moral progress

a recent article in the economist remarked how material progress can and often is combined with spiritual decline. the problem is not trivial - modern science and technology can bring livelihoods to millions, and can also cause massive destruction.

if you care about mankind's survival on the planet, moral and spiritual progress is actually pretty important - just so we don't end up self-destructing. then again, even if we self destruct, we are but a tiny, tiny blip in the universe. sometimes the perspective and appropriate level of lenses through which that we should peer at life gives me problems.

perhaps, as Susan Neiman says, a sense of moral purpose is necessary to give life its dignity. We might not (and probably will not) get to some saintly ideal, but it is up to us whether we want to make progress.

the premise

well, we need to start somewhere don't we. so, the premise of this is based on "good", also implying good is good, and bad is bad. it is worth reminding ourselves that the physical laws of the universe (as we know it) do not care. the individual neurons in our brains also don't care.

so who does?

do we really?

perhaps. at the very least, we care about feeling good. in a world of uncertainties and philosophical and existential paradoxes, i am pretty damn certain i like feeling good. sometimes, a lot of pain and suffering happen before i feel good, but in the end, i vastly prefer feeling good than bad. that's the easy part, and yes, it's pretty obvious.

now with that established, i am figuring out, via trial and error, that being good, results in, for the most part, feeling good. the hard part is figuring what that engenders.

a quest

i set up this blog several months ago, thinking i would start posting some random ponderings that flit through the mind now and then. then, i never even got around to posting the first one, as they never seemed to be well thought out enough.

then i realized anything that i deem to be decent takes me a year to write (and i come out with a measly few words). and i care way too much of what others think of my half-baked ideas.

the temptation when faced with a humungous problem is to do nothing. believe me, that's much easier than trying to do something that seems like it will end up being of no significance whatsoever.

but still, i think it's worth a shot.

so here, i will attempt to track my attempts to make sense of the world and, as the title indicates, to be a reasonably good human being. let's see how this turns out...