| | My own view is that your own life should be the standard for how you live your life. Are your actions benefitting your life? Are they harming it? Which choice better benefits you, all things considered? How exactly do you determine whether an action is "benefiting" or "harming" your "life"? You must then be implying that "life" is a goal to attain/keep attained. Life is the process of self maintenance, which for greater success includes strategies such as resource collection and reproduction.
When your brain cells stop communicating and the connections between them and the biological material they are made with are consumed by micro organisms: your conscious process ceases to operate and your memories are destroyed by the decay. This is the death of your body and your conscious body which once had reasoned motive power in the world, now no longer. Some of your ideas which you communicated with others or recorded on books etc still exist, but ideas that were unique to you are forever lost (unless convergent invention).
When you die, your exact design is forever lost (unless you are cloned or your DNA is recorded). If you never had children, then all of your genes will then have fewer copies (will be less redundant) in the world. For your genes that had unique differences from all others, they are forever lost (unless convergent evolution).
This is death. Death is when a relationship between parts of reality ceases to exist.
To describe us at the micro level, we actually do not strictly "live" and then "die" all at once. We continually change over time, we start off small, grow and increase our abilities, then at some point in everyone's life so far in human history, parts of our bodies begin to fail and one by one our brain cells permanently lose their ability to function (this can happen quickly or over a very long period of time). Even when we are growing, one could say our old relationships within our bodies have "died"/changed and new relationships have formed.
Natural selection is the process by which designs (relationships between parts of reality) are copied (with various degrees of duplication differences), and the designs that exist for longer (via durability or reproduction) do exist for longer, and the ones that are destroyed for one reason or another cease to exist.
So now that we have the definitions down...
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You say that one's morality (one's process of deciding on which action is better than others) should be based on whether your actions benefit or harm your own life.
You said should without having should in your premise. You failed to identify the premise!
Here's the deduction:
1. If you want to perform actions which will tend to bring you happiness (ala your design's interpretation of your state: happiness = the identification of goal attainment) then the most likely thing that will bring you happiness is to perform actions which result in the attainment of goals that you have.
2. The process of natural selection makes complex things that (in general) perform actions in order to benefit their own life. Of course there are exceptions, some things have designs that fail in this goal. By definition, this is to say that natural selection designs things to have the goal of performing actions to benefit their own life (each instance has different degrees of success). Hence this is the general pattern of human's goals as well.
Conclusion: 2: Humans have the goal to live (to varying degrees, hard to know to what extent for a particular human because reality is so complex). 1: Achieving your goals brings you happiness. 1 + 2 = Achieving life brings you happiness (to varying degrees).
So here's the final concluding statement: If you want to be happy then acting to benefit your life is the most likely way to achieve happiness.
That's where your should comes from!
Cheers,
Dean
(Edited by Dean Michael Gores on 11/23, 7:48am)
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