Fights

It may be the case that what we consider “nature” or “personality” is more or less the competition of traits in the battle field that is the minds of people. The variety of human nature could only ever arise from a conflict between traits, not the presence of them alone. I know for a fact that people wear their insecurities on their sleeves, but who would ever do so willingly? It seems to me that people are more or less subjects of this battle between traits and in a sense completely beholden to them. When utilitarians go on about what they believe I always confront a deep irony in their arguments. Maximizing aggregate utility, probabilities, usage of words like “utils” and “priors”, deferring moral decisions to graphs, all of this is idiosyncratic of a certain urge, a desire that does not want to be bested, not sober objectivity. What it is a rejection of arbitrary morality and a greater eagerness to manifest a reality where concern is appropriately applied. This is not particular to just utilitarianism, all moral frameworks work this way, however any utilitarian would have you think otherwise. They would want you to believe that this theory is the most sensible way to morally operate and that it has been basis of objective good this whole time. In the midst of this logorrhea it is important that you note that the origins of utilitarianism, like any other fancy moral theory, are in the prejudices that exist within the psyche. None of the actual decisions a utilitarian makes in innate to their sensibilities, and the deference to long essays, graphs and data that is quite typical of utilitarians reveals to us this truth.

This all-too-human-moral process, proclamation and reification, forgetting and then disregarding your own humanness always seems to make its way into the practices of huemans, especially among intelligent people, for this reason I also do not believe the majority of people could ever become total utilitarians. A human is more like a stage in the competition of desires and less like an objective rational machine. I think it is more fit to describe any moral process as the refinement of a moral question while a host of underlying competing desires hash out their disagreements, up to a certain level of satisfaction within the individual, or maybe even more interestingly up to a certain threshold that when past exhaustion, boredom disgust or other raw emotions defeat those other desires in the battle field. At the end raw emotion will always win that fight and past this threshold it becomes the tyrant of the battlefield. Keeping the door closed on moral subjectivism, this understanding on the decision making process only suggest the obvious, that humans are just like everything else and are not like what has never been observed to have existed: that is the existence of objective concepts and principles in reality as they are talked about in abstract. Within those fights there will be a desire to be objective, and the belief in objectivity is essential but suffice it to say that human are moving indicators and most things in this regard are contingent.

Relevant to my issue with utilitarians is how this dressed up idea of coherent moral characters intensely sticking to principles especially among those who are out of touch, is how it paints the picture of equality as the ultimate virtue. Utilitarians construct every moral dilemma ignoring all other aspects of human life, ignoring all the fights, constructing dilemmas concerned only with the number of people alive after X action. In those dilemmas the characters are faced with actual death, that internal fight would be won swiftly the fear of death. But most people understand this and only this. Of course from this perspective one would believe that most important value to hold is equality. Equality is the most likely answer to these sort of meta-questions the same way the the word “you” follows the word “thank” most frequently, it seems to follow clearly but that doesn’t endow it any relevance to primordial morality in general. An amplified fear of death is a distortion of desirability and one’s sense of morality by extensions, there are clearly things that matter much more than the fear of death and those things are frequently in command. We must disregard unrealistic hypotheticals in moral debate, more importantly pay attention to the variety of battles between tastes that occur the minds of people. Maybe that variety is a minutia when faced against raw emotions like fear at one’s limit, so let us never get to that limit.

Morality outside the tyranny of fear is a beautiful thing to explore.

✶