A Skillful Morality

Well, it's an old idea: in the other thread I referred to the ideas of Socrates and Epicurus. The belief is that to live well (in the sense of living happily) is essentially the same as to live well (in the sense of living morally).If this is the case, then people who live badly in the ethical sense are also living badly in the practical sense, since they are making themselves miserable. It would be reasonable to apply the word "unskillful" to this: someone who is selfish and wicked while trying to live the good life would be analogous to someone who falls off his bicycle while trying to ride it; he's doing it wrong even by his own standards of success (self-interest) if only he knew it. He thinks he's doing what benefits him, because he's too dumb, too unskilled at living, to understand that it doesn't.

But in fact you seem to be suggesting an absolute objective standard, based on happiness. I think what you actually mean is that there is no simple set of rules prescribing which actions one should and shouldn't undertake that are guaranteed to attain this standard.

Sombra would agree with you. But someone pushing this version of morality would say that you will suffer. At the gain of smuggling some gimcrack Chinese novelty out of Wal-Mart, you suffer by feeling cheap and nasty. And if you manage to overcome the cognitive dissonance involved, they would say, then this will lead you to become a bigger thief, which will lead you to feel even cheaper and nastier ...Now, I am not one of those people, like Sombra or Socrates or Epicurus or the Buddha, who will maintain that this is always and necessarily the case for all people. Indeed, I think this thread exists largely because I argued that it wasn't. But it is what such people think, and so needs to be argued against as an empirical proposition rather than a moral one. Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.