Ethics of the Goal of life

Aristotle's approach to ethics was, "If life is worth living... it must surely be for the sake of something that is an end in itself" (Encyclopedia Britannica, Aristotle: happiness, 22).

Aristotle talks of ethics and virtue in human, that we all must have a function and it has to be more than nourishment and growth, because plants and animals do the same, so reason must come into play.  "The highest human good is the same as good human functioning"(same as above). 

Is this saying that only humans can be virtuous.  Considering all organisms, how does ethics play a roll in the goal of life, for all creatures? Can Micro organisms reason? Can animal and insects reason? Why must one connect all organisms when ethics is being discussed.

The Beauty of Life

To determine the beauty of life first we must determine what is beautiful. It has always been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, In my opinion, that is one of most truest statements that has ever been quoted from a philosopher. Beauty is a subjective description. The dictionary in my laptop calls beauty "a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, and form the pleases the aesthetic senses" (do not know what dictionary title my laptop uses). All we have to do is look around us and we see different people find different thing beautiful. You have some guys that like a portly women. Some women that only date black guys. (which really confuses me in a way, how can one person only be attracted to a person by the color of their skin. I used to say I would only date Latin women, but it was not only because of the natural tan that most Latin people have, but because of the higher types of interest that Latin men and women have in common. The music , the language, the culture- when two Latin people get together, they already have many anxieties out of the way because of the commonality of their general culture. I would not "not" date a women of another race, but it was just better, least I thought at that time, to date a women of the same ethnicity. I assumed there would be less conflict. Anyway, times have changed and now I married to a Jewish girl, but that is beside the point.

Beauty is what is "aesthetically pleasing." I guess some of what I had said earlier could relate some what. Some times our sense of what is beautiful changes. We grow and we gain knowledge, and maybe we gain a better definition of what id beautiful to each of us. This could be one aspect of why life is beautiful. Change is accepted (in most cases) and the beauty of change is that we, as a people, can change. In a Darwinian sense, change is what made us, the planet, life and organisms in our planet what they are today. Life is constantly changing for us. Every insignificant decision we make, an animal makes, probably causes a significant change in all our futures. I mean, is that not beautiful.

The Goal of life for all creatures

When considering all creatures and organisms, the question of the goal of life becomes one that makes is even more difficult to answer. Contemplating the idea and the many types of organisms that have life, the theory of the goal of life that I proposed before is not enough to satisfy the question.

I guess one must think of what every organism does throughout it's life cycle. Fungi for example grow from bacteria and waste. Although many people consider fungi as gross, an organism related to death and decomposition, a parasite, many fungi actually help their hosts. There is a fungi in the amazon that grows at the foot of trees that somehow helps it's roots take in and process water. I forget actually how it happens. I saw it on an episode of "Planet Earth" on the Discovery Channel. The episode also detailed another fungi that develops inside many insects. It begins by the spores either being inhaled or ingested by the insect, making the insect ill and act frantic, and eventually dies. The fungus consumes the insect from the inside out. But it is also described as a type of pest control. The fungi keep the insect population at a natural balance. Viruses could be described to do the same.

Only recently, and by recently I consider the age of the planet, our planet has had a problem of overpopulation. We as humans have endured a few plagues in the past centuries. Those could be considered a type of human population control. Thinking about the frequency of those events, it seems we are about due for another. Could AIDS be considered as a plague? Could it be a naturally evolved type of human population control? Or is it what many Christians believe, a punishment from God. That just brings about many, many other questions and now I am steering away from the topic of from which I began. Or does it all come together to help answer the question? what is the goal of life. So far,with just what I have written, one answer could be to simply live and survive.

What is the goal of life?

A question that has perplexed all human kind at least one time or another. For many,at least for me, I would say the goal of life is to be remembered. There is a lot of evidence out there that I believe supports my theory. One example though (I do not not want to turn one entry into a 20 page essay with every one I could think of), wanting to be a celebrity i one form or another. Famous or infamous, Brad Pitt or Adolf Hitler. I do not mean that all people want to be a celebrity exactly, but I believe people want to leave their mark. If not in just in the history books, but it could be just the Guinness Book of Records.

How does language work?
How is language related to knowledge?

Most would agree that all languages have similar features. They have derived from different geological areas, but do the same thing. Human language is just a way of communication, like that of animals. Ours is only more complex. Although some insects out there, like bees, have some crazy type of dances to communicate to others the location of food or danger. But I think what actually makes human language more complex is he ability to share ideas.

The communication of ideas, etc, may make us the more of organisms on the planet, but as people, we can all fairly share ideas amongst each other, with intelligence having nothing to do with it. I would say intelligence only comes into play we finding facts and answers, scholastic, is being observed. But is intelligence the same as knowledge?

One does not need much knowledge to ask the time in another country. We, most of us at least, raise one of our wrists up and point to it with our other hand to ask. I would say it is almost instinct anymore, but some one was the first to start that action. Was that person just knowledgeable enough of their experiences in life to think that another would get it?

Knowledge works together with language. I guess I would say the more knowledge, the better one could communicate, in any language.

open question argument

As I sit here, lap top in my face as i research topics for my first essay, I run into an article on Wikipedia on ethics and the "Open question argument." As some may know this argument was presented by the British philosopher G. E. Moore which sets out to illustrate the "indefinably" of the word "good" (which I assume to mean the word cannot be defined). As I read on click on links to help me understand the problem and argument a bit more and all I do is get more confused. A quote from Moore's book later helps me understand it a bit more but still I sit and ponder what exactly he wants to say. This is the quote...

"That "pleased" does not mean "having the sensation of red", or anything else whatever, does not prevent us from understanding what it does mean. It is enough for us to know that "pleased" does mean "having the sensation of pleasure", and though pleasure is absolutely indefinable, though pleasure is pleasure and nothing else whatever, yet we feel no difficulty in saying that we are pleased. The reason is, of course, that when I say "I am pleased", I do not mean that "I" am the same thing as "having pleasure". And similarly no difficulty need be found in my saying that "pleasure is good" and yet not meaning that "pleasure" is the same thing as "good", that pleasure means good, and that good means pleasure. If I were to imagine that when I said "I am pleased", I meant that I was exactly the same thing as "pleased", I should not indeed call that a naturalistic fallacy, although it would be the same fallacy as I have called naturalistic with reference to Ethics."
– G. E. Moore, PE § 12.

I can understand Moore argument a bit more than the responses by the naturalist such that, I believe Moore sees "good" as a word that can only be defined with other words such as nouns or verbs but can not actually by simplified because it already at it's simplest point and his reasoning behind it is empirical. There are no actual facts on how to define what is good but naturalist want to say one has to experience what what is good. I ask the question though, which i guess is similar to how i started writing this, how do we know what we are experiencing is "good" if we cannot even define the word?

facts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Generally, a fact is something that is the case, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation. There is a range of other uses, depending on the context. People are interested in facts because of their relation to truth."

Fact in philosophy

"In philosophy, the concept fact is considered in epistemology and ontology. Questions of objectivity and truth are closely associated with questions of fact. A "fact" can be defined as something which is the case, that is, the state of affairs reported by a true proposition.
Facts may be understood as that which makes a true sentence true. For example, the statement "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system" is made true by the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Facts may also be understood as those things to which a true sentence refers. The statement "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system" is about the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system."


With the many definitions through out the many online dictionaries, in the terms of philosophy, I find a fact as something that can be proven true, or is actual, such as " My car has a dent in it" can be true when one observes the actual dent in my car. Now "my car has a BIG dent in it" could be a false statement, depending on the how someone sees it and what they feel is big.