Giving up on all that

Apr 25, 2025; dated 26 for administrative reasons; and with edits on subsequent days.

I've decided to give up on morality. Only in a certain sense, of course.

I spent a while learning what people should do, but apparently this does not help very much. They just do whatever they want.

In fact, I think the category of morality has been poisoned for a lot of people, in various ways. (I'm treating morality and ethics as the same category btw, as is common.) People have used that category to make all sorts of risible claims to them.

I've also had the idea, for a long time, that two good people should be able to agree on things. This is still probably technically true, but acting in this way gets you in trouble.

Moral persuasion is also supposed to work, but I've almost never found that to be the case. First of all, people often are just doing their jobs, or have already made up their minds, and are basically committed to operating in an amoral way. (An interesting example of this is the famous video of a Yale professor being confronted by students over an opinion that it's ok to wear appropriative Halloween costumes. The “conversation” is an appeal to morality, reason, emotion. But it didn't work because the counterparties in the discussion were pre-committed to their irrational pseudo-moral opinions. I've seen videos of more-civil debates at protests, but I can't say any of them have seemed more productive to me. But then again, as they say, you debate to win over a crowd, not the person you're debating against.) Second of all, the common man is so non-expert in talking about morality, so impoverished in his concepts, that I find it's basically impossible to make any progress with him. I think it would be necessary for me to ask “what's everything that's good and bad and moreover why is it good and bad?”, to even know what the hell are starting position is, and he wouldn't be able to answer that, and if he did answer it then his answer wouldn't be accurate to himself (and also wouldn't be accurate to the nature of morality).

To be fair, most of my discussions of this nature have been online. As dril said, most of these people are outcasts from society, for good reasons (they may legitimately have autism (or other such disorders), which is less detectable over text, which I read in my own immaculate internal monologue by default).

The main reason I'm giving up thinking about morality is that I find thinking about bad things very disquieting (the normal reaction btw) and it hasn't helped so far. Bad things just keep going on without asking my opinion first. I had an uplifting or at least amusing last sentence for this paragraph in mind, but I've forgotten it.

It is also making me hard for me to enjoy life. Whenever I read what Tom7 is up to, I think “haha that's a cool and fun thing you could do with computers”. And then I think about doing similar stuff myself, and then I think about how I'm wasting my time on that when there's so much evil in the world that could be combated (although it is difficult to say how I could combat evil in the world, especially given my disposition and position in life) and briefly become filled with a sort of disappointed rage. And if a man cannot enjoy Tom7, then he cannot enjoy life.

I should just throw my life away on jazz.

Coda: having considered it, I've decided to only consider morality a small portion of the time (possibly a small and determinate amount of time on what I may call "Morality Mondays"?). Inshaallah to effect it.