The Uselessness of Ethics

I am currently spending part of my Thursday nights sitting in ethics class, listening to our professor and the peanut gallery of people who care within the class comment upon the human condition. Common topics include; why should we do certain things, or why shouldn't we do certain things? What is the true nature of the universe? Are our lives truly predetermined by a bunch of genetic material stuck in protein envelops that move around and do stuff we don't really understand? The conversations, while charged and in many ways, interesting, often lead me to merely stare at my computer in a drunk stupor because, well, I'm dying, working on something more meaningful with my time, or trying to kill a computer generated enemy using my assault rifle.

There is a great trend among people my age to become more concerned with ethical issues. We as a people become concerned with whether we are good or bad, whether our actions are universally beneficial or detrimental, and any combination of metaphysical concepts involving our place, purpose, and ultimate end. However, fundamentally, our ethical dilemmas are the result of our own confirmation processes. In many ways ethics, like so many other social movements, have become powerful based on our own insecurity as separate social groups, except that ethics is much more personal. It is a shame, in some ways, that ethics has been reduced down to the justification for our 'feel-good' feelings as opposed to a process that critically challenges and enables us to grow as a collective.

For one thing, one thing that goes unnoticed in general is that ethics is a privilege. We as a species would not have been able to ponder what makes us feel fulfilled (and what sneaky 'rational' justifications we can use) had we not advanced past fighting for our day to day survival. To be ethical is, therefore, as much a result of our socioeconomic status as it is our need to be justified towards others in our actions. I am intensely uncomfortable with ethicists who argue that human rights for starving people in third-world countries, should be at the forefront of discussion. Such people, perhaps, could care less whether they can read or write, or whether they can meaningless debate conjecture about an elected leader but would care much more for a cup of clean water, or a good, hot meal. This disconnect in priorities illustrates the act that ethics are a personal justification for one's own actions, rather than the glorious 'code of enlightenment' many people see ethics to be.

I do not personal believe that ethics can lift itself out of the mire until people, as a whole, grow more aware of themselves. Many who hold strong, ethical considerations are in fact, rigid dogmatists unable to open themselves to more possibilities, and certainly unable to possess the courage to live in the face of potentially being wrong. In short, ethics is in many ways, just an excuse not to grow and further develop as people when it precisely is perhaps the opposite. Shared discourse, paradigm shifts, and all such things are within the domain of ethics, but they are discarded in favor of the cheap thrill of 'wow, I am right and you can't prove me wrong!'

Join in next time while I wail on relativists despite being a relativist as a demonstration of ethical and philosophical hypocrisy among the general human population!

Today is boring, hence, I am lazy.

Cheers.