Is Objective Morality Possible?

In reply to a dear friend abroad, who asked if I thought Objective Morality was possible (that being a morality that was true, in virtue of itself, and thereby agreed by all who think rationally) I replied with a brief outline of some of the troubles I’ve come across, namely, how different values interupt this goal. I’ll write more on this later, after I’ve done some more review. But here’s what I had to say to him:

tough one. A lot have tried. A lot of people think Kant did the best job, but I feel too ignorant this morning to try to recap that. I’m not sure if I believe that we could have one.

All moralities are based off defining what is good, the highest good, and filtering down from there if an action intends to achieve that good. You get into trouble when these value systems disagree. For the Greeks, for example, (who I think you would really dig) it was all about Excellence, or “Arete.” The best people, for them, were people like Achilles. Streangth, directness, honesty, passion, purpose. It was all about the achiever, about dominating. This gets messy when you compare it to modern Judaeo/Christian values which (go ahead and think of any Disney tale here) are about humility and modesty and chastity, the denial of the very thing the greeks went for. Nitzche is most famous for trying to expose modern morality as being a kind of “slave” morality. He uses this wonderful analogy to exemplify the two perspectives. The sheep, in their flock, look at the wolves, the powerful who eat them and make them slaves, and shun them and their evil ways. They are the good, harming no one, living simple lives, while the wolves are preditors, seeking to destroy them. This is Good VS. Evil. The wolves, on the otherhand, have no malice towards the sheep. “We have to eat them,” they say. They are wolves, and it is natural. They have no care for the sheep, except that they are right to eat sometimes. This is a Good vs. Bad morality.

So, in the now common way of slave morality (what we all basically live in, and which isn’t necessarily “wrong”) the good is a matter of sevility and meakness and humility. Evil is that which seeks to destroy you. On the more Greek side, there is no “evil” perse. It’s the good vs the bad. The good is a life of streangth and excellence, while the bad is the opposite, the weak.

Ideally, I tend to favor the Greek ideal, because I like ideals that start with positive for a positive. You get to say that the good life is this, it is positive, it is excellence, and establish lots of nice qualities, while the bad is not doing those things or living that life.

What I don’t like about current morality, what Nitzche called the “slave” morality, is that it starts by defning the ‘good’ in terms of not doing things, and I think that’s very difficult for people.

I actually wrote a little essay on the term “Maturity,” for example, about how most people didn’t seem to get this word right, because they were always defining it in terms of what not to do. Essentially, “don’t act childish.” This gave us an ever growing list of “don’ts”. Instead, I proposed a positive definition, where ‘maturity’ was defined as a clear, simple guideline, and immaturity, as any negative or opposite should be defined, is not doing that.