Life of Pi

[Mr Khan]

Bong Lover said:

This answer does little to solve the puzzle. Fine, you aim to live a long life enhanced by progress and coexisting. What about the countless people who aim for detonating a nuclear bomb in a large city? What makes your choise 'good' and their choise 'bad'?

Without something that exsists outside of the mechanical universe there is nothing to judge the two different actions against each other. It's all just particles in motion anyway. The mechanical universe doesn't care one way or the other if I live and think or if I die and decompose. Basically, how does my desire to live carry more weight then someone elses desire for me to die? The right to life is not a law of nature. A purely mechanical universe have no normative rules what so ever. So without allowing for something that exsists outside of physical reality it's impossible to create a system of ethics  that is consistent.

It's important to note though that the fundament for normative rules doesn't have to be religion. It can be any number of things, but to my knowledge it can't be inferred from matter. If you know how that is basically what I started asking about. There has to be something outside of the physical representation of things that define what is good or bad. Be it that life has a value somehow in itself, or a rule made by a God somewhere or whatever.

And lastly, Pi survives for more than 220 days on a life raft in the pacific, with a homicidal madman that he eventually manages to kill. He stays alive by eating human flesh as a last resort. The killing of the crazed chef is completely justified both as a matter of self defense and as retribution for the chefs behavior, and eating human meat is also justifiable if it perserves your own life. To me Pi shows an unbendable will to survive which is heroic.

If we are all (or in the majority) in the belief that existence is good and preferable to non-existence, we can then enforce that norm, thus stopping the homicidal as part of a mutual pact to protect the lives that we generally agree that we love

Human life can be held sacred from a purely humanist and indeed nontheistic perspective, and imbued with meaning in our quest to make our own life and the lives of others better.