Philosophy of Everything

Let's observe first that we tend to attribute evil when there is a sufficient capacity of understanding the consequences of one's actions. A small child that produces a tragical accident is not considered evil usually, because there was no intent in doing that harm. We then observe that we judge evil in the contrast to another, better, possible action: "he could have decided to not kill him". We don't attribute evil when someone produces harm without having the possibility of doing something better. Moral judgement on evil is therefore a judgement of one's actions and decisions, in relation to some other actions or non-actions that would have resulted in a better world. That better is a highest "local maximum" that we can envision. The misdirected action is usually dictated by another, more narrow,  goal that is aiming at a smaller local maximum. For example, one can aim his narrow, selfish, good (local maximum) at the expense of others. T...

"It's more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he's at a higher level of evolution" In "Lila, an Inquiry into Morals", Robert M. Pirsig brings intriguing reflections about the philosophy of moral using as pretext a river journey he had on a boat. Here I will bring my insights based on this book. Many of this reflections will be my own re-interpretations that were inspired by the book. Even my understanding on Pirsig's views might not fully correspond to the original author's intention.

If there is a meaning of life , then this meaning should only be achievable as long as life exists. You could still believe in a meaning "after life", however I personally find it unlikely. If the meaning would be only after life, the very existence of  this  life would be a bit... meaningless ;) I personally don't believe in a "life after death", at least not as a continuing existence of the person. I would be more willing to accept a kind of fuzzy "life after death" by informational replication and resulted impact on society (like in "live by your good deeds")

You have an intuition on this, even if you cannot articulate it probably. Every major vector of our existence is derived somehow from this intuition: why we make children, why we try to preserve our existence, why we help others, why we don't kill each other. I would postulate that our everyday moral code can be derived from this intuition on "the meaning of life". The major religions captured it in slightly different ways; however there seems to be something more unifying behind various religious dogmas. I believe there is something very convergent in the intuition that we each have about the meaning of life. But wait; is there really a meaning of life? I would answer this by paraphrasing the Descartes's quote "I think, therefore I am". If there would not be any meaning of life, then there would be no meaning in everything we could do. The answer to this question would be meaningless too. If there is no meaning, it does not matter if we ans...