Full discolsure: I am a speech and debate coach at the high school from which I retired as an English teacher. Much of the time, given the difference in years between me and my students, I either think, "I'm so much like them" or, "I'm nothing like them."
Our team had a fundraiser last week where the dual natures of the relationship were clear. The venue was a game palace in the San Fernando Valley's Sherman Oaks, where we played laser tag. Nearly my entire team, over 60 teenagers, was there, accompanied by a growing stack of money. These elements I liked, along with the Jungian corridors we crept through: dark and dreamlike. I wasn't so taken by the game itself, in which we pretended that the toy assault rifles in our hands were true lethal weapons whose flashing lights and clanging sounds indicated death to others or to ourselves. As we stalked the corridors, speakers broadcast female and male voices bellowing, "Attack base! Destroy!," accompanied by hard rock music. I felt I had landed in the very mindset I often critique: the love of rivalry and violence typical of our species.
To be honest, I couldn't really say, "I'm nothing like them," regarding my enthralled students. There was a certain excitement to the environment and the echoing sounds, though it became evident to others, by my leisurely gait and randomly fired gun (blazing at both my own and rival teams) that I had abandoned the game itself.
My students started saying "Sorry, Mr. Lasken" each time they felled me.
But did my relative comfort in a war game mean that my longtime complaint against the wastefullness and stupidity of war is phoney? Can you enjoy a violent fantasy yet hold yourself to be separate from it?
It better be true that we can hold ourselves separate from our fantasies. If it's not true, then everyone's ethics are phoney, including ethics about relationships, about money, about harming people.
Ethical systems appear to derive, not from absolute truths, but from faith based maxims, as religious dogma does. For instance, most ethical systems assert that "murder" (killing that is not sanctioned by society or the state) is bad, but this badness, though we almost unanimously agree on it, cannot be proven. All we can prove is that most people do not want homicide to go unrestrained.
Thus the "badness" or "goodness" of actions as determined by ethical systems are extensions of popular opinion and persuasion, as reflected in historical attempts to define ethics. Aristotle saw ethical behavior as that which benefits others (the definition of "benefit" being subjective); Kant held that ethics are a duty ("duty" being conceptual); Utilitarianism holds that ethical behavior provides the most happiness for the greatest number ("happiness" and counting systems being a matter of perspective). For guidelines so integral to human behavior, ethics are unsettingly open to interpretation.
One difference between ethics and religion is that ethics cover only behavior, not inner thoughts and feelings.
I'm not interested in obtaining a real assault weapon and waging war, yet when I read in Tolkien about hordes of malevolent orcs threatening the peaceful Shire, I do experience warlike feelings.
What are these feelings for? Are they intrinsically "good" or "bad"?
After watching on the news repeated unchanging depictions of people at war whose groupings are purported to be either victims or aggressors- each grouping always presented in only one of the two ways- my ethics tell me that someone is trying to trick me into risking my life and paying my taxes for corporate profits and unnamed parties' quest for lebensraum, and my ethics tells me that this is "bad." Yet when I see a real enemy, like a sadist whose joy is making me and my society dead or miserable, my ethics do not stop at toy guns.
How powerful are ethics? Are they weakened by the lack of objective truth?
I don't think so. Since this is the only type of ethics we have, what choice is there but to go with it?
One engaging thing about debate is that competitors must argue both sides of an issue. According to the rules, I would be required now to argue that ethics derive from absolute principles. I could do that, but I wouldn't want to.
