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9:23

(In »The syntheist agent and her desires and drives«)

Morality instead concerns a displayed attitude to the arbitrariness of a powerful external judge who might be, for example, God, the nation, the State, the leader, or the law per se, that is, the phantasmic figure that is called the great Other within psychoanalysis. The subject is forced to take a stand in the struggle between good (pleasing the judge) and evil (rebelling against the judge). Morality is thereby an externalised evaluation process. This is on the assumption that the subject who acts needs to be castigated, tamed and made subservient to the powers that be, rather than acting freely from a will of its own. Being moral thus primarily concerns following laws without questioning them. Moralising is attempting to impose one’s own values, in the form of laws or quasi-laws, on others, for example through laws or other regulations. This is in contrast to being ethical, which can best be described as intentions and actions following an inner conviction for the purpose of becoming one with this conviction, without taking account of, for example, prevailing social norms. The purpose of the ethical agent is not to placate any external judge, but to give oneself an ever-so-momentary existential substance, internally for oneself.