ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
ment. Adaptability to changes in the environment. Diversity to handle fluctuations.
Cooperation to optimize resources and reduce the harm that comes from conflict.
Competition to spur effort and progress. Limits to competition to give losers a chance
to cooperate on the next iteration. Progress in learning, to understand and predict actions in the universe. Progress in technology, to give options for directing outcomes
where we want them to go. These are the virtues and outcomes we must cultivate to
face our existential threats and remain determined to conquer them. Traditional moral
rules supporting concepts such as charity, honesty, freedom, justice, etc., may also
lead us toward these survival traits, but make no mistake that this is the end goal of
morality toward which we are headed. We know this now.
We also know the locations of the decision points along the way toward that goal.
What are the best means to achieve individual flourishing? How much individual
flourishing can we have and still remain cooperative with one another? How can our
differing societies experiment with their own ways forward without devolving into
utterly destructive competition? How can we balance the progress of humanity with
the scarcity of resources needed to fuel that progress? These and many other questions
of morality still remain to be answered. Knowing these locations and desired outcomes though will help us empirically evaluate our choices wherever it is possible to
experiment with them. Good answers will strike the best balance between all the options. Evil answers will get the mix wrong. Most commonly, evil will involve
weighting the needs of an individual too heavily in comparison to the needs of other
individuals or other groups. But there will also be instances of evil being done to individuals in the name of social or ecological forces that have been overweighted.
On that note about evil, I’ll close with a word of caution about this new direction we
can now take. The probabilistic nature of knowledge means we won’t always know
how to solve our moral conflicts – in fact, we may never be certain of some of the answers either before or after we make a decision. How do we proceed then where we
don’t know? Carefully of course, and taking a cue from The Black Swan33, which
made a study of this fuzzy realm where consequences of improbable events may be
large and especially terrible. Limited trial and error is the way life has blindly found
its way through these dark minefields of existence in the past, and anyone that takes a
big bet on a non-diversified strategy will eventually lose everything over the billions
of repetitions that our existence in evolutionary timescales allows. So even if we become confident about the direction we would like to go, humans should not be lured
into racing there using existentially risky behavior. No, change that last part. Humans
ought not to do that, now that we know what it is that we ought to be acting towards.
Notes
1. Curry, O. (2006) Who’s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy? Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 4, p. 243.
2. The Categorical Imperative from Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
3rd ed. Hackett, p. 30.
3. For a more nuanced description of the use of the term morality, see the entry in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy titled The Definition of Morality.
4. Wikipedia definition of morality.
5. Dictionary.com definition of morality.
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