Thank you! This has given me a lot to think over. I appreciate your words, and will think on this idea of an Objective Morality.

Could you please elaborate? I didn't quite understand that.

But if you rely on a [insert group or institution] to enforce your property rights, that also becomes a racket. — frank

Try it out: insert any governing body you can think of. It will still be true. This is one of the main problems of a society without ownership.

I also described something similar earlier:

one ... would awaken their selfishness, and come to fill this power vacuum ... These new, selfish rulers would undoubtedly ... corrupt [the society's] selflessness."

I am sure others have described this too.

If there is a power vacuum, someone will fill it, and no matter who does, the nature of power is to corrupt, and so they will be corrupted and will take advantage.

I feel the need to add, since you quoted Sartre:

Let me raise in response to your Sartre quote, yet another Sartre quote:

For a right is nothing more than the other aspect of duty. — Jean Paul Sartre

"Freedom comes with responsibility," you say. Here, it is implied that responsibility is an addon to freedom. The very author that you quote from, however, argues something different: that the right of freedom is equal to ("the other aspect of") duty (responsibility). Sartre not only implies that if you fulfil your duty, you gain the right of freedom, but also that the right to be free is yet another duty one must fulfill. I believe this is what Sartre meant by "Man is condemned to be free "

What is freedom? — Nemo2124

It is my opinion that there is no such thing: If we know every starting variable if a situation, we are able to calculate the end result perfectly. And thus, if we know the state and position of every atom and electron and so on in your brain, along with every piece of stimuli being input, we would be able to perfectly predict your next thought. There is, however, the illusion of freedom, and in my opinion, that is enough for day to day life.

For the sake of argument, I will put this view aside (as I believe it isn't what you meant).

I would like to ask, however, what do you mean by a "higher-dimensional" freedom?

Hmm... Why the pendulum swings? If I had to say something, I think I'd go with suffering. Suffering brings out the best and the worst in people, it allows for our human selfishness to take hold, but also for a selfless dreamers to dream.

Take, for example, the formation of the USSR. The people under the Tzar we're suffering terribly, with famines, war, deaths, you name it. It was because of this suffering that Lenin dreamed the dream of a communist Russia, and Lenin meant it. He truly wanted an equal society for all, he wanted complete selflessness. Some people rallied behind the banner of communism with their hearts on their sleeves. They were the dreamers.

The rest, however, used communism in a bid to take power. Take Stalin, for example. He road on the coat tails of Lenin's dream, and then he turned it on its head for his own benefit.

I think a better metaphor might be a car. This suffering is the fuel, and the steering wheel decides which way we go: to selfishness, or to selflessness. Now it's all up to the driver.

You make a good point. Thank you for your response!

There is only one thing I can disagree with within your response, and it is this:

There must be an objective morality I'm not aware of.

While I see your point, and I now realise my cowardice in not being able to admit this, I must disagree with a complete, objective morality. If morality is truly objective, and our emotions are guides to help us follow this morality, then why does this "objective" morality differ from culture to culture? Why do the Chinese value upholding their honour more than we in the west do? Why do the Slavics find it correct to hold in their emotions rather than to "burden" others with them? Why is politeness and discipline considered a core trait in Japan, and not so much in, say, the Baltics?

Now, I don't mean to say that all people of these cultures act and value the exact same, and these are simply observations I myself and those around me have noticed, one must admit that there are different "objective" moralities around the world. I would instead argue for a sort of cultural morality, wherein the morals of a person are shaped by their culture mainly, rather than being completely innate.

I don't think such a society could develope on it's own.

The selfish human desire is both nature and nurture. It is built into us (selfishness means more food means better chance to reproduce; therefore evolution makes us selfish), and built into our society, too (ex. capitalism). The urge to own private property is an example of selfishness. But selflessness is, too, built into us, though not to the extent that selfishness is (selflessness means community means protection; therefore evolution creates a selfless element within us. This is furthered within our cultures regarding respect, kindness, honour, and other traits that integrate one into a society, and make us protected). To be able to give up on property is to be selfless.

I do believe that, with enough nurturing, the human selflessness can be made to overcome the human selfishness. This, however, takes dedication, effort from others, and ideally, a lack of preexisting selfish notions in the mind. And to instill such selflessness in an entire people, this would logically have to be pushed to the extreme. As such, the development of this collective society would take extreme dedication and effort from an outside, nurturing source, be that divine, or a pregenitor or "parent" civilisation; this is impossible in the scenario you describe, as there is no nurturing force (other than perhaps a divine one, though I don't believe in such a thing).

Even if we are to assume there is a divine nurturing force, we would still be missing the other component in the development of a selfless society: the lack of preexisting selfish notions. In the societal breakdown you have described, the human selfish instinct overpowers the selfless one (after all, if one find himself in a wasteland, he would naturally prioritise himself and his family). Therefore, these selfish notions are ingrained in the people of this cataclysmic world, and it would be nigh impossible to nurture it out of them.

As such, because of the lack of a nurturing force, and the preexisting selfish values of these post apocalyptic people, such a society is impossible to form.

Alright. Then let us imagine a scenario where this selflessness is possible: this world must be bountiful and abundant with resources, with no dangers as to not provoke the natural selfishness in people. The people of this world, as such, are mellow and easygoing, not very hardworkers (as they have no reason to work very hard when all is abundant), and not desiring much (as there is nothing left to desire).

In this world, there must also be a nurturing force to mentor these people, and bring out the selflessness within them. As humans are inclined to do as their mentors do, this force must necessarily be selfless, else the people would copy the mentor's selfishness. I see two possibilites for this mentor:

The first is that the mentor is a group, perhaps a progenitor or parent civilisation as I have previously described. I will presume this civilisation is comprised of a species bound by evolution (I will cover the opposite later on), and as such, has an inherent selfish component. This raises the question of, who mentored them to be selfless? And who mentored the mentor of the mentors? And so on. The logical endpoint: there must be an inherently selfless mentor, with whom this cycle breaks.

The other option is to simply skip this cycle, and assume the mentor is inherently selfless. As all species subject to evolution are inherently selfish, this mentor must necessarily come about outside of evolution, and is therefore what we may label "divine." (This is not to say that this divine being has those powers we so often associate with divinity, however.) I will refer to this being as Mentor. As Mentor is completely selfless, even if they were a collective, the goal would be the exact same: the best for everybody around them. Therefore, as the objective is the same, we may refer to Mentor as a singular entity. As for Mentor's role in this selfless society, I see two options:

One: Mentor claims no power over the people, and takes on a soley guiding role. In a selfless collective, this leaves a gigantic vacuum of power. As there are no outside dangers, this vacuum can only be filled by one of the people. As these people are taught selflessness, and their human selfishness is simply dormant, it is logical that eventually, one (or multiple) would awaken their selfishness, and come to fill this power vacuum---and these mellow, non-hardworkers would not be able to fight back. These new, selfish rulers would undoubtedly shape this society to their needs, and ultimately, corrupt its selflessness (see: the Soviet Union).

Two: Mentor fills the power vacuum. This is the only scenario in which, I believe, such a selflessness can be taught as to allow for the giving up of private property and the creation of a collective.

To conclude: it is my belief that a collective as you describe, with a complete lack of ownership, is possible only under the best of conditions, with complete abundance and safety, and requires direct divine rule. That is to say, it will never happen.

The Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre.

Favourite quote so far:

There are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning

Theologus Autodidactus by Ibn al-Nafīs.

Favourite quote so far:

[Kāmil] also observed the heart within the thorax, its right ventricle full of blood, its left ventricle full of spirit

(Also, if anyone has a PDF copy of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, please message me!)

The complications come in when you consider the value of the individuals on the tracks — Philosophim

This seems like a slippery slope here, assigning individuals "value." To believe that someone is objectively more valuable than another is

A) dangerous, as such a thought natural leads to the preservation of "valuable" individuals and the sacrifice, or perhaps even the culling, of "undesirables," to increase the amount of "valuables."

B) absurd, as it would imply either an objective decider of one's value, or that you are the objective decider (which, noone is).

C) an oversimplification of a person. One cannot simply assign a number (ex. a "value") to a person, because the person behind the number is forgotten. While it is my belief that yes, we are all simply variables in a grand calculus, and that we don't truly matter, to reduce another man to a number is to waste the power you have to make him truly valued. We are all insignificant to the universe, and we can only ever be significant to one another, and by refusing to acknowledge them as people, you waste this power.

My reply to that would be: not consciously. Perhaps, if enough time passed between the end of Earthly civilisation, and the beginning of ECO-2, the stardust our cells have now become may find themselves hurtling in all directions, after our sun's supernova, and by "chance," (though I don't happen to believe in such a thing) making its way to the solar system of ECO-2, and being consumed by a pregnant ECO-2 organism, and integrating into the child in the form of the matter of a single cell or two. In that case, one would technically be part of ECO-2's ecology. But I would not describe this as what you have described, as "[being] naturally born to ECO-2."

A second position to consider would be a more spiritual one, one that believes in a part of a human outside of a body, a "soul." In his Theologus Autodidactus, Ibn al-Nafīs describes how he believes the afterlife works:

According to al-Nafīs, the coccyx of the body is the beginning of growth, and is indestructible. Once a person dies, the rest of his body decomposes and ceases to be human, and only his coccyx remains forever. In the afterlife, the body is constantly regenerated from the coccyx (either into suffering, or into "paradise").

If one subscribes to a theory like al-Nafīs', then ones soul would live on beyond the destruction of the earth, and may be able to, after either billions of years (if the soul is attached to a physical form, like al-Nafīs describes) of an arbitrary amount of time at which an object with no mass would travel to ECO-2 (perhaps at light speed, perhaps beyond), to take form or be reborn into ECO-2.