Quantum Morality

I think good and evil are helpful constructs, but they must be contextualized to have true meaning.

Killing, without context, is an amoral concept. Killing in war can be a good, likewise killing to protect your family. Were those imperatives universalized, without dilution, the world would be a better place. Even Kant could be convinced of their moral worth.

Murder, contextualized by its definition, is evil except at the extreme margins--where the victim, in life, had been a greater evil. (Of course, this leads into second order problems of who gets to decide who should be murdered. The answer, historically, has been to grant the authority to the State. Of course, the addition of "the State" into our matrix changes the context of the act, so the moral worth of the act changes. State "murder" becomes State-sanctioned execution.)

Good is that which is life-affirming. In any situation, it is defined by a matrix of contextualized data points.

Unfortunately, some of those data points exist in the future, as things that have not yet happened. Our knowledge of context is imperfect. Worse, we don't know if the unforeseen change in context will change the moral valuation--the good or evil of the act.

But the past is our glimpse of the future, and after a while certain patterns begin to form. With humans, these patterns became statistically sound maxims and moral rules of thumb: in other words, they became our Newtonian Ethics and Newtonian Morality.

But life is more complex than we can imagine, and at extreme pressures, Newtonian Morality breaks apart. Laws get flipped and turned upside down. Actions, amoral in nature, are rapidly reevaluated for moral worth. Murder becomes self-defense.

It is in the search for an underlying order in the chaos of high pressure where mankind cannot seem to find good answers. Until we get a statistical theory of morality, we never will.

Newtonian Ethics have worth, there is no doubt about it. It is just that they are shorthand for something else.