I try my best to have a moral system, but naturally, there is none I have found which show no holes under my skeptical gaze. I merely attempt to adhere to the most conistent and definable morals as I see them.
As such, the moral system I try to follow basically goes as this. It is a teleological ethic, which means that I believe good and bad are defined by consequences. The ends are what are important. Motives and means are relevant, but again, they are only relevant in how you can relate them to the ends. Does something have a positive impact, or a negative impact?
That being said, I define positive in terms of what creates happiness and joy, and destroys sadness and sorrow. There's a very simple system here. That which does the opposite is the worst thing of all. That which say, removes both sadness and happiness, is better, but still not as good as something that removes sadness and instills happiness. It's easy enough to follow.
And it's about quantity, not just quality. Two happy people is better than one. and a long, happy life, is better than a short happy life. Though this does not actually reflect reality, it may be easier to understand if you were to imagine that happiness is an independent commodity unto itself, and the goal is to generate it in mass and longevity. Of course, imagine the same thing with sadness, but that it were something that needs to be removed, (like toxic waste).
Now, pay very close attention that I'm saying
happiness, or
joy, and
not pleasure. Often time moral utilitarians, most obviously the hedonists, recomend maximizing pleasure. I have found, undeniably, that pleasure and happiness can exist totally independent of each other, and between the two, I've concluded that happiness is much better. I do not advocate hedonism because it merely generates pleasure, not happiness, and that the process of seeking hedonistic lifestyles often comes at the expense of things that would bring happiness. This is a fact that has lived on from ancient wisdom to modern scientific study.
Now, as I said, the theory has holes. The most obvious is the concept of degree of happiness, and degree of sadness that one person experiences. Clearly, the higher degree of happiness and lower degree of sadness, the better, and we could just apply this to every single human being and calculate it all the same. But there are two problems. One, there is absolutely no consistent way to measure a person's feelings, so calculation is impossible. If one person could be made to experience happiness at the expense of ten other peoples' happiness, but the overall degree of happiness that the one person and those ten people felt combined, was now greater than the combined amount before hand, would it be right to make it so? Should the number of people feeling a certain base degree of happiness be more important than the amount of happiness that any one person feels? Personally, I would say it does matter more, but again, the problem is that there is no way to measure happiness, so I do not know what the standard degree of happiness would be. It is never the less also a purely subjective, unrationalized decision on my part.
Another issue is about whether or not happiness is really th best thing. What if people could be made to be absolutely, mindlessly happy? Kind of like the way hedons indulge in pleasure. What if people could be made to be maximally happy, all the time, until they die? They would presumably have no motivation to do anyhting, even to maintain their lives. Society, and the human race, would die off. But they would all be totally happy doing it... So is it wrong? The only argument I can find for saying that such a situation is undesirable is that the human race would die in one generation, and as a result, there would be no more happiness at all. That would be the end. I admit though, that this requires one to attach their own sense of value to generations far into the future, which is often a hard thing to rationalize,. I can't say why it matters that happiness should exist in a future world where nothing we know now exists, so I'm not sure about that one.
Never the less, holes aside, I stick with this system because I find it the most understandable, simple, workable, and containing the least holes when compared to other moral systems. Another thing that's convenient for me is that it makes the most subjective aspect of morality, that is deciding what is good and bad unto itself, a very small and simple part of the issue. The result of this philosophy is that most moral problems simply become a matter of determining workability. The subjective part is quickly brushed out of the way, and most of the time is spent on objective problem solving. This is very satisfying for an INTP like me.
