photograph taken at a certain moment of the life of universe? Is it a never-ending motion, change that is never stopping? Something like the symbol of “Yin-Yang” with the point of different colour just inside the area of opposite colour and changing and eating each other?

http://www.professionalanimations.com/Animated-Yin-Yang-Change-Color-IMG7086.html

So when we say “pursuing goals in life” it still has to be defined which goals are the best now and today, which goals were those about yesterday and ages ago, which goals will be the right ones for tomorrow and next ages.

Life is (in my opinion) evolution of all living beings, of all things. In this view it is not possible to find a right goals for any time and any place for all human beings. The right goals are still changing because of the right “time”. Good timing is important, isn’t it right?

I think that all the ultimate questions of human beings as philosophers and searchers for truth and knowlege are connected in a strict way: what is love for human beings?, what is right and what is wrong for human beings?, is there a objective truth for all existance?, all these questions are strictly connected each other.

One more thought and idea: taking living for others or taking living for ego and edonistic could have a medium standing point. “In media res stat virtus” were the ancient latin philosophers used to say. It means that extremes are not so good, just try to find a good compromise in the middle area. In this view I can find a new nice “golden rule”, this one: “ama il prossimo tuo (gli altri) come tu ami te stesso”, meaning “love others around you just the same way that you love you yourself”. This golden rule has the good points of the thoughts of Derick and still have the important idea to feel harmonius with all other human beings around, keeping the both extremes of “love” and trying to harmonize them.

How is it possible to love ourselves and soon after to love all others in the same way? It is still possible, joining here again the other fundamental question: “what is LOVE for all human beings”? In other words: if I find what is real love for me myself (what it is really good for me in a objective way) how could it be possible to avoid to share it with all other human beings, brotherhood of mine?

Marco

Marco,

You bring up an interesting question in your last para – If I find what is real love for myself, how could it be possible to avoid to share it with other human beings? I think, it is not possible to avoid to share it with others, should you be able to discover that true love! Reasons – well I already explained before. I also share your belief that all these key questions concerning human lives – love, absolute truth, meaning of life, right or wrong …. – are all intimately interwined. That being the case, I believe, true solution of one question/mystery will automatically answer/unfold other questions/mysteries.