Assignment Four – “Higher Laws“

Do we live in the best of all possible worlds? I don’t think so. There surely is more than one possible course, our world could have taken and therefore there has to be one, that is the best. If we are looking for an ultimately true moral, this best world definitely is the place where we would find it. Unfortunately it is not in our humble human power to decide which one is the best. But we could approximate by standards on which we have to come to a conclusion. Unfortunately, as history shows and psychology dictates, we won‘t come to a conclusion about that, because the opinions what is best for mankind are as numerous as there are people who think about it. Allthough logically there has to be the one best model, our subjectivity is always in the way.

People talking about utilitarism usually mean a consequentialist—the quality of an action is evaluated by its consequences—system, that rates actions with regard to the overall amount of happiness that is generated by them. There are other forms of utilitarism, but this is very likely to be the one that Nagel has in mind. And it is a system that seems to have a lot of objective insight and therefore feels very logical and sensible to very many people; this does include me as well.

But this utilitarism, that I described here, is not a system at all. It is a basic idea upon which a utilizable system could be build. There have to be rules for evaluating the happiness that is produced by an action, but neither do we have a scale or unit to express definite amounts of happiness nor do we have a way of measuring happiness other than our intuition. This is where we encounter the problem of subjectivity again.

And even if we were able to agree on a moral system, that is completely based on common sense, we have “an animal in us“ (p. 167), as Thoreau describes it, that has all the urges we decided to oppress. Thoreau says that whoever is living after the best moral code is blessed and “[h]e is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.“ (p. 168) But to which degree can our inner urges be oppressed whithout resulting in a complete loss of indiviualism? I am not going to answer this rather big question, but it turnes the attention to the problem with questions of moral. It is impossible to draw clear lines because life is more complex than any logical system, we could ever establish.

All in all, Thoreau and Nagel indeed are right, mathematically there can be—and has to be—the best universal moral ideal, but there still is the individual at the end of this chain of command, that has to execute this ideal. And there will always—even with the best possible system—be someone who decides not to; and as long as this is the case the system is not in effect.