Writing for everyone.

I am writing this for everybody to understand - and hopefully appreciate-why I do what I do. I will try to use a vocabulary which everyone can understand and to show the steps behind my reasoning as clearly as possible.

Today I shall be writing about ethics- the general rules which tell us about what we should and should not do in life.

Nowadays almost everyone has his or her own personal outlook on life- and therefore how one should live it. When one sees the vast amount of different opinions which exist it is very tempting to just jump straight to the conclusion that life- and therefore ethics- are different for everyone. This kind of reasoning is called "relativism" - the denial of there being any absolute and universal truth.

Now while it is true that as of yet there doesn't exist one fully complete proven ethical law- it can be shown how from the vast majority of different views one can quickly narrow it down to only a handful of possible choices.

Let us first begin to do so by proving that some absolute things must exist. This is VERY simple: just think about the phrase "Everything is relative." If you except it as true then you create a paradox because you have excepted an absolute truth while at the same time saying that absolute truths don't exist! Therefore some things must be absolute.

So now we know that some things are absolute and some things are relative. The relative things depended on other relative things which depended on other relative things etc etc etc until eventually the relative things will have to depend on the absolute things.

Therefore we can see that we do not have an infinite number of possible situations- only a limited number. Situation A differs from Situation B because of how they relate to an absolute thing- but since there is a limited number of absolute things and a limited number of how they relate to other things then there is a limited number of situations.

WAIT DON'T CLOSE YOUR WINDOW. OK, I admit that it isn't as simplistic as I promised- but things get simpler from here on. The summary of what we said till now is simple: There is a limited number of possible situations which all have something to do with an absolute truth. Now that is important because it means that if we can define what these absolute things are we can come up with a general rule for every possible situation- since they ALL relate to the same absolute things. See? Simple.


Now then. These situations all have something in common: a person is making a choice. So for our purposes we can forget for now about all the irrelevant pieces of a person- bones, organs, skin etc. I'm not saying you can live without them- but when considering the case of making a choice the important piece of a person is the choice-making bit. Now we have to understand how this bit works.

Well, overall, people make choices depending on their list of priorities. They weigh out what is important to them and make their choice based on that. This is were the relative piece comes in: because different things are important to different people.

BUT- importance is also a relative thing. The leftover lasagna is MUCH more important to a starving man than it is to a rich, well-fed man. So is there one specific thing we should give importance to?

On a personal level- not really. We all have our likes and dislikes- there isn't a general rule for that. But when you think about ethics things change. Because relative to ethics- things do have a different importance- and this time in general, not on a personal level.

For example: people are the very very very most important things in ethics- because they are the only conscious beings which can make an ethical choice. It doesn't take much brainpower to figure out that if people are the only things which have ethics- then they're the most important things in ethics.

I AM NOT SAYING THAT ALL OTHER LIFE IS USELESS. I am simply saying that people have more importance than other living things when it comes to ethics. Therefore helping other people should be at the top of everybody's priority-list, and animals/nature/God/religion/money /etc. in second-place.

So now we have a rough sketch of what everybody's priority list should look like. But still some people might say that "helping other people" is relative too. Well, on a non-ethical level yes. But like I said before- in ethics we have to give number one importance to the choice-making ability of people. So helping other people essentially means making them more in control of their lives.

A quick summary of helping other people is promoting:

Peace
Freedom
Health
Morality

Therefore- we can see that even though we cannot (yet) come up with a full law for ALL ethics- we at least have these four guideline: peace, freedom, health, morality. And anything which goes against any one of these can be called utterly wrong without the need of going into relativism.

Therefore ANYONE, ANYWHERE, at ANY TIME can prove that racism, violence, abortion, imprisonment, torture, sexism and many other vices are all wrong. Nobody can ever say " Well it depends"

Hopefully I have managed to keep this clear and easy to follow for the everyday man-on-the-street. If not I sincerely apologise. I do hope, however, that those who understood my reasoning can see why I insist on philosophizing about ethics- with general laws about ethics we can be sure and determined when it comes to fighting against injustices all over the world.