The Beautiful Simplicity of Ethical Concepts

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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The unceasing debate about morality, which if compiled would fill a billion libraries, is a testament to how “beautifully simple” ethical concepts are.

I’ve read a fair bit about ethics, but one thing I haven’t read is a theory that has all three of the following properties:

  1. it’s brief and eloquent
  2. it’s convincing
  3. it’s not an irrelevant conception of morality (ie any definition that basically ends up being ‘people are justified in doing whatever they want to do’ or ‘people should do whatever has the greatest personal, subjective expected value’ or something like that)
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Hi. Thanks for your support. We may look at the face on the television screen and say, “Hey, there’s George Clooney.” The image is a systemic value ordinarily, made possible by a number of systems working together in the technology; but when we personify it we are intrinsically-valuing that image. The poet does it at times, like Emerson did with the flower (and the exquisite poem) named The Rhodora. http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/poems/rhodora.html He wrote (addressing the flower): …If the sages ask thee why/ this charm is wasted on the earth and sky/ tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing/ then beauty is its own excuse for being. …

At this point I will list some ethical principles. The first ten are from a summary found at the end of the fourth part of the four-part treatise, A UNIFIED THEORY OF ETHICS. It is reproduced from the booklet with the title, ASPECTS OF ETHICS. After that I’ll list two other principles along with comments I learned from Dr. Clark Wolf, a professor at The University of Georgia.

A SUMMARY OF SOME OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES

(excerpted from my Aspects Of Ethics: Views Through a New Lens. A link to the paper was offered at the end of the original post.)

) Honor and respect every individual.

  1. Everyone is doing the best s/he knows how. If we
    knew any better we would do better. It’s mainly
    due to ignorance why we behave badly.

  2. We are all in this together. We’re all just trying to
    make a life.

  3. Work for mutually-beneficial relationships. What
    really helps you, helps me; and vice versa.

  4. Strive for excellence in performance ! Aim to be a
    good person. Intrinsically value yourself and
    others.

  5. Be authentic ! Don’t be a phony; be true to your
    true self.

  6. In every situation in life the Central Question of Life is:
    What choice can I make, and action can I take, in this
    moment, to create the greatest net value? By that phrase"greatest net value" is meant: how can I maximize the value for all parties concerned and all things considered? [ With thanks to P. Demarest & H. Schoof.]

:sunglasses: Provide everyone the full opportunity to express
their creativity.

9 ) Empower the individual to express more of his full
potential.

  1. Look to creative design to solve problems.

Maximize well-being, yet be aware that more (more things, more population) is not always better. Well-being refers to the moral health of society as well as to mental health. “Health” is a concept that shifts as we learn more about it, though we recognize it when we see it. It is more than the absence of disease and discomfort. Well-being means human flourishing.

Minimize suffering, and even work to wipe it out altogether. And this principle takes priority over – if we have the opportunity to do so – increasing the bliss of those who are not miserable, let alone those who are fortunate and are already well-off. It is more important to relieve pain and deprivation than to help the rich get even richer, as nice as that is. Observing moral principle will deprive no one.

We have a moral obligation to implement the ethical principles. We are morally-obliged to reduce poverty and deprivation. This will result in optimum benefit for everyone who is alive and conscious. That society is best which has the lowest score on the Misery Index (rather than the most billionaires.)

Dr. Wolf writes: “We should regard poverty as getting worse when there are more miserable impoverished people, and should regard development efforts as successful when they reduce total destitution, not when they merely increase GNP or they decrease the proportion of the population that lives in destitution.” Let’s deliberately aim to get rid of starvation and destitution in the entire world population.

See the book ABUNDANCE (NY: Free Press, 2012) by Peter H. Diamandis & Steven Kotler. This is must reading for anyone who cares about these issues. It tells precisely, and without omitting any steps, how well-being is now becoming maximized and misery is inexorably being reduced worldwide. It backs up what it says with established facts.

I’d like to know what you think about all this. Comments? Questions? Impressions?

Do you have any Principles to add to the list?

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If I were to attempt to tackle it I would analyze it this way:

Your set of plans is Systemic. That is the base value. Then, in the axiological calculus, the base is raised to the Intrinsic power, since it is your hobby; but because you never put the plans into actual practice empirically, the entire formula is then raised to the minus-E power, which E means Extrinsic value. So the entire business turns out to be worth only a tiny fraction of value, close to zero, since raising anything to a negative exponent is equivalent to a fraction.

You can go through this [or a similar] process yourself with respect to that imagined house, or any other concept in the universe, by following the model you find here at this link, where Dr. Gojman has brilliantly applied the dimensions of value to the concept: Industrial Design. Read this application to see how the process works: http://hartmaninstitute.org/Portals/0/html-files/GojmanIndust.Design.htm

Let me know if it helped clarify how more-involved, advanced applications can be handled …and turn out useful perspectives that might not otherwise have occurred to a person. Isn’t Gojman creative :exclamation:

He really got into the spirit of it. I am confident you will too, once you ‘get the hang of it.’

All constructive comments most welcome…

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Close to zero?

Egads. So, if the plans were for gas chambers, but I actually built the gas chambers and used them, say, on Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, would that increase the value?

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I suppose the closest to this would be one of the versions of the so called golden rule.

I know, I know, it doesn’t give one a complete set of heuristics, at all. Nevertheless I think it comes the closest to satisfying your criteria.

It is brief and some versions are banally eloquent.
It has come convincing power, since I think humans have this built-in fairness tracking system, which young children start making noises from, and which the GR fits to great degree.
I don’t think it allows people to do whatever they want, though obviously people can twist the rule - well, if I was a godless heathen I would want someone to kill me before I did more evil. Sure, acknowledged. Nevertheless, closest perhaps.

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Greetings, Faust

It’s an advanced question you bring up, to your credit; a question about the application of the calculus of value within the system of Formal Axiology. You miss the point, though, in what you said in the passage quoted above. If you even glanced at the manual, ETHICS: A College Course you (with your interest in math/logic) would have noticed early on that thought-experiment which was named “The Algebra of Value.” There (on p. 15) it defined the notion: Transposition of Value. It equals V to the minus V. The symbols are interpreted as one value being incongruous with another value (contradicting it, or being incompatible with it, or being nonsense relative to it.) V can stand for either S, or E, or I. It means a value in general.

Plans for gas chambers are of course Transpositions to anyone who has an ethical orientation, or is morally sensitive, or who know his Ethics. {Incidentally, did you ever read all the way through in that Unified Theory of Ethics which you claim to have studied?? I think you will agree that: A little Knowledge is a dangerous thing. Did you read at least the entire Part One? What was your impression of End Note 4 …I’d like to know.}

So “plans for a gas chamber” is legitimately - by the rules of interpretation of the Axiological system - to be put into a formula that has a minus exponent in it. When you build the crematoria, that raises the original formula to an aleph-null power, …the cardinality for E-value. When you use them because you think it’s the right thing to do (say for race-purification; for efficiency; for the good of the Reich [= the authority] ; for conservative principles; or for whatever fine excuse) then the correct symbolization is to further raise the formula to an aleph-one power, for I-value. But since the base was I-sub-S (meaning a life downgraded by a system - namely the plans to cremate living people - as symbolized in the calculus by I-value to the minus S-value exponent [which has a cardinality of aleph-one to the negative nth power], the total resultant is a fraction even closer to zero than the previous example was.

All this technicality will likely repel many readers who don’t feel as comfortable with Logic as much as you do, so it would be far better if you ask me such questions in the future in a private message. Okay?

I’d recommend as required prerequisite reading this paper by Dr. Hartman -
http://hartmaninstitute.org/Portals/0/html-files/AxiologyAsAScience.html It is one of the Research Reports offered at the Institute set up in honor of this philosopher/logician. Did you read his bio in Wiki?

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I have found these quotes from the Unified Theory of Ethics piece.

“Hopefully your Self has some high ideals within it that your parents or role models taught you either by their words or – better yet – by their example.”

“The conscience includes one’s sense of what is right and wrong. This may be what some philosophers have called ‘basic moral intuitions’.”

“Conclusion: We need our consciences, and we need them to be operative. When we give it respect, when we listen for it, our conscience will guide us to the good life.”

What if my parents taught me to smite mine enemies, and my act of building the gas chambers is in accordance with those ideals, and my conscience is therefore clean?

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All humans value slightly differently. Taste.

I can not always both fully respect another persons or creatures taste in deed, and not compromise my own.

The future mankind (the one that is sustainable) is grouped according to taste, inborn values. The internet is a means to this, so is the printing press. Non local cult-forming is essential for man not to constantly be at odds with his environment. Consensus can ultimately only exist on two spheres: minimal general legislation (habeas corpus, etc) and a limited number of people agreeing on particular arrangements.

The setup of the American constitution can be completed in a globally applied form that will last thousands of years without causing the sort of problems that warrant massive outbreaks of rage and ad-hoc regime-changes that only further mass-suffering.

Americanism and Anarchism aren’t very far removed. The difference is in the fact that America is an isolated nation that has to defend itself. This is why I am in favor of a global ideological “America” with political touches of “France” “Britain” and “Netherlands” and cultural elements of all nations.

America is already been globalized at the symbolic level - almost every culture embraces the symbols of its significance, except very notably the Islamic world. Islam is to be respected as a true adversary to individualism, because therein lies the key to the dismantling the political grasp the Koran has on populations. Eddie Bernays was good, but even his advertising genius couldn’t quite outdo the 72 virgins as a reward for docility and self-sacrifice.

More is needed, the American Dream need to be reinvented as the Global Dream.

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In that case, your conscience is not what the system refers to as ‘an educated conscience’, for if it were sensitive, educated and awake you would have been taught the moral principles contained within the Unified Theory of Ethics - many of which were listed in an earlier post in this thread - and you would have been taught to affirm that you want (with all your might) to be a person of good character who strives to be highly moral. You would have been taught how to implement this intention, taught about habit formation and what it takes to motivate yourself to do it, to put ethics into practice. Once they teach such values are parents and teachers really then doing their (full) job.

Any idea of causing suffering to a conscious human being contradicts life, violates Intrinsic Value, and is thus a Transposition of Values: it is an incongruence :exclamation: As values go, it is worth only a tiny, tiny fraction at best. Only suckers would settle for that. Smart people aim for a huge bargain of value. They aim to make the world work for all, for a high-quality of life for all: they aim to maximize value and minimize suffering.

Moral good must not be confused with axiological good. A murderer can be axiologically good if he murders well. But he cannot be morally good; for his definition of himself suffers from a self- contradiction: one cannot fulfill a self by extinguishing selves.

As I see it, and this speaks to the concerns of those who hold that education reform is the number one task to get our concentrated effort today, Education is an application of the discipline named Ethics. It is one of its major applications, the others being Coaching [adult education] and Psychotherapy [remedial education]. All of them are to be aimed at assisting an individual to become all he or she is capable of being and becoming.

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…. within the context of whatever invented reality is imposed on him to live in?

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thinkerdr - how then do we approach moral reasoning about conflicting goods? That is, if we are to minimize suffering, is the operant principle then Utilitarianism? And do we not then have the problem of defining the good while avoiding circularity?

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Hello, Faust

In every one of those selections by Marvin C. Katz you read, he defined “a good x” early in the document; and I believe I spent some space defining it here in my posts. There was no circularity. Why are we still talking about defining it :question:

As I have reiterated in several posts, the new paradigm for Ethics is a synthesis of deontology (when it discusses universal human rights), of utilitarianism (when it has chapters on happiness), and of modern Virtue Theory (with its emphasis on character, moral habits, prudence, etc.) If you studied the booklets freely offered you probably have detected strains of all three schools …and then some. It also incorporates Pragmatism and Phenomenology and Existentialism.

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Sure, it’s a synthesis. There are different types of each theory. So, if we are to minimize suffering, and we are to choose a course of action that causes us no suffering, but would cause equal suffering to one of two other parties, depending upon which choice we make, then which choice do we make?

For Kant, to take an example, the choice is clear, and is not dependent on the suffering of either of the two parties that would suffer. For Rawls, the choice is made according to pre-selected rules - it’s possible, depending upon those rules, that the choice is made according to the expectations of the parties, and not specifically according to the amount of suffering. For Natural Rights Theories, some rights will trump others, and again, the suffering of specific parties in specific cases may not determine moral right.

And so on. But what does the axiologist say about my example?

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Perhaps by not seeking out some perfect principle to model and fix ourselves to, we will act more human. Is it to be so complex in structure that simplicity will not be accepted?

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Wiki - “Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good (or right) and those that are bad (or wrong). A moral code is a system of morality (according to a particular philosophy, religion, culture, etc.) and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code.”

Morality is relative to the objective. If one seeks death, food is bad. If one seeks life, food is good.

If someone disagrees with your objective, they wont share your morality. You argue how to be efficient in attaining one’s goal, but you’re not addressing why anyone should follow your objective.

Here in lies the problem, my friend.

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If you have no objective nor want one, no one can persuade you over to his point of view. No problem.

Having no objective does not mean you have no good morals.

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Death is an objective to some. It is not a non-objective.

This was just an example. There’s many objectives people can have that counter objectives of others. Therefore, morality isn’t objective in and of itself, but relative to one’s objective.

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If it’s the case that you don’t know what is right, it doesn’t follow that there is something wrong with you. But for thought it may seem there is due do it making comparisons. The comparisons create nonexistent problems though.

I agree with you Joe in that after thought stops comparing the different situations and whatever it is in people that guides them, one thing is for sure: you only know what is good for you simply because it is that which guides you in your situations as situations change. It is what all your reason and skill is based on.

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Although I introduce a new meaning for the concept “morality” within my system of Ethics, it incorporates the definition that the contributor to Wiki offers in the quote above.

In my theory, when looking for a name to put on the distinctive kind of value which is moral value, I chose “morality” as the term that would most-appropriately cover it. And it turns out to be a happy coincidence that the writer of the Wiki article had a meaning in mind that actually overlaps with my view …or maybe it’s not such a coincidence after all. :wink:

In the new paradigm “morality” is eventually defined as: An increasing correspondence between one’s (observable, empirical) self with one’s improving Self-image. So it is self becoming Self. In order to do that one must be able to distinguish between good and bad; as well as between right and wrong. My definition is a very dynamic one. {In the Preface to ASPECTS OF ETHICS: Views through a new lens a fuller look at morality is presented, and the structure of it is explicated - for the philosophical/logical mind. To examine that summary, click on the fifth link below; the last one.} :slight_smile:

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Maybe this will answer some questions.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/coachpeterd