As you’ve noticed, the root of good and bad lies with individual preferences and values. What is good is “merely” that which satisfies our desires at the lowest levels (perhaps what is good is what is least surprising to us, if you buy the predictive processing model of the brain). I put “merely” in scare quote, though, because it’s not so mere as it seems. This is in fact the root of all that matters to us in the world.
It’s normal, when first noticing that good and bad rest on something so subjective as what individuals like, to feel a sense of disease because you’ve likely been carrying around a strong expectation that meaning is externalized and objective in the universe. Realizing that humans create meaning for themselves through their existence rather than relating to it out in the universe can feel like the ground has fallen away.
But, it always was this way, and that which was already true cannot destroy us by having realized it.
Now, we can say a bit more about good and bad. Because all humans are quite similar, we care about substantially similar things and a supermajority of us share common ideas about what is good and bad, even if we tend to focus a lot on the ways in which we differ in our values among each other. If we expand our moral circle to include other animals, we find that there’s still a lot of commonality. Thus, people often choose to equate good with some fundamental thing common to all living beings, like preference satisfaction or not suffering. This is basically how various flavors of utilitarianism are grounded.
As to why are humans important, well, humans are important to us because we’re humans, so it’s reasonable that we value humans. The only confusion is if we previously thought our value was given by the universe to us rather than created by us caring about ourselves, so we’re well entitled to care about things that benefit humanity. Although, while we’re here, maybe we could expand the circle a bit to be all living things? The choice is really up to us!
There’s lots more to explore here, but hopefully that gives you a start!
As you’ve noticed, the root of good and bad lies with individual preferences and values. What is good is “merely” that which satisfies our desires at the lowest levels (perhaps what is good is what is least surprising to us, if you buy the predictive processing model of the brain). I put “merely” in scare quote, though, because it’s not so mere as it seems. This is in fact the root of all that matters to us in the world.
It’s normal, when first noticing that good and bad rest on something so subjective as what individuals like, to feel a sense of disease because you’ve likely been carrying around a strong expectation that meaning is externalized and objective in the universe. Realizing that humans create meaning for themselves through their existence rather than relating to it out in the universe can feel like the ground has fallen away.
But, it always was this way, and that which was already true cannot destroy us by having realized it.
Now, we can say a bit more about good and bad. Because all humans are quite similar, we care about substantially similar things and a supermajority of us share common ideas about what is good and bad, even if we tend to focus a lot on the ways in which we differ in our values among each other. If we expand our moral circle to include other animals, we find that there’s still a lot of commonality. Thus, people often choose to equate good with some fundamental thing common to all living beings, like preference satisfaction or not suffering. This is basically how various flavors of utilitarianism are grounded.
As to why are humans important, well, humans are important to us because we’re humans, so it’s reasonable that we value humans. The only confusion is if we previously thought our value was given by the universe to us rather than created by us caring about ourselves, so we’re well entitled to care about things that benefit humanity. Although, while we’re here, maybe we could expand the circle a bit to be all living things? The choice is really up to us!
There’s lots more to explore here, but hopefully that gives you a start!