I’m not quite sure what I want to write, but I feel I should make some sort of post this night before my eighteenth birthday. As I type this I have roughly five hours until this collection of cells other collections of cells like to refer to as Sean will have been around for eighteen years, the age at which this reasonably liberal society decides that one becomes responsible for oneself and one’s own life, when some rights end and others begin. What will I have achieved in that time? I’ve been fantastically lucky to have been born into the rich western world. I’ve had every opportunity slung at me by enthusiastic family members, I’ve had a pretty good education, and I’m supposed to be planning for a successful career in the eyes of this utilitarian society. I seem to have set myself up as someone who questions and questions and never stops, occasionally suggesting an answer to the mix, and I am proud of the fact that I don’t let myself be influenced quite so heavily as others can be by social tyranny and confirmity. I try to improve things around this plane of existence where I can. In the end I may only be another human and I may be immensely insignificant in the eyes of eternity, but at least I can pretend otherwise and write away on this blog as if I am penning an epic tale.

But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.

The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.

The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.

I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear - but that’s sort of the point. Good night.

I’ve railed against utilitarianism before now: speaking as a philosopher who’s trying to build things up from little, I’m against basing the entirety of morality on happiness primarily because this means the ends always justify the means if the end result maximises happiness for the maximum number of people. However, in having a discussion over the ideal society the other day, I realised that I don’t seem to follow this. In fact, I’m actually far from it: I often seem to be arguing for a society where there is as little suffering as possible. In said discussion, I was trying to make the point that I’d rather see a world where no-one was in poverty or suffered a poor standard of living, even if there were members of that society not pulling their weight, by not working when they could do so. My opposition said that they would rather see what they called a fair world, where everyone had the opportunity to take part in society and those who didn’t would rightly face the consequences of poverty. I’m talking about those who can work but choose not to: not those who can’t due to disability etc. My opponent asserted that the UK right now is pretty good at providing such opportunities even though there are improvements to be made. My first thought is that this is unrealistic, but I don’t really know about, so I shall leave such empirical arguments behind.

So I was arguing for a society where people were individually better off even if they didn’t deserve it in the standards of many other members of said society. Why? Because they would be happier, and because I don’t see the rest of that society as having any right to take such basic rights of a decent standard of living away, because we’ve had too much poverty and suffering in the human race already. But this is effectively utilitarianism: I’m arguing that the duty of contributing to one’s society is less important than the outcome of happiness for all. However, I believe I can reconcile this apparent hole. The reason I want to allow everyone to have basic rights at all costs is one of liberty: people must be in a position where they can be individuals if we are to be in a position where society is exposed to as many possible variations of humanity as possible, because this is the only way we can hope to achieve a better society on whatever scale of betterment you choose to use. Many would use happiness, I’m not sure yet.

I am having other general problems with my arguments for morality. One thing I particularly hold to is the importance of intentions. To me, given that the only thing people have control over is what they aim to do, this is the only thing that can possibly be used to judge them. It’s not reasonable to punish someone for causing great misery when they didn’t intend to because there’s no point: it’ll just make them suffer when they can’t do anything about it. This suggests that now is very important. It’s not what happens in the future, it’s what we do now that defines us, what we choose to do or not do. But we make choices about what to (try and) do now based on what we are aiming for in the future, so I’m not actually making any kind of progress on things. I attack consequentialism for aiming at future ends rather than worrying about the means needed to achieve them for always looking into a future and never ‘landing’ somewhere. But actually, I end up in the same problem myself.

This isn’t flowing properly today so I’ll leave it there.