As a look at my blogs shows, I'm interested in amateurish philosophizing. The pros seem to mostly do nothing but talk about what philosophers in the canon said or didn't say, so I call what I do amateurish. I actually think about real answers.
(I do however recommend knowing at least what a few important philosophers had to say -- keeps one from re-inventing the wheel).
By the way, I do wonder how some people, like Nietzsche or Marx or Hegel or Sartre or Ayn Rand, got into the canon. Their ideas don't hold water, and all philosophers seem to do nowadays, is refute them. They were maybe just good, albeit arrogant, writers, and of course Marx and Hegel are significant politically, but not as far as I can see as philosophers.
But one doesn't do things like philosophy just to be right, since these are questions one never can be sure of. No the fact is I do it because it's fun. Thinking about it though, maybe one way into the cannon is to be sure one is right -- it's like a religion then and one gets disciples whom others have to set straight. Those less arrogant don't make it.
No, what philosophy is really for, is happiness. It provides ways to see the world in less gloomy ways -- except of course if you enjoy being gloomy, since it provides that too. One can learn to accept or maybe not care about or maybe see and avoid the two-by-fours life sometimes hits you on the head with.
Ethics is an example, and maybe the first branch of real philosophy (rather than religion or philosophy that became science). We all want to do what is right (I would hope), and doing what is right is satisfying and provides even joy. But that assumes we know what is right, which in turn implies there is such a thing.
Analogy to aesthetics is hard to avoid, so let us analogize. We all want what is beautiful but we don't really know how to say what is beautiful or whether or not beauty really exists -- except in the head -- we know it exists in our heads. Beautiful things give us joy (do they ever) but we don't know why or what it is. All we can say for sure is that beauty changes from person to person as well as over time and from culture to culture.
Does right and wrong behave similarly? If we say it does then the whole exercise of doing what is right becomes a farce. Right and wrong behavior affect others and affect the world -- we can be destructive or constructive. Now making beauty is the right thing to do, no doubt, but appreciating it is personal. Doing right is not. What we do and don't do have consequences far beyond what we like and don't like.
It might be that what is beautiful is not so variable as I think but exists in an absolute way, inferred from fundamental principles, but I doubt that very much. On the other hand I am forced to think that is the case with good and evil. What is evil, at least, can be reasoned out from principles, such as more sophisticated versions of the Golden Rule (the actual rule as we have it is easy to criticize, but the criticisms can be handled with rephrasing). Kant I think did a decent job of that.
The point is that the views of people (derived from their culture and personality), even majorities and universals, about ethics, are historical and personality accidents, to be disregarded (maybe evidence as to what is bad but not as proof). That is why the common test of an ethical rule, namely to think of a scenario where the rule when applied to the scenario has results we think violate our conscience, is not a valid test.
So when I do ethics I do philosophy in trying to deduce right and wrong using what I suppose is another branch of philosophy, logic and reasoning. In the end I do this in order to be happy and to have fun working it out. Kinda funny if you have that sort of sense of humor. It's not as funny though as trying to work out the nature of existence or whether non-existence could exist, or how we might know or not know something.
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