Billy Beck

To begin with, morality is a question that only concerns humans, exclusively. No other species faces this problem, and that's precisely because they do not live by reason as their only mode of existence. We do. Reason is all we've got. We're not fast, big, or well-armed by nature. What we have is a conceptual faculty with which we -- unlike any other species -- adapt the world to our purposes, and not the other way around. (The rise of tools illustrates this, and that was just the beginning.) If man is going to live as man, then he must be free in every social context to apply his mind to the problem of his existence and flourishing. Morals arise from a basic understanding that this condition of life is necessary to every member of our species who can live up to it. It's a necessary discrimination against those who cannot or will not, and who must be separated by their own actions from those who can, and do. Morals exist because of what we are. There is nothing arbitrary about them. That is the most principal fact of this whole issue, and everything follows from it.