Today, I encountered one of the biggest tangents in my life, and I wanted to take note of it.

I was reading A.J. Ayer’s article, The Claims of Philosophy, where I stumbled upon the sentence, “Few men, indeed, can ever have reasoned worse than Hegel, the arch-pontiff of the nineteenth century, but at least he claimed the support of reason for his fantasies.” This made me curious about Hegel (a big mistake).

I had heard a bit about him before but knew nothing in detail, so I searched around and found a two-hour video about him. After an hour, I stopped because it made very little sense to me and switched to another, shorter video by a professor. This one, at 45 minutes, was much more understandable—I highly recommend it.

In the video, the professor said something like, “The classical phase starts with the myths of the gods and then shrinks down to human scale […] if you know the movement from Aeschylus, with his moral rigor and seriousness, to the complete moral abandonment in Euripides […], there is clearly a movement from gods to heroes to men.”

This piqued my curiosity about when these people lived because I recently read Plato’s The Republic, where he already complains about the moral decline (in Book 3, section 1.(b)) in mythological stories, referring to Homer, the most famous poet from whom many great Greek myths, like the Odyssey, come from.

I looked it up and found that Homer was born around 800 BCE, while Euripides was born around 480 BCE, nearly a four hundred years later. It really does seem like throughout history, people have always complained about moral degradation.

From Euripides’ Wikipedia page, I learned that he was prophesied at birth to become a great athlete. This got me curious about the Olympics and whether they continued uninterrupted or were resumed later. It turns out that ancient Greece held around 195 Olympiads (possibly more, if some were unrecorded), and the games were officially resumed in 1896.

This led me to wonder why the games had been paused. They were outlawed by Theodosius I, the last Roman emperor, before the Roman Empire was split into a eastern and a western sections. The split, I think, began with Diocletian, who appointed a co-emperor to help manage the vast empire.

And that was the tangent.

The subfield of Ethics in Philosophy concerns itself with the questions What is morally right? and What is morally wrong? The most well-known ethical systems are:

• Deontology, where we act in accordance with a set of rules (e.g., do not steal, do not kill).
• Utilitarianism, where we act in ways that try to maximize happiness and well-being for all involved.
• Virtue ethics, where we act in a way that embodies virtuous behavior (e.g., a virtuous person wouldn’t steal to enrich themselves but might steal if it meant feeding hungry children).

Let’s consider the following scenario: we can kill one person to save five. How would these ethical systems respond? A deontologist, if they follow a rule against killing, would probably disagree with the action. A utilitarian would most likely say yes, as maximizing the well-being of five people is better than that of one. For a virtue ethicist, it would depend heavily on the situation and which virtues they believe are most important.

Now, let’s raise the stakes: we can kill one person to save five hundred. A deontologist and a utilitarian would most likely maintain their positions. If a virtue ethicist initially said no, it is foreseeable that they might now say yes.

What if we assume the worst possible case: we can kill one person to save the rest of humanity, or let the one person live and allow humanity to perish? A utilitarian’s position remains the same. A virtue ethicist would likely also say yes, as it doesn’t seem virtuous to doom all of humanity for the sake of a single person. Even for a deontologist, despite the strict rules they typically follow, I don’t believe they would refuse to break their rule in this scenario. One possible exception is if they adhere to divine command theory, which states that what is morally good is what is commanded by God.

It seems, then, that unless one’s morality comes from divine commands, all ethical systems ultimately collapse into utilitarianism if the stakes are raised high enough.

Today is one of those days.
Nothing that I do not believe exist, is real.
I feel my sanity is slipping.
Who have I to blame but me?

“A delusion starts like any other idea, as an egg. Identical on the outside, perfectly formed. From the shell, you’d never know anything was wrong. It’s what’s inside that matters"
~ Legion

With what do I numb my brain today?
So many choices.
Will I drink, until I can’t think anymore?
Will I stress my ears with screams, drowning all thoughts?
Will I smoke, until the sleep takes me?

“I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair … Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering!”
~ Dostoyevsky

I wish I was the monke from bloons tower defense 6.
Popping one balloon after another.
Poop! Poop! Poop! Poop! Poop!
Poop! Poop! Poop! Poop! Poop!
Conciousness was a cruel misstake, of the universe mistress.

“Time is like a dream. It’s impossible to tell wat is true and what is false. When you dream, you see others. Perhaps, in the world of others, the dream version of you appears. Or perhaps, our lives are like an invisible bubble that could pop at any time and cause us to awaken.”
~ ISSTH