Philosophy of Life

We all have a philosophy of life whether we know it or not. It can be conscious or unconscious, subconscious. Parts may have been conscious when we learned them, and go quickly into the subconscious. Either way, we are still responsible for what we believe. If we have any free will at all, it must include the decision to accept what we are told to believe, at least once we are financially free of those who forced wrong concepts into our minds in our youth. Yes, some of what we were taught was wrong.

Bringing our philosophy of life to the conscious is really what developing a philosophy is really all about. 

So the foundation or metaphysics and epistemology of the philosophy, include our identity, existence, existence of what we see and assumed reliability of our physical perceptions, our conscious, reason and reasoning. My physiology does not include anything from the mystics, or religion anymore.

Our ethics can be based on anything from the mystics, religion, parents or reason and logic. Cleaning of my ethics of all some non-logical bullshit has been and is an process, which may still be ongoing. It is the process of identifying an underlying premise, and applying reason, one line at a time. It is an ongoing process. Often it is seeing something that is not right, and applying a rational look at the situation. Some acts are not illegal, but are just foolish. Sexting, drinking, drugs, sex in any form outside of a committed relationship, hitchhiking, and the like are just plain foolish, hoping nothing bad happens. This places a whole bunch of things on the do not do list.

What do we base our ethics on? Justice. Do not make a slave out of anyone, nor allow yourself to become a slave. I escaped from being raised a agricultural family slave in my youth. I escaped from the religious slavery of altruism like thinking, where I allowed others to take advantage of me, without proper compensation, and I used junk equipment that requires a floating ax+b calibration factor, that is not much better than estimating from experience. We did testing as directed by the client, not necessarily as it should be done. Not something that is good ethically, but we got paid, it generated revenue, that was the only reason to keep on doing it. For the money. There was much of the engineering done for that reason, little more, according to the client. Some understood the value of what we did, and looked for values provided. To others, it was just necessary. Oh well, I survived and retired.

Justice is the act of fairness in all our trading, buying and or selling. It is the foundation of our ethics, along with our hierarchy of values. We need to place ourselves higher on the list than others, self-interest above altruism. Objectives makes this point, but Ayn grew up under Stalin, but religions also have this others first view, that is often taken to far, and self-interest must come before altruism to avoid self-sacrifice. Doing for others after we are taken care of, and without risk to ourselves is proper to do, but do not let others take advantage of us is important, essential for self esteem and confidence necessary for the good life. Oh well.