Dear colleagues,
If ethics relates mostly to the quest for the "good" or for the "good
reasons" of our social behavior, apparently it can be treated as another
discipline --really? An initial complication is about the subject --good...
"to whom"? It maybe one's personal interests, or his/her family, business,
profession, country, species, Gaia... but those goodnesses are usually in
conflict, even in dramatic contraposition. It is a frequent motif of
dramas, movies, poetry, etc. (aren't we reminded "arts as technologies of
ethics"?).
And then the complications about the circumstances, say the "boundary
conditions". Any simple economic story or commercial transaction (e.g.,
remember that ugly provincial story about "the nail found in Zaragoza") may
involve quite a number of situational changes and ethical variants ---if we
put scale into a whole social dimension of multivariated networkings... it
is just mind boggling. So I really would not put much weigh on those
hierarchical categorizations that only take a minimalist snapshot upon a
minimalist, almost nihilist scenario. However, some points by Loet months
ago on how complexity may hide-in & show up along privileged axis might
deserve discussion at this context.
Could we accept ethics just as an Art of moral problem solving? Quite many
conceptual tools would enter therein, but the "scientificity" of the whole
would not be needed. Even more, such scientificty would look suspicious to
me. A few decades ago, a "scientific" guiding of the whole social evolution
was taking place in a number of countries... apparently paving the way to a
new, conflict less Era!
best regards
Pedro
At 22:56 06/05/2006, you wrote:
Replying to Pedro's query below, we can have:
{physical / chemical affordances {biological behaviors {cultural norms
{social guidance {personal past learnings {{{...{continuing process of
individuation}}}}...}}}}}. Some of us would place ethics somewhere between
social guidance and personal past learnings. An interesting question in
this scheme is 'where is transcendence?' The problem is that there is
added, with each integrative level, further constraints. At present I am
considering that, if we allocate the same energies at each level, then the
remaining degrees of freedom in the higher levels will benefit from having
stronger embodiment than would have been possible in the lower levels. That
is to say that, e.g., behaviors which could only be weakly supported in,
say, the biological level, become more possible to be manifested in, say,
the social level.
STAN
>Dear FIS colleagues,
>
>The question recently raised by Luis, but also in a different way by Karl,
>Stan and others, is a tough one. How do our formal "disciplinary"
>approaches fare when confronting the "global" reality of social life? My
>point is that most of knowledge impinging on social life matters is of
>informal, implicit, practical, experiential nature. How can one gain access
>to cognitive "stocks" of such volatile nature? Only by living, by
>socializing, by a direct hands-on participation... Each new generation has
>to find its own way, to co-create its own socialization path. No moral or
>ethical progress then!!! (contrarily to the advancement of other areas of
>knowledge). Obviously, learning machines or techno environments cannot
>substitute for a socialization process --a side note for "prophets" of the
>computational.
>
>By the way, in those nice categorizations by Stan --it isn't logically
>awkward that the subject tries to be both subject and observer at the same
>time? If it is so, the categorization process goes amok with social
>openness of relations and language open-endedness, I would put. Karl's
>logic is very strict, provided one remains strictly within the same set of
>reference. Anyhow, it is a very intriguing discussion.
>
>best
>
>Pedro
>
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