Godless Morality

You can of course switch the question of moral value to a question about health, but switching is what this is and the initial question remains unanswered. I don't see how buttering bread is either healthy or unhealthy, so considering that doesn't help me make a choice either way, so perhaps this is not an ideal example at this point.

But let's consider that it was clearly on one side and not the other. Let's say it is of great health benefit to butter bread. Does that mean it is a good thing to do? Should we be doing it? If so, why? Conversely, if it is highly unhealthy, does it mean we should avoid doing it? Again, if so, then why? Remember, with morality replaced by health, health value is the only thing you can argue with. While the question of "why be moral?" is a forever unsoluble one, I submit that covering it up with a layer of "why be healthy?" doesn't quite make it any easier. If anything, it just puts a new layer of complexity over it for no reason and once with a lot of effort we get around that new layer, we are back where we started with all the problems we were faced with before.

As for the coming back of things, I for the moment fail to see that it is actually so. Yes, some things do, yes, perhaps even most things do. But we don't know why they do if they do or why they don't if they don't and we don't even know in most cases whether any one thing was the coming back of another thing or of which thing. To put words like illness in there doesn't demonstrate that there is a correlation anywhere in place nor does it have any moral implications which is what this thread is about. Besides, how do you know it is them who are ill and not us? See how the health argument really doesn't get us anywhere? We just shifted the issue to a new layer, given ourselves more hurdles to overcome. That is what I meant that it doesn't help us make choices. Not even with the golden rule it would because ultimately we can't without affirming the consequent say that to follow that rule would be healthy.

Disclaimer: Health in most senses is very much quantifiable and identifiable. It is when we make it the basis of our moral framework that it fades into obscurity. Medical science is not concerned with metaethics. I have in this post used the term 'health' as it applies to the context of the discussion, not to the medical disciplines.

remember - my first post here i expressed that my view about morality is that i see it more as an issue of health -

individual health and system health

and the health of the relationships between individuals and the systems/societies in which they live

the way i see it, there are no morally nuetral acts and this is because i dont view morality as a value judgement of good and evil

a 24 yr old marine eating two pieces of wheat bread lightly buttered

a chain smoking 68 yr old double bypass patient (heart operation commonly associated with cholesterol) who spends less than an hour on his feet in an average day and who will eat an entire loaf of bread and a tub of butter and call that dinner

when viewed in terms of morality, things like how we eat or what sort of entertainment we pursue are to a geat extent considerable as neutral - viewed from the lens of individual health; physical health yes absoluty, but also psychological health - deveopmental maturity, emotional intelligence, spiritual openness, commitment and courage - then such things take on broader implications

even simple things like butter and movies are things which both indicate and influence the overall health of the individual (and in a broader view, cultural) health

so we're back to having to determine precisely what health means

and the first condition imo of psychological health is the ability to proccess relevant information and integrate it into the existing program, then to make an appropriate decision based on the overall data - and then to follow through with that decision

so basically it is ultimtely the individuals responsibility to come to an understanding of what it means to be healthy and what it means to have a healthy relationship with other individuals and with the systems of which they are a part

these systems can be generically labeled as "ecology"
but it has to be understood that ecology in this context includes things such as ones job and ones local community every bit as much as "the environment"

lol

thats kind of what i mean - "the environment" is spoken of as if it is something "out there"

like it only exists in the rain forest or the middle of the ocean

the environment is everytbing you see when you look around

thats the system you live in

health is a matter of our own development and relationships with and within our systems

again this is only my view and if i talk as if i expect everyone else to follow along thats not my expectation

im just expressing my personal interpretation

i know that they are ill by a number of indicators - one of the more interesting is that the system they live in has a regualtory mechanism to weed them out - or put another way - theyre headed for a crash no matter what choices they make because at this point theyre so far out of touch with healthy choices, choices which are in harmony with their ecosystems/ecologies, that they dont even recognisze the healthy choices as plausible optionals

theyve taken so thouroughly antagonistic roles against their ecologies which were so inherently beyond their personal abilities to maintain that they cant prevent their own destrcuction at this point

this particular feature is somewhat more difficult to quantify (for me anyway) but its a legitimate phenomena of the natural world

natural systems have self regulatory mechanisms

immune systems so to speak which deliberately target unhealthy elements within the system

i know they are ill because they so misread their system that they caused that system to regulate them

this is not to say that every person who is swallowed by their ecosystems is ill

ecosystems feed on whatever they can catch
thats the predatory element of life at work

health from another perspective is measured by ones ability to not only survive the dangers of the ecosystem, but to thrive in spite of them

the ability to adapt to the changes of the moment

from this perspective the "why" of health is clear - because otherwise we die!
we die regardless of course but maintanence of health gives us a longer and more "successful" life

and here its not to say that everyone who seems to be successful is necessarily healthy - large systems produce all kinds of circumstances and seeming randoms

but the truely healthy can adapt to a very wide range of ecologies and the truely unhealthy cannot adapt to many at all

morality - in the traditional usage - relies on the judgements and impersonal determinations of others to offer value to our lives through a set of black and white clear cut parameters which may or may not be appropriate to our situation

killing is said to be evil, as is lying - and still we justify and even sanctify both killing and lying under certain circumstances

from the lens of health we understand that its never healthy to be UNhealthy

but the ambiguity is not quite so ambiguous when we have a reliable set of criteria for determining and maintaining health - well being - harmonious actuallization within a given ecology

also sometimes an individual actually elevates the cultural sophistication of the entire system

something like an einstein or an aristotle but even these exceptional people are limited to the potential achievement/actualization inherent within the outer limits of the system

aristotle could not hope to elevate the field of robotics for example
though there are probably aristotles among us every few generations or so i think, its just that they dont always have the luck of fortunate birth or effective cultivation by the gatekeepers of their ecologies

predatory elements

many lives are lost in the natural world simply because of inexperience and physical vulnerabilities of youth

on that note we are predators ourselves and another view of health is our ability to feed within our ecologies

this is broader than simply aquiring food - in our ecologies we can correlate any kind of desirable outcome with successful predation or actualization within the system

getting a good job and an honest devoted spouse are forms of actualization

and all of these are viewable as the ability to navigate and utilize the elements of our ecologies

another sign of poor health is disproportional consumption

to bite off more than we can chew

or to be unable to support our basic needs

all things in moderation lol

belive that the essential desire to BE

the will that developed or was expressed the first time "something" came from "nothing"

that drive to exist
to bloom

i call that love

imo all love begins with this

i dont know how to explain this

but this is the meaning of health, by my view

to bloom
to become
to actualize

somewhere people became confused and we began to feel that this meant some kind of battle with each other

that we have to defeat one another
that we are dangerous to each other

we are dangerous because we view each other as dangerous

and in a way, the most violent are also the most fearful

and the most traumatized

this has nothing to do with interpretations of god

the deists are right imo that if there is a god it is manifest within the system that it created

and if we want to understand god we have to always seek to better understand the systems it made - they express the truth of god as the lines express the truth of the poet

though no one poem - or one system - will contain the whole of the truth

but then again maybe it does lol
the holotropic mind in a holographic universe!

this line of thinking takes one eventually into a place of great esteem for all life - the self as a micro of the whole as a macro of the deeper truth within the self - and god and morality are just words we use to make it easy to speak of these things to people who arent ready or arent willing to understand or accept them