It seems to me that there is a problem in how some people view and pursue their emotional states. Most people will conduct their entire lives pursuing a particular emotional response, such as happiness or pride. They will marry, they marry ill-advisedly, they will manage their careers, they will read books and attend lectures on the pursuit of happiness, they will steal, they will kill, they will abuse drugs; they will do whatever is necessary to attain a few blissful moments when glandular tissue in their brains is secreting a pleasurable chemical. Whatever means they choose, their goal is to make those cells secrete happiness.

What's wrong with this is that people pursue things like happiness and love as if they were the ends to some means. Happiness is not an end to any means; it is a means to some end. It is a functional tool, like a compass, and to no one is following a compass an end to some means; we follow compasses to arrive at some goal.

So what are the goals of happiness and similar emotions? What are these internal compasses trying to lead us toward? Should we really be following them? Emotions are evolutionary adaptations. They were not developed specifically for your benefit or best interests. They developed because the creatures and communities of creatures who had something similar to them were more likely to endure and reproduce.

That in mind, they can be a reliable guide, but they can also be a treacherous one, because evolution does not always have my best interest at heart. It is also a very slowly developing mechanism, and we are a very quickly developing species, so much of the emotional information imbued in us at birth is better suited to the necessities of ages long since gone. They're misguided, confused, self-defeating, and inapplicable to modern society. Many of the things that they drive us toward are of no benefit to us whatsoever, either because we live in a different circumstance or because they were never meant to benefit us at all, but to benefit our offspring. So emotions have some limited relevancy to us still, but we should take their advice with a large spoon of salt.

In any case, they are functional, as tools, and a tool is only ever a means to an end. A wrench is a valueless and queer novelty if there is nothing to tighten. When we are driven to some end by our emotions, we must examine that end and make a conscious and informed decision on whether or not that end is worth pursuing and is in alignment with our values, because this compass doesn't always point north.

As for the people who aim to cheat their biology with substance abuse by tricking their brain into drowning itself in pleasurable neural-chemicals, they are missing the point of the emotional response entirely; they are misusing the tool, and as such, they suffer for it.

Emotions are our tools, our slaves; we must never be theirs.

Looking at America, I have a difficult time discerning the intended purpose of the judicial system, namely the courts that deal specifically with prosecuting criminal activity and imposing penalties. I might presume the purpose is to “bring about the rule of righteousness in the land … so that the strong shall not harm the weak,” or some snobbery of that sort, whatever that means. My question is how? Is it by instilling fear of retribution? Is the retribution itself, as many grieving victims would profess, the entire point of it? Is it merely by separating the bad lot from the good lot?

Try as I may, I can’t find a morally consistent argument for the status and practices of America’s justice system. It seems that if they’re not trying to correct a wrong with another wrong, then they’re merely acting out of a sadistic disregard for the innate value of the people they punish and subject to violence, psychological torture and death.

They simply don’t seem to be doing anything particularly helpful or in alignment with their own goals. If their objective is to instill fear of retribution, then they’re doing an abysmal job at it; America's prison system's ability to attract people back, or draw them there in the first place, is evidence enough of that. If their goal is to issue damage for damage, then their goal is morally corrupt and self defeating. A moral imperative does not invert simply for moving to the other side of a courtroom. If human life and dignity were of innate value to the courts, then they wouldn’t be so eager to put an end to them. If their goal was to attain compensation for damages to society, I could understand that. Fines and compensatory debt have moral justification in that someone is returning what they have taken, but there are no labor camps and no output to society from prisons; they’re not factories, they’re cages. If the goal of prisons is simply to remove the negative element from mainstream society, then one must question why criminals are not simply relocated, but are stripped of all rights and dignity and are subject to execution, and they themselves are no longer guaranteed safety. There is a retributional element here, but I can’t find the justification for it.

I am advocating the notion that there should be only three general actions that a legal system should impose upon criminals. They are fines, rehabilitation, or segregation if the first two are unviable for specific individuals. Currently, the fines are not acted upon to their fullest potential, rehabilitation is nearly a nonfactor, and segregation is issued in such excess as to approach stupidity, involves more elements than it needs to, and is corrupted with a host of superfluous and unjustifiable penalties.

It seems to me that this country’s judicial system has changed little since the time of its inception, and rather than adapt new systems to an ever changing society and value structure, it’s still applying the frameworks applied in the middle ages.

In conducting my affairs, I incessantly pose questions to justify my course of action. "What exactly am I doing?" "Why am I doing this?" "Do the projected benefits of this outweigh the potential costs?" "How does this relate to the scheme of my worldview?" In recent months, I've found myself forcing like questions onto the matter of friendship. What is friendship? Are the people around me friends? Why am I engaging in this social bondage to them? What is the benefit? Is this incongruent with my morality?

To complicate the matter, no person or encyclopedic source can provide me with clear and definite criteria for friendship. I myself have no definitive criteria; the people around me who call themselves my friends and vice versa are permitted the position only out of a habitual convenience. They have been there for so long and so devoutly that I've simply lacked the motivation and rhetoric to discharge them, yet I am faced with a growing uneasiness with my inability to justify their rank in my life in practical or principle terms. I have a gnawing suspicion that they do not belong there.

I might suppose, for simplicity, that friendship is merely a mutually elevated regard between two or more people based on some personal inclination. Practices and policies often attributed to friendship such as openness and emotional support flow from this elevated regard. This leaves me with the question of justifying my own partaking in this social practice. Is there a reason for me to regard these people exceptionally? Is it because they themselves are of exceptional merit? Is it because they are exceptionally important to my affairs?

As in any interaction, there is ideally the demand for beneficial exchange. I am expected to give something that they desire in exchange for something that I desire. Friendship doesn't normally seem to follow this framework, however, because things are seemingly expected to be given free of return. This is categorically unacceptable by me. How can I be demanded to sacrifice my effort and resources without any benefit in return? Am I a sacrifice upon the altar of "friendship," merely a transitional means to their ends? It would seem so, as they unspokenly expect me to give unto them what they need without my explicit want for a return, and returns are something that I do not acquire from them. Their company does me little benefit; their resources are irrelevant to my needs; I have all of the emotional support I need in myself; they offer feelings of social adequacy and acceptance, but I've never needed these things before, and cannot glean what use they are to me now. It would seem that I gain nothing substantial from them.

There is perhaps another justification of friendship. Perhaps in their characters there are virtues and values that I hold in high regard, and because of that, I may desire to see them be made to prosper. If I value certain principles and see those principles reflected in the lives and philosophies of like minded people, then they themselves must hold elevated value to me, and it would be a tribute to the framework of my own principles to see them blessed with my company and loyalty. Is there any such reflection of myself in my friends today? There is not. None of my perspectives or values are akin to theirs. In most of my friends, there is never any agreement between our experiences, perspectives or morality.

Having reflected on this, I conclude that there is no justification for me to continue this social bondage with any of them.

Mo-ral-i-ty , n. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct.

I find my definition of it more useful and of equivalent meaning: “a framework of principles by which it is determined how one should act.”

I am profoundly morally minded, and who should not be? If it is the means by which one determines how one should act, it follows that everyone should be concerned about it in determining their actions, but it is clear that not everyone is.

I can detect in the people around me two different views on morality. There are those who believe that it is universal and objective for being dictated to man by characters of authority. Others believe that morality is baseless and subjective, that it has no reason for being outside of cultural opinion and hence is profoundly able to be disregarded.

My perspective on morality is of a different kind. Morality is not arbitrarily dictated, such as by higher powers, nor is it formed exclusively by willful and personal views. Properly exercised morality is not an end to which man must live up to, nor is it something that man may disregard and still thrive; it is a means to the ends of man, a tool to achieve his goals and a guidance for what those goals must be.

The thing that truly makes morality authoritative is logic, or rather, a consistency between premise and reliably inferred conclusion, to include the validity of the premise. I have been told that there is no logic in morality. If that were the case, since morality is a means to determine how one should act, the implication would be that there are no logical actions, or at least not actions that can be realized through logic. This is of course not the case. If we arbitrarily accept a goal, logical inference is perfectly suited for determining a route by which to meet that goal, if it can be met; hence it is by logic that we can determine how we ought to act towards an end.

It is the apparent flexibility of the end that makes morality relevant to each individual and their own interests. That does not mean that morality can be fitted towards any end, which logical inference will then loyally carry it to. The ends that we are appealing to are things that we value. In order, however, for our morality to not collapse under its own weight, the things that we place value in and work towards must not contradict each other or undermine our own rationale for valuing them. If one analyzes the rationale behind many of our decisions, it becomes apparent that there are self-evident values that, by definition, must be present in any decision making individual. When all is accounted for, there is an empowering flexibility to morality and what one’s principle values may be, but the logic underlying the distribution of values leaves some ends indefensible by rationale.

I conclude thus that there is a moral foundation applicable to everyone, that morality has aspects that are both universal and personal.