3. “Is”, “Ought” and “Nature”: The dynamics of metaethics
Outline
1. Introduction
2. Simplicity
3. Evolution: the epistemology and metaphysics of creation
4. Writing
5. Aristotle's first mover
6 Hume's is-ought
7. William James: thought and action
8. Newton, Einstein, mathematical formalism and potential
9. Street's Darwinian dilemma
10. The ontogenesis of the human mind
11. Pain
12. What am I to make of this subtle story?
13. States of mind and social constraints are real
14. Conclusion
It is fair to say that there is no consensus on whether moral thought and talk, as we know it, can actually be vindicated. And there is no consensus either as to what a successful vindication would involve, were one in the offing. Yet there is little doubt that our views of morality play a crucial role in our lives. As a result, we are not even close to understanding ourselves until we have wrestled with, and come to a settled view of, the issues that define the debate concerning moral realism (Sayre-McCord 2013). Geoffrey Sayre-McCord: Essays on Moral Realism
Introduction
This essay is an exploration of the question: What general method should be followed in deciding between competing normative ethical theories? It is a metaethical question. The prefix meta entered the philosophical lexicon when the editor Andronicus of Rhodes put Aristotle’s treatise about the eternal world after (meta) his treatise on the moving world (Physics). Since then it has come to mean looking a a subject from a higher or more general viewpoint, so metamathematics asks questions about the method and meaning of mathematics and is parent to a multitude of theories about what mathematics really is (Tymoczko 1998). Metaethics has given rise to a similar spectrum of notions about ethics. On the whole these distinctions between subject and metasubject seem rather vague, insofar as the critical overview of any subject is very much part of the subject itself. Thomas Tymoczko: New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology
Under the historical influence of Christianity, the predominant discourse about ethical questions fell into the categories of theology and religion. Galileo broke this spell by showing that we can understand the world by observing it. Newton built his System of the World on Galileo’s insights and the consequent Enlightenment opened all questions in ethics, arts and sciences to secular studies.
Like all practical scientists, ethicists are trying to identify and formulate general rules or norms to answer their questions. History has provided us with the golden rule: do unto others . . .. Christianity says love God, love your neighbour. In the Christian view of the world God is the answer to all questions. The principal task of a Christian moral theologian is to ask and answer the question: what would God want? This is not easy, since God cannot be consulted directly, but they can assume one fundamental principle: God is good. Aquinas Summa I, 5, 1: Is goodness really different from being?, Aquinas, Summa, I, 6, 2: Is God the supreme good?
From the Christian point of view, we are pilgrims and sinners in a fallen world in need of God’s grace to do good, a massive psychological burden. Scientifically enlightened, we would like to throw off this burden and expose our natural goodness.
Reality is enormously complex, however, so that secular ethical casuists face a potentially infinite set of cases. Our advantage is that we know now that the system of the world evolved to its present state. Evolution is an accretive process, so the simplicity remains within the complexity and provides us with a route to understanding. As Sayre-McCord notes above, however, the answers are not yet clear.
I wish to suggest a much deeper approach to the roots of ethics which takes us back, in a way, to the old supernatural story, by exploiting the modern assumption that the world plays the role once attributed to God, thus providing a context for evolution which reveals a firm foundation for ethics.
I begin with a brief cosmology, comment on Susan Streets view that the theory of evolution is not helpful to a realist view of ethics and then take another look at evolution with its social and cosmological roles in mind.
2. Simplicity
Ernst Mach, one of the guiding spirits of both modern physics and the philosophy of science writes, in the introduction to his treatise on mechanics:
6. Economy of communication and apprehension is of the very essence of science. . . . To find then, what remains unaltered in the phenomena of nature, to discover the elements thereof and the mode of their interconnection and interdependence—this is the business of physical science (Mach 1960). Ernst Mach: The Science of MechanicsThe simplicity of the world is implicit in its mode creation. To the best of our knowledge, it has evolved within a structureless initial singularity analogous to the singularity in a black hole, and this initial simplicity remains part of the structure, along with all the other evolutionary steps that brought us to the present moment. Hawking & Ellis: The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time
3. Evolution: the epistemology and metaphysics of creation
The Christian story, recorded in Genesis, describes the creation of the Universe by an omniscient and omnipotent God who designed the Universe, is present at every point within it, and knows and controls every moment of its existence, past, present and future (Aquinas, ST I qq 8, 14, 25). We might call this creation from the top down. Aquinas, Summa, I, 8, 1: Is God in all things?, Aquinas, Summa, I 14, 1: Is there knowledge in God, Aquinas Summa 1, 25, 1: Is there power in God?
Modern cosmology takes the opposite view. As noted above, it is widely accepted in the cosmological community that the Universe began as a structureless initial singularity within which occurred the big bang which initiated an evolutionary process which, over a period of about 14 billion years, has brought it to its present condition. We might call this creation from the bottom up. Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 7: Is God altogether simple?
It may not be a coincidence that the traditional God and the initial singularity are effectively identical, insofar as both are considered to be completely without structure, ie absolutely simple, and the source of the Universe.
The traditional view implies that the structure of the Universe pre-existed in the mind of God. It is teleological. The modern view is that the Universe created its own structure. Common to both views is that God = the initial singularity is pure activity.
From the scientific point of view, there was no divine plan to creation. Instead the universe has created itself by a simple algorithm with two principles. Pure action requires that the system try everything. Consistency requires that only consistent structures survive. This algorithm is very similar to scientific method: given a set of data, try to imagine every possible explanation. The explanation we are looking for is the one that is both internally consistent and consistent with the data. Fritz Zwicky: Discovery, Invention, Research Through the Morphological Approach
Aquinas, following Aristotle, defined God as pure action. Physicists, following Einstein, see the universe as pure energy, formally the time rate of action. Energy comes in two forms, the energy of motion, kinetic energy, and the energy of relationships between particles, potential or binding energy. There are four potentials: gravitation, which is universal and defines the large scale structure universe (Hawking and Ellis op. cit.); the strong and weak forces, which determine the structure of atomic nuclei; and electromagnetism, which is responsible for all the other structure in the world (Feynman 1988).We are bound to Earth by gravitation. Our bodies are electromagnetic. Richard Feynman: QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter
The ceaseless kinetic motion of particles of all sizes from fundamental particles to galaxies causes random meetings, that is variation. Some meetings lead to attraction and binding, others to repulsion and scattering. This simple sorting mechanism is the evolutionary origin of structure. Empedocles was already onto it (Kingsley & Parry 2019). Darwin put his finger on its occurrence in the biological world, but it is universal. K. Scarlett Kingsley & Richard Parry (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2019): Empedocles, Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
The elemental particles that comprise the universe bind to one another through communication and have shown enough nous to have worked together to create the magnificent universe we now inhabit. This history might have much to say about moral realism. Much of current morality seems to be a search for the origins of moral intuitions built into us by genetic and social evolution.
My thought is that all the problems of morality and politics were solved in principle when things were simple and the first particles were born and began to interact with one another. As systems became more complex, the problems they faced became more complex and the solutions thy fund became more complex. What are ethicists and political scientists trying to explain? In a nutshell, their questions are first: why do we treat one another as we do? and second how should we treat one another.
The first set of questions is the source of data for scientific studies of human nature. The range of phenomena we have to deal with run from war, murder, rape, and torture through to cooperation, care, benevolence, love and self sacrifice, a vast range of behaviours which we might subsume under two general heads: competition and cooperation, which are deeply mixed with one another. War, for instance, is a process of cooperative killing used by human groups in lethal competition with one another.
The second set of questions deal with the establishment of norms, that is laws, for human behaviour. The oldest and most widely circulated set of such norms in the western Christian world are the ten commandments. These commandments serve as a broad paradigm for many other attempts to establish ethical norms. The key criterion for scientific judgement is consistency, and it is seen to operate at two levels. First, scientific hypotheses are required to be internally consistent, and then we seek to establish whether an hypothesis is consistent with the data. Traditional theologians see that God fills the whole space of consistent being. Scientists believe that inconsistent structure cannot exist in the natural world. Apparent inconsistencies demand explanation.
4. Writing
Face to face human communications are dramatic and dynamic, ranging from deadpan to lethal. From an abstract point of view, we are particles like any other and our interactions are moved by potentials which we feel as motivations, attractions and repulsions of one sort or another. On the other hand, the invention of writing in all its forms gave an enormous boost to an eternal, timeless view of the world, capturing passion in fixed text. What has this got to do with metaethics? The first thing to note is that the metaethical debate is played out in writing, each round governed by the time constant of the read, criticise, write, publish, read . . . cycle.
A semester for a course, a working lifetime for the Kants, Murdochs and Rawlses of the trade, everyone adding branches to a literary tree with its roots in antiquity. Just like the tree of life, growing for thousands rather than billions of years. The tree of knowledge is infinitesimal compared to the tree of life but the methodology is the same, reproduction with variation, some texts selected to become popular standards, others neglected to be forgotten.
For many writing is the enemy of the people and they enjoy burning books. Rousseau, a very talented writer comments, with approval on the legendary incineration of the library of Alexandria and often speaks as though high culture is the root of all evil while spending a lifetime contributing to it (Dunn, 2002, 65). Susan Dunn: Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses
Nowhere is the impact of writing more difficult to untangle than in the philosophy of ethics and politics. These issues were debated in antiquity. Then Christianity emerged, was coopted by the Roman Empire, and shut down the discussion with dogma enforced by civil and military violence. Martin Luther pointed out the corruption in the Christian hierarchy, and set off the stream of events that led Christianity to self-destruct as an ethical and political force and opened the way for science, the Enlightenment, and a vigorous search for a new route to human political and ethical salvation.
The hard sciences have done well out of this revolution, motivated and paid for by the military advantage they confer, but I feel that the moral sciences remain lost, and the heart of their problem seems to lie in the distinction between descriptivism and expressivism, which may be seen to exist in formal written language, but appears to be largely absent in music and spoken language which is a physical reality which carries both description and expression simultaneously. In nature every particle which may be the subject of a description (an electron is . . .), comes also with an expression (electrons express an enormously powerful a potential which accounts for much of the structure of the world . . . ).
I approach this idea from four angles: the first is Aristotle’s discussion of the first mover, the paradigm of the Christian God; the second is Hume’s is-ought problem; the third William James’s concept that all mental activity is oriented toward action; and finally the blending of mathematics and natural language explains the gravitational structure of the universe.
5. Aristotle’s First Mover
Aristotle introduces the first mover in Book VII of the Physics. He begins with an axiom: everything that moves must be moved by something else. Then, assuming that there cannot be an infinite chain of movers, arrives at an unmoved or eternal mover.
He provides a detailed discussion of the divine nature of this entity in Book XII of his Metaphysics. Here he notes that mere form is not enough to make the world go. We need motivation as well as description, there must be an active agent:
Thus it will not help matters if we posit eternal substances as do the exponents of the Forms (ειδη), unless there is in them some principle which can cause change. . . . Therefore there must be a principle of this kind whose essence is actuality (1071b14-21). Metaphysics XII, (1071b14-21)
Aristotle’s agent, like Aquinas’s God, moved a passive world. The modern world, described by quantum theory, is its own energetic mover.
6. Hume’s is-ought
In every system of morality that I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’s that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction for the others, which are entirely different from it (Hume 2000, 3, 1, 1, 27). David Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature
This observation, that logical coupling (is) does not imply motivation (ought) appears to have become a commonplace of ethical discussion. It looms large, we shall see below, in Street’s discussion of the coupling between reproductive success and evaluative judgement. Aristotle beat Hume’s objection by giving the first mover not just formal reality, but active agency. In our world, to be is to act, moved by potential.
7. William James: thought and action
Operating a large central nervous system is a metabolically expensive. Although the human brain only weighs about a kilogram it accounts for roughly half our resting energy consumption. From an evolutionary point of view, we should not expect such an investment if it does not yield a considerable advantage in reproductive success. There is little value in idle thought, so it is not surprising to find a pragmatic psychologist like William James writing that:
All consciousness is motor. . . . Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts (James 1892, 370). William James: Psychology: The Briefer Course
For James, all mental processes are superpositions of both cognitive and non-cognitive attitudes. This view has become more firmly established as many fields of research have slowly broken down the ancient dichotomy between mind and body. Consciousness, evaluation and action may be separable in analysis but are united in reality. (Damasio 1999, 16). Our bodies have evolved billions of years of wisdom which drives our minds. The rules of morality . . . are not conclusions of our reason (Hume, op. cit. 3, 1, 1, 6). Antonio Damasio: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
8. Newton, Einstein, mathematical formalism and potential
Wigner noted that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious . . . and there is not rational explanation for it (Wigner 1960). This might not seem so mysterious if we recognise that the Universe is logically consistent, numerically precise and stressful. Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
Newton set the intellectual world alight by bringing the heavens down to earth with his law of universal gravitation. Aristotle’s metaphysical proof for the existence of the first mover relied on the hypothesis of potency and act. Motion, he argued, is the transition from potency to act. Nevertheless, no potential can actualize itself, a restatement of his claim in the Physics that everything that moves is moved by something else.
The axiom no potential can actualize itself has proven to be false. In physics potential energy is the energy of interaction between two particles. We see it demonstrated in the pendulum. At the top of its swing, the weight of the pendulum has gravitational potential energy. On the downswing, this potential is converted into kinetic energy, to be converted back to potential energy on the subsequent upswing. In a frictionless environment, this process will continue forever. What this implies, at least in the physical environment, is that is implies ought. Every particle in the Universe feels a potential to act in a particular way.
As I noted above, everything in the universe has a real relationship to everything else mediated by the gravitational potential. Newton explained this in terms of a force with the difficult property of instantaneous action at a distance. Einstein, using Riemann’s mathematics of dynamic space, showed that gravitational potential is indistinguishable from space-time itself, an expression of the structure of the world. We experience gravitation in every moment of our lives.
9. Street’s Darwinian Dilemma
My next step is to use this blend of ancient and modern cosmology to examine Sharon Street’s Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value with a view to pointing out where I think she underestimates the power of evolution (Street 2006). Sharon Street: A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of ValueMy point is that the time constant of traditional evolution, measured in generations, varies from minutes in bacteria to centuries in long lived plants. We know that the past is fixed, but the future is uncertain and creative, so we can imagine a continuous form of evolution that moves from moment to moment, the fixed past acting as the genome of the future. This image gives us a better understanding of the social evolution of our children, who grow from day to day in wisdom, age and grace, guided both by the genome they inherited from their parents and the social milieu in which they find themselves (Luke 2:52).
Street begins:
Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. (page 109)An independent evaluative truth I take to mean a moral fact independent of any moral agent. An evaluative attitude toward such a truth I take to be the feeling of approval or disapproval of an agent with respect to the truth, which we can expect to result in some action.
Street continues:
The basic problem for realism is that it needs to take a position on what relation there is, if any, between the selective forces that have influenced the content of our evaluative judgements, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other.
In other words, she sees the realist seeking a relationship between genetic evolution and mental states. Her paper is an example of an evolutionary debunking argument which purports to demonstrate the non-existence of moral facts (Cullity week 9, slide 32). Garret Cullity: Evolutionary debunking arguments
Like the best of dilemmas Street’s has two horns:
Let us begin with the realist's option of claiming that there is no relation [between selective forces and independent evaluative truths]. (121)
This horn assumes no ethical role for evolution. The real interest lies in the second horn:
So let us now turn to the realist's other option, which is to claim that there is indeed some relation between the workings of natural selection and the independent evaluative truths that he or she posits. . . . The critical question is what kind of relation. Different metaethical views will give different answers, and we may judge them according to those answers. (125)
She then explores two possible relations, a tracking relation and an adaptive link.
According to [the tracking] hypothesis, our ability to recognize evaluative truths, like the cheetah's speed and the giraffe's long neck, conferred upon us certain advantages that helped us to flourish and reproduce. (126)
This hypothesis requires a cognitive act to underpin an evaluative attitude.
[In] the adaptive link account, tendencies to make certain kinds of evaluative judgements rather than others contributed to our ancestors' reproductive success . . . because they forged adaptive links between our ancestors circumstances and their responses to those circumstances, getting them to act, feel, and believe in ways that turned out to be reproductively advantageous. (127)
She compares and contrasts the adaptive link to a mechanical reflex and notes that
the link between circumstance and response is forged by our taking of the one thing to be a reason counting in favor of the other - that is, by the experience of normativity or value. (128)
This hypothesis also requires a cognitive act.
The key to Street’s dilemma lies in the phrase quoted: Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. I agree that this is true, but the relevant evolutionary forces are social, not genetic. We can argue for this conclusion both from a simple information theoretical calculation about the ontogenesis of the human mind and from common and clinical experience.
10. The ontogenesis of the human mind.
The ontological development of an individual human human brain poses an interesting problem in network creation. An important source of formal guidance in the develop of any living creature is the genome.
Formally, programmed deterministic development is subject to the cybernetic principle of requisite variety (Ashby 1956). This law establishes the condition for completeness and computability that render any process deterministic enough to have a high probability of good success. W Ross Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics
The total human genome comprises some three billion base pairs, each of which carries a maximum of two bits of information for a total of 6 gigabits per genome.
The human nervous system comprises some 100 billion neurons each with possibly 1000 connections to other neurons.
In the specification of a standard engineered computer network, every physical connection is precisely specified by source and destination. Measured in bits of information this is at a minimum twice the logarithm to base 2 of the number of connections. Such precise specification in the case of the n connections of the human nervous system is n log n, where n = 100 billion (neurons) x 1000 (connections per neuron), ie 1014. n log n is therefore about 1016 bits, far in excess of the information content of the genome.
This calculation considers only the actual connectivity of the brain, without considering the synaptic weights associated with each connection. These weights are understood to be the specific determinant of mental content.
It is necessary, therefore, that some other mechanism must be available to account for the connective structure of the brain, which is to say that to a large degree this system must define itself. This requirement reveals that the human brain must have a self-structuring property. This is not to be unexpected in a self-structuring universe such as ours.
The explanation appears to be a form of evolution by natural selection. The neurons in an infant brain seek out synaptic connections with one another, a process which is to a large degree random. There follows a process of pruning which continues through the teenage years, eliminating connections found to be unnecessary for processing environmental inputs..
As well as determining the wiring of the brain over a period of years, experience determines the synaptic weights connecting neurons. Changes in weight may occur in milliseconds during the real time processing of speech, and over a lifetime during the acquisition of knowledge and experience. The physical development of a brain is thus closely related to learning and serves as a microcosm of the development of the universe.
The upshot of this scenario is that our evaluative attitudes are a product of social evolution rather than genetic evolution. There is evidence for this in the fact that no genetic foundation has been discovered for the placement of individuals on the autism spectrum and the random occurrence of savants in the community (Whitehouse 2019, Kanigel 2016). Andrew Whitehouse: Its 25 years since we redefined autism - here's what we've learned, Robert Kanigel: The Man Who Knew Infinity: A life of the genius Ramanujan
11. Pain
Street discusses her dilemma with respect to a number of scenarios. I only have space for one, pain:
The case of physical pain—for instance, in the various forms associated with burns, cuts, bruises, broken bones, nausea, and headaches—serves as one of the strongest temptations toward realism about value. (144).For the purposes of the ensuing discussion, let us focus on the following evaluative claim: someone's pain counts as a reason for that person to do what would avoid, lessen, or stop it. (145).
Since unreflective valuing is something that many or most animals are capable of, this definition is consistent with the idea that many or most animals can experience pain (146).
. . . the moment a pain sensation ceases to be the object of a negative unreflective evaluative reaction - it thereby ceases to be a pain, and becomes just another sensation (148).
The essence of pain, therefore, is that it arouses a negative evaluative reaction. To get the dilemma working, she hypothesises a case in which unreflective evaluation come down in favour of seeking pain rather than avoiding it. Do we find many such cases? No, because anyone who seeks pain through the bodily damages that cause it is likely to be at a reproductive disadvantage. (150)
Pain may well be bad, in other words, but if it is so, its badness hinges crucially on our unreflective evaluative attitudes toward the sensation which pain is. The realist is thus forced to recognize the role of our evaluative attitudes in determining the disvalue of pain (151).
Her conclusion, as I understand it, is that it is not so much reality (ie independent evaluative truth) that motivates our behaviour, but how we think about it. She concludes:
Consider again the old dilemma whether things are valuable because we value them or whether we value them because they are valuable. The right answer, according to the view I've been suggesting, is somewhere in between. Before life began, nothing was valuable. But then life arose and began to value - not because it was recognizing anything, but because creatures who valued (certain things in particular) tended to survive. In this broadest sense, valuing was (and still is) prior to value. That is why antirealism about value is right. (156) [my italics]
Here she seems to have abandoned her genetic picture in favour of the social picture. Societies select for the things that they value, and this valuation enters the minds of their inhabitants not through the information carried by genes, but through the information carried by social communication.
12. What am I to make of this subtle story?
The central question here is what is real? Implicit in Street’s position is that social mental constructs are not real, which is hard for me to accept. Rawls recognises the social development of moral positions:
Let us assume that each person beyond a certain age and possessed of the requisite intellectual capacity develops a sense of justice under normal social circumstances (Rawls, 1971, §8). John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
A standard metaphysical answer is that the real is what is observed, verified and understood by the natural sciences. Insofar as ethics is very closely related to psychology, as Street’s article demonstrates, reality becomes moot, so people can talk quite seriously about realism and anti-realism, even though the latter may sound rather offensive to a positivist empirical scientists like Mach quoted above.
Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology study a hierarchy of complexity in the world. Psychology is concerned with the information processing control systems in higher animals, following the sequence from senses, through the central nervous system to action. We may study actions either as biological operations like mating per se, which, given its importance in evolution, has a strong genetic content, or we can study them in terms of their ethical context which in the case of mating may include social questions of consent, health and social implications. Rape and pillage may be rational strategies for survival in some situations, but they hardly pass any social ethical criterion of good behaviour.
My first problem with Street’s approach is that she leaps from relatively ancient genetic evolution to ethical questions which are clearly related to matters of contemporary social evolution and education. I have suggested that there is probably negligible coupling between genes and evaluative judgements. The enormous complexity of the human brain is well beyond detailed genetic control, so that like the universe itself, each new brain must construct itself by variation and selection, guided by its environment. Evaluative judgments are a matter of education of a relatively mature mind in a specific social milieu.
13. States of mind and social constraints are real.
Cecilia Heyes book Cognitive Gadgets draws attention to the fact that even though human genomes and human nervous system are not that different from those of our nearest ancestors, our cultural differences are measured by the enormous difference between a global city and a patch of bush. This difference is principally social, made possible by the plasticity of our minds (Heyes 2018). Cecilia Heyes: Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of ThinkingMy second problem, which appears to be widespread in ethical work is discussed in the first part of this essay, and is descended from to the the ancient distinction between reason and desire which is central to the Christian history of salvation and which appears to be far from extinct in ethical thought.
We, like everything around us, have a tendency to fall toward Earth without the slightest hint of an evaluative attitude. Positive and negative charges bind to one another, bacteria swim toward nutrients and away from toxins and we pull our hands from the fire. In reality all information has potential, cognition and action are inseparable. I suspect Street of overthinking when she tries to argue that the perception of pain is not really the pain, it is the evaluative attitude that does the job.
Evolution works within the context of energy and potential, action, attraction and repulsion. That it why it works: evolved structures have behavioural consequences, and it is how these consequences interface with the larger environment that selects the structures that multiply from those that do not. This occurs at all levels of complexity, from the big bang to the heights of business, politics, academia and the music industry.
Undesirable consequences, like the works of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Trump, may follow, but these are very hard to predict and control precisely because they are not deterministically embedded in genetic or any other history.
14. Conclusion
Evolution has not finished, it is a ongoing process that occurs at every moment in space-time in exhaustive detail. New ethical issues arise every time new social connections are established. Globally, we are now learning to take the view that the rights of man include the rights not only of women and children, but of all forms of life and of all elements of the global system that sustain us. Many people and systems lack the flexibility to deal with new issues as they arise and will attempt to cope with them by denial, but this is not safe. We must face the facts and work out strategies to deal with them.
How should I live? Be ready for anything. We must remember the apocryphal answer that Harold Macmillan is said to have given to a journalist who asked what was most likely to blow governments off course: “events, dear boy, events”. A perennial problem with government, as with many other aspects of society, is that it has sunk so much capital into the status quo that change is expensive and consequently painful.
