Philosophy of Everything

 Secular Morality series 1.  Punishment is not really about free wil l 2. Morality and killing 3. Morality applied to animals 4. Hell 5. Devil's offer 6. A secular God 7. Morality derived from space colonization 8. On "morality derived from space colonization"     Please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.

Imagine that humanity is offered the following deal: All living humans will enjoy 100 more years of healthy and happy life, finished by a peaceful death in sleep. Immediately after signing the deal, humans will forget the deal and will not worry about this "deadline". If you sign the deal, no human will even experience any suffering. As life will be extended to 100 years from now regardless of the starting age, no human will even witness the death of another human. Even old people would enjoy a healthy and happy life, becoming physically young again and regaining their mental capacity - without losing their experience. Each life will be full of accomplishments, not only by material welfare, but also with most spiritual accomplishments that a human can reasonably expect. Children will still be born, parents will still be happy about them - even more so, because all would go smooth with no worries and no accidents. People would live happily and without any worry until the ...

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...

" Morality derived from space colonization " defines as the highest "Good" the survival of humans in case of an eventual global Earth cataclysm. I believe that such goal (humanity preservation) is likely to be acceptable for many people, but why only by space colonization? There are arguments that an event that could destroy human life on Earth is likely to happen. We don't need to go until Sun depletion, it is more likely that a big enough asteroid will fall in the next thousands of years. Even without this, life of Earth might be threatened by local events like nuclear accidents, major climate change (it happened before). Even destructive diseases might not be contained in a certain Earth region. If not this, we might also face resource depletion if the population continues to grow. It seems reasonable that saving humanity from a global Earth cataclysm depends on... finding another planet capable to sustain human life. It is like in the saying "don...

"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.

I claim that most of the modern moral problems can be translated into "does this increases the likelihood of space colonization for humans?" This covers both traditional religious-based moral and more modern secular moral. You should take it with a grain of salt, of course ;), but let's see how it goes...

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")