In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on July 11, 2010

In the part 1, I tried to establish certain guidelines for how I am looking at ethics, morality and, to a much lessor degree, group dynamics surrounding these issues.  The overarching model I use for this is taken fairly directly from Wm. Calvin’s work on Darwinian bootstrapping (op.cit.) which I have found to be both extremely useful and quite robust.

The “environments” of ethics and moral systems

In part 1, I alluded to different operational “levels” or “environments” in which components of ethical codes “compete” without really elucidating them beyond such generalizations as “group”, “role” etc. (the exception being the last part dealing with the “soul”).  But, in order to properly apply Calvin’s model, these environments need to be more fully developed.

The Soul

If I use the case of the “soul” that I discussed previously, it is actually a fairly “simple” environment.  It has a single “location” in physical space contained, or at least localized, within our bodies (let’s just agree to leave out of body experiences out of the discussion).  The existence of a “soul”, at least as I defined it, is empirically verifiable at least by the individual.

That it is a “multifaceted environment” is also empirically verifiable, at least to anyone who stops and thinks for a moment. I will also note that this can also be indirectly verified by examining folk sayings such as “when I put on this hat” or when people talk about acting in a particular social role and doing things that they would not “normally” do.  That the soul is also the location of “competition” between patterns and their variants is also empirically verifiable, at least to anyone who has ever kept a diary or struggled with their actions belief.  As a side note, this type of conflict is actually one of the two meanings of the Islamic term Jihad.  If you prefer a Christian version of it, then try reading St. John of the Cross’ The Dark Night of the Soul.  You can find similar discussion in pretty much every religious system humans have ever come up with.

Social Roles / Obligations

We all fulfill multiple roles in our day-to-day lives, and this is the basis of both role theory (role appropriate behaviour).  In many ways, these role obligations are “cultural” in the sense that they are patterns of socially expected behaviour that people are not “formally” trained in and the sanctions for breaching these expectations are equally “informal”; think of the difference between a “custom” and a “law”.

This distinction between “custom” and “law” (including, but not limited to, common law, legislation and regulation) is an important one for a number of reasons.  First, custom is often more powerful in immediate terms to an individual than law.  Second, custom is more immediately “flexible” than law, at least in the sense that it is a) more amenable to situational “tailoring” of responses and b) more temporally immediate than formal legal systems.

Formal legal systems do, however, play a role in the discussion of custom as an environment for competition amongst patterns of behaviour and perception in two main areas.  First, laws provide moving boundaries which define when and where formal sanctions may take place.  I used the term “moving” very specifically because laws do not exist in and of themselves; they are human constructs that change over time (hence “moving boundaries”) depending on political power, fad or whim (depends on the political system of the group in question).  Second, formal legal systems act as a “backup” for the power of custom if the custom and the law are not too misaligned.  Third, formal legal systems act as a ritual recourse for breaches of custom.

This final point, that formal legal systems act as a ritual recourse for breaches of custom, is a crucial point for the model I am building.  Formal legal systems of any form have two properties that are critical.  First, they act as a tipping point (in the sense used by physics) between two radically different competitive environments (custom vs. legal formalism).  Second, formal legal systems have a tendency to concentrate on the form of a behaviour / perception rather than on the immediate effect of that behaviour / perception.  Loosely translated into plain English, that means that they apply formal criteria to a behaviour / perception regardless of any specifics of the case which have not been formalized; it is a deductive system of logical reasoning as opposed to the inductive and abductive systems of logical reasoning that dominate the area of custom.

Returning to social roles / obligations as an environment, we can see that it is bounded by two primary boundaries: the individual on one “side” and formal legal systems on another.  There are, however, certain characteristics of it that need to be teased out.  First, and this is (or should) be obvious, the environment is inherently inter-subjective.  Second, and this is less obvious,  the actors involved in the environment do not have to be alive or even empirically verifiable as having or being “real”.

At first glance, this assertion may appear to be insane (“Marc is off talking with dead people / ghosts again…!”), but my assertion is easily empirically verifiable.  Have you ever had to listen to someone in your family telling you you should be more like Uncle Jack or Aunt Minnie (both now deceased)? Have you ever read a book by someone who is now dead?  Have you ever had to deal with someone who bases their behaviour / perceptions on something written by a person now dead?  These are just some of the more obvious instances of dead people “acting” in the current social environment.

How about non empirically verifiable as “real” actors?  Again, this is easily empirically verifiable in a number of ways.  The simplest is when someone invokes a fictional character as a role model for what you behaviour / perceptions “should” be.  Indeed, fictional characters appear to have been used as a primary means of socialization for millenia via “fairy tales”, songs and games.  This is the easily verifiable form of non empirically verifiable as “real” social actors: fictional characters that “embody” certain behaviours and perceptions with attached stories that define them “morally”.

There is, however, another category of non empirically verifiable as “real” social actors which exert a fairly substantial influence on role behaviour.  Unfortunately, all of the terms for this category of “beings” in the English language that I am aware of are not really accurate.  “Supernatural” implies that they must be outside of the “natural world”, and yet certain types of these social actors are conceived of as being both real and natural by some groups (the Djinn and nature spirits are good examples of this).  “Superstitious” implies that not only do they not exist but that they are figments of the imagination (or plots maintained by charletans).  Since I am taking such an empiricist stance, that might appear to be a term I would approve of where it not for one simple observation: people who believe in them act as if they were real and, as a result, for them, they are real.  They are “social facts”, to use Durkheim’s terminology, and their existence as social facts is empirically verifiable which, de facto and de jure, means that they are social actors.

All of these social actors, living and deal, real, fictional and “social facts” make up the warp and weft of our cultural life that operates in the area of role expectations and it is their interactions that make selections between patterns of behaviour and perception within a social population.  This, however conclusion, however, brings us back to the question of environmental boundaries.

I noted earlier that we had two boundaries for this environment: the soul and formal legal systems.  There is, however, another boundary that defines this environment: communications.  It is, as I argued earlier, quite simple for an individual to perceive at least some part of their “soul”.  On the other hand, it is almost impossible for someone else to examine our “souls” without spending a lot of time talking with and observing us.  There are some technologies such as hypnosis, certain types of drugs and (maybe) enhanced MRI scans, along with some social techniques (in Ellul’s sense of the term) that also work (e.g. ritualized examinations such as confession or psychoanalysis), but they are all labour and time intensive.

What we, as a species, tend to rely on for making these decisions (i.e. selecting whether someone’s action has been “good” or “bad”, etc.) is not an in depth discussion of their choices but, rather, what has been communicated to us from other social actors about those choices.  We then take that “data” and compare it with that person’s reputation (i.e. what we “know” about them) which is, in effect, our internal, mental image of that person’s soul in order to render a judgement.  As Louis McMaster Bujold once noted (page 293)

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

This plays out in some fascinating ways when it comes to selection between patterns since the selection may often be based on the reputation of the person rather than on the content of the pattern.  This process is also the reason why customary action is more flexible and adaptable than formal legal systems.  If you would like empirical verification of the first point, ask yourself how often you have heard people say something along the lines of “I can’t believe that Joe did X – he’s a good person!”  What they are actually doing is projecting their image of that person’s reputation onto the reported actions of the individual and using the person’s reputation as a way of modifying their own ethical evaluation of the specific action.  We also see the inverse of this.  Think about how we react when a person (or class of persons; remember that role theory operates in this environment) act in a behaviour pattern that we would “normally” consider to be “good” but, because they have a “bad” reputation in our minds, we look for a way to explain their actions as “bad”.

This brings me to the final boundary condition in the social roles environment: our need to stereotype.

Whether or not we, as individuals, believe that stereotyping is “good” or “bad”, we all do it.  Indeed, all human languages are, to one degree or another, based on stereotyping (think about collective nouns and category terms).  From the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, stereotyping is a “good thing” for one simple reason: it means that we, as individuals, do not have to “think” about what actions to take in situations that have proven deadly to us in our evolutionary past.  Indeed, extreme self-reflexivity and particularism (i.e. treating every interactive event as if one had never encountered anything similar before) is a pattern of action subject to extremely negative selection forces.

Let’s take a simple of example of this and you will see what I mean.  The first time you encounter an active burner on a stove (note the general terms “burner” and “stove”), you put your hand on it and get burned.  If you are human, and not suffering from some degenerative nerve disease like leprosy, you will pretty quickly say something like “Ouch!” and pull your hand off the burner.  If you are like me (and about 10-15% of the human population), you may touch the burner again, “just to make sure”.  But, let us suppose that you, as an individual, have an extreme for of self-reflexivity and particularism.  Rather than “learning” from one (or two) burns, you think “Ha, this is a new burner, I must test it!” every time you see a burner.  Pretty soon, your hands will be a mass of burn callouses and, even if you as an individual, survive your repeated attempts to test the burner, you are unlikely to reproduce (hey, you aren’t going to find many people who think you constantly burning yourself is sexually appealing!).  So, even if you don’t get killed before you reach reproductive age, you probably won’t be able to find someone who is willing to put up with your behaviour long enough to have kids (other examples of behaviour with extremely high, negative selection values can be found here).

So, stereotyping is, as Martha Stewart would say, a “good thing”; at least from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology.  Whether or not we, as individuals,  believe that is immaterial: at the species level, it is a survival characteristic which, in philosophical terms, means that it is part of “human nature” (and empirically demonstrably so).

So, what does this mean in terms of boundary conditions?  Well, basically, it means that we are stuck with a selective environment where reputation and stereotyping defines “understanding” of the moral “value” of behaviours and perceptions.  This is most readily apparent in cases where both individual reputation and stereotyping combine to produce an evaluation of behaviours and perceptions that, de facto, disregards the specifics of particular choices.  In effect, stereotypes and reputation interact in a synergistic fashion that serves both to completely over ride the particulars of a case while, at the same time, “hardening” both the reputation and the stereotype of the individual actor.  This process is, in cybernetics terminology, a positive feedback loop that is almost impossible for the participants to control.

In order to verify the existence of this positive feedback loop, I could play “academic” and give you multiple citations but, since I decided at the start of this series i was going to play empiricist, I will ask you questions instead.  Have you ever woken up in the morning and thought “I can’t believe I did that last night!”?  Have you ever sat down with a bunch of your friends and passed rumours and catty comments about people back and forth?  Have you ever argued a point to the point where winning the argument was more important than the actual content of what you were arguing?  If the answer to any of these questions is “Yes”, then you have been caught up in the type of positive feedback loop I am talking about.  If the answer is “No”, then I really have to wonder if you are human and not, maybe, a Bodhisattva?

One might ask why I am spending so much time (and electrons) on this feedback loop.  The answer is, actually, quite simple: under “normal” circumstances, selection pressures on patterns of behaviour / perception (the contents of moral codes) is a fairly homeostatic environment.  The primary mechanisms by which this homeostatic state is disturbed (a tipping point in the sociological sense of the term) are twofold: either a radical shift in the perceived social environment (the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center are a good example of this) or via the feedback loop I have been discussing (BTW, and playing academic here, an excellent examination of the operation of this feedback loop as a consciously constructed campaign – a social movement – is available in Joel Best’s fantastic 1987 article Rhetoric in Claims-Making [official source; pdf]; I cannot recommend this article highly enough).

This, then, is the second environment in which and through which selection pressures operate on components of moral and ethical codes.  Its boundaries are the individual soul, the formal legal systems, the limits of communications and the “natural law” of stereotyping.  As a selective environment, it only changes when there are either major perturbations in the general perception (e.g. 9/11) or as a result of positive feedback loops operating within it.

end of part 2.

Category: Ethics, Uncategorized, Working Ideas
Tags: Ethics