One of the more irritating questions I’ve been confronted with in the discussions I’ve had in my life is: “But what if everyone acted that way?” This kind of objection tends to get thrown up against everything from someone choosing not to vote all the way up to its most grandiose manifestation as Kant’s categorical imperative. And of course sometimes realizing that you wouldn’t necessarily want other people to behave the way you do leads to the realization that it’s not a very upright thing to be doing in the first place, which is the essence of the Golden Rule. But at the same time it’s pretty obvious that not everything you do in life is somehow an expression of the conviction that everyone should be doing the same thing. If a general orders his troops into battle, no one would conclude that all the soldiers should hence start ordering each other around. Nothing would ever get done. Not only are exceptionless general rules too clumsy to deal with every unforseen occurence in life, they tend to undermine the conscience as a guide to integrity and decency in the world in favor of inflexible dogmatism.

Something similar comes about from the continuing belief in some quarters that ethical rules somehow represent objective existing things in the world. 100 years ago the logical positivists, soaking in their hermetic stew of scientism, were claiming not only that all of language describes things out there in the world but that in some sense the representations were actually equivalent to the things they represented. Then Wittgenstein came along and received all the accolades in the world, as well as becoming the golden calf of idol-worshipping college students ever since, by pointing out that this obviously isn’t true, a common reward for those that happen to be in a position to puncture ridiculously over-extended theories and bring them back to earth. One would think that “you should” statements would be a pretty clear example of an area where the theory lacked, even if it hadn’t been for J.L. Austin and the “speech-as-act” school. To claim that such a statement is really a description of something existing, as opposed to an assertion in favor of something ideal, makes about as much sense as claiming that ordering a beer at a restaurant is a description of an existing reality. It goes against the very essence of proscriptive statements. To erase the distinction between them and descriptive statements loses the meaning of both.

I understand the impulse to ground claims about what should be in objective reality, but this attempt shows no courage, no confidence in the strength of subjectivity. Something should be because I believe it should. No one else need share my belief, and my subjective conscience grants me license to judge the actions of others. The mania for “objective” moral truths is consensus-building shit. There’s no use appealing to a higher source of affirmation than one’s conscience, because it doesn’t exist. Anything else is just deference to authority. Surely even the religiously-inclined might be persuaded to trust to the conscience God imparted to them, the divine flame, as surer guidance than various statements issued in the past that, as issued by mortals, could not have anticipated every twist of fate in the future. Of course people often lull themselves into equating their own self-interest with righteousness, but the problem isn’t exactly dismissed by shuffling the responsibility off on someone else. When people choose which parts of doctrine to obey and which to ignore, it all comes back to personal affinity and intuition in the end anyway.