Ethics is complete bosh

"Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." -David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

Kant's categorical imperative is a classic example of setting up Reason in the place of God as our Divine Dictator. To say there is one norm, whether we call it Religion or Reasonable, is to deny the inherent multiplicity of nature. It is to establish another code of conduct on the false edifice of a supposed absolute. Let's not be fooled if our absolute is cloaked in the jargon of reason, being called 'categorical' and our 'Thou shalts' and 'Thou shalt nots' are dressed up as an 'imperative.' The one categorical imperative is that there must be no categorical imperatives. No values, no morality, no set of ethics is absolute.

Yes, yes, ethical proscriptions are relative... I am sure everyone has heard this at some point and understood its implications to varying degrees. The problem that arises from denying the validity of the old forms of altruistic morality and ethical systems is the arising of various egocentric moralities. They are ethics nonetheless and therefore restrictions.

The problem with ethical egoism, that we ought to be motivated by self-interest, is that there are no objective 'oughts.' An 'ought' is only meaningful in relation to a relative standard of value. This also presupposes that the person knows their own self-interest. It most certainly smacks of the old forms of ethics with its 'ought'... implying some absolute standard of conduct.

The problem with rational egoism, that the rational thing to do is always in one's own self-interest, is manifold. It depends on an assumption that a certain line of conduct is 'more rational' than another, another assumption of an absolute standard. "‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my greater, and to have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter." (David Hume) It depends on an assumption that the person in question not only knows what their own self-interests truly are, but also that it is possible to know one's own interests completely in the first place. I suggest that our motives will forever lie in the indefinite reaches of the unconscious, with our awareness only being able to grasp the decision at the end of the process.

The problem with psychological egoism, the idea that we always act in accordance with our own self-interest, is not that we apparently perform acts of genuine altruism and therefore the proposition is untrue. Instead, the notion of a coherent ego, or self, to which we supposedly owe our locus of motives should instead be attacked. In the end, the most we can say is that each 'person' is a relatively coordinated, self-sustaining gestalt of impulses & impressions.

The actual motives behind all actions - those unconscious impulses that breach the threshold only after a long process of internal deliberation - do not distinguish between self and other, and most certainly have no rational 'purpose' in mind. The fact that they may intertwine & overlap to form the entities we know as people with their bodies and psyches simply show complex arrangements and interactions, not necessarily entirely selfish entities moving about. Further, each 'person' is an open system - they receive and give, consciously and unconsciously. For every breath we take in, we must breathe out, and for everything we eat and drink, we must excrete something. We always construe altruism in terms of human to human but we never think of how altruistic a person is to their cells, to the fungus which feed on their trash, to the plants fed by their fertilizer, etc. We never consider how even wiping out a human civilization might be considered altruistic to the surrounding flora and fauna.