As evolved—and evolving—agents, we would benefit from increasing awareness of (1) our values, hierarchical and fine-grained, and (2) our methods for promoting those present but evolving values in the world around us, with perceived consequences feeding back and selected for increasing coherence over increasing context of meaning-making (values) and increasing scope of instrumental effectiveness (methods). Lather, rinse, repeat…
As inherently perspectival agents acting to express our present but evolving nature within the bounds of our presently perceived environment of interaction, we can find moral agreement as if we were (metaphorically) individual leaves on the tips of the growing branches of a tree, and by traversing the (increasingly probable) branches of that tree toward the (most probable) trunk, rooted in what we know as the physics of our world, finding agreement at the level(s) of those branches supporting our values-in-common.
I am not a god, but this is the advice I would provide to the next one I happen to meet, and thereby hope to expedite our current haphazard progress (2.71828 steps forward, 1 step back) in the domain of social decision-making assessed as increasingly “moral”, or right in principle.
The arrow of morality points not toward any imagined goal, but rather, outward, with increasing coherence over increasing context.
As evolved—and evolving—agents, we would benefit from increasing awareness of (1) our values, hierarchical and fine-grained, and (2) our methods for promoting those present but evolving values in the world around us, with perceived consequences feeding back and selected for increasing coherence over increasing context of meaning-making (values) and increasing scope of instrumental effectiveness (methods). Lather, rinse, repeat…
As inherently perspectival agents acting to express our present but evolving nature within the bounds of our presently perceived environment of interaction, we can find moral agreement as if we were (metaphorically) individual leaves on the tips of the growing branches of a tree, and by traversing the (increasingly probable) branches of that tree toward the (most probable) trunk, rooted in what we know as the physics of our world, finding agreement at the level(s) of those branches supporting our values-in-common.
I am not a god, but this is the advice I would provide to the next one I happen to meet, and thereby hope to expedite our current haphazard progress (2.71828 steps forward, 1 step back) in the domain of social decision-making assessed as increasingly “moral”, or right in principle.
The arrow of morality points not toward any imagined goal, but rather, outward, with increasing coherence over increasing context.