Joy is not an emotion; it is a way of being
A philosophical discussion about Moral Ends
There is no better way to test an idea than to take it to its extremes and the most important idea to test in this way is that of moral imperatives. Why should we do what is right and not do what is wrong? Why should we pursue virtue and avoid vice? How are right and wrong to be even defined logically?
One of the most common ways that these questions are answered by materialists and atheists is simply this: we ought to do that which maximises our pleasure and minimises our pain. This way of thinking reduces human beings to mere animals running from the trap and toward the cheese, and reduces morality to operant conditioning: we do that which is right because there is a reward at the end of it called pleasure and define right by that which gives us pleasure, and we avoid that which is wrong because wrong is defined by something that gives us pain. This way of thinking about morality is called “hedonism”.
Many claim to reject hedonism but don’t have anything sufficient to replace it with when they’re truly interrogated about virtue and morality. Some replace it with the age old “God-said-so” but for the intellectually curious, that is insufficient. This essay is an attempt to go provide the way of thinking about morality that better explains the concept than hedonism or authoritarian religiosity.
