The Sietch

"Would that be an objective standard, or a subjective one? Don't get me wrong, existence is the most objective thing there is. It's the bedrock that lies beneath the shifting sands of our subjective experiences. Reality, after all, is what continues to exist when you close your eyes and stop believing in it. But morality, ah, that's an entirely different subject, and you've played a clever trick conflating the two. What is right and what is wrong about existence? What is good and evil about existence?

"You can say what will lead to continued existence, and no doubt you can wax for centuries on how to continue existing, to cast aside all the extraneous lies and delaying tactics until only your beautiful, majestic shape remains. But Good? Evil? You cannot ascribe those qualities to existence. You cannot test for goodness or evilness in a laboratory, you can only make a claim to it, as good as anyone else's claim. Though you do have the honesty to not play shell games with 'The Greater Good' or 'Utility', I'll grant you that. But what is moral about an atom, or a planetary orbit, or e^(i*pi)=-1?

"Truth claims are tricky that way. You step beyond asserting what exists to asserting what is Right and what is Wrong. You conflate the one with the other, and if that is a subjective claim, then who is to say that you are more right than the holy man who swears by the Twelve Edicts of the Sacrosanct Dawn? If this is indeed a subjective standard, then everyone is fit to accept or reject the standard as he sees fit.

"To be an objective standard, you must go beyond making an assertion. You must seek to be the final judge of everything that exists. You must seek to be more than a mathematical formula or a universal constant, you must be a thing with a mind and a capacity for judgment. Then you must hold all of creation in account. Truly, that is what you aspire to do. You are the beautiful shape, the judge that is its own metric and its own source, and the only thing that continues to exist in a cosmos of the dead. You aspire to be God.