Saturday 27 August 2011

On Ethics

Nawrte. Ethics has been without foundation since it was first entextualised graphemically ten thousand years ago. Half a million years before that it was merely biographical. Morality is base, automatic organism-level difference-maths, the source before even the youth of the flow of thought, and so half a billion years further before, plants fixed altruism, sharing root space with closer relatives, to their impersonal detriment.

Since all ethical axioms are arbitrary, and effects-calculation endings also, the greatest philosophers have not agreed, nor ever can. Words have no objective meanings, yet language thrives, and may be harsh or affectionate, constructive or destructive, as dictated by the multifactorial influences that so govern all action.

Phenotype is genotype plus environment, to a good approximation - twin height varies by 1.5cm on average. In the last 250 years, height has increased as much as in the previous glacial 250,000. The expression of the inter-subjective consensus language of morality, the narrative of humanity, similarly reflects the avalanche of socioeconomics.

Eudaimonia is in the ear of the audience, and one note cannot make harmony. Any felicific calculus will yield answers that vary with time and geography. There is not one apodictic force. Yet viewed from appropriate distance, the arrow of morality flies ever upwards, ignorant of the paradox of perspective.

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