Ethics as Augmented Social Intelligence

ETHICS AS AUGMENTED SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE

The problem with thinking outside the box is that my education and culture lie not only inside the box but are part and parcel of it. The postmodern thesis teaches us of the impossibility of objective thinking, of completely throwing off the shackles of the past and resting our ideas of “pure reason.” So, how does one reach beyond one’s foundations even when those foundations have been found incomplete or inaccurate? The “box” even controls the language in which we speak and think. This is the main problem of developing a new paradigm or discovering one that might work. We are forced to give up what we once thought as truth and the words used to express it, or at least bend it somewhat to fit our new reality—you can’t pour new wine into old bottles. Torrance called paradigm thinkers those who could think “beyond” present circumstances and people who could, “Beyonders.” I am still left with a puzzle! If what I am able to think and say is limited to present cultural paradigms, then how different is today than yesterday? Am I left with Hegel’s methodology: thesis-antithesis-synthesis? If this is the “way” to proceed, then a new paradigm is something of a combination of what was and is – thesis and antithesis. How do we become “Beyonders”? The search for an ethical paradigm continues, but it’s an uneasy expedition.

A Social Phenomenon

A study of cultural history leads to the conclusion that ethics usually arises in social contexts; that traditionally ethics has its roots in society and reflects the dominant patterns of a culture – i.e., educational, political, community, religious, etc. – all of which espouse certain group-value-schemes that continue to seek collective dominance. This fact doesn’t deny the personal nuances of value choices and behavior, but recognizes that personal value choices are usually imprinted with cultural and socio-political standards.

Historically, these governing patterns emerge as ethical paradigms—a basic set of beliefs that guide action. We set them in stone through religion and constitutions and, in time, believe they are invincible, unchangeable, and absolute. We can conclude that any ethical criteria that delineates the parameters of ethical behavior will at once be communal and, at the same time, reflect the personal beliefs of individuals as they interact with others; that is, people as social beings.

Understanding ethics as a social derivative, commits one to an ethic of persons as social beings. It also commits one to an ethic of the institutions and the communities people create. Thus, the purpose of ethics finds its resolution in community and through people. Although some would twist ethics into their “own image” and make ethics extremely personal, upon examination, they will discover that ethics like persons are communal and have the maintenance of community at their foundation. I have argued that if this were not the case, why did a religious right emerge in America and how does a Muslim right maintain itself throughout the world? We now have moved beyond the merely personal and are asserting the religio-social-political nature of ethics, any ethics.

The Ethical Ought

Ethics, therefore, is a social act which gathers strength through the promotion of certain moral imperatives to which each member of the social group ought to be committed. Ethics defines a way of life whereas morality tells us how we ought to treat each other. It is the relationship between these two – ethics and morality – and their community orientation that must be explained and then justified in any meta-ethical narrative. For reasons such as these, I find it difficult to separate morality/ethics into categories such as person-centered or group-centered. An ethical life is a life that is lived with others and therefore, this just might be a false dichotomy. Groups are made up of persons, and although they have traits of their own that might smother individuality, individuals can act this way as well. A meta-ethical narrative must explain the interactions of persons and society, of society and culture and give reasons (justify) any future prescriptions it might make. This is a difficult task.

There will always be unanswered questions and queries will never satisfy all, for ethics is not a scientific discipline in the sense of a practice that follows certain physical laws, procedures, and methodologies that work in the concrete world of “stuff.” Rather, ethics entails a different kind of human behavior, one that must deal with human behavioral inconsistencies, mega differences between societies and cultures, and those societies and individuals who choose not to live by ethical prescription but strike off on their own to create a “new” world and a “self-focused” ethic.

This is why ethics, like morality, is prescriptive, but relies on our knowledge (descriptive) of persons, society, and culture for real-life application: we are able through the social sciences to use scientific procedures and methods to describe behaviors, but must use reason and dialogue to inform the ethical notions that guide the harmonious interaction of persons and social groups. Thus, ethical decision making is conditional: if certain facts about people and society are true, then we know more about how we ought to live.

Also, ethics is prescriptive at the level of application, recommending certain proven procedures (reasons, rules, duties, etc.) as ways for achieving ethical harmony among people and groups of people. These procedures are rationally developed and described in the meta-ethical narratives that guide ethical behavior and they are based on facts about people and behavior. They become, for the ethicists and for the society that chooses them, the ethical paradigms that guide behavior. The difficulty is in getting universal agreement on these paradigms—an ethic of everyone. Thus, there are wide ethical differences between societies.

The problem philosophers have with the ethical “ought” comes from their commitment to logic and science as the only avenues to truth and knowledge. The is-ought problem was first raised by David Hume (1711–1776), who noted that many writers make claims about what ought to be on the basis of statements about what is. However, for Hume, there seems to be a significant difference between descriptive statements (about what is) and prescriptive statements (about what ought to be). Hume then calls for writers to be on their guard against such inferences, if they cannot give an explanation of how the ought-statements are supposed to follow from the is-statements. “Follow” here is another word from “deduced” as in “logical deduction,” but Hume somehow neglects to talk about logical conditionals.

But how exactly can you derive an “ought” from an “is”? In other words, given our knowledge of the way the world is, how can we know the way the world ought to be? That question has become one of the central questions of ethical theory, and Hume is usually assigned the position that such a derivation is impossible. This complete severing of “is” from “ougjht” has been given the graphic designation of “Hume’s Guillotine.”

Hume questions the possibility of deriving prescriptive statements, which tells us what we ought to do or not do, from descriptive statements, which tell us the way things are or are not. The distinction between these two sorts of statement is in his opinion so radical that one cannot be reduced to the other. This means effectively that moral or ethical propositions have no formal basis in fact, i.e. they cannot be claimed as true in an absolute sense. By “formal” Hume is referring to mathematical logic. There is no logical way, he claims, to deduce or induce an “ought” from an “is.”

Prescriptive statements are then, according to Hume, at best just practical advice on how to pursue our self-interest and the interests of the people we value (or more broadly, sympathize or empathize with). This is a kind of pragmatism or utilitarianism. In this way, ethics is made essentially amoral – an issue of convenience, a mere description of the ways we might best pursue our arbitrary values. The implication is one of relativism and convention.

It should be added that Hume’s conclusion with a non-ethics or relativistic ethic is consistent with his position on freewill. For if we do not really have freewill, but are inevitably driven by our passions, and moreover can rely on them rather than reason for guidance, then we have no need for ethics. Ethics is only meaningful if we have a real power of choice and must therefore take decisions.

Hume’s view of ethical logic is an interesting mix of truth and falsehood, which is why many have agreed with him and many have found it difficult to refute him. Ethics is of course a vast and complex subject. Hume’s approach, for all its seeming skeptical mastery, is superficial and narrow.

The issue raised is primarily formal, that is mathematical or logical. What are prescriptive propositions and how do they relate to descriptive ones? The obvious answer to the question would be that prescriptions relate ends to means. I ought to do (or not-do) this if I want to (or not-to) obtain or attain that. The ‘ought’ (or ‘should’ or ‘must’) modality is essentially the bond in a specific kind of if-then proposition, with a desire or ‘value’ as antecedent and an action or ‘virtue’ as consequent (If [I value X], then I ought [to do X] and [not do Y] ).

Such if-then propositions are not themselves descriptive, but are deductively derived from descriptive forms. When we say “if we want so and so, then thus and thus is the way to get it”, we are affirming that “thus and thus” is/are cause(s) of “so and so”. The latter is a factual claim, which may be true or false. It follows that the prescriptive statement can also be judged true or false, at least in respect of the correctness of the connection implied between its antecedent and consequent.

Prescriptive statements may be positive (imperatives) or negative (prohibitions). An imperative statement is conditional. Good or bad mean good or bad for something or someone. The imperative is only true as such if we grant that the value pursued is indeed of value. But how can we ever know whether any of our values are valuable in an absolute sense? This is Hume’s query, and it is quite valid. But his conclusion that values are formally bound to be arbitrary (i.e. cannot be deduced from plain facts) is open to challenge.

We press this argument because many are quick to dismiss ethics as arbitrary because of the claim that they are not scientific and can’t logically be deduced from facts. Our task is to show that we can arrive somehow at categorical imperatives, i.e. ethical standards that can ground and justify all subsequent conditional imperatives. One conceivable way to do so is to use a dilemmatic argument: “Whether you want X or Y or anything else, the pursuit of Z would in any case be a precondition.”

Something is an unquestionable (total, unconditional, supreme) value if it is necessary to the pursuit of any and all arbitrary values one personally opts for. A relative value can be by-passed in the pursuit of other relative values, but an unquestionable value is one presupposed in every pursuit and must therefore be respected unconditionally.

Are there any such unquestionable values? An obvious such value is life itself: if one lacks life, one cannot pursue anything else; therefore life must be protected and enhanced. Another unquestionable value is the self – if the soul is the source of all our actions, good or bad, then the soul’s welfare is an unquestionable value. Whatever one wants, one needs the physiological and psychological means that make such pursuit at all possible – viz. one’s bodily and mental faculties. And most of all, one needs to be present oneself!

Ethical propositions do not apply to inanimate objects. And we can say at the outset that to engage at all in ethical discourse, humans have to study and take into consideration their nature, their true identity. They have to realize their biological and spiritual nature, the nature of their physical-mental organism and the nature of their soul. Moreover, since biology and spirituality relate not just to the individual in isolation, but to larger groups and to society as a whole – ethics has to be equally broad in its concerns.

If this large factual background is ignored in the formulation of ethical propositions, one is bound to be arbitrary and sooner or later fall into error. In conclusion, we can develop an ethic that involves unquestionable values and is based on factual truths. Ethics is clearly seen not to be arbitrary, if we consider the conditions that give rise to it in the first place – viz. that we are fragile living beings, with natural needs and limits, and that we are persons, with powers of cognition, volition and valuation.

If all the relevant facts are taken into consideration, then, an “ought” encapsulates a mass of “is” information, and can therefore be regarded as a special sort of “is”. That is, if properly developed, an ethical statement can be declared true, like any other factual claim. Of course, if not properly induced and deduced, an ethical can be declared false – but not all ethical propositions are false.

Hume failed to realize the said logical preconditions of any ethics, and therefore got stuck in the shallow idea that ethics cannot be deeply grounded in fact. Since the scope of his considerations was partial, he could at least see that an “ought” is to start with conditional, but he could not see further how it could eventually be made unconditional. He therefore wrongly concluded that inferring an “ought” from an “is” is fallacious reasoning. This was later pompously called “the naturalistic fallacy”. (See: Logical and Spiritual Reflections by Avi Sion)

Ethical Universals

Some question whether universal agreement can ever be achieved, whether an ethic of everyone can ever be developed. It’s a goal and the definition of or promotion of ethical universals reflects this intention. To say that certain ethical principles are universal or ought to be accepted as such is not a description but a hope or prescription for the ills that beset all of us. This does not logically commit us to ethical relativity. What social scientists call “ethical relativity” is merely a description of ethical practice which in no way is subversive of a “universal ethical project.” Relativity points to the individual and personal nature of ethics or even the cultural nature of ethics but in no way denies the possibility of finding universal agreement. To say so is to give up hope and hope is the power of any rational morality.

There are many competing moral paradigms in our world—virtue ethics, relativity, deontology, the feminist ethic of care, the good reasons approach, pragmatism, wide reflective equilibrium, and the list continues. Can meaning and significance be found in all of them, some but not others, or must we confess that the relativity of personal and cultural goals rules out any search for a universal ethical paradigm as such? We know that as the dominant ethical paradigms grow and strengthen, they provide moral support for our social groups and institutions; they become, in our mind, “foundational” (Some would call them “traditional values”). Should we guard against identifying these so-called foundational values as absolute and try to avoid giving them the stamp of universality?

The World is Flat

Relativity is not our only choice: cross-paradigmatic and cross-cultural dialogue promise understanding and consensus. After all, we have been told that the “earth is flat,” meaning that human differences are of no consequence. We also know that this metaphor is perhaps over reaching a little bit because there are significant human and societal differences that lie just beneath the surface of our capitalist greed and quest for material success. These differences have ethical significance and can inform the future ethical patterns we seek or for which we settle.

The essence of multiculturalism—an often misused term as some have made it prescriptive rather than descriptive—is the fact of our common humanity and our surface differences. Understanding that such values are created and molded by time and circumstance, unleashes within us and society the power of ethical possibility; a force that is noncategorical and not bound by the traditional absolutes of religious doctrine or so-called historical doctrines (such as “the American way”). Positive change is possible and seems to be its strength as each generation is able to take the foundational principles from the preceding generation and recreate them as needed.

Hope and Possibility

Building on the strength of our forefathers, understanding their weaknesses and limitations, and providing an ethical path for future generations is one purpose of democratic constitutions and governments. It’s also an ethical path that requires patience and understanding. To cling to past formulas because they are “traditional” or “historical” serves only those who seek to dominate and clouds our creative vision for an ethical future. Dominant scientific, religious, or ethical paradigms offer societal stability but at what cost? Dominance doesn’t mean “absolute,” does it?

We should be advised that the language that frees us also constrains us. As postmodernists are struggling to break free from the Enlightenment and its foundational conclusions, some have said that they ushered in nihilistic relativity by denying “unchangeableness” of the scientific method. Others believe that the postmodernists have provided an opportunity to assess our foundations and recreate our world in ways that benefit all mankind and just not the dominant Western view of values and morals? Both postmodernists and constructionists appear to welcome this opportunity. But this is not a black and white argument. We seek foundations because it’s human to want security and consistency; and we seek knowing that our selections are only tentative and will need constant vigilance, reflective maintenance, and modifications.

Ethics is both an internal and external phenomenon: at the same time attitudinal and behavioral. As the world as grown smaller, or “flat,” many realize that distilling a new, “universal” conception of ethics—from the graveyard of past ethical theories—one with which most people can live, is vital to the continuance of human life and contemporary civilizations. Some have called this a “survival ethic” and that is one way, albeit, extreme, to describe it. I would rather call ethics “augmented social intelligence.” To me, this gets at the heart of it all.