Life and Choice as the Basis of Value and Morality

The objective basis of value and morality leaves no room for subjective opinion or arbitrary dictate...

Life makes value possible and necessary.

• The existence of living things is contingent. They can live or die.
  
• Some things benefit lives and other things harm them. Food nourishes and poison kills.
  
• Some benefits "just happen" while others must be actively sought or created. Plants grow roots to get to food, turn their leaves to capture light. Mice find the grain to eat, scurry from predators. Values are benefits which living things ACT to gain or keep.
  
• Values are sought by the beneficiary as a means toward the end of living: life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.
  
• Life is what establishes something as a benefit or hazard, value or disvalue, good or bad in the short or long term. Eating poison is bad for the mouse and drought is bad for the plant -- by reference to their striving for life. A rock cannot generate action toward an end, and the things that happen to it are neither good nor bad for it because it has no goal being furthered or frustrated. Value has no meaning apart from life.
  

Free will makes morality possible and necessary.

• We have free will. We can choose to live or not, to seek values or not.
  
• But we cannot choose to rescind the Law of Causality. This isn’t remarkable: if you want to build a bridge, then you must act appropriately to bring it about -- you can't act just any old way and expect a wonderful bridge to appear. Likewise: if you want to live, then you must act appropriately to achieve that end -- you can't act just any old way and expect a wonderful life. On the other hand, if you don't want to live, then you do not need to do anything in particular.
  
• So IF we choose to live, THEN we must identify and pursue objective values. That means gaining objective knowledge and acting in accordance with causal law. Subjective feelings and arbitrary commandments won't work so well for that: you can't make up what a life-serving value is, they have to be identified; and you can’t achieve them by arbitrary means, you have to act in accordance with the law of causality.
  
• Yes, gaining objective knowledge in general is challenging. Yet life requires it, and that’s why we need the field of Epistemology.
  
• Yes, understanding objective values and adopting moral principles to guide us in pursuing them broadly and over the long term is challenging. Yet life requires it, and that’s why we need the field of Ethics.
  

This is why I say life is the primary value and objective yardstick in morality, the value that makes all our other values possible and necessary and coherent -- and why rationality is the primary virtue as our faculty for identifying objective values and how to achieve them.