Ethics - a polemic

There really is no such thing as Ethics. Not as it is normally construed. People, philosophers, have spent a lot of time discussing ethical theories, but all of this is bunk. Although it may be interesting bunk, I don't rule that out. Ethical reflection, like any other reflection, may help you see things another way, maybe that is good. However the theoretical aspect of ethics is absurd. How can we say that we could codify how one ought live their lives? Let us take the Big Three: Aristotle, Kant and Bentham/Mill. First, each has been far too vague to have really said anything at all. They have said no more than 'be good (you know what I mean)', except they have been more loquacious. What do they tell us about how to live our lives? Nothing. One may present one's actions through such a frame, if it aids sleep, but there is nothing in these theories which says that a Kantian or an Aristotelian will behave differently in a given situation, or that if they do that this difference was in any way theoretic. Bentham/Mill is slightly different, because it is really more of a political ideology. However it is just as vague, vacuous and truthless.
People do what they do. Actions are rarely considered. And even when they are, we are so steeped in prejudice, structural dogma, fears, desires and other complications that we cannot isolate our decisions for ethical consideration. Yes, we invent little games - take Peter Singer in The Examined Life with his example that you see a drowning child but you are wearing expensive shoes, stuff the shoes we all say but we still buy the shoes when we could give the money to charity. Now there are issues in this example about ethical scope but that is not the point. Singer thinks we are inconsistent, as if we ought to be consistent (in this way)!
So we can be deconstructivists instead, and we can say the only moral life is one of anxiety. Pah, this is merely asserting a new dogma. I can sleep easy at night so long as I cannot sleep easy at night. What drool.
So how should we look at ethical dogma, and I include the deconstructivists in this? It is nothing but the positing or implication of a hierarchy we claim follows from reason, thus providing the necessary distanciation, that allows its speaker to position themselves relative to others, depending on their self-image; or it is the re-assertion and re-affirming of one's childhood dogmas. There is nothing theoretical to be said here. There is nothing for ethical theories to be theories of, nothing for them to predict and nothing to contradict them but opinion. It is all opinion. And that is fine, have your opinions. What bothers me is when those opinions are used as a means to exert power, and I do not just mean in the traditional sense, but even as Singer uses them - to create guilt, self-doubt, self-loathing, inferiority. Singer positions himself as a moral compass, now we are lost (and it is he that lost us, or told us that there is something to be that is to be lost, in this way). Bush and Blair used it to justify wars, the Catholic Church to grip Europe for centuries, now ecologists use it to gain power and press their idea of what the world should be upon us. I do not care that they say this, maybe we want the world this way. I care that they dress it in normatives. I care that they say - or imply - "If you do not think like this, if you do not see this as we do, then you are wrong in the most profound way possible, you are spiritually bereft, you are below humans." This I find sickening. This is the essence of Ethics - the self-righteous degradation of others.
And that is exactly what I have just done.
So what do we want? I don't know, different things, who cares, take it case by case. What should we want? Nobody but God can tell us, and God cannot tell us (despite the pseudo works), for God is beyond us in every possible way, or else is not God.
Have your opinions, try to force them upon me if you must, but don't pretend this force is exerted by something external to us, something ethereal and mystic - be it God or reason or whatever concept you deify. "But why shouldn't we, if there is to be no should. You criticise others for telling us what we ought to do, then tell us what we ought to do." Of course, I am playing the game.What more do you want? I am human, I am bound up in these games, I don't deny that. I try to assert power, in this case of ideas. I don't deny it. I am honest about it. If you think that's a virtue the fine and if you don't then fine. I will not call you vicious for calling me vicious. O no I already have. In fact I made out that the only virtue is to not call others vicious. O what a tangled web, eh?
So can we drop ethics? No. As long as we are to live together there is ethics. It is perhaps best captured as the necessary terms of co-existence. Like house rules. What's spiritual about that? There, theory gone, tangled ethical paradox gone (don't call me vicious/don't tell me not to call you vicious/don't tell me not to tell you not to call me vicious... or, there is no ethics, so one oughtn't behave as if there were), what is left now?
How to live. Well if that is a decision, or as far as that is a decision, I guess it is up to you, in agreement with those around you, as far as such an agreement is necessary - that is if you piss everyone off they'll vary from being less receptive to ending your life, you may or may not wish to consider that, but nothing presses upon you to say you ought to care.
Of course now I am just telling you how it is to me. To me it is all about these power structures - that if you do not do what you are told there is some consequence, just as in physics if you choose to put your hand in a fire there is some consequence. What does this mean? Governments, schools etc, should stop arguing about ethics and merely make threats? Maybe. Or maybe they already employ systems of implicit threat - to conscience, to God, to good will... - and need nothing further. And what are these systems? Ethics.