Experience is valued on a scale of preference. There is no reduction to principles but instead value is imbued within each experience by the individual, not by some rational process but simply by a product of their being.

There is no precise "measurement" but instead a process of thought that one undergoes to commit to action that benefits them. There is no defined process of thought because this will change between each individual depending on their values.

An experience that is stable and works for an individual across a longer timescale is valued higher than others. What Im suggesting is not that we act on impulse but that we reject the values of others. If you believe that suggesting the individual should do what they value most instead of following the values of others is a simple statement, then you already partly agree with the foundation of what I believe in. However, regardless of its simplicity, this doesnt change its opposition to common moralities held today.

I suppose that your caught up on the word "guide". Ethics exists to guide the action of the individual, it concerns the creation of psychotechnologies that lead to preferred experiences. However, Im not offering any psychotechnologies here, since those are incredibly individual pursuits due to the individual nature of value. I cannot tell you how to best achieve a goal that I do not hold and have never thought about. The only claim Im making here is that ethics surrounds the individual, their value, and their action. However, I can create a model of ethics that can give some insights into what concerns it. Or to be a bit more neutral, Im questioning the relation of value and action and where that leads, and Im calling this ethics.

Egoism cannot give specific advice to people, since everyone holds seperate values. However, egoism can be used as a model to further the creation of ones own advice, and defines what ethics is actually about.

Also, your criticism was a bit vague so idk if your suggesting guiding action is impossible due to moral realism or what not. If thats the case then the above wont really matter to your argument and I'll need to provide something else in response.

In regards to objective or collective morals, none. In regards to individual action, everything.

All actions are committed by indviduals. There is no such thing as a "collective" outside of the individuals that compose it. Remove the individuals and the collective vanishs. As such, I dont care about such a pointless goal as "collective realisation". I have my values and you have yours, imagining a universe where we can act according to some doctrine and magically have all our values fuffilled is childish. There are tradeoffs in life, sometimes you have to hurt others to benefit yourself. Therefore, any doctrine must neccesarily designate some peoples values as more important than others. However, those who are left out have no reason to follow it or not create their own doctrines in turn.

In terms of what we can accomplish? We can create a framework for individuals to build a system that guides their action by designating what is within the realm of ethics.

Just because Im a moral anti-realist does not mean I have no values. I have values that I will defend equally as a moral realists will defend theres. However, the moral realist's view of morality is simply untrue and can only lead to bad decisions or deluded action based on some emotion of righteousness or disgust. As long as humans can come together under similar values, egoism will exist to act as a framework for the construction of a doctrine promoting values that truely match with their goals, not surface level emotionalism.

Im not sure what you mean by natural conditions. However, I will attempt to flesh out my belief further.

All labels are an attempt to categorise the world into discrete units. However, the world has no such units. This isnt an exaggeration. From states, to chairs, to electrons, these categories do not exist outside of our minds, regardless of there being something outside of our minds we can interpret as having the same effects as these labelled objects.

Morals and Aesthetics consist of categories of "good" and "bad", except there is no such thing. All values are fundamentally subjective, just as all other categories.

Theres a nice quote by nietzsche stating this:

"Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations..." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Also, your criticism was a bit vague so idk if your suggesting guiding action is impossible due to moral realism or what not. If thats the case then the above wont really matter to your argument and I'll need to provide something else in response. — Ourora Aureis

Going over the exchange back to the OP I see I'm latching onto "maximize", which I generally associate with mathematics, and so utilitarianism, and so measurement -- but I missed that you're going against that sort of thing. At least to explain why I asked about how you could measure experience: I now see you weren't meaning it as literally as I took it.

But then my second question remains relevant, I think: How can egoism serve as a guide to action?

Usually I'd say that if I'm doing what I want then I'm not really deliberating about what is good or moral or ethical. I'm already decided. It's when I have to make a decision that I start to wonder about ethics.

Though the better way to put the question is: How do you know what you want?

I haven't read all the replies yet, so I don't know if somebody else has said the same thing. The idea that you could replace any principle with an anti-principle was new to me, and it seems true. Although, I have for a long time thought that the principles in moral systems were arbitrarily asserted, I thought that was just unavoidable. I don't know if it can really work to build a moral system off experience, since we only have experience of particulars. We can say, "I liked this particular event and I didn't like this other particular event," but as soon as we say, "I like events that are similar to this event," then we have entered into an abstraction and thus a principle.

I am not sure I understood everything. Maybe you should have given examples to illustrate your points.

I don't know if this is relevant here, but your post reminded me of a difference between people theorized by the MBTI. It says that some people see the past as a series of concrete events, and the present as an abstraction of what could happen right now (Si + Ne). Other people see the past as an abstraction of the general trend of what happened, and the present as the concrete of what is right here right now (Ni + Se). Your discussion of how we experience a chain of events reminded me of Si (introverted sensing), which although true, is not my default conception of the world (being an INTJ with lead Ni). I have a general sense of what I like and don't like, sometimes without remembering most of the specific instances that led me to those preferences. I don't know if this is true, but imagining a moral system built off experience makes me imagine my wife, who is an ISTJ. She, for instance, had the experience that her dad's car was from 2005 and it broke down a lot, so she is convinced that we can never own a car as old as 2005 (rather than abstracting out the general rule that old cars require more maintenance). As another example, many of the men she met in her life who had beards were dirty hobos, and thus she hates beards and expects me to shave. This seems silly to me, but shaving my beard seems like a small compromise to make for an otherwise easy-going wife.

I believe the only thing that certainly exists is experience itself. All categories and identities have to be carved out from experience (ie. we subjectively decide upon them, consciously or not). When you view a table, you see it as a "thing", not just a meaningless plot of data as you might see with sand or any grainy texture; you have "carved" it out of your experience into its own category. Obviously if identity itself is a carved out property of the subjective mind, then principles have no fundamental basis outside of what we decide, and hence anti-principles are always equally valid.

However, we dont need to use principles. Experience is known, regardless of any other factor; and experience has value built into it. Humans are not blank slates, we are born with patterns which give us perspective and value from which to work from. This inital state is the solution to the issue of an arbitrary moral foundation. For example, touching a hot iron is almost always seen as a negative experience, and no foundational moral principle is required to understand that touching the iron is bad.

You mention how any abstraction of experience neccesarily creates a principle, and you're correct. However, this has no issue. Principles are not invalid within themselves, they are simply baseless within themselves. A principle has the special property of being able to hold other principles up, but requiring principles to hold itself up. Experience acts as the foundation from which to build these principles.


I dont think the personality idea is all that relevent, but I am an INTP.

I became a member of TPF a few days ago, and I apologize in advance if I make any mistakes in interacting with the forum.

I believe the only thing that certainly exists is experience itself. — Ourora Aureis

Ourora proposes that ethics should be based on personal experience. I agree that this is indeed a source of ethics and, in my opinion the primary one, as long as personal experience is enriched by knowledge developed by others. There are also other potential sources of ethics: philosophical thought, religions, or innate tendencies.

The experiences that serve as the basis for establishing our ethics cannot be reduced to our own life experiences alone, as these are necessarily limited. We must also incorporate other verifiable experiences, which leads us to consider the cumulative knowledge of science.

Scientists tell us that humans have existed for approximately 0.004% of the life of our planet. They also tell us that Earth began as a mass of incandescent matter, which has evolved into the beautiful, life-filled planet we know today. We do not know why things have evolved in this way, but we must accept that both topics are well-established facts.

At this point, before proceeding further, I pose two questions:

A/ Since we are debating ethical principles, which is no minor matter, is it reasonable to say that it is beneficial to incorporate scientific knowledge—information currently considered reliable—into our limited personal experience?

B/ Before continuing our discussion on the sources of ethical principles, is it worthwhile to consider what occurred on our planet before humans existed, that is, when only natural forces operated without human intervention?

If we agree on both points, I believe it is useful to examine the insights offered by the trends followed in Earth’s evolution, trends that will remain unchanged in the future. All of this is knowledge that we can incorporate into our personal experience before determining what we consider ethical.