Both the words "morals" and "ethics" have always bothered me. I feel like they attempt to give an air of absolute authority, that is undeserved. In most cases, using the word "strategies", is much more humble and appropriate.
Why strategies? Ethics for example is taught as a bunch of rules or constraints to consider in decision making. It is mostly to control undesireable side effects of your actions.
I see, there are similarities. But on the other hand engineerings ethics doesn't say how to achieve engineering goals, it says mostly how to avoid anti-goals. So it is a part of a strategy but not a strategy itself.
Any group of rules/guidelines/rules-of-thumb can be described as a strategy; even if their goals are stated in the negative. And by my definition, the justifications for those strategies, amount to a meta strategy. To me, it's strategies, all the way down.
Yes, i've been trying to dig into this. People's values are basically a strategy; they hold these values, as a strategy developed by evolution. Evolution has found that instilling these values is a good strategy to sustain the continuity of life.
So, in my terminology, "values" are simply a meta strategy, that inform the development of more specific and functional strategies.
The reason I am trying to avoid the language of ethics/morals and values, is that they depend on an appeal to authority. Or at the very least, they take on the air of such authority. They're often presented as beyond debatable, somehow God sanctioned and any opposition to them is "evil".
What I would like to argue for, is that all morals/ethics/values are just strategies employed by a group of people. None of them are anointed by a higher power. Of course, we can still argue about relative effectiveness of such strategies, and why they're employed.
