Worldview: ethics
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the 'Worldview: ethics' page (the fifth inferring)
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This page does not aim to draft an ethical code. Instead, it examines why humans need ethics and how we experience this to become such a flourishing community.
Ethics is the value component of your evaluation step in the ... relevance --> action --> EVALUATION --> relevance --> action --> EVALUATION --> relevance ... chain. It broadens your behaviour from self-insight to commonality.
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Deep dive
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Our remarkable human intelligence is mainly social
- Be aware of the 'relentless ambivalence and ambiguity' of the human mind
- We are hierarchical creatures exquisitely sensitive to cues of status
- Never act in such a way that you treat humanity as a means only, but always as an end in itself
- What to do with the residual revenues is the key question is business ethics
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Evolution of ethical doing
We evolved along the same branch of the great tree of life that connects every living thing. Orangutans departed from our common branch of descent some 14 million years ago. Gorillas did the same roughly 7.5 million years ago, and the genus Homo branched off about 5.5 million years ago from the common ancestor that yielded both bonobos and chimps.
Modern human beings share about 98.8 per cent of their DNA with bonobos and chimps and some 98.4 per cent with gorillas.
Trained to live in the particular, we are instinctively allergic to the general. If we humans were entirely free to fashion ourselves as we would, unconstrained by our biological inheritance, we would be naïve at the extreme. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau once rightly asked, " For how can the source of the inequality among men be known unless one begins by knowing men themselves?"
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Hierarchy
The social organisation of all the great African apes is intensely hierarchical, from "despotic (gorillas and chimpanzees) to semi-despotic' (bonobos).
Gorillas and chimpanzees organise themselves in dominance hierarchies around an alpha male.
Chimpanzee societies are a prime example of this unique hierarchical social organisation. They enforce a strict linear hierarchy of dominance and submission, dictating the place of every animal in the group. The rule of each alpha is comparatively short—rarely lasting more than four or five years—but the hierarchy itself endures, a testament to the resilience and adaptability of these fascinating creatures.
In Bonobo society, unlike in chimpanzee society, in which every female is subordinate to every male in the hierarchy, bonobos are governed by both an alpha female and an alpha male. The relative absence of conflict is a sign of the strength of the hierarchical order, which is more stable than that of chimps.
Human beings, like monkeys and apes, are hierarchical creatures exquisitely sensitive to cues of status. Rank, dominance, submission, patterns of gaze, vocal and speech characteristics, posture, body size, age, and height are just a few of the traits all social primates are carefully attuned to. You are wired with specific neural networks to detect them.
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Reciprocity
While you may think of 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' as a human adage, it's actually a way of life for apes too. Like you, they keep track of who owes what. But they also display empathy, compassion, consolation, and other forms of prosocial behaviour, just like you.
Chimps and bonobos who jockey for positions in environments shaped profoundly by hierarchical arrangements based on status and power also act in ways that redound to the bent of others, cooperating for the benefit of all.
Human beings harbour similar tendencies. You compete and cooperate, are self-seeking and prosocial, pursue power and domination, and are also concerned with fairness and reciprocity.
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Ambiguity
This is the profound insight of recent primatology and evolutionary biology, which highlight the 'relentless ambivalence and ambiguity' of the human mind, a trait inherited from your primate ancestors. This complexity is a key aspect of your behaviour.
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Human intelligence
Our remarkable human intelligence is mainly social, permitting you to communicate and act to secure common ends. It enhances your capacity to work together and see the benefits of cooperation and sharing. Tracking favours, obligations, and slights enables you to evaluate complex systems and negotiate power.
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| Content source |
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| Equality - Darrin Mc Mahon - Ithaka - 2024 |
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Important ethical thinking in our history
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Aristoteles
Aristotle’s search for the good is a search for the highest good, and he assumes that the highest good, whatever it turns out to be, has three characteristics:
- it is desirable for itself,
- it is not desirable for the sake of some other good,
- and all other goods are desirable for its sake.
For over 2300 years, Aristotle’s concept of phronesis - practical wisdom - has been at the centre of moral philosophy, guiding discussions on virtue, character, and ethical decision-making. According to Aristotle, phronesis is the intellectual meta-virtue that directs moral actions, ensuring that virtues such as courage, generosity, and honesty are applied appropriately in different situations so that flourishing can occur.
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Baruch Spinoza
- Our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue, nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason.
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Emmanuel Kant
- The Formula of the Universal Law of Nature
- First, formulate a maxim that enshrines your proposed plan of action.
- Second, recast that maxim as a universal law of nature governing all rational agents, and so as holding that all must, by natural law, act as you yourself propose to act in these circumstances.
- Third, consider whether your maxim is even conceivable in a world governed by this new law of nature. If it is, then, ask yourself whether you would, or could, rationally will to act on your maxim in such a world. If you could, then your action is morally permissible.
- The Humanity Formula
- We should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself. This is often seen as introducing the idea of “respect” for persons, for whatever it is that is essential to our humanity.
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Hannah Arendt
- Equality is based on our decision to guarantee each other equal rights
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Emmanuel Levinas
- “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”
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Jaques Derrida
He has pointed toward the difficulty of introducing ethics into questions of justice and politics. Part of the difficulty here lies in the tension between
- universalization understood as the ethical cultivation of humanity,
- versus universalization understood as providing an ethical inflection to politics broadly conceived.
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Jean-Michel Salanskis
- First, duty as irreducible to being, as Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein experienced and expressed it.
- Secondly, duty must be felt; it is not really duty unless it is mine.
- Thirdly, ethics, must nevertheless favor the designation of an objective duty, not relative to a subjective or psychological trace (such relativity being precursive to the dissolution of morality pure and simple).
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Recent business ethics
Normative business ethicists tend to accept the basic elements of capitalism. That is, they assume that the means of production can be privately owned and that markets—featuring voluntary exchanges between buyers and sellers at mutually agreeable prices—should play an important role in the allocation of resources.
There is significant debate about the ends and means of corporate governance, i.e., about who firms should be managed for, and who should (ultimately) manage them.
There are two main views about the proper ends of corporate governance. According to one view, firms should be managed in the best interests of shareholders. It is typically assumed that managing firms in shareholders’ best interests requires maximizing their wealth. This view is called “shareholder primacy”.
The second main view about the proper ends of corporate governance is given by stakeholder theory. Instead of managing the firm in the best interests of shareholders only, managers should seek to “balance” the interests of all stakeholders, where a stakeholder is anyone who has a “stake”, or interest (including a financial interest), in the firm.
The debate between shareholder and stakeholder theorists is about what to do with the residual revenues, i.e., what’s left over after firms meet their contractual obligations to employees, customers, and others. Shareholder theorists think they should be used to maximize shareholder wealth. Stakeholder theorists think they should be used to benefit all stakeholders.
| Content source |
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| Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - 2024 |
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The Ethical Regulator Theorem
The human race has become very good at designing systems that are effective, but we are very bad at designing systems that are resiliently ethical; the vast majority of our social and computer-based systems are ethically fragile and are generally vulnerable to abuse and manipulation.
The Ethical Regulator Theorem (ERT) claims that the following nine requisites are necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic regulator to be resiliently effective and ethical:
- Purpose expressed as unambiguously prioritized goals.
- Truth about the past and present.
- Variety of possible actions.
- Predictability of the future effects of actions.
- Intelligence to choose the best actions.
- Influence on the system being regulated.
- Ethics expressed as unambiguously prioritized rules.
- Integrity of all subsystems.
- Transparency of ethical behaviour.
Of these nine requisites, only the first six are necessary for a regulator to be effective. If a system does not need to be ethical, the three requisites ethics, integrity, and transparency are optional.
| Content source |
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| Ethical Regulators and Super-Ethical Systems - Mick Ashby - Archivist of the W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive Trustee of the American Society for Cybernetics |
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Do you want to know more?
Since the ethical domain is as broad as humanity itself, we can only support you with references to discussions of relevant subdomains for business.
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Value theory (Axiology)
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_theory |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-theory/ |
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Business ethics
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ethics |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-business/ |
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Technology ethics
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_technology |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/ |
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Information ethics
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_ethics |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information/ |
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Environmental ethics
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| Wikipeadia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_ethics |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/ |
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Ethical concepts
Rationalism
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism |
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Utilitarisme
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism |
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Rights
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| Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights#Philosophy |
| SEP | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/ |
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