Tuesday 14 January 2020

The victory of materialism, the final judgement...

...Has been neatly described by Amo Boden at his Brief Outlines blog:


All of ethics and morality can now be reduced to a quantifiable number.

The final judgement is no longer God or a set of ideal moral principals that must be interpreted by each individual.

Whether you are a good person or a bad person, whether your contribution to the world is of value or not - all this is ultimately judged in terms of a single, quantifiable number.

Any institution or culture, no matter what its inherent goodness is, will from now on be judged in terms of this number. If this number is high, you, the institution or culture are deemed "bad". If this number is low, you, the institution or culture are deemed "good".

This number is the parts-per-million of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere as a result of you, your institution, or your culture. There is no longer any gauge of morality that is higher than this.

This number is the final judgement. 



3 comments:

Kristor said...

I suppose it should come as no surprise that by this materialist metric, the absolutely best society, person, organization, and so forth is ... dead.

Moloch rules. He rules this guy, anyway.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Kristor -

"I suppose it should come as no surprise that by this materialist metric, the absolutely best society, person, organization, and so forth is ... dead."

Very true. And increasingly obvious.

Not sure, but you may have missed that Amo Boden's piece was ironic and satirical (revealed by his characterisation of the expressed view as Ahrimanic) - he certainly was not stating CO2-concentration as an expression of his personal morality. Indeed, the opposite.

Brief Outlines said...

Many thanks Bruce, apologies that I have only just become aware that you shared this.