Beyond Ethics To Post-Ethics - Peter Baofu - Bog

Is moral goodness really so desirable in the way that its proponents through the ages would like us to
believe? For instance, in our time, there is even this latest version of the popular moral idea shared by
many, when Dalai Lama suggested that "[w]e need these human values [of compassion and
affection]....Even without religion,...we have the capacity to promote these things." (WK 2009)
The naivety of this popular moral idea can be contrasted with an opposing (critical) idea advocated not long
ago by Sigmund Freud (1966), who once wrote that "men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved,
and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among
whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their
neighbor is for them...someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his
capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions,
to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus."
Contrary to the two opposing sides of this battle for the high moral ground, morality and immorality are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that
their respective ideologues would like us to believe.
But one should not misunderstand this challenge as a suggestion that ethics is a worthless field of study, or that other fields of study (related to ethics)
like political philosophy, moral psychology, social studies, theology, or even international relations should be dismissed. Needless to stress, neither of
these two extreme views is reasonable either.
Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of ethics, especially in
relation to morality and immorality-while learning from different approaches in the literature but
without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with
each other). This book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature on
ethics in a way not thought of before.
This seminal project is to fundamentally alter the way that we think about ethics, from the combined
perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human
future and what I originally called its "post-human" fate.