Universal Objective Morality

The Issue:
Is it possible to find, just by looking, universal values that exist despite any human involvement? Are there any values attached to mere objects, values that exist across space and time, values that are obvious upon inspection, self-evident as are the first principles of reality and thought?

If there are morals or ethics attached to objects, what are the objects and how did an ethic become attached to it?

A First Approximation
In a universe without humans, there would be no ethics or morals attached to any of the objects in that universe. That universe would just exist. Like discovering a huge and grand new cavern: no matter what it contains, short of humans, nothing in that cavern would have any ethic or morality attached to it by virtue of its existence. The humans that discover the cavern might start attaching values to the objects in the cavern, but the objects did not come with values a priori.

Values are assigned by humans. It seems that things are defined to be good or bad as they pertain to human needs and behaviors. If there are universal values, it would appear upon inspection that the values are restricted to areas of life and health, because the attachment to wealth and family and religion and tribe / nation, even freedom are not universally present in every person. On the other hand, life and health can be seen by the individual to bear directly on his happiness. Life and health as values suggest also the necessity of mind and the free will to make decisions concerning one’s life and health, and hold philosophies based on personal views of reality.

Platonic Objectivism
But there might be other, more abstract, concepts which are not necessarily material in nature yet which have value to humans. Plato argued for Good, Justice, and Virtue as examples of that type of objective value.

If there are things that are good for humans, then in a just society all humans would have access to those Goods. A just person would help to see that such access to the Goods is provided. Justice is the consequence, or effect, of the the action of a just person or a just society. And the action of a just person or society is called virtuous, and virtue is the property of that person or society that acts toward justice.

So virtue produces just actions which produce justice which produces access to the Goods for members of society. It is possible for virtue and justice to be benign, allowing members of society to provide their own access to the Goods through their own efforts, saving virtue for applying justice and Goods to the helpless.

The problem arises when human Goods are defined by elites rather than by individuals defining the Goods for themselves; when access is defined down to a common level, rather than defining it as open to all and everyone; when the value of a social structure is prioritized above individual human value; when freely held worldviews and opinions are ridiculed, harassed and legislated into quiescence.

Two Views of Human Goods
If we assign two tiers to Goods, perhaps it would look like this:

Tier One: Moral Goods for Individuals:
Life;
Health;
Mind;
Freewill, and freely held opinions and worldviews;
Freedom of speech, movement, possession, and association.
Freedom from disabling dependence – financial, physical, addictions, etc.

Tier Two: Moral Goods for Social Systems:
Social Structure – expandable and controlling;
Freedoms positively defined within that social structure;
Responsibilities of individuals are first to the social structure.

It is obvious that many individuals in the past and present have not agreed with this prioritization of Goods, with some preferring social structure to have priority over any personal liberties, including life. For them justice is the pursuit of strengthening the social structure while deprioritizing the personal Goods for individuals. My own bias, reflected in the prioritization shown above, is for personal individual freedoms, which will be discussed below.

Under Tier Two, virtue, of course, remains defined as the pursuit of justice, now called “social justice” since it is justice for society and the social structure at large rather than justice for individuals who might buck against the social system. Those who stand against social justice and systemic extension are clearly not virtuous under this understanding, nor are they just as viewed under this interpretation. And from that observation it is a simple step to assign them to the “evil” category.

Contradiction and Non-Coherence Between the Tiers
Because of the defects of contradictory interpretation that are obviously and clearly existing in the definition of human Goods, it is not possible to declare that any of these Goods, nor any of the attached definitions of justice or virtue, are universal. If they are not universal then, they must be relative and supported by some force other than the mere communal recognition of their universality if they are to succeed.

Are these two camps both relative then, rather than either representing a universal, absolute, objective morality? Relativity relates to situations, types of persons involved, political and economic conditions, and the power and personal predilections of those who are doing the defining. In our culture those are the elites in politics, the judiciary, media, and universities who are defining what is and is not good for humans.

If there are any truly universal Goods for humans, that information does not derive through the elite-driven culture. And the concept of universal Goods seemingly does not attach naturally to objects, even human objects which demonstrate life, rationality and intentionality. But let’s examine this further through the consequences of the tiers outlined above.

Consequences of Contradictory Tiers of Moral Goods
The disparity between Tier One and Tier Two definitions of human Goods becomes intractable due to the attached issues of virtue and evil. Tier One adherents can only see the encroachment of Tier Two advocates into Tier One domain as evil; Tier Two advocates can only see the refusal of Tier One adherents to comply with the social restrictions and invasion into personal Goods by Tier Two advocates as evil. With each tier’s advocates viewing the other tier’s advocates as evil, the gap becomes a rigid, morally defined barrier, and the issue of force comes to the fore: should one tier force the evil other into compliance, morally as well as physically?

With the emergence of force as an issue, the spotlight returns to morality. How much force can be fit into a moral concept? Could Tier One advocacy be moral in its forcible resistance to the introgression of Tier Two? Is Tier Two advocacy moral in its forcible encroachment (regulatory, economic) into personal areas (previously defined as rights) of Tier One advocates?

Up until now, the choice seemingly boiled down to a personal preference. Do I want to control society for its own good, or do I want to be left alone with freedoms as outlined above? This preference itself delineates a moral aspect of the individual making the decision. To be left alone has no moral downside; to dictate to others does.

An Objective Moral Wrong:
The elites who wish to dictate to society how each member should behave, receive and give, are clearly in the moral wrong, even (perhaps especially) if morals are relative. To remove other individuals’ rights in favor of establishing one’s own agenda for that other individual or group is immoral. It is immoral in the same sense as kidnapping or any other robbery of personal freedom. And if that is not clear to the encroacher, then the encroacher is morally defective. Even if it is clear to the encroacher, the encroacher is morally defective. This is not traffic law, codifying a necessary prevalent behavior; it is Nietzschean hegemony for the sake of power and personal glory, based on a philosophy of personal moral and intellectual superiority.

Sorting a Good From the Goods
When force comes to force, human Goods go out the window. The most effective force wins, regardless of its moral standing. But just short of actual physical conflict, which tier above seems to be more closely aligned with human Goods? That in turn depends on the answer to this question:

Is there any value to human intentionality, individual rationality with freedom to think, and free will?

If one answers “No”, then Tier Two can be given priority over Tier One. If “Yes”, then Tier One clearly has priority over Tier Two.

Can any rational person deny himself the right to have and use his own rationality? It would take extreme, forceful measures to implement the denial of this right to any category of humans. Life and health can be denied using privacy theories to permit abortion of preborns, and triage theories of health care to deny health to the elderly. But denying the right to rationality to an individual or group is nearly impossible to implement, even using fear to squelch free speech. Unless one implements wide scale death, of course.

In addition to the difficulty of removing the right, it can be seen, maybe even self-evident, that rationality defines a main essence of being human. It is a necessity. Those with chronic irrationality are termed insane, in the sense of Nietzche whose anti-rationality became irrationality and a decade of insanity. Rationality is a necessity in the definition of normal human behavior.

So here we have a more definite element to the discussion, that of the natural right to personal possession of a free intellect. This provides a differentiation between the tiers that life and health do not. The possession of a free intellect can be provided by only one of the tiers.

And this is a universal, moral truth:
If rationality is valued (and it necessarily must be), then the freedom to use and pursue rationality follows as a necessary and objective personal Good, a necessary and objective moral value. From that freedom, other freedoms are easily deducible as necessary Goods. Valuing rationality produces a clear-cut universal, objective moral tenet. After all, objectivity cannot exist without rationality.

The Free-Thinker
While objectivity is not necessarily pursued as a trait by Free-thinkers, it is definitely advertised by them as a value, part of their claim to superior intellectual and moral character. If rationality and objectivity are in fact values, then even Free-thinkers are morally and intellectually obligated to Tier One values. But a Free-thinker that cannot abandon the morals of Tier Two, despite the intellectual case against it, that Free-thinker is not free at all, but is a captive of an irrational agenda regardless of its moral qualities, or lack thereof.

Conclusion
Because of the necessity for a free intellect and the associated freedoms to use that intellect, the Tier One category of human Goods is a clear moral winner over Tier Two, resulting in those Tier One human Goods truly being universal Goods. Justice is still defined as being the pursuit of distributing and maintaining those Tier One Goods, and virtue as being the pursuit, or at least non-hindrance, of justice.

When I started this study, I doubted that there could be any objective source for moral elements. What emerges, though, is moral theory that derives not from material objects that are observable and measurable, but from a non-material element that we objectively and subjectively know exists even without the ability to hold it between our fingers or to weigh and measure it materially. The faculty of reason and its effect, rationality, provide the necessary moral need for the freedom to exercise those human capacities, unhindered. There is an irony in finding the necessity for objective morality in the non-material object, the intellect.