Not a single sane mind in this world could escape from the neccessity of asking the question of ," What should I do?" in his daily encounters. If there is one who can, I can't imagine. He would be an automaton and as lifeless as a robot or a zombie whose actions are formed by merely automatic presets and as absentmindly as it can gets. Life, is consists of actions taken, should be taken, whether you want it or not, that would be ultimately determine what becomes of you. We don't call it a life, if without actions, just as a story without set of events.
" What should I do?"
That phrase implies that man is a creature of choices, particularly volitional choices. Apart from that, it shows that we are creatures who seek values, something to keep and to gain in our course of life. Or else why should we ask that question? To keep and to seek values in order to what? The answer is in order to live. From this, the concept of value is formed.
From that question, there are numbers of other questions could be derived if one care to ask.
" Why do I want to do it?"
" How should I do it?"
" Is it good or bad?"
But, being a volitional creature, shouldn't he just save himself from all these encumberments by saying : just do it. Right? So why bother?
Well, these are the questions that were constantly asked by philosophers and conscientiously discussed under the subject known as ethics. One might as well ask why do we need ethics, after all?
To answer that, we must ask the preliminary question, " What is ethics?"
I am speaking from my views of Objectivism, where I learn ethics and primarily philosophy from, and which I hold as true. Ethics or morality is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions -the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. As to why man need ethics, it serves as a guideline, as a system which he refers to in taking a course of any action, that is properly constructed for him to achieve his goal whether it is an immediate one or for futher future.
What then? Where would we rely this guidelines upon? On what standard?
As an Objectivist, we put that our moral standard is what pertaining to 'life' itself. It is based on the premise that life is an end in itself. Hence, to derive from that concept of 'life', what would be considered as good, is what proper to life and vice versa.
Another thought come to surface, "How do one determine what is proper and what is not?". The answer is reason and reality. A man can choose whether he wants to take the task of thinking and bear responsibility of it or not. If he does, he needs his steady and focus consciousness all the time for his own life's sake, bearing in his mind that every step taken has consequences. Good or not? Reality will tell. While, if he doesn't, he will surrender his mind before the battle even begin and let it dictated by other's, which ultimately will cost him his life.
Our rational mind is the sole weapon given to us for our survival on earth. A rational man will use his reasoning capacity to its limit in defining his actions, his purposes and what he desires to gain. Although this doesn't guarentee him to be infallible and omnipotent, but so long as man hold his rational mind as his spear in the battle, he will realize if he's done a mistake, a miscalculations, and try to correct it by his own will. On the contrary, the irrational is the impossible. To believe in something nonsensory, non-rational, non-definable and supernatural source of knowledge is to put oneself in a chaos of contradictions that will end up in a perpetual surrender to the unknowable whimsical power.
Above all, why do we intent to keep our path straight, protecting our loved ones, and struggling day after day, in a pursuit of what? What is the purpose of this sort of conduct?
While man's life is the standard of values, his own life serves as the ethical purpose of every individual man. The purpose of living a life proper to a rational being -belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own.This means that our lives are selfishly ours to conduct and to lead. We, have to choose ourselves the purpose of it, the actions and the goals that we desire to achieve.
As I've said earlier, ethics is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions -the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. So, what are the values that man should seek to gain in his life, as a rational being?
Value is that which one acts to gain or keep, while, virtue is the act by which one gains or keeps it. Correspondingly, there are three major values and respectively their virtues which eventually leads to one's ultimate value : his own life.
- Reason - Rationality.
- Purpose - Productiveness.
- Self Esteem - Pride.
Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as his only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action. If one understand what this implies, which means that to be a rational man is to give full commitment to the reality of one's own existence, one will not fail to deduce from that fact that this will bring him to another corollary set of virtues : Independence, Intergrity, and Justice.
Independece means one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgement and of living by the work of one's own mind.
Intergrity means one must never sacrifice one's convictions to the opinions or wishes of others.
As a result, one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit which is Justice.
The second of the three values is Purpose with its derivative virtue : Productiveness. Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man's mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background but gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productiveness will not function effectively and productively without man's highest attributes of his character : creative ability, ambitiousness, self-assertive and refusal to bear uncontested disaster. Thus, a man with purpose will focus his mind on exercising his abilities to the fullest with the notion that his productive work is the central purpose of his life.
And the last value and virtue to be touched here is Pride - Self-Esteem. Pride aka "moral ambitiousness" means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one's own highest value by achieving one's own moral perfection. This is rather difficult, as to achieve that level of high self-esteem, one must not, and never failed to practice virtues one knows to be rational and never accepting any unearned guilt. Had he earned any of it that resulted from his flaws, he shouldn't leave it uncorrected. By this Pride, a man can assure himself that his life is worth sustaining because this is what makes him a man, a self-made soul.
Ethis is an enormous subject which I couldn't cover in one sitting. This is merely a simplification and the essentials that I think serve as the basics and preliminary ideas on this subject should one decided to pursue it any further.
As a conclusion, the Objectivist holds the basic principle of their ethics is that life is an end in itself so does man, is an end in himself and he has to live for his own sake. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.
p/s - Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. As John Galt says, "Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy -a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction.... Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions."
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