The following is an intellectual exercise of probably nothing new yet, as one with a different perspective, I feel the need to pursue.
Essentially, mankind has a dual nature. The animal, which is the physical, and the intellectual, which is the higher mind. The animal, of course, seeks to satisfy our physical needs and wants. The intellectual goes beyond; it contemplates life, the nature of man and anything potentially metaphysical perpetually beyond what we know or possibly ever can know. It's the lower mind and the higher mind, the Id and the Superego. The ego, our individual personality, can be rejected in an argument about ethics. Our personality is the rudder between our base instincts and our power to wonder, ponder and create. It's the marriage counselor but it's not a prime mover. "I wish we had peace on Earth" is a nice hope but it's one of personality, namely an individual that greatly wants peace. However, this basic belief is personality, not the superego because it doesn't think about HOW to make such a dream a reality. It just wants peace as a matter of temperament but doesn't argue how peace can happen or if peace is even desired. Those are deeper matters. Some like conflict and some like peace. It's a matter of how we think as individuals, not as we see things in a broader, greater, more profound sense.
As stated, we're driven by our passions and our intellect. Our passion are, quite frankly, stupid, yet we all indulge them with some frequency, some more than others. Some are driven solely by instinct and desire. They fuck, eat, drink and that's about it. In this reality, ethics can be described by our base behaviors. We're dogs and cats. It's just what we do. We live, we die and there's no reason to think about anything else. If we choose to look at this as the meaning of life, we can either call it ethics or reject even the concept of ethics because the behavior isn't ethical or unethical. It just is.
The higher mind, the intellect, must reject this view in any proper abstract argument about how we SHOULD live and behave. The higher mind is our only advantage over the animal kingdom. Our ability to reason and think makes us special. To me, a life solely based on hedonistic indulgence is de-evolved. We've grown the ability to reason, therefore it must be important. If it's important, we should use it and that means speculating and analyzing ourselves and the world around us soberly and dispassionately, something we've been working on since man truly evolved into man from our animal pasts.
So we have these brains that can think so let's ponder about the concept of ethics. Many brilliant philosophers, both religious and scientific, have created moral philosophies. How best can we process ourselves and our world? Men like Aristotle put forth and trusted in the five senses as our primary means of accumulating data. Men like Plato put forth the idea of intuition and perception because our five senses can be faulty and we can misperceive. Since then, great thinkers have become more refined as society has grown. In this time, the idea of ethics has become an enormous subject. What is ethical? From the simpler ideas of Hammurabi's moral code of "An eye for an eye" to the Jewish idea of the Ten Commandments to Kant's Categorial Imperative of Universal Morality, we've always strived to rein in our potentially destructive nature. This is, of course, necessary to create an interdependent society where we work together to achieve our goals and live the age old dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Laws are created to help guide us and to keep us from tearing each other apart. Laws are all that bind us in this way. As animalistic as we can be, laws must be created and maintained. It would be wonderful is we could always control ourselves and act as disciplined, rational beings all the time but that's impossible. We feel and we have desires. Sometimes, we're going to lose our sense of order and decency and last out. An absence of laws would mean anarchy and, in all likelihood, the destruction of ourselves as a species.
Law and order are our practical solutions to problems of basic animal behavior. Now it's necessary to consider the beyond, namely the idea of a God or Prime Mover, as Aristotle believed. Since Day 1 of human society, man has strived to understand the world around him. Ancient civilizations built ziggurats, the ancient form of churches, and put them in the center of towns as a foundation of whatever city and society used them. Since Day 1, we've reasoned and speculated on the idea of a God, something beyond, a higher power that we are subject to, a basis for behavior that goes beyond our rules and laws for each other. The idea of divine law, codified mostly by the different religions, is this representation. We have rules to keep us from killing each other but is that it? Do we have a greater purpose? It's easy to pick on religion and many people in our society (and we know who they are) have a field day with attacking religious people as simpletons and morons across the board. I feel that this misses the point. It is our very ABILITY to create religious ideologies that makes us special. Those that believe try to live according to those beliefs. Why? Not because of anything practical but because of POSSIBILITIES. In this way, we are truly being intellectually creative. Often crude, such as in the simple belief of a heaven or hell, but we're thinking of something that could be and that's vital. We're working our minds and we're trying to define and develop a soul, even if only rudimentarily.
I honestly have tried to just present the usual arguments and perceptions of how we as humans try to explain and justify our behaviors as a means of setting up my premise (I apologize if I've been overly wordy.) Now comes my argument of the possibility that the higher mind definition of ethics can largely, if not completely, be thrown out. This argument also rejects animal behaviors. There's nothing truly ethical about animal behaviors IMO because they take no effort to accomplish. Though we all do them at times, animal behaviors are instinctive and cheap. They're hardwired into us and involve no evolutionary process whatsoever. So, if ethics isn't driven by our higher mind or our animal passions, what is it driven by or is it even something we can disregard altogether?
My perspective comes from a mentally ill one. I'm bipolar and have had severe bouts of psychosis, very severe hallucinations and delusions at various times in my life. Driven by a hypersensitive idea of moral obligation, I have strived for much of my life to behave in a way that is a credit to myself and my community, to try to help mankind in as many ways as I can. As any bipolar person can tell you, at times it becomes incredibly difficult to control behaviors, be they high or low. We take medication to try and control symptoms. However, there are times when we're overwhelmed and will act out, occasionally driven by our delusions and hallucinations. This doesn't usually involve violence but will occasionally lead to violence against the self or others, usually for a reason considered valid by the mentally ill person. To put it bluntly, it's "crazy," not evil though it seems evil.
I'm a big fan of "spirit in which it's intended" as a moral compass. If we mean well yet do evil, we can't be blamed in a moral sense because we didn't intend for anything bad to happen. This is a common moral rule that humans have lived by, at least to some extent, for a long time. In an ethical sense, therefore, because mentally ill people are human and this is an argument of the complete human experience, ethics cannot be completely defined by effect. Violence, destruction and death cannot always be viewed as unethical because there are those that commit violence UNDER THE DELUSION that they are not doing evil. Some philosophers, like Sartre, argue that there are, essentially, no excuses for what is considered bad behavior. As a bipolar person, I do not present excuses. I present REASONS.
My conclusion is that ethics are not for human beings as biological creatures because we are flawed by nature and our behaviors are occasionally, also very flawed without evil intent. We sometimes do damage and not even know it. However, ethics IS a subject for the pure intellect, one that is capable of reason and thought on a very high level. In that way, ethics is an intellectual past time, one that we spend our time thinking about in the romantic hope that, one day, we will be able to live up to the standards we set. Like any ideology, it's based on POTENTIAL and a loose ethical set of standards often keeps us from destroying each other. I'm comfortable with intellect being linked to a spiritual sense because what is spirit but we concoct as being important and timeless, the same as ethics? It's not in our best interests to kill each other, unless we consider it necessary (moral?) in a war capacity. Our humanity leads us to these disasters all too frequently. The thought and the hope of the CONCEPT of ethics as a set of ideas, does us credit as creatures with the ability to think. We have potential. If we can ever learn to practice what we think, we'll have as close to comprehensive peace as possible, the very definition of morality. Will we grow in an intellectual sense and meet our concepts and dreams halfway or de-evolve back into mindless animals bent on killing each other? Time will tell. Some have attained, and will attain, such intellectual enlightenment. Sadly, I don't like our chances much as an overall society.
