To: "whynot".

You posit that the two moral imperatives of life are:

1. To live as long as possible

and/or

2. To create/discover/build a life one can live with (in laymen's terms: to be happy)


I can only partially follow your following arguments because they are, to my simple mind, written using an unnecessary amount of jargon which tends to mask your basic points.

But I have to say that I disagree with your two imperatives, as I understand them.

Surely, if there is an underlying principle behind all moral decisions in life, it must be the desire to pass on our genes?

Parents are willing to sacrifice their lives for their children.

We want to live for a long time because people who don't tend to have fewer offspring and so don't tend to pass this tendency on to the next generation.


There are other objection to your first imperative, but I believe they are superficial. For example: suicide bombers. They clearly do not want to live as long as possible.

But I would say that, in a sense, they do. It's just that they sincerely believe in a life after death and they believe that their actions in this life will result in a more comfortable afterlife (in paradise). They are therefore, in a strange way, conforming to imperative number 2.

whynot: I ask only if it could be the case that passing on ones genetics wouldn't fit comfortably beneath axiom number two?

Ah yes, but I think then you have a bit of a circular argument. You see, I read your axiom number 2 as essentially saying that we are motivated by a desire for our life to be happy/contented/fullfilled.

But if the underlieing motive for passing on one's genes is happiness, it's looking as though you're going to define happiness as our underlieing motive.

Clearly we all do things that make us happy because that is kind of the definition of happiness - it's "what we want". And as long as you define "what we want" in the broadest possible sense, then we all, by definition, always do "what we want".

(I'm not sure if that makes any sense. Can anyone else think of a way to make it clearer?!?)