Jef Allbright:
- I am developing a concept, currently named "The Arrow of Morality", which, while avoiding the trap of the Naturalistic Fallacy, makes the following claims:
- There is a real direction of progress in the universe, from simple to more complex (in the sense of overall fitness) and there are principles, similar to the principles of thermodynamics, that describe "growth" at all scales.
- That "growth" consists in effective synergistic interaction between an existing structure, "self", and the adjacent possible, "other" and that this "growth" is "good" in the sense that it "works". Further, human moral precepts and individual ideas of what is "good" can be framed in terms of this "growth". [I apologize for the excessive use of scare quotes -- the terminology is yet to be clarified.]
- In a fundamental way, consensus on what is "good", i.e. what works, tends to spread in expanding circles of increased awareness and understanding as the scope of interactions increases in terms of range of actors, range of interactions (time), or range of common interests (the mutual "other".) This expanding consensus forms a metaphorical "arrow of morality" as interests become aligned for the (increasingly consensual) common good.
- Principles of effective cooperation can be discovered and apprehended, and form a metaethics upon which policy could be based, in the sense of rational governing principles, in an era of (currently) unimaginable personal freedoms.
What you describe here is in essence the view that has been
proposed in the work of John Stewart (Evolution's Arrow), Robert
Wright (Non-Zero) and myself (The Growth of Structural and Functional
Complexity in Evolution, Mediator Evolution, and other papers).
The main idea is that interacting systems eventually tend to
settle into a more "synergetic", "symbiotic" or
"cooperative" configuration, which is mutually beneficial
(positive sum). They thus form higher order systems which undergo a
similar synergy-increasing evolution to form even more complex
systems, etc. This principle extends all the way, from particles to
global society, thus determining a universal arrow of evolution or
"progress" towards higher synergy or fitness.
See:
http://www4.tpg.com.au/users/jes999/ (Stewart)
http://www.nonzero.org/thumbnail.htm (Wright)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/ComplexityGrowth.pdf
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/MediatorEvolution.pdf
--
Francis Heylighen
Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
Francis Heylighen
Center "Leo Apostel"
Free University of Brussels
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html
