Introduction

This is a subject back to which I keep coming every time I see a critical comment on the ability to develop a system of moral virtues without a foundation in some religious dogma or tradition. As a non-theist I take umbrage at this criticism although I do not discount the utility of starting with traditional religion based moral codes. My belief is that religious institutions and the institution of religious thinking itself has, as a matter of natural selection refined their traditions towards, at least, a local optimum in those systems of social interaction which promote the prosperity of its members.

What is more, attempts at developing systems of universal ethics independent of the mystical dogmas of religious ideology have failed in that they still seek a goal which is itself a foundational premise of such ideology, namely the very goal of seeking a universal ethic, the presupposition that there is such a thing and that ethics is external to the individual is in error. For example to declare oneself a Utilitarian is to presuppose the virtue of utility. That virtue is externally postulated. It is not an argument for Utilitarianism but a faith based declaration of such. Further it leaves the definition of “utility” undefined or more accurately as circularly defined.

At another level, attempts to argue toward an ethical system themselves presuppose there is virtue in the use of logic and reason at the same time they make the above mentioned logical errors. I will argue that subject to ethics of certain forms there is in fact derivative value in the use of logic and reason but the key word here is derivative. They are not moral primaries nor absolute.

What I want to attempt then, is to begin at a more fundamental level and in earnest to adopt an agnostic, or even antagonistic view on the existence of or value in believing in a universal morality. Rather I wish to explore the foundational meaning of ethics. I will attempt to merely describe the way I view ethical systems function over time, refine and change and merge, and how ethics manifests in higher order institutions of economics and politics.

This is, of course, a tall order. It is an audacious goal to say the least. But my expectation is that I can, in the attempt, at the very least cover a bit of new ground, or at least ground new to me, in the attempt.

Beginnings

For the purposes of this essay, at least at the beginning, I will treat the terms ethics and morality as synonyms. Some, I believe, distinguish ethics as a personal code of behavior while qualifying morality as a common social or universal ethic. The latter begs important questions, the answers to which we shall not presuppose and thus address these qualifications only if and when they arise.

An ethic is a system of value by which a behaving entity determines its behavior.

In one sense ethics is meaningless in so far as it has no negation. Immoral behavior is, at this level of analysis an oxymoron because a behaving entity’s behavior is always determined by their ethic by definition. The question however returns when we begin to consider persons whom I define as self-aware behaving entities. But let us not get ahead of ourselves.

By the behavior of behaving entities we mean more than, the behavior of a falling raindrop in the wind or of the trajectory of a proton in the presence of external electromagnetic forces or the formation of galaxies over the course of eons. Life behaves in a way somewhere between the deterministic flight of particles and the chaotic dance of swirling gasses. In describing a bird in flight, while it never violates Newton’s laws of motion nor Lord Kelvin and Clausius’ second law of thermodynamics, its future state is at the same time much less predictable than a planet’s orbit and much more predictable than the dispositions and motions of the many gas particles in a Helium balloon. For a more comparable series of examples compare the behaviors of a spray of buckshot when fired, a flock of birds, and the molecules of gas in a chamber at near vacuum. The analysis of birds requires different language and tools than the statistical mechanics of a gas or the deterministic mechanics of particles.

We better understand a bird by considering it as a goal seeking entity capable of perceiving and analyzing its environment and predicting the likely consequences of its activity.

On the nature of Nature

My study of physics and especially quantum mechanics has led me to adopt the position of non-objective materialism. I believe we experience an external actuality of phenomena (what happens). The concept of an objective reality is not foundational but rather reality as a collection of objects is our means of modeling our actuality by resolving coherent collections of phenomena into objects. If you must label me anything, call me an Actualist.

Within that framework it is important to realize that at the level of common everyday experience objective reality is a very “good” model wherein “a rock is a rock” and there’s no need to resolve its material components in phenomenological terms with relative realities. But as I understand things, the objective model breaks down when the entity we seek to objectify reacts strongly to acts of observation and measurement the scale of precision of our measurements. This occurs when our scale is very small as with quantum systems but also when we seek to describe the complex systems of living organisms when what we seek to describe is their behavior which strongly couples to their environment in a sophisticated way. It is not that we must throw up our hands and treat either phenomenological entity as an imponderable black box. But rather we must recognize that in such cases our object language of description is insufficient and we must adopt a process language as described by A. N. Whitehead and others.

Moral Life in Amoral Nature

So my position is that life spontaneously evolved, firstly as self perpetuating phenomena and then as self reproducing phenomena capable of then multiplying and evolving through natural selection. We speak of natural selection as if it were goal seeking but we must recognize that this mode of speaking is due to the aforementioned need to transition to a non-objective process language of analysis. It is an observation that along with random chance there are structural reasons some organisms become more numerous than others and with the amplifying effect of this multiplication in reproduction leads us to see more of certain structural traits.

Original nature qua nature is amoral it is not a behaving entity in our premised absence of divinities. But of course nature in the presence of life becomes an environment containing moral entities and eventually we can ascribe purpose in, say, the high volume of milk production for modern dairy cows which have been consciously bread by humans.

First Stage Life

But again we get ahead of ourselves. Consider then the beginnings of life in this presupposed accidental nature. Its very early behavior we imagine consisted only in absorbing energy and material from its environment and duplicating its structure via fission. There were no choices within a single organism. It reproduced its structure mindlessly and automatically with only the occasional copy errors yielding diverging, diverse copies of itself over time.

It would be very hard to ascribe an ethic to such an automated form of life however we shall do so. We give it the singular ethic of reproduction or rather we ascribe it the single choice of reproducing vs not reproducing. We do not say reproduction is the better choice but rather distinguish the organism with a singular ethic of reproducing from the organism with the singular ethic of non-reproduction without imposing an external judgement. We merely note that the in the face of harsh indifferent nature the non-reproducing organisms will much more quickly actualize their moral ideal of non-existence and become rare over time compared to the life which “has chosen” to struggle to procreate.

Second Stage Life

At the next stage of life, which we shall assume is DNA and protein based cellular life or some alien equivalent, we imagine there is a new level of abstraction in the process of activity. While the processes of transcribing proteins and copying of DNA are not deterministic they are less random and more (quasi-pseudo-para-kindalike) algorithmic. Certain branching activities may be said to occur where the organism turns on and off internal processes or more accurately significantly increases or decreases their rates. An organism may “choose”, by virtue of the structure of its DNA to change its internal processes in the in response to changes in temperature, or the presence or absence of specific molecules in its environment.

The “ethics” of the organism, is no longer encoded in its structure as a whole but in the driving control structure of its DNA. We may then begin to compare the “ethics” of say reproducing as soon as sufficient materials and energy has been internalized to waiting until there is also the organisms genetic code effectively “detects” an abundance of material or energy that may be utilized for future growth in the environment. We again strive to remain agnostic in our judgement as to the value of such choices even to the extent of revisiting the ethic of continuing to exist and reproduce. We merely acknowledge that the organism has achieved a second stage of behavior wherein the ethics of its 2nd stage choices may be valued in the context of its first stage ethic. From the question of “To be or not to be?” to questions of strategy in accomplishing that primary ethic whichever position it takes.

As we extend our considerations of this 2nd stage life, acknowledging as mere fact that life which encodes an “ethic” promoting successful reproduction tends to be those who will continue over time we come to the point where strategies have become sufficiently sophisticated that the individual organisms behavior accounts for other organisms.

We still consider this 2nd level although we might find it useful to subdivide at this stage Level 2A vs 2B. I think the critical departure to the next level occurs when we define multi-cellular organisms. Still in Stage 2 we however see the emergence of very sophisticated ethical codes. Colonies of organisms may form encoding cooperative behavior in their DNA. Predatory amoeba, and antibiotic producing molds encode strategies of behavior within their genes which necessarily function as a reaction to the existence of other organisms. Some organisms of different ken develop symbiotic relationships. Others parasitic. The genetic code can be “designed” not only to promote continued existence and reproduction but genetic adaptation in the form of genetic exchange.

Stage 3 Life

Stage 1 life simply lives and reproduces automatically. Stage 2 life is capable of reacting to its environment at the genetic level. Both are single celled organisms or at the most cellular colonies. We recognize stage 3 life as organisms for which single cells are but components to the extend that they specialize in function so that that function is primarily in support of the whole. Biologists may have better ways of defining the distinction between a multi-cellular organism from a cellular colony but for this discussion the primary concern is not their composite structure. The issue is the level at which behavior is considered and most importantly the higher level mechanism at which that behavior is actualized. We may well consider a single celled organism at Stage 3 provided it, in addition to its genetic component has some additional organelle or distributed, isolated biochemical mechanism which can process information. Likewise many multi-cellular organisms, e.g. plants, so far as we know, would be considered stage 2 life. A prototypical early Stage 3 life-form we might consider is the flatworm. Without getting into detail as to whether and how much learning goes on in a flatworm at the level of its RNA we recognize that a flatworm in addition to its genetic code has sensory apparatus and behavior sufficiently sophisticated that it can be said to learn and perceive rather than merely react. The crucial distinction we make in defining Stage 3 organisms is that stage 3 organisms with equivalent genetic code can have distinguishable ethics.
This covers a wide range of life on our planet. From worms to bees to tigers. It is in Stage 3 that life evolves the facility to differentiate behavior within the species and even within genetically identical siblings of that species based on different perceptive history.

Stage 4?

I am not sure now how to define further stages. Are humans at stage 4 or 5 or 6? As multi-cellular life is practically useful but not definitionally necessary nor sufficient for stage 3, social organisms and mutual communication such as we see in packs and hives and tribes are neither definitionally necessary nor sufficient for the last stage at which I would place (most) human beings. We further may want to distinguish between early pre-humans who communicated as a means of sharing immediate perceptions and emotional states to later humanity which was capable of abstracting experience enough to relate history and communicate over time.

I think the principle condition for the last stage is the point where a being is sufficiently self aware to contemplate the question in its abstraction of “Should I do X?” and to communicate the opinion “You should not do Y!”. We see in pack animals behavior akin to this in the form of warning bellows and growls and threat displays when young males begin to challenge the dominance of pack leaders. We could investigate hypotheses as to the extent to which such behavior is instinctual and reactive or learnable and malleable. Our interest however is not where to draw the line but in the existence of this boundary between the stage 3 of adaptive ethics to the fourth stage where we humans reside where ethics is now abstracted. A human being can contemplate their own behavior in the abstract hypothetical, reason as to the effects of their actions and evaluate the consequences over alternatives. So we shall define this level of ethics as Stage 4.

Stage 5?

Some may wish to argue that there is a higher stage of life and thus ethical behavior. As Carl Jung hypothesized a collective unconscious one may speculate the ability to form a collective consciousness. One may even point to beliefs that such exist in the form of clans, states, and societies. Socialism for example asserts a social ethic that supersedes the interests and values of the individual members. I would argue that this strong assertion is an error. While I too may error in this analysis I would posit that even a collective entity such as the fictional Borg collective of Star Trek is not a higher stage but rather the same stage at a higher tier. In each of the prior stages there was a new component added. The proverbial Borg as a whole decision making entity has no new features not already present in a human individual. It perceives, contemplates, and acts within itself. The Borg is yet another Stage 4 life-form which is constructed from formerly stage 4 entities which have been subsumed to the level of stage 3. To go beyond is to stretch the definition of ethics too far in my not so humble opinion. I further support this opinion by pointing out that such constructions as states, and tribes, and corporations are entities with overlapping and varying members. The cognition in formulating actions and their value must still occur within individual human minds.

Absolute Moral Relativity

The term moral relativism has degenerated to a form of moral nihilism as it is most typically invoked without a properly founded relativity principle. I assert that all ethics is personal and thus trivially relative to the individual holding and assigning values and their decisions as to which hypothetical actions they will then actualize. [More, basically arguing that an individual cannot help but act morally in the technical sense in that an individual always actualizes his system of values by definition. Whether that system is coherent or self contradictory is a separate question and whether coherence and self-consistency is a virtue is itself a question each individual must decide based on their personal ethics. Even in the undeniable presence of God were that the situation an individual is either the Deity’s puppet or they have the ethical question of whether or not they will choose to accept or reject the moral dictates that their deity may chose to pronounce. The heart of the moral question is invariably the heart of the free willed individual.]

Transcendent Ethics

The Context of Human Ethics

[In order to act based on values we need the power to act and the ability to predict consequences of those actions. These are limited.]

Meta-Ethics and Transcendence

[In the context given previously we understand that in achieving any system of values, better understanding of ourselves and how we evolve or personal ethics is itself of value. This is meaningful especially in light of our acknowledged ignorance. If we adopt a premise of an ethic which is not one of self annihilation (rather than merely nihilistic) then our non-omnipotence and non-omniscience dictates value in power and knowledge to the point of our ability to reformulate and consciously adapt our own ethical coding.]

Toward a Tentative Code of Conduct

[Here acknowledge that human society as such is a collection of individuals acting according to their individual values. Further we are individuals who can recognize this elementary fact consciously and adapt our value system accordingly. This gives a context in which certain prescriptions of social behavior are tentatively but universally consistent with the ethics of most individuals within that society. Argue that much of this coding evolved naturally in the evolution of our religious institutions but need not and ultimately should not depend on them.]