This isn't really intended as a "debate" thread; I don't expect people to argue about which philosophy is the "correct" philosophy, but I just thought it would be fun to share your personal philosophy with everyone else :)
And by "personal philosophy", I mean share your ideas of how you make moral decisions, the people and philosophers who influenced your moral thinking, and maybe some of your opinions on contemporary moral issues.
Since I started this thread, I'll go first:
In general, my personal philosophy is very utilitarian in nature: my moral judgements are tied very closely to how I contributing to someones experiences of happiness or pain. When I talk about "rights", I generally talk about the way we're obliged to treat other beings based on those beings capacity to feel satisfaction and suffering, I'm not talking about any abstract concepts of "duty" that we have to beings.
If you've ever seen me write or talk about morality for any length of time, you'll probably be familiar with all of these very broad, general moral opinions that I hold:
Morals in general:
- "Duty" means precisely nothing without tying it in some way, shape or
form to the way we directly or indirectly affect other feeling beings; but a kind of morality that is intrinsically connected to the way we affect others is a consequentialist one, not a deontological one. Generally my personal philosophy tends to be exclusively consequentialist rather than
deontological.
- I think people waste too much time talking about gays marriage and abortion, and not enough time talking about starvation in underdeveloped nations and the profoundly cruel way that people treat animal suffering everyday.
- I tend to talk more about animal rights than any other moral topic, generally because I think the animal rights debate is the single most important moral issue of our time simply because it affects so many beings. Compared to abortion, which has resulted in the deaths of 45 million unborn babies in the last 33 years (in the US at least), 15 billion animals are intentionally bred and slaughtered for food in the United States every year. In the same 33 years, about 400 billion factory bred animals have been slaughtered for food (this excludes commercial fishing, vivisection, animals slaughtered for fashion, etc). Going strictly by the numbers of beings affected, the importance of public discourse about factory farming seems to outweigh abortion in importance by a factor of 10,000:1.
Here's a list of categorical statements that I don't intend to justify or explain in any rigorous detail in this thread:
- There's no moral distinction between taking human life and taking the lives of non-human animals.
- Human life has no intrinsic value. It only has conditional value.
- Animal slaughter and vivisection should be categorically abolished.
- Elective abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and some instances of involuntary euthanasia are morally permissible.
- God provides no basis for ethics.
- God does not and cannot exist.
- Even a being rightfully called 'god' does exist, he almost certainly does not look anything like the like any conception of god described by religion.
- The universe is fundamentally material. Everything in the universe is a product of matter and natural phenomena, there is no seperate immaterial or spirtual component in the universe.
- "Consciousness" is not a 'thing' which sits inside the head. Consciousness is inseperable from the material processes happening inside our brain. No process, no consciousness.
- We can discuss and debate about ethics and moral theories without committing to the belief that morality does not "exist". If you think about, economic and social theories are no more tangible than moral theories, but no one says that economies don't exist and all economic discourse is worthless. Morality is not some tangible object exists out in the universe somewhere, but its also no correct to say morality is "created" by people either -- you could say the same thing about economics and social theories too. Morality, like economics, exists in a difference sense: morality "exists" between people, their interactions, and the effects they have one another's welfare. If people did not exist, or if they did not interact with each other, or if they had no experiential welfare to speak of, morality would not "exist" and there would be no coherent way to talk about it the first place.
- Everyone should read "How are We To Live" by Peter Singer.
- Be excellent to each other, and party on dudes!