My days of writing disertations on subject such as this are long over. You seem to be advocating for the "greater good" basis. THe problem with the greater good is why should I accept that the greater good is what is good, particularly if it doesn't help me and in fact might hurt me. Trying to remember terminology from my ethics courses but it has been over 40 years.
Ultimately greater good can and does result in the tyranny of the majority. As aregued in Star Trek II, does the need of the many outweight the needs of the few or the one. Is it right when I have 2 pigs and you have no pigs for you to take one of my pigs because it is for the greater good. We would say no, unless there is a government and have society take it from me. Which is why libertarians would say that most forms of taxation are legalized theft.
Obviously there is most to that model than that, but as I said my days of writing novels are over.
The other thing to look is saying that you taking my pig is wrong in the first place has no basis for it being wrong, if there is no objective standard. You need to eat, you have the "right" to life so how can it be wrong? Do you know the story of "Alive" the rugby team thalt crashed in the Andes and lived off the dead people flesh. Most would say that there was nothing wrong with what they did. But what if no one had died and instead one of them actually killed one of them to eat, so the rest could live. Is that wrong? How about if they took a vote to decide who to kill? How about if they held a lottery?
BTW you are right I am arguing for an objective (as much as possible) to determine how we should live.
I'm not advocating for the "greater good" basis, per se. IMHO I'm looking for an ethical system that is most consistent with human nature.
I don't think we want to devolve into a pure utilitarianism society. I don't think THAT fits human nature, because I think humanity works best when we build a structure that believes in the existence of, and the protection of, human rights and civil liberties. Many of our biggest failings as a species occurred either before we really started to do that, or in countries which don't do that now. (Which isn't to say that we're not failing, in many ways, every day now.) In pure utilitarianism, individual rights are held in lower esteem than "the greater good", and I think that leads to dark places.
So it's more of a thought experiment. Assuming that there is no true "objective" standard, but that we have the mirror of human nature to reflect against:
- Where, ethically, are we doing things right in the modern era?
- Where, ethically, are we at risk of going off the rails in the modern era?
For example, I would argue that we're at risk of going off the rails with divisive identity politics. We seem, as a society, to be segmenting across various identities (race, class, religion, sex, orientation/gender, political party, etc) and to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort both
highlighting our differences and trying to compete for which group is most oppressed/aggrieved. We've invented the concept of "micro-aggressions" for when you're actually not oppressed in any actual way but you're supposed to feel aggrieved.
Ergo, I think we took the concept of being different and respecting our differences in the wrong direction. Instead of acknowledging and celebrating our differences while focusing on the many things that we share, we've increasingly used it to "other" anyone who isn't exactly like ourselves.
And that's a human nature thing. Going back to our earliest societies there was always "us" and the "out-group/other". That is something that was perhaps necessary back in the days when we were small bands of hunter-gatherer tribes. Anyone outside of your tribe could not be trusted and it was probably useful to "other" them. But IMHO "othering" in modern society is one of the "bad things" in human nature that we should be trying to restrain. Instead, we seem to increasingly be leaning into encouraging it.
