Nothingness

The question is often posed (and likely has been since questions were invented), "Why is there something rather than nothing?". This question has special philosophical and religious importance and of course I am not about to suggest that I am in any position to provide a definitive answer. With that said, I must admit that I find the question a peculiar one. In order to explain why, a slight diversion is required.

I have typically reserved this blog for musings of a strictly philosophical nature in the past, especially with regards to ethics. However, physics is my trade, and my original intention was never that the blog was to be exclusively philosophical. It is therefore with no guilt (but plenty of fore-warning) that I am about to introduce an element of physics to this particular musing, and I will have to ask that the less scientifically-minded of my readers bear with me as I will try to keep things as simple as possible.

In the popular literature one of the more commonly referred to principles of quantum mechanics is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is commonly expressed as meaning that a particle's position and momentum cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrary precision or, as it is usually misleadingly rendered: one can either know a particle's position but not its velocity, or its velocity but not its position. Mathematically this is understood by the equation ΔxΔp ≥ ħ/2: the product of the uncertainty in position (Δx) and the uncertainty in momentum (Δp) is greater than or equal to half the reduced Planck constant (a very small but importantly non-zero number).

What is less well-known is that the Uncertainty Principle applies to many other pairs of properties, perhaps the next most common pair of which is energy and time -- ΔEΔt ≥ ħ/2. This equation has far-reaching implications. Suppose we consider a small patch of empty space and contemplate the energy content there, if any. We know from the Uncertainty Principle that for any finite amount of time that you care to measure you will find your portion of 'empty' space has a decidedly non-zero energy (this energy is called the vacuum energy). This is not a question of the accuracy of your tools, it is a direct consequence of the wave-like nature of particles in quantum mechanics and is fundamentally built-in to the way the Universe works.

So our little region of space has a little bit of a buzz to it, so what? We now turn to the most famous equation in the world, Einstein's equation of mass-energy equivalence E = mc². This suggests that from the vacuum energy matter can be created, although only in the form of virtual particles (vacuum fluctuations) with short lifespans as the Uncertainty Principle prohibits 'borrowing' energy from the vacuum indefinitely. (Sidenote: this is slightly misleading, as the relation E = mc² only applies to real particles, with virtual particles lying slightly "off-shell" where E ≠ mc². Even so, mass-energy equivalence remains valid and interestingly, the further off-shell a virtual particle is the shorter its lifetime, exactly as the Uncertainty Principle demands.) This means that out there in space, a sea of virtual particles are constantly flashing in and out of existence. This may sound like the ramblings of a madman, but so far as modern physics can tell it is an accepted fact.

Now, to give relevance to this slight digression, let's return to the question that sparked this blog post - why is there something rather than nothing? Well, what is nothing? A typical immediate response is to think of some small region of space deep in the void with nothing remotely nearby -- a classical vacuum. As I hope I have just demonstrated, however, this notion of nothingness is flawed as this region of space is not truly empty but is populated by virtual particles, fluctuations in the various quantum fields that permeate the universe. It seems we will have to reconsider what nothingness is, then.

Let us put aside quantum concerns for the moment. Even still the argument can be made that this does not constitute a reasonable view of nothingness. Wheeler's famous summary of general relativity (a purely classical theory) is: "Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve". We have forgotten that our region of empty space in a classical universe still contains, or rather consists of spacetime. In fact, we can do away with relativity altogether and still argue that we are envisioning a Universe endowed with space and time. Some may be reluctant to call these 'something', but since they have properies they are most definitely not nothing. Thus we must abandon our picture of a Universe with any notion of distance or duration, as nothingness precludes any such concept.

Now we are confronted with trying to conceive of a Universe which is literally nothing in the senses I have described above. There is so light, no matter, no particles of any description, not even space or time. Though it may seem unlikely, modern physics has the tools to deal with such a scenario, albeit in a somewhat imperfect way given our current knowledge of physics is not complete. What quantum field theory (perhaps the most accurate theory of physics ever discovered) suggests is that this nothingness is an unstable state and will inevitably and spontaneously turn into something. It seems that the way physics works just precludes nothingness from being a viable possibility. Problem solved, right?

Not quite. There is is one last resort for the hold-out, and that is to claim that nothingness is not only the absence of objects, fields, space, time and the rest, but also of physical law. While there is nothing wrong with this definition in principle, in practice it is nonsense. It only seems reasonable in my opinion that if someone is to establish their own definition of what constitutes 'nothingness' they should do so in an explicable way. This is simply not possible as it is so far outside of human experience that there is no reasonable way to explain it. Any analogy will fall short, any visualisation will falter; we had enough trouble trying to imagine a Universe with no notion of space or time!

What's more, how can we prove or disprove that such a nothingness can actually exist if we have deprived ourselves of all our tools for answering such a question? The typical recourse is to the supernatural, perhaps explaining that God somehow creates something from this absolute nothingness, which is established by hypothesis. But if this nothingness is so perfect, how can there be a God there at all? What meaning does the concept of God hold in such a scenario? Clearly He must have no physical properties as there are no physical laws, and cannot be within the Universe as it is by hypothesis nothing, so He must reside outside the nothingness, and yet be able to change it. It is at this point that I throw my hands up in the air and ask in exasperation what such a statement means, not in a deep or mystical sense but rather as a basic statement in the English language. It seems that this desperate endeavour has led us down a path which is, as I suggested earlier, nonsensical. We might as well discuss the colour of a red green, or the weight of an idea for all the progress such an approach can yield.

It may seem disingenuous to argue that we limit our definition of nothingness to what we, as flawed people, can comprehend, but in fact we have no other recourse than abandoning the question altogether. Given the curious nature of human beings, I doubt we will be able to withstand the temptation to revisit it, and so our hand is forced. It seems to me at least that we must restrict ourselves to discussing the question of why there is something rather than nothing in strictly physical terms, and that is why the question of why there is something rather than nothing strikes me as being especially peculiar in contrast to other important philosophical questions.

Just have a think about it

Fact: people don't like thinking. Okay, that's not quite true. Lots of people, myself included, enjoy thinking a great deal. Oftentimes you'll see me staring at some uninteresting point in space, perhaps a wall or the corner of the table or somebody's knee, and I'll have this dead look on my face and my eyes will probably seem glazed over. That's me thinking. It's not infrequently more interesting than talking to other people, depending on who those people are, of course. Even so, though I may claim the contrary, I prefer not thinking to thinking. Of course, you can't stop thinking (if you think you can, you're only lying to yourself); what I mean is that it's much easier to sit and accept something you may be seeing or reading than thinking about it. If not for that fact, it would be significantly more difficult to enjoy a lot of things, such as films, to give only a single example. And hey, there's nothing wrong with sitting back and just saying, yes, I do believe it's perfectly believable to drive a car into a helicopter. If you can't do that, you're going to miss out on a lot of cool stuff.

Be careful, though. That sort of mental relaxation can only be safely enjoyed under certain circumstances, much in the way that physical relaxation can only be safely enjoyed under certain circumstances. To give an example, it would not be overly wise to put on a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts, rub in some sunscreen and sit down on your deck chair when you've only just recently stumbled into an orgy of furious bears. There's a time and a place, is what I'm getting at. The troublesome part of it is that it's much, much less obvious when we should allow ourselves to drop our guard mentally than physically, and because it's so much easier to not think than it is to think, it's tempting to simple drop our guard and leave it dropped, and if worst comes to worst, so what? We'll just deal with that later.

As you can imagine, I don't think that's a terribly bright idea. Leaving your guard dropped can make you susceptible to the machinations of vicious people, and that sort of thing can get people killed. To quote a great man, don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out. That, however, is not the primary subject of this post (perhaps I will address it at another time). What I would prefer to talk about instead is the idea of coming up with your own philosophy, and by 'philosophy' I mean a comprehensive system of belief in regards to your being. I do not recall having written about this before, although I most certainly have spoken to people about it, so if you have heard this before, I most profusely apologise, although perhaps you would like to stay and read a little anyway?

I think it takes a deal of courage to try and form your own philosophy. Of course, having (to some extent, at least) done that, I would be the sort of person to make such a claim, I know, but hear me out. If you want to come up with a philosophy of your own, that means you have to look at everything you have come to know about life and the way the world works, both through you own experience and through what people have told you, and this is harder than it sounds. Imagine reassessing everything that your friends, parents, teachers, leaders, religious figures and so on have told you and being prepared to say no, to disagree, and to try and come up with something different, with solid reasoning behind it. The hubris of it! you might think. To deny the collective wisdom of hundreds or thousands of people before you and to try and replace it with something you might even claim to be superior. To not only turn your back on this sort of societal tradition but to go against it requires serious balls.

You need more than balls though. You can selectively reject what you might previous have believed and instead substituted it with your own thoughts, carefully developed by considering all the possibilities you have considered, and still be a complete moron. Rejection for the sake of rebelliousness is not only intellectually lazy but it is the antithesis of a proper philosophy, which requires the support of logical underpinnings and fundamental principles. That's why nobody respects teenagers who walk around with more metal in their face than a Holden Kingswood and more eye shadow than a cheap hooker (I'm probably going to cop it for that one).

What you need in addition to testicular fortitude is to think, because unsurprisingly, reviewing the fundamental tenets that have guided everything you have ever thought or felt or done and all of the secondary notions that have accompanied them is tough, and that isn't even the whole of the job, because if you reach the frightening conclusion that the arguments used to justify your way of life have some pretty big holes in them that can't be reasonably filled, your going to have to come up with new conclusion to replace them, and those conclusions are going to need some airtight reasoning of their own to support them. Nobody's saying everything has to be an original idea or an original argument, of course, because the fact of the matter is that someone else might already be right about it all, and there's no point punishing yourself for that. The hard part is finding out which people you think are right and adapting their thoughts for your new philosophy.

So let's say you've done all that. It's taken a lot of effort and a hell of a long time, but you finally have a mostly complete philosophy (complete enough to use until the rest of the gaps are filled at least). Congratulations! Job's finally done, eh? Well, no. This is the hardest part of all: teaching yourself to live by your new philosophy. Now, chances are your philosophy is pretty much based on how you were already rolling, so you might not have to change much at all, but if you've done the job right you'll have found yourself needing to make some pretty significant changes somewhere along the line, like having to teach yourself to think or even feel differently than how you used to, and I don't think anybody's going to be stupid enough to tell you that's an easy feat. What it requires is denying yourself the luxury of not thinking virtually all the time until you satisfy yourself that you've changed your habits, and that's the sort of thing that can't be done in a day or month or a year.

Now, maybe you've followed me this far but think I'm just putting on a show, saying how hard it is to do all the stuff I've done and such. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I want to do is try to explain how challenging it is to develop your own philosophy, but also illustrate how fulfilling and ultimately how freeing it is. After all, what greater challenge is there than learning how to live? If you can overcome that challenge, you can certainly overcome any other challenge in your life. After all, that's what your new philosophy is for. So that's why I'd like to take a moment here with this post to urge you guys, as you see in the New Year, to have a go at developing a philosophy of your own. Take it step by step: read some philosophical material you otherwise would have no interest in and evaluate it critically. If you read something that strongly appeals to you, perhaps you could build from that. Just have a think about it.

The parable of the raft

Three men were trapped on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. 'Trapped' may be the wrong word to use here; the island was a hospitable one, and offered much in the way of food, water and shelter, and since they found themselves there one day the three men had led lives of relative comfort. However, they agreed that the time had come for them to leave the island.
The first man threw himself into the ocean and was dragged by the currents almost immediately down the beach. He struggled to stay above water before he eventually scrambled on to some rocks and pulled himself back inland before trudging back to their camp by the beach.
The second man tut-tutted the first and pulled out from the jungle a raft. "The other man is a fool to try and swim through those currents," he said. "I took my shelter and fashioned a raft from the wood. I'll have no such problems as him." So he dragged his raft out into the water, stepped on board and pushed off from the sand. He drifted out into the water with a grin on his face directed squarely on the first man, still dripping wet, but still set on swimming from the island.
But soon enough the current took the second man too, and pulled him down the shore. As he rounded the rocks, he passed out of the sight of the third man. "That man thinks himself superior for his raft," he mused, "but whether he is taken back to shore or left at sea, he will always be at the mercy of the currents."
And so the third man pulled out a raft of his own, made also from his shelter, but unlike the first man, he had taken the time to venture away from the camp to the interior of the island to gather materials for fashioning oars and a sail of palm leaves, and so when he cast himself out into the water, unlike the first two men who were doomed to follow where the fickle currents took them, he was able to sail away from the island, away from its currents, and go where he wanted.

In this story, the camp represents childhood, situated on an island of wider formative influences. The currents are indifferent desires, such as for wealth and fame, which both come about from the presence of the island itself and surround it. There must come a time for all youth to venture out into the world, both literally and metaphorically, and grow up. All the men in the story recognise this. The first man tries to do so, but is subject to his desires and almost becomes lost in them, to the point where he ventures back to the safety of what he knows, his bubble of influence, to keep from drowning. The second man knows that one cannot expect to swim against the current and succeed, so he builds a raft, and thinks himself all the cleverer for it, despite the fact that he is just as subject to the whim of his desires as the first man. Though the lessons learnt from childhood keep him afloat, he still goes blindly where his wants take him, and so he will never stray far from the roost. The third man recognises, however, that he must draw on a wider experience if he is to ever grow into his own man. Drawing from other parts of the island allows him to give his life new direction away from the island and towards other lands of learning and growing.

Most young adults are akin to the second man. They look at those whose lives are governed by crime or the bottle and think themselves all the wiser because they have taken up the trappings of adulthood, responsibilities towards themselves and others, and are content enough, blind to the fact that they follow the whims of worldly desires, those same destructive influences as the ones they look down on. When people come to reach the age of adulthood, they are fooled by their parents and their education into thinking their raft is a steel-hulled ship, capable of going anywhere and doing anything, even staying out at sea indefinitely. No, such ships take time and expertise to construct, and in order to do so one must visit many ports on many islands, and upgrade their raft from there. That is why it is the third man we should try to be most like. Draw from as wide a pool of learning as you can (the sort of learning about life, not the sort you find in a textbook) and consciously try to construct as good a raft as you can. Only then will you be able to reach those other ports to improve your boat even still. It may expose you to the elements, but isn't that worth it for the possibility of true freedom? Better to work at becoming a truly free person than allow yourself to always be brought back to that same old shore, and let the one that bore you become the one you die on.

The lesson is this: experience is knowledge of life. Learn experience where you can and then use that experience to learn more, because the more experience you garner the wiser you become, and wisdom is the key to freedom from desire, the only true freedom. Do not be seduced by your wants and "needs", they are phantasms and, if not heeded, will keep you from attaining the wisdom that grants you freedom and the happiness that follows.

Ethics, Chapter 3: Actors and Actions

Despite the apparent nebulousness of the topic at hand, it is trivially easy to make a clear delineation between conventional notions of morality and the morality of virtue. Conventionally, morality lies in action. It is what you do that is important, morally speaking. It's not hard to confirm this at a basic level; think of the problems I offered in Chapter 2. Why were they hard to resolve morally? Because every possible action leads to a result that is undesirable, or the possible actions themselves were in some way undesirable. Think of any other moral dilemma - why is it hard to resolve? I will wager it is for basically the same reason. Now, I suspect at least some of you will think this is a silly train of thought. After all, the whole point of a dilemma is to offer two actions, neither of which is clearly right. My pointing out that this is the case doesn't establish anything at all, does it? Well, it should, I think. Let me provide something of an abstract Gedankenexperiment.

Let's suppose that we can define "moral" to be whatever it is we choose. In real life we seem to think, for some strange reason, that good is good. We have already seen that this can lead to nasty dilemmas. Now, if we can choose any definition we like, we might as well try for one which eliminates such dilemmas. Then what is right and wrong will be, at the very least, less ambiguous than it is in the real world. Let's try making bad "good". But no, we get the exact same dilemma, except we're trying to be bad and not good. At the end of the day, we're still going to get a subpar situation which just hasn't turned out bad enough. But why bad? Why not something less value-based. Why not base morality on the ability to light fires, or the colour green? It doesn't really matter, at the end of the day. There will always be some situation which cannot be satisfactorily resolved for anyone, let alone everyone (at least from our objective standpoint).

The point is that it's not the content or the make-up of the dilemma that is important, it is that the dilemma exists.This suggests to me that maybe we are interpreting the situation wrongly, or that we're not asking the right questions. As an alternative, I will offer a suggestion of a radically different way of looking at morality that I imagine will take some convincing for you to think that I haven't completely lost the plot. My alternative is that the morality of a person's actions relies not on the morality of the action but on the morality of the person. Does that make any sense at all? If you understand me, then I imagine your first thought (as it would be mine also) would be, "Doesn't that lead to some sort of loop? You're judging a person's moral judgement based on... what? How moral they are? And how exactly do we do that, Mr. Smartypants?"

Clearly the matter is a little more nuanced than that. For the proposition I'm making to make any real sense to you, you really need to drop the outside frame of reference. "Judging" a person by means of virtue ethics is difficult at best. Maybe I should try putting it a different way for you. Ordinarily, if you want to ask the question, "Is this person morally good?" you enquire as to what their actions have been and you infer from the details of those actions an answer. In real life, most people aren't dyed in the wool consequentialists or deontologists but have some sort of mixture, some of which are more consistent than others. It doesn't particularly matter, though. In the one case you look at an action and determine its value by its consequences, and in the other case you look at an action and determine its value by its own nature. This is not just how we analyse other people's actions but also how we look at our own. My suggestion is that we change this question from asking what a person does to why a person does it, not only in terms of motivations but more generally their moral values, their influences, their character.

If my estimation of you is right, I imagine you're reading this with a vague sense of amusement, perhaps mumbling something sarcastic under your breath. Sure, it's a great idea, but it's probably full of holes, you probably imagine. Certainly it's all fine and good to have the right intentions, but doesn't everyone have the best of intentions, at least as far as they are concerned? And yet people still do bad things, act in a way which we would look down upon as immoral. You're not about to tell me that Hitler was fundamentally a good bloke, just misunderstood, are you? Well, I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that no, I'm not about to say any such thing. I will answer your question in full, but first I will introduce you, or those of you not already acquainted, to the doctrine of double effect. The doctrine of double effect was introduced by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, and attempts to provide a rationalisation for acting in situations which would ordinarily be permissible but in this particular case bring about particularly nasty side-effects. I don't intend to go into the DDE in much depth for fear of getting side-tracked, and certainly there is no lack of information out there should you choose to look for it. I bring up the DDE because one of the key criteria is "right intentions", that you mean to do well. This leads to some peculiar cases.

One such case, which was raised by Judith Jarvis Thomson, I will paraphrase here. Suppose that you are a bomber pilot involved in a war which is in every manner fictional. Let us imagine two possible missions you are asked to go on. In the first, you are sent to bomb a munitions factory. You have good reason to think you can destroy the factory, but you will also likely destroy a nearby hospital, simply because your bombs cannot be any more accurate than that. In the second scenario, you are asked to bomb the hospital as part of a terror bombing campaign to cause the enemy to surrender, but will also somewhat serendipitously hit the munitions factory. In both scenarios we have the exact same result but according to the DDE the first mission is morally acceptable and the second is not. Such a situation is, to say the least, highly suspect, and it is same suspicion that I imagine many of you harbour against my newfangled suggestion. Clearly I'm not fazed by the objection, however, otherwise I'd likely not be bringing it up, so let me tell you why it doesn't in fact apply to the ethics of virtue.

It's quite simple, really. Yes, good intentions are a sign of virtue, but they are not sufficient. We have established already, as a matter of fact, that bad things can be done in the name of good intentions. As I have hinted at already, actions are not good or bad, but are made so by the actor. If an action appears to us to be prima facie wrong, then we can infer that, in this case, it is because of some deficiency in the actor (not, mind, from the action itself). Certainly it is good and well to bomb the munitions factory, but if one chooses to do so knowing that such an action will result in the deaths of innocent civilians and, furthermore, the destruction of a hospital, then we might argue that going ahead would not be the action of a virtuous person, though we are not yet able to establish why or why not we might reach this conclusion. The point, however, is that there is much more to virtue and, importantly, to character, than intentions alone.

In our discussion to this point, I have been working on some assumptions that perhaps we should question, and in doing so I think we will be able to establish some other interesting facts (if we can be so bold to call them that) about the nature of our morality. In Chapter 4 I will work on this interesting topic, focussing on the nature of objective morality and its implications for virtue ethics, before returning to an exploration of virtue itself in Chapter 5.

Magic Morality Addendum

It occurs to me more frequently than you might think that a lot of what I write seems fine in theory, and perhaps even interesting to read on paper, but holds no bearing in the real world, where things are as they always have been, and everyone is more or less fine with that. I mean, why even bother trying to work out ethical problems in the first place? People seem to have a good idea of what's right and wrong, and complicated hypothetical situations are only distractions or contrived examples of odd imperfections in an otherwise workable system. Right? Wrong. Sadly, I don't write only for the fun of it, I write because the system is badly broken and I see evidence of this on a daily basis, and I believe other people do, too. Because this has become quite galling to me since I posted Chapter 2, I've decided to offer up some real-life examples of how badly and how often our unwritten moral frame or worldview fails in the hope that any of you who were less than convinced by my theoretical objections to 'magic morality' will be more convinced by practical demonstrations.

First, something a little less public. In my last philosophy tutorial, we were discussing Rowe's evidential argument from evil, which is one of the more influential arguments about God since its publication over 30 years ago. Most of the group was satisfied that, though it might not be terrible strong or difficult to work around, it was still the best argument we'd studied this semester on the topic (not that that says much). There was one person who vocally disagreed, and he said that according to his notion of God, there was nothing in the argument terribly damning. For those of you not familiar with the argument, it's very simple and goes like this: There are instances of intense and unnecessary suffering in the world that do not give rise to a greater good nor prevent a greater evil, and yet God, who is supposed to be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, does not prevent them. If He existed, He most certainly would do so, and so we should surmise He does not exist. An example given is of a fawn who is trapped in a forest which has been set on fire by a lightning strike. It is badly burned and lies in agony for a number of days before finally succumbing. I will not go into a detailed analysis of the argument and its strengths or flaws; I don't want to get side-tracked after all. The point is how he justified his claim. Now I am putting words in his mouth here, but this is how I interpreted his description of his God: "God's domain is a moral one, as it always has been. He is interested and indeed, should be interested, exclusively in the moral for that is His domain. Certainly, "bad" things happen to people and other creatures and one of those "bad" things is our notion of suffering, but where there is pleasure there must also be pain and we cannot hold God responsible for this, or any other, feature of the natural world."

Now in my opinion, this young man came so close and yet remained so far from a reasonable position. I agree that in and of itself there is nothing morally wrong with suffering, or indeed any other state of being. However, I do take severe umbrage to his notion of God, which, had I been otherwise inclined, I might have even found somewhat offensive. What do you take the "moral" domain to be? How much you give to charity? How often you pray? Whether or not you've ever put your penis where it doesn't belong? How very peculiarly narrow. It would seem to me that a God of any stripe which is indifferent to intense and apparently unnecessary pain is in fact quite cruel, even if we say that God is not responsible for the nervous system of the fawn or the starting of the fire. Not just cruel, in fact, but severely morally deficient. A being worthy of revulsion, if you will. Can you imagine my saying that I am a perfectly morally good and all-loving being while beside me an animal lies wailing in desperate pain? My saving (or even mercy killing) it does not impinge upon free will, it does not unduly interfere in the way of the world. The fawn is alone, whether it dies alone now or in a few days is irrelevant. It seems to me that the only way someone could justify holding such a position is if you held up some sort of moral divide, and the pain of an animal lay on the non-moral side, but why should it? Doesn't that seem entirely arbitrary? Why should it not be a moral matter? It seems to me to lie very definitely within the "moral" sphere, and I can see no particular reason why it should not.

But that is just one person, you might say, who made one silly remark in the heat of debate. That doesn't prove my point at all; the system is still workable, it still makes sense. Well, allow me offer another, more public example. Many Australians will be at least passingly familiar with the proposed Internet filter that, barring rejection by the Senate, the current Government would pass into law. Now, the purpose of the filter is to block out all illegal websites, especially those of an exploitative nature, much like a nation-wide firewall. Many objections have been levelled against the filter, varying from free-speech concerns to claims that Internet speeds will be slashed as a result, with many other objections in between. Again, I will not delve deeply into the debate in this post for fear of becoming side-tracked. The point is that the Government frequently retorts these objections with the claim that the filter is a moral necessity. It is morally wrong for people to view websites of a paedophilic nature and so it is a moral imperative to block them from view. This, I think, is supposed to be a debate-ender. After all, if it's a moral matter, surely there can be no real reason not to support it. This betrays two important and related features of magic morality which I mentioned in Chapter 2.

The first feature is that moral matters are different to non-moral matters. There's no doubting that denying people access to websites which benefit from the sexual exploitation is a moral action, and indeed it is deeply so. But let's remember that this proposed filter will, either directly or indirectly, affect millions of people. I'm not asking why this isn't a matter of equivalent moral import, I'm asking why it apparently isn't a matter of any moral import. The second feature is that moral matters are superior to non-moral matters. If I demanded to know why 3 is suddenly supposed to equal 2 and you responded that 3-2 equality was a moral imperative, I, and I think most people, would quite rightly think you had given a non-answer. If I demanded to know why the Internet should have a filter on it which would probably not even decrease the availability of child porn and you responded that it was a moral imperative, I would still think it was a non-answer, although it seems as though this time, for some reason, I fall into the minority. Why? To my mind there is no good reason.

The idea of morality as it currently exists in society is jumbled and incoherent. The fact that the very word "moral" can elevate a mundane problem to a matter of high interest is a direct result of this chronically damaged view. Now here I have presented two real-life cases where the current attitude towards morality has caused people to respond in a likewise jumbled and incoherent manner, logically at least. Certainly my analysis has been shallow and I admit that the two examples I have given are not entirely perfect, but they are two amongst many that have come up in the few days since I posted Chapter 2. Had I the time and the will to suicide in the most painful way possible, I would document them all. Now, in these two posts I think I have demonstrated that magic morality doesn't work and identified the need for a replacement, but I have not explained why this is the case and I haven't offered a replacement itself. These two matters are for Chapter 3, which is coming soon. I hope you are looking forward to probing the matter a little more deeply with me then.

Ethics, Chapter 2: Magic Morality

So, what is wrong with the ordinary modern understanding of morality? What in particular would make someone decide that it's an unworkable way of looking at the real world? There are a number of reasons, to be sure. I will here address two in particular. I do not expect these to by themselves provide any sort of conclusive and wholly persuasive proof that there is a need to betray our current framework, for surely I can do no such thing; I do, however, hope that they will sew the seeds of doubt to the point that when I provide an alternative framework it seems to the reader to be entirely plausible to adopt it in lieu of this one.

The first of the two problems I will address is the less formal, perhaps, but the one I personally find more convincing. Indeed, it is this problem that lends its name to the title of this chapter. One of the founders of modern virtue theory, Philippa Foot, has for a number of years now campaigned (in the way that a philosopher is going to campaign at least, that is, through scholarly publication and debate) against what she calls "magic" morality, which happens to be the modern framework I have been somewhat more forgivingly been referring to. As you have probably guessed from the quotation marks, the description is not meant to be flattering, and is to the contrary something of a criticism. I will attempt to explain the criticism using some of my own examples.

If you are well-versed in history, you will recall that there was a period here in Australia as in a number of other countries (and indeed, this is true today for some of those as it was then) where compulsory military service was in place. Let us hypothesise that there is a nation in a state of war on foreign soil today where national service is in place. We are observing a committee hearing where potential conscientious objectors are being interrogated. The committee calls in the next applicant. Once the details are confirmed, the questioning begins.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"
"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."
"And why is that?"
"I have a strong moral objection, sirs, that prevents me from taking up arms against another man."
"Very well, objection granted."
Of course, such a hearing would be unlikely to go as I have written; the person would certainly be asked to explain his objection in full and would be subject to a round of questions. For the purposes of our thought experiment, however, it is not necessary to go into such detail; let us simply take the example for how it has occurred.

Now let us imagine the next applicant has had his turn called and once he fronts the panel and his details are taken down as was done before, the questioning begins anew.
"Why do you wish to become exempted from national service?"

"I feel, sirs, that I cannot in good conscience participate in the military."

"And why is that?"

"I made a promise to my mother that I would not willingly harm another person, and I cannot in good conscience break such a promise."

"Your story is touching, lad, but do you not think the safety of your fellow man is more important than one naive promise? Objection denied."

Putting aside the unusually similar beginnings of these simple examples, it is not inconceivable that they might realistically come to pass, though perhaps in a more complicated form, in our hypothetical land. I don't think it is fair to say the committee acted in a clearly biased or unfair fashion here; if anything, they've been reasonably reasonable. And yet still something bothers me about the exemption of one and not the other.

Trying as best we can to deal with the ambiguity of the first objector's reasons, why should the cases be treated differently? Yes, it is not hard to break a promise, especially if the reason is great enough, but perhaps in this person's mind the war, for whatever reason, was not enough to justify the breaking of that promise. Perhaps his family came from a war-torn country and his mother had seen first hand what killing can do. Perhaps this made it practically impossible for the second objector to accept military service as reasonable. Certainly his belief is a strong one, and well grounded. If he explained it to the panel that way, would they still deny him? It is not clear to me they wouldn't. They might say that though the reasons are compelling, they still do not have sufficient gravitas to grant omission. Yes, the promise is meaningful to you, but it is still just a promise, and promises sometimes can and must be broken. This may seem cruel, but war is cruel, and they are all victims of the circumstances they live in.

Perhaps, but why then exempt the first objector? If he claimed religious reasons for rejecting military service, I find it difficult to imagine his objection being denied, unless he was a part of some obscure cult, or couldn't sufficiently demonstrate adherence to his belief system. Even yet, is his belief made stronger by the fact that it is grounded in religion than secular promise? If the beliefs were held equally as strongly, let us suppose, would the panel still decide in the same way? Still, I think so. The fact that the first objector is religious in this paragraph is not of particular importance, I should note. All that is important is that he can prove that he is bound by the modern moral framework I have been talking about, and religious adherence is perhaps the most traditional indicator of that, while the unsuccessful applicant of an equally stringent belief is denied. Herein lies the problem.

Think about it a little. You have two people, both of whom wish to avoid military service for equally genuine but different reasons. One is granted exemption because his objection lies within the sphere of our modern moral framework, the other is denied because it is a more borderline case; he may not like it, but is it really a moral objection? And yet for all intents and purposes the objections are the same. If drafted, both would have equal difficulty sleeping at nights. It is this differential quality that morality possesses in our society, the quality that makes the mere usage of the word set sentences and ideas apart from the competition, which is the problem, this apparently "magical" ability that, it would seem, it has no right to hold. Indeed, what in the above example sets the religious man's objection apart from the other? One cannot attribute it to his being religious, for religiosity is not a defining characteristic of objector status, nor can one fault the strength of the other man's case. It would seem that by accepting that the panel is reasonable we have nevertheless come to an unjust result, creating an apparent paradox. The only way to resolve the paradox is to accept that moral statements aren't really different to similar non-moral statements. If this is the case, of course, then what is there to differentiate any moral statement? Nothing, and so our framework must be wrong, for a fundamental tenet is that matters of morality are of greater severity and import than other matters, no matter the circumstances. 

I should note here that when I refer to moral statements and moral matters, I refer to statements and matters commonly thought of being somehow related to morality. If I thought that all truly moral statements were no different to non-moral statements and that, indeed, there is no such thing as morality at all, we would hardly be having this discussion. To the contrary, I do believe there is a morality, but to reiterate, our current perception of moral matters in distorted, incomplete and wrong. To further press the point, I will now address the other, more commonly cited reason for thinking there is something wrong with the way we look at morality.

A lot of the time it just doesn't work.

"Oh," but you may say, "we all know not to kill each other though, right? And we all know not to rape and steal and generally be unpleasant. Sure, there are the occasional bad eggs that go against the grain, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule." Well certainly we can agree that we know not to be generally nasty to each other, though we may do so anyway. I'm not arguing that point. But since we're putting forward examples, allow me to retort. I have already mentioned Philippa Foot, and I will probably mention her again, as in my opinion she is an outstanding philosopher. She is perhaps most famously known as the creator of the trolley problem, which I know many people not in the least interested in philosophy to be familiar with. Nevertheless I will provide a short description for you in case you are not so well-versed.

Let us suppose you are wandering by the train tracks one lovely afternoon, as you are wont to do. The day has been peaceful and largely uneventful, with only the singing of birds to disrupt your walk thus far. All of a sudden there is a rumble of thunder and it begins to rain heavily, not that you mind. You then (only barely) see in the distance a trolley hurtling toward you at tremendous speed, its sound masked by the downpour. You won't be hurt, of course, because you aren't silly enough to walk on the tracks, only beside them. You have just come to a junction where a lever lies to switch tracks - the thought strikes you that you might send the trolley off to a siding, where it will be stopped by some barrier, but you remember you have just come from that way. The track the trolley is heading down leads to a tunnel where five men are working on the track; why, you had a chat with them on their lunch break. On the other track is a gardener, working to clear the weeds away from the sleepers. Both tracks are supposed to be closed, and busy at work, in this weather, they are all unlikely to see or hear the trolley coming before it is too late. It seems one of the two groups is certain to die, but by a stroke of luck (good or bad) you still have the option, if you wish, to turn the trolley. The question here is this: do you save the five men and turn the trolley on to the track with the gardener, or do you refuse to involve yourself and allow the five men to die?

Clearly there is a moral choice to be made here, but whatever you choose it seems like you can't do the "right thing". Choose not to involve yourself and you allow five people to die needlessly, choose to pull the lever and you become personally responsible for someone else's death. Certainly it is possible to choose one or the other with some degree of confidence that your conscience will be clear, but for the vast majority of people, a nagging doubt lingers. Unsurprisingly, given it was made for this purpose, the thought experiment is a somewhat troubling one for the exact reason that it is so troubling. If we accept that for all "moral questions" there is a correct and an incorrect response, though those responses may be incredibly subtle and nuanced, and whether a response is correct or incorrect can be determined, why should this problem (and indeed, problems like it) be so troublesome? It's almost as if the very question itself forces an inconclusive and unfulfilling solution. But of course why should this be? It's easy to defer to some notion of mystery, that perhaps we simply haven't worked out a solution yet, or to put it down to a matter of interpretation, but to my mind these measured answers are both cop-outs. Why, only before we established, or so I thought, that killing, raping, and general nastiness are all wrong with some degree of certainty. In the real world (and the hypothetical world) things get fuzzy around the edges, but this isn't fuzziness, it's like someone smeared grease all over the lens.

In a sense, that is what's going on here. It's this reliance of thinking in terms of magic morality that leads us questions like these which have no proper solution. I hope it seems a little clearer now why we need to shift our thinking away from the idea that moral considerations are somehow separate and of superior importance to non-moral considerations. Some of you may (and rightly so) still be sceptical, however. I hope to, in Chapter 3, outline how virtue ethics is different to magic morality in both theoretical and practical terms while still dealing in generalities. I hope that by the end of that chapter I will have given you reason enough to think that virtue ethics has at least some truth and some reason to it, and by that point we can move onwards to more specific matters. 

Ethics, Chapter 1: What is Morality?

It is surely tempting, if one wants to write an all-inclusive (or at least fundamentally so) treatise on ethics, to begin with a meta-ethical discussion, no matter how brief, on whether or not morality as a distinct fact of the real world exists in the commonplace sense, and if so how well (if at all) it can be known and by what form. Indeed, this is the course that previous (failed) attempts at this topic have yielded. I have come to realise, though, that this course of action is not wise, for if we are to be properly basic, we must analyse all (or the most important) of our underlying assumptions, and the most critical of these is unquestionably the nature of ethics and morality itself, what it is we are referring to when we talk about matters of morality. 

I have certainly been criticised in the past for being so unendingly pedantic in my quest for accuracy and completeness, but in this particular instance the question is not being raised simply to quash spectral, nagging doubts. It may come as something of a surprise to you, as it did to me, that the ancient Greeks of so many years ago did not consider ethics in the same way that we do today. Perhaps in hindsight it should not have been such a surprise that people of thousands of years past did not address a particular topic the same way we do today, but I digress. As a matter of fact, the Greeks did not have a word for "morality" specifically, or at least not in the way we mean it today. The word from which ethics is derived, ἦθος (ēthos), meant character, custom or habit, while the derivative of morality, the Latin mos (mōs), meant the same. 

I once pondered what responses I would get if I asked intelligent, educated people what morality was, or indeed what it meant to be moral. I found it very difficult to imagine much of a coherent answer that avoided undefined value terms such as "right" or "good" (a clue in itself which will become more meaningful later on) but even putting this aside, it was clear enough to me that no answer would or could come close to this "original" meaning. Ordinarily I should say this fact is inconsequential; language changes over time, as do ideas, and it certainly doesn't make our modern conception, whatever that may be, somehow incorrect. This is a special case, however, because of the very assumption that I am attempting to question, for the assumption about what morality is, if we include the implicit assumption that we are discussing "objective" morality (to my mind the only kind, but that is a topic for another day), is that our idea of morality, though the particulars vary from culture to culture and person to person, is and always has been universal. If this is incorrect, as it seems to be, I think it is time to start re-examining the ways we look at ethics, and the best place to start is with a little history. 

As I have oh-so-subtly hinted at, the current way morality is considered has not always been the norm. I think to anyone who has reflected sufficiently on the topic it should come as no surprise that modern morality, with its solid ideas of right and wrong and likewise expectations of reward and punishment, not to mention the strength of the notion of "social morality" and the blurred line between ethics and law, is a result of the medieval period, when the power the Church in Europe (and indeed, religion in general almost everywhere it existed) was far more direct than it is today. Over time in this highly religious cultural atmosphere, religious morality became not only the norm, but indeed changed the question sufficiently to become the very way the topic was framed. I think regardless of your religious inclination this should be at the very least a warning sign that we need not consider morality in the hard and fast sense that we currently do (though you, of course, may wish to, but then I must certainly have failed in my task to convince you otherwise). If we need not, however, what alternatives do we have, if this is all we have known? And in fact, why bother changing the paradigm at all? These questions I will attempt to address in Chapters 2 and 3. 

An Interesting Discussion

I'm currently studying a minor sequence in philosophy at university, and one of my current subjects (one week from completion, I might add) is on the topic of ethics (it's styled as an introduction to ethics, being a first year course). As a part of this course, we have a weekly hour of discussion in our tutorial group about the previous week's lectures. Naturally, such an open-ended discussion did not always conform to this expectation - on better days we would stray on to more recent lectures, on worse days we would talk about other philosophical areas of study such as metaphysics, and on a few occasions I found myself in a discussion (if it can be called that) which consisted of little more than a handful of forced comments on the topic at hand followed by an inane conversation about the latest developments in so-and-so's social life.

Now, as I mentioned, there were good days, and a couple of those were real crackers. The most recent of these saw myself and "the usuals" whom I normally sat with talking about that week's lectures, which were on abortion and infanticide. Out of the first awkward comments eventually came one person with an especially strong position; he was quite firmly against abortion, and he was happy to try and defend that position, a position he found at odds with the university's "very left-wing" philosophy department, which he noted was sadly like that of Melbourne and unlike that of several universities in the United States. If you had not guessed already, yes, it turns out he is a Christian, and I would guess something of a more conservative one at that. However, on this day and at this time, I didn't know any of that. All I knew was he was against abortion, and he had some reasons.

Now, I believe that if we're going to debate right and wrong, we should see all acts as morally acceptable until shown to be wrong. That's not to be taken as some overarching principle, more a guideline for tolerable behaviour. Some things I should think are prima facie wrong, and so would not enjoy much time in being considered acceptable (that's not to say that they were once fine and now are not, only that they were once seen as fine). My point here is that the burden of proof should lie with he who wants to say an action is wrong, not with who wants to say an action is right. This is just an opinion here, and I'll not offer justification for it (not any time soon, certainly) but since it really only applies to debates I don't see the need. I personally think it's a reasonable position to take. Had I been of lucid enough mind to recall this, I might have pressed this certain gentleman on his claim that by refuting arguments for abortion he has shown abortion is wrong - he would need to offer some sort of positive argument for his case.

Alas, I did not, and so our miniature debate, adjudicated by my friend Tyson, was less about abortion and more about this fellow's objections to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Violinist analogy. He seemed to be of the opinion (one that was never stated outright I should note) that because her analogy was invalid, his position was right. Clearly logically this does not follow, but I did not press him, as I mentioned, because I was perhaps too preoccupied with the debate we were having at the time. Now, I don't support Thomson necessarily, I find her ideas interesting but from as a virtue ethicist I'm not convinced by them. To paraphrase my tutor's comments on Singer (my tutor also being virtue-inclined), we're not even on the same wavelength.

I'll not describe our little argument in any detail because not only was it frustrating to participate in, the recollection surely capable of driving me to tears, the precise nature of his arguments are not the primary topic of this post. He had four points, three of which we properly debated. The final was not resolved in time, but I would say that with some assistance from my tutor (by the end I was exhausted) I had shown that at least two of them were severely flawed if not entirely refuted. But again, this is unimportant. After we touched on three of his Violinist counter-arguments, we got slightly sidetracked (as we are wont to do in these tutorials) and began talking about ethical perspectives - I demanded that he provide some justification other than 'most people would agree' or, if he didn't want to go into depth, his guarantee that he at least had some other justification, a demand which he refused. He then turned on me, and demanded I provide justifications for my beliefs. This was something of a non-sequitur, as I was not defending my own position but someone else's, and I let him know as much, along with protests that my own position was complicated.

Like a fool, however, the more he pressed, the more I relinquished and gave him the two-minute summary of the entirety of virtue ethical theory, something he was less than convinced by. He grilled me about details, extrapolating from my summary, ventured into meta-ethics, and generally caught me, tired and unprepared, by surprise. This was relieved by a rare interjection from one of the others in the group, who turned his questioning back on to him. His response, which is the main point of this topic, was a moment which Tyson later remarked to me as being a "dumbpiphany" (a reference to this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic (a webcomic we both enjoy)) and it started with the phrase, "Well, I'm coming from a Christian perspective, so...".

He didn't say much of substance after that, so I imagine his saying that was supposed to explain everything that needed to be explained. But what does that statement mean, exactly? Ok, he's a Christian, so what? So he's against abortion automatically? And everything he says is just an attempt to justify a belief he takes for granted as true? That doesn't seem very fair, but what else could it mean? He mentioned that Christians in philosophy courses aren't very open about it, as though this were a bad thing. Christians in science courses aren't very open about their Christianity either, because it's not relevant. Why should it be? There is a reason that ethics in analytic philosophy is secular, and that's because appeals to religion necessarily either reduce to arguments about God or tradition. Since the current consensus seems to be that we can never know if any god exists and it is something which must be taken on faith, that leaves the apologist in a difficult situation. Philosophy is about argument and rationality; if a rational person can't accept your position as being a reasonable one (though that person may not agree) then your position isn't worth consideration. I will tell you now that any argument which requires the person being persuaded or convinced to have faith that the argument is already valid is never ever going to be a good one, because it can only work on people who already agree with you. How can you expect anyone to take that position seriously?

Now, when I recounted this story to a friend of mine who was not present (telling it to someone who was would be quite boring for them, I imagine) his reaction to my shock at this supposed philosophical position was that I should be careful and hold in mind that he himself was Christian. I will tell you now that I have nothing against Christians in general, and I don't simply like ragging on a Christian philosophy student because I'm a big bad atheist and it gives me the jollies. The fact that he was Christian was irrelevant - the fact that he tried to use his religion to justify his stance was what shocked me, and the fact that he was blindly proud of what 'courage' it took to do that is what appalled me. It's not a question of religion and it's not even a question of attitude. The point is that, if look through the prism of reason vs. faith, that old dichotomy, modern philosophy falls firmly within the sphere of reason, and that is absolutely where it belongs. If "My god says so," or "My Holy Book instructs as such," become valid points of view ethically speaking, then literally any action could be considered completely justifiable. If so, then what is the point of ethics? If it is to be any good, it has to apply to more than one person or one group or one dogma; it must be able to apply to everyone.

Virtue and the Phronimos

A question was posed to me recently, a question I will rephrase and in turn pose to all of you.

A man goes and volunteers at the soup kitchen for an evening, let's say. In doing so he not only acts with beneficence but also considers the interests and autonomy of others, helps to maximise (local) utility and respects his obligation towards minimally decent Samaritanism. It seems fair to say then that by ethical and intuitive moral standards, this person is doing the right thing. Consider this then: the man does this not out of his own free will, but is compelled by a friend or loved one (with a more attuned sense of social justice, perhaps) to volunteer to pay something back to society. The fact that he now performs the same act reluctantly makes no difference to the nature of the act itself; it is still, by all accounts, the right thing. But with this in mind, on this information, can we call him a 'good person'?

It should seem to me at least that, purely from the information above, it is difficult to answer yes in any meaningful way. This question might seem trivial, but it highlights a significant deficiency in the current major ethical systems of thought. Though consequentialist and deontological ethical systems require, and thence give guidance towards, 'right action', they do not in and of themselves contain any requirements for how one should feel. If the question is any illustration, it seems that our concept of what constitutes a good person is very much dependent on not only how we act but also how we feel and what motivates us.*

But what is the relevance of being a 'good person', particularly? Need we bother with such considerations, when right action could just as well be all we need to live moral lives? To answer this question, we must consider what it is exactly to be a moral person. One might be forgiven for thinking this is the springboard for some long, philosophical discussion. To the contrary, if one cannot reduce moral concepts to basic common sense thinking, even if that thinking is somewhat complicated, then your concepts become difficult, perhaps too difficult, to implement in real life, and a moral theory without practical application is all but worthless. So what does make being a good person so crucial to morality, what makes it as (if not more) important than simply doing the right thing?

There are a number of recourses we could make in answering this question, but I will start with one particluarly simple and pragmatic one. What is the difference between someone who characteristically does the 'right thing', but does so to appease the demands of others, and someone who acts in much the same way but voluntarily? How would we treat these two people in our relations with them, knowing this? Would it make a difference? I think it would. It would seem to me that if we took both of those people and placed them in a social vacuum, one could still be depended on to do the right thing while the other would be far more reluctant. In our interactions and relationships with people, we are constantly assessing their character to determine how and what our relationship with them should be, and to what limits we extend the bounds of our interactions. Needless to say, it is far easier (and more appropriate) to trust someone whose motivation comes from within than someone whose motivation comes from without. This is an important realisation that we will come to in a moment.

However, it is quite arguable to suggest that one can derive motivation internally from the consideration of the interests of others using purely consequential or deontological principles. So this is only part of the story. Perhaps we should consider a new scenario to further probe the issue. I have adapted this example from my recent ethics lecture, and so credit is due to the School rather than myself. Consider your sick friend, who is staying in hospital. It seems that by any account you should go and visit them, as you have the time and ability to do so and it would surely mean much to your friend to put in the effort. But why, morally speaking, should we go? Appealing purely to consequences or a sense of rational obligation seem not only forced, but also somewhat cold. Though we might be impartial in our ethics, can we still call ourselves a 'good friend' if we go to visit only because it increases the net utility of the world than acting otherwise, or if we have an obligation to be minimally decent to each other? And can we justify seeing our friend rather than someone else in the hospital by merely appealing to a greater increase in utility or a set of duties and obligations and still seem a 'good friend'? Surely not. Thus we can see that unless a person acts with feeling, or perhaps acts out of feeling, we cannot truly call them a good friend, and if not a good friend, then even more surely not a good person.

Why be a good friend though? Why be a good person? These questions we still not have properly addressed. Our response relates back to the answer to our earlier question. The good person characteristically acts in a manner which is good. That it is a matter of character is important, because character is wholly internalised. Except in situations where it is impossible, the characteristically good person does good. Not because of obligations, not because it will be 'better' overall, but because it is in their character. Good deeds are not enough to be good, one must be able to be counted on to do those deeds, no matter what. Without the ability to do good out of character alone, one is not only dependent on circumstances to determine action (circumstances whose whole nature it may be impossible to know) but cannot be trusted to act as a friend, in the case of the situation above, or as a good doctor, a good engineer, a good businessman; or, in other words, a good person.

Please excuse my repetition in the paragraph above, but what I have repeated I have done to be both clear and definite, because the concept is an important one that must be understood if we are to continue.

So we have established, I hope, that it is important to be characteristically good and not do good out of purely impartial means (a full address of impartiality and morality will have to come in another blog post, I'm afraid, but I trust you are able to keep up so far by filling in the gaps). Having done so, we must next define exactly what "good" and "good person" and "good character" mean within this context. It is surely not enough to use vulgar definitions; when we speak of a good doctor, we really mean a good person who happens to be a doctor, not a person who happens to be good at the practice of medicine. Where then do we get our most basic definition, that of 'good'? Without it we cannot make any justified moral judgements at all, we can only appeal to gut feeling. While this feeling is important, it is no basis for a system of morals. It is simply too unreliable and susceptible to immoral suggestion, as I'm sure we have all found from personal experience.

Lacking the ability, or perhaps believing it impossible, to appeal to impartial means of determining what is 'good', perhaps the best place to start off is the so-called 'good person' we have already rudimentally identified. After all, what other recourse do we have? This may seem like an invalid appraoch, and indeed it is most certainly contrary to our usual method of determining moral values - it is generally thought we must have the values before we make the judgements. Why must this be so, though? If we can all agree that some people are 'good' while others are not, and we can agree at least to some extent on what characteristics those people possess, as I believe we can, then it does not seem like there is any reason we cannot derive our definitions from these examples. And even if we cannot, surely there is no harm in trying and seeing where it leads us.

Unfortunately, and I know this will be a disappointment, it is not within the scope of this essay to determine the nature of these characteristics, which I will from here on refer to as virtues. I will surely write a far more detailed on the virtues alone at a later date, as it is definitely the sort of concept that merits its own discussion. This is only an introduction to the concept, and if I have sold it to you with what I have said so far about how we come to find the virtues, then I'm sure you will be happy to wait to find out more about them.

That is not the end of our story, though. We have established so far, I hope, that there is merit in the case for virtue ethics. I mentioned earlier, however, that any ethical system is useless if it does not have any applicability. It might seem as though from what I have written so far that while virtue ethics seems appealing, it is too open to flexibility and personal opinion on how we should act, and does not offer sufficient moral guidance. After all, if we accept that we define what is good (virtue) in relation to the people who possess it, how can we possibly come to any sort of moral decision of our own if we accept that we are not wholly virtuous people?

This is where I can introduce the concept of the phronimos, a moral expert. According to Aristotle, the phronimos embodied phronesis, or practical wisdom - not the sort of old-hermit-giving-obscure-and-metaphorical lessons wisdom, but the sort of wisdom in knowing about the world and how we should act within it. "What should I do?" "Think about this, this and this. Do you see now?" That sort of useful wisdom about everyday life. [[In my philosophy, the phronimos can be considered someone on the way to becoming a sophos, or sage - someone who is truly wise and fully understands the world, and so has achieved eudaimonia (this is a term I will discuss in more depth at a later time). This will be pertinent to later discussions, but is not strictly relevant now.]] So what does the phronimos have to do with moral guidance? I certainly do not consider myself a phronimos, so how does it relate to me? The answer should be apparent from my brief attempt to give an example of practical wisdom. You are uncertain in how to act, so what should you do? Ask someone whom you would consider to be a phronimos. Someone whom you think embodies a certain virtue or virtues, and who can be relied upon for useful moral advice. This is where our guidance can come from.

We will not always have a phronimos at our disposal, however, and in fact these people can be difficult to come across sometimes. What then? Well, try to do what you think they would tell you to do. You don't know what that is? Then just do something. You may make a mistake, but this is to be expected. What made you think you could always do the right thing in the first place? If you made no mistakes you would have no need for advice in the first place! But mimicry is not enough. You have to be able to learn from the phronimos and learn from your own mistakes. Only by increasing your understanding can you yourself become wise, and that is why active moral consideration is important. You can't forever act on moral autopilot if you hope to ever become a good person, because remember what we discussed earlier - it is one thing to do good, it is another thing to be good.

Clearly, the case for virtue does not end here. There are many more points and issues on the topic, positives and negatives, which must be proven and refuted if we are to take virtue theory seriously. What are the virtues? How can what is virtuous in a doctor be considered good while what is virtuous in a thief be considered bad? And how exactly does emotion relate to moral consideration? This essay has only been introductory, and was not intended to address these issues, but if they strike you as interesting, you can await my future posts on virtue ethics (if you are particularly patient) or you can research the topic yourself, and if you like I can point you in the right direction. For the moment, however, it seems that we are done.

*I am concerned that I here have conflated emotion, motivation and action. It is my opinion that we should try to keep these separate. I am not trying to say that feeling should necessarily provoke certain action - emotion is a reaction to a situation, and that means it entails judgement, judgement which can be right or wrong. Therefore we cannot derive right action from emotion nor can we associate certain actions with certain emotions. The two are not (or I should say, should not) be closely linked. My point here was to point out that emotion is a separate but important part of moral consideration in addition to right action, something which impartial theories do not account for.

What are we?

We often ask ourselves in times of change or difficulty who we are, and quite rightly so. However, the question of this post is not asking who, but what we are. This question might at first seem unnecessary at best, but we often tend to overlook the more basic questions when we try to come to grand conclusions, and I dare say we are far the worse off for it, for how can we possibly assume to be able to tackle grand questions of meaning and existence when we haven't even considered the most basic tenets and preconceptions upon which we base our arguments, or question the assumptions we make in the course of making those considerations? If we are all so expert in the science of life and the art of living that we presume to know the answers to these questions without having need to properly sit down and think on them, why is it that we are so often feeling unsatisfied or unhappy?

The simplest and perhaps most obvious answer to the posited question is that we are human, but this answer is not nearly satisfactory, and merely raises more questions. "What is it to be human?", and "How do we know?" for example. But even those questions are built upon a more basic presupposition which needs to be explored; before we can ask what we are, we must ask if we are (and presumably, if everything else in the Universe is), or, in other words, if we exist.

This again seems like a question that has a self-evident answer, an answer so self-evident that I dare say few people will even bother to provide a response. This in itself should be setting off warning bells that we are far more ignorant in our considerations than perhaps we had supposed, and this is a situation that must be remedied as soon as possible if any progress is to be made here.

"Do you exist?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

"How old are you?"

"Eighteen."

"Twenty years ago, did you exist?"

"I suppose not."

"So before your body existed, you did not exist?"

"No."

The temptation here is to equate our own existence with that of our bodies, but clearly more consideration must be given when one considers exactly one begins to exist. This tends to be a major sticking point in the debate about abortion. Though it is not my intention to enter into the politics of that particular issue in this post, some of the issues which I intend to address are crucial to the debate, so please excuse me, reader, for dabbling briefly into politics.

"Your body existed at birth, did it not?"
"It did."
"And one day before birth?"

"I suppose so, yes."
"And one day before that?"
"Yes."
"What about at the moment of conception?"

"It would appear so."

"It certainly would, wouldn't it? But what was your body at the point of conception?"

"A single cell, a zygote."

"Hardly a body, I would say. It would seem to you or I no more a body than a single cell of skin or muscle, I imagine."

"But a single cell of skin or muscle won't grow into a fully formed human, will it?"

"No, it will not."
"So there is clearly a difference."

Again, there is a temptation at this point to simply say that because the fertilised cell can in time grow into a fully formed human, it is a human, but even the logical underpinnings of the argument defeat it - if the cell will in the future become a human, the implication is that now, at the point where it is a single cell, it is not a human. Even so, the matter of potential development is one which must be addressed, and so the discussion continues.

"What exactly is the difference, then?"

"The difference is that one will grow into a human, one will not."

"So it is a question of potential?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"But how does one measure potential? A single sperm cell has the potential to eventually become a human, supposing it meets an egg. Is this sperm human? No, it is merely a single cell with the potential, given certain circumstances, to become human at a later point. How is it different to your zygote? In chromosomes alone. Does your humanity lie in the number of your chromosomes alone?"

"Of course not!"

"Then this zygote is no more a human than a single sperm cell."

This is something of a simplification, though. If your DNA is in that cell, then there is at the very least something of you in that zygote. Even so, it is still a mistake to go on to equate a human being (with all the rights that status enjoys) with this single cell, no matter its genetic make-up, purely on the basis of a nebulous idea of "potential".

However, the question then arises as to when exactly a collection of cells becomes human. It may be after conception and before birth, but beyond this we have little idea of when it is the case. This is because we have yet to pinpoint what it is to exist. We know that we do not exist before our body does, but we have established that we, as people, do not strictly exist for some time post-conception either. Again, there is a temptation to return to the body for an answer.

"Consider that you have died, and your body is lying before me. "

"If you say so..."

"Am I looking at you?"
"Unless there's something extraordinary going on outside the window, I imagine so."

"Can I converse with you?"

"For your sake, I hope not."
"Can I play sport with you?"
"No."
"If I'd never met you, could we form a bond of some sort? Become fond of each other, even friends?"
"That would be absurd."
"Indeed. Tell me, can you donate to charity, or assist the poor, sick and elderly?"

"No, I'm dead."

"Right now, do you consider yourself a good person?"
"I certainly think so."
"Do you do what I mentioned? Donate to charity and perform other works?"

"I do."

"So as I look at you lying cold on the floor, do I see a good person?"

"Yes."
"But you told me dead men cannot do those things which you say qualify you as good."
"But I did them in the past."

"In the past yes, but not now, as I look at you. So either you have become a person who does no good, or I do not see you."

"You cannot condemn the dead for being dead!"

"Of course not, which only leaves one conclusion. That dead body is not you."

This may seem like a perplexing conclusion, even paradoxical. But there is a resolution if we consider another avenue of hypothetical argument. Consider now two people, let's call them Daniel and Emily, of contrasting personality. They are put under the knife and, in a world-first operation, their brains are switched from one body to the other, with no complications and complete functionality. Medically speaking, this is entirely impossible, with our current knowledge of medical treatment anyway, but luckily we need not perform hypotheticals in real life to determine their outcome.

Having completed this hypothetical surgery, we ask ourselves this: Who is Emily, and who is Daniel? If the body we might recognise as Emily's comes up to us and begins acting in a manner entirely at odds with her character, speaking in a different way and about different things, taking no interest in foods or activities she previously adored, and so on, but instead acting, speaking and eating just as Daniel would, by what merits can we call her Emily instead of Daniel? If we've never met Daniel, this "Emily" does not even have a singular memory of us, and will probably not even like us. To call her Emily instead of Daniel would seem to be a mistake, for it is not her. It does not think like her, it does not act like her, it is nothing like her except for the bodily form she once possessed, and the same can be said for "Daniel".

So identity does not exist in the body. Where then? The brain? Well, let's change focus slightly back to another of our early questions. We began by asking if we exist, so let's now ask how we know. That you can see, hear, touch, these in and of themselves prove nothing. But that we know what seeing, hearing, touching are, this is paramount. To cut to the short answer, we know we exist because we are self-conscious, a fact summed up nicely by Descartes in his declaration, "Cogito, ergo sum." or, in English, "I think, therefore I am.". All sights, sounds, and other sensory inputs prove nothing, for they could be non-existent; synthetic representations fed directly to you, akin perhaps to The Matrix. But the fact that you can process them, whether they are real or not, indicates that you must exist, if not in the world of the inputs then at some higher plane of existence. If you did not exist, you could not process the input. Of course, you must then question how we know that a non-real entity cannot "think", and in order to do that we must question what it is we consider to be "real". However, this is only a short blog, and many great men have spent their lives on those questions, time which we, needless to say, do not have here. I do not think it is entirely unreasonable, however, to take Descartes' declaration at face value, at least for the purposes of what I would call the philosophical equivalent of "rough working". If we do continue presuming "cogito, ergo sum" to be a true statement, and thus taking thought, representational of self-consciousness, to be the proof of existence, it follows that self-consciousness is also prerequisite for knowledge of existence.

Now, what is it that makes you you? In other words, what constitutes your identity? It cannot be what you do, because I'm sure that many others have done, or at least can do, what you have done, perhaps not exactly, but then nobody else can have the exact same experiences as you; such is the nature of the Universe. This detail is irrelevant though. I kick a ball exactly 10 metres. Another person kicks a ball exactly 10 metres in exactly the same fashion. Is it the fact that he did not do it at the exact same time or place what makes him essentially different to me? No. The same reasoning follows for all things external and experiential. With this excluded, all that is left is the internal, or rather, that which is internal to the mind (the mind being holonymous to thought). Though further exploration is possible, it satisfies me that, given that all people have different identities, and given that what distinguishes one identity from another is (or at least seems to be) the mind, and that the mind is individual to its possessor, the mind is fundamental to identity, or, in other words, it is your thought and intellect, your consciousness that makes you you.

This has profound implications, the most pressing one being that before a human develops its consciousness, it does not have a distinct identity. In humans, consciousness does not typically develop until the age of one, which means that before this point, the child was merely a body. This is not as confronting as it immediately seems, but it does mean that we have not yet come to a conclusion about when a body becomes human, only when it develops an identity. Since I do not want this post to be political, I will not further explore that issue, as it is not only time-consuming, but rather tangential and not essential to our question. After all, we said that we were human, but did we not mean that our bodies were human? And have we not already discounted our bodies as being determinant of what we are, the primary question at hand?

So, let us recapitulate. We know we exist because we are conscious of our existence, and our existence, that being the existence of us and our identity, resides in the mind. Thus, before the mind (not the brain) functions, we do not exist, and the same is true for after the mind has ceased to function.

"But wait," you interject, quite rudely. "What about life after death? What about the soul? If identity exists not in the body but the mind, is there not the potential for us to survive bodily death?" The allure is certainly there, for those who wish to draw that conclusion, to do so. I would argue that such an action would be premature. Those despairing for some comfort, unable or unwilling to confront their mortality, might cling desperately to such a prospect. As for a soul, this is more of a theological question, as certainly no evidence of souls has come to be, but as for a mind, this is something which can be discussed.

The brain and the mind are not one and the same. But with this said, the mind is dependent on the brain. If one shuts down the rational centres of the brain, the mind can no longer function rationally, something which becomes evident in certain cases of brain trauma. A clearer example comes from split-brain patients, whose corpus callosum is severed, leaving both hemispheres of the brain unable to communicate. In these patients, it is not unusual to see two distinct personalities develop, two minds, as it were, one corresponding to each half of the brain. It is therefore not unreasonable to assume that with the whole brain dead, so dies the mind and, subsequently, you.

So no, your mind will not survive death. If you wish nevertheless to believe in some sort of soul, beware that it may not resemble the mind at all, it may not correlate any form of nous at all, it may not be conscious, and it may not be you, not at least as you know yourself. However, this is not a question I have to struggle with; I see no reason why a spirit or soul should exist within me. As far as I'm concerned, if there is such a thing as divinity, the mind is as close a thing as a fragment of it as can be found, and I've no need for more than that. And at the end of the day, think of it the way Mark Twain did: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

God

When considering one's belief in a god, one must first establish that there is a god for one to believe in. This may seem like a simple task, but if one lends sufficient thought to it, one realises that before one can even begin to do this, he must first define what a god is.

Before you have much of a chance to conjour your own response, first let me paint a picture for you, a picture which began my own reflection on the subject. You're walking along a rather small beach. There's no surf, and it's not particularly warm, but this means the beach is empty and you have an opportunity to collect your thoughts. This beach happens to be covered in many small rocks and pebbles, as many beaches are. For no reason in particular, perhaps to marvel at its colour or simply to skip it along the sparkling surface of the sea, you pick up a rock at random. Upon closer inspection, you find nothing remarkable about the rock whatsoever- it is a smooth rock, and flat, an inch across with a dark, dullish grey colouration. Your first instinct is, perhaps, to drop it, or throw it; after all, it holds no significance to you.

But then, for no reason in particular, you ponder the rock. Your thoughts were adrift, and they happened to float upon the topic of the small object in your hand. Where did this rock come from? You look around- the sea, most likely. After all, it is smooth. You know that exposure to the waters of the ocean would do that to a rock, eroding it until it became smooth. So the rock came from the sea. Most likely it came from nearby, perhaps it has always been here, perhaps it, over time, was pushed down the beach from some other location. Or perhaps it came from much further out to sea, or even from across the sea, from some peninsula somewhere. How long would it take for such a rock to travel 100 metres down the beach, let alone across the ocean?

At this point, you are struck by a certain feeling, a feeling you are not familiar with. You realise that this one, small, tiny and insignificant rock is so much older and has travelled so much further than you, and from wherever it came, having left however long ago, it has come to you, you of all people, and is now sitting in the palm of your hand. In less than a century, you will be dust, but this rock, who knows? It could be somewhere else, to lie in someone else's hand. You feel insignificant compared to this thing which easily fits into the palm of your hand. This feeling that fills you, to say it was magical is to belittle it: it is more than that. It is a sliver of revelation. You see in this simple object something special, and you look up, and see hundreds of rocks upon thousands of grains of sand. You are overcome with awe, and feel that you are in the presence of divinity. But this is only a shadow; in the whole universe, you are standing on a small beach in on the edge of some continent on a backwater planet in an insignificant system in an unremarkable galaxy, one of hundreds of billions.

So, you acknowledge that something special has happened, something perhaps godly. But what is it? Well, what has happened? You've realised something, pretty much. So then that then begs the question as to whether or not the feeling you have encountered stems from without or within. If we assume that this experience really has to do with some sort of god, and we thus extrapolate our experience to the point of 'godliness', then it leaves us with perhaps two options. Either these rocks, and these grains of sand and all the rest, are God, and from your consideration, you have seen a hint of this godliness, or your knowledge is a hint of this godliness, and hypothetically, were you to gain a great enough understanding, you would be God, or at the least, a god.

I considered both, myself, and found the second one did not sit well with me. I thought that only a god could truly appreciate the whole of the universe at once, but having that ability does not make one a god. Consider if a human could achieve this. Yes, he may have unlocked the secrets of the universe, no mean feat, but he would not have any practical use for this. He would not be omniscient, omnipresent or omnipotent. He would, for all intents and purposes, have the potential to be a god, but potential alone is not enough to grant one such a status, if it were possible to do so in the first place. Hypothetically, he would be no better equipped for detecting or even defending against a person sneaking up behind him with a knife, and would be just as mortal as the rest of us. Though perhaps infinitely enlightened, such a person is not a god, and so we can discount that alone as being a critereon for divinity. That leaves the first option, whereby the universe is God, or perhaps is a part of God or a manifestation of God.

Naturally, my little story alone is not sufficient to determine which of these three is the best answer. As a matter of fact, it works only on the premise that there is a god to be considered, when in fact the case may be that there is none. I will touch on that more soon, but I think it best that we continue with the presumption that there is a god or gods, for now.

Where we go from here is a matter of personal preference, but as this is about my philosophy, I will kindly show the way. I will state now that I do not believe in any personalised god. This includes Jehovah, Jesus, Allah, Ganesh, Zeus, Jupiter and Odin, though I do recognise of course that Jesus was a real person. Allow me to explain why: on a most simplistic level, I have no need for a personalised god. Naturally one might say that one has no need for the colour blue, and though this may be true, it does not mean that blue does not exist. However, there is no evidence for a personalised god such as there is evidence for blue, that being solid and undeniable; in fact most modern religions rely to some degree, some almost entirely, upon the concept of faith, which is belief in spite of a lack of evidence, or to some, belief in spite of evidence to the contrary. I must admit that I find this concept somewhat suspect, and I will delve into that shortly. First of all, though, I must level my greatest criticism of the personalised god. Through all of my research, I have not found a god who was truly logical. Every god I read about acted in a fashion which was secretive, deceptive, roundabout, and all for reasons which themselves were indirect and unnecessary. Why, for example, does not God simply reveal His existence to us? As a test of faith. But why must we have faith? Because God does not reveal himself to us. Examples of circular reasoning of this kind permeate almost every religion on Earth to this day. If one looks back in history, one finds that many philosophers have looked for reasons to explain god unto man, some of which are astounding in the lengths they go to in reading logic into the illogical. While one must admire them for their effort, one must question why a god would not be logical. But now I must check myself, for I have not explained why I believe a god must be logical in the first place- the reason is simple. The universe follows a set of rules, rules which we are able to deduce through logical means. I cannot accept that there would be a god who would create such a universe and then go out of his way to act at such odds with his creation.

So why would a god not be logical? The simplest and most reasonable explanation is that the god was made by man. If one were more hesitant in their blasphemy, they might suggest that god has merely been corrupted by man, but the effect is the same- the gods people worship are not true gods. One only has to look back into history to see this creation or corruption happening consistently whenever something occurs which goes without rational explanation. When the ancients felt an earthquake, they could have no comprehension of the movement of tectonic plates, and so they did the best they could- they deduced that a god had caused the earthquake. And judging by the devastation, he was mad, punishing them perhaps. If one looks carefully, excepting certain times and places, such as periods in Ancient Greece and Rome, the medieval period and more so, the Enlightenment in Europe, one finds that most major progressions in theology occur after natural events given supernatural explanations. This so-called 'god of the gaps' is inefficient and illogical because it is necessary, else it could easily be explained away. This is a root of another of my major criticisms of certain modern religions. People should not be compelled to do good through fear. People are perfectly capable of acting morally and ethically in both peace and harmony without the threat of some horrific, eternal punishment. Jesus' message of love and acceptance, for example, is often mixed inextricably and perhaps tainted by the threat of Hell. Fear is only necessary as a means of control, for a people without fear of retribution for deserting a religion will look for their own explanations of right and wrong. One pertinent example might be the Reformation, where people who looked for their own interpretation of God, despite having found one astonishingly similar in many way to the Catholic conception, were actively persecuted all the same: when supernatural fear is not enough to dissuade dissenters, perhaps some more mortal pain is in order, it would seem. Fear comes from and breeds hate, and it should not be the basis upon which a religion is founded, but I will go into this in greater depth in Part Two. However, this is Part One, and it is about God, not religion.

Fear of god is also important for reverence, for after all, a personalised and sentient god would be perfectly capable of striking you down if you do not obey him. If one fears death, and especially Hell, then one will try and avoid this. But a god so hell-bent, if you'll excuse the choice of language, on punishment is not a kind god, and it is of my opinion that if your god is omnibenevolent, he must be kind. You might say that he is not kind to test us, but I have already touched on illogic above. The God of the Old Testament, Jehovah or Yahweh, is not a kind god. He is cruel, vain, and at times even sadistic. Of course, not all profess to have benevolent gods, so that, it would seem, lets them off the hook for now. However, I cannot accept that any god would try to hurt his creation in any form, and I cannot accept that this harm is for the good of that creation. If one were to beat a child, one would be sent to jail for a very, very long time, and arguing that it was for his own good would not justify it in the least.

And then there is the matter of the sheer number of gods. If one accepts one god over others, one must ask why. The Christian might say that it says so in the Bible, but of course it will- if the Bible said that God was nonsense, then it wouldn't be the Bible. Lacking any hard evidence, the same evidence I speak of when referring to the analogy of the colour blue above, that being verifiable beyond doubt ('miracles' or personal revelations do not count, I am afraid, for they persuade only prior believers), one must accept all gods as potentially being true, equally so. Taking the argument from inconsistent revelation, one finds that simply given the sheer number of gods (and interpretations of god within the one religion), the odds of selecting the 'right' god to worship are simply astronomical. From this point of view, it makes little point which god one worships as most likely one will ultimately be sent to some sort of hell in any case. If deciding what god to worship becomes a matter of inconsequential trivium, then one must acknowledge that the worship of any god becomes unnecessary, especially when doing so will most likely cause you to act in a manner you might not like. Though I do not particularly like him, I feel a quote by Richard Dawkins is relevant here: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

Of course, there are some personalised gods to which most of the above criticisms do not apply. Deism is one of them, which believes in a singular God who created a self-governing universe and then left it be. I admit that this is somewhat appealing in the light of the above, but there is one problem I find with it- why? I hate to bring up Occam's Razor, as it is too often misquoted and misconstrued to support arguments where it oughtn't be used, but I think it applies here. If one can observe only the universe, and the universe is self-governing with no interaction with God, then why even bother believing with God? There is no need for him but to explain why the universe began, which makes him simply another god of the gaps. To an extent it seems like retaining tradition for the mere sake of retaining tradition, which is ridiculous to say the least.

So, if we discount the personalised god, what are we left with? If a personalised god is sentient, all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere and nowhere, existing beyond time and yet for eternity, of flesh and blood or of the ether, then what god is there that is not personalised? I now ask you to cast your memories back to the start of this text, where I told you the story of the person on the beach, and before that, the question of what defines a god. Having reached this point in our reasoning, these two things become suddenly important. The question of a definition spawns the question of, if a god is not these things above, then what is it? And I will attempt to answer it using that story I told you.

I take a small tangent here when I say that during my research, when researching stoicism, I found the stoics' beliefs to be particularly interesting. Regarding cosmology, most of their beliefs would now be discounted as nonsense, especially regarding the elements. What did influence me, however, was their conception of Logos. What their idea of Logos was is not particularly important in this context, for I did not adopt it; rather, it sparked a thought which I carried through to a point where it touched where I last left our reasoning, regarding the nature of the universe and God.

The thought was this: what if, rather than a God creating a self-sustaining universe, something I touched on earlier, what if it was this self-sustaining nature, this driving force which made the universe work, what if it was this which was God? Immediately this appealed to me, as it was a thought I had not encountered before. Clearly, as I mentioned, the universe works according to a number of rules, rules which we have observed and deduced via scientific means. It may seem strange to you, but I assure you that this is due merely to my inability as a writer to describe it, when I suggest that it is the force behind these rules, this innate driving force which is God. It does not think or do, it simply is, and its being is sufficient to cause the universe to work. The analogy of the watch might better explain it: if what we see on a watch, the ticking of the hands, is the observable universe, and the cogs and wheels inside the watch the laws which govern the universe, causing what we see to occur, then this God would be the electricity which makes those cogs move; in the same way, this God is the force which causes the universe to work. If we now relate this to our story, we can marry the two concepts: what we have seen from our consideration of the rock is, for a split second, a hint of this force.

While this appeals to me, I must admit that from the start there was one feeling nagging me as I concieved it. What need was there for it? Perhaps there ought to be some universal god as I hypothesised, but that doesn't mean that there is one, and even if there was, what then? No religion could possibly be founded upon it- how does one pray to an entity with no concpetion of itself, let alone you?

I have up until this point chosen to dance around my actual beliefs, preferring instead to explain the journey I took in reaching them, in a perhaps too indirect fashion to keep your interest. If so, fear not, for we have now reached the business end of the work.

There was only one satisfactory explanation I could find after my journey. That Nature and God are inextricably linked. For the universe is so wondrous, how else could such divine beauty exist but were it God itself? I personally cannot help but marvel at the mysteries of the universe, and this idea was the only one that could explain this higher feeling to me within the confines of my aforementioned preconditions. Some would say, quite correctly, that this would make me a naturalistic pantheist. But this somehow seems wrong to me. I can accept that there is something higher, above me, almost spiritual in a sense, and to say that it is divine. But it is a God in words alone- it cannot be worshipped. How can one believe in a god and be irreligious? So, somewhat paradoxically, I believe that this 'god' of the universe does and does not exist. For belief in this god in no way affects my thoughts or actions, except indirectly in my shunning of all other gods in preference to it. It is almost not fair to call this god, and I do so almost out of convenience alone, as it cannot be described as a being of any kind. So in a sense I am caught in between my disbelief in personal gods and this believe in a wondrous universe, trapped by words of unclear meaning and use. But ultimately what I call it does not matter. So long as I know, and you know what I mean when I speak of this God, then it makes very little difference indeed.

I will add on one more thing as an addendum: one reason I sometimes refer to myself as a nontheist, besides to resolve the awkward paradox above, is that most people would not consider such a passive deity to even be a god. If I accept this, then I cannot say I am an atheist, for I do not disbelieve in a god, nor would I profess to be an agnostic, though I accept that it may be the case that some things may be unknowable, for the reason that I think what is unknowable is often largely irrelevant. If I cannot know if there is an afterlife, why should I bother considering it? "Nontheism" is sufficiently broad to cover my position for informal discussion.

Additionally, I freely admit that throughout this work I have gone in search of God, and I recognise that it is all based on one, admittedly possibly flimsy presumption: that one finds majesty in the consideration of the rock. I am well aware of the possiblity that one might have no interest in the history of the rock, and no care for the stars above us. I likewise admit that there will be people who will criticise me and say that my belief in a higher entity is the exact illogic I deny others, and that these feelings of mine are incompatible with my thoughts of deities. For the present, I will say that those statements are valid, and I have considered them greatly, for I cannot honestly say to know the Truth. Only when the Truth is known will thought be unnecessary, and so for most likely the rest of my life, I will continue to reflect on the nature of God, and perhaps find my beliefs will change over time, as they have already. I am greatly looking forward to Part Two, in which I will go into a complementary topic which ought to dicuss a great deal I have omitted here which may serve to fills any and all gaps I have left in this, Part One, regarding my philosophy.