I was watching Dr. Jordan Peterson debating with Matt Dilahunty on YouTube and I kept getting fired up as they danced around an important point. Dr. Peterson was validly critiquing a flaw in Matt’s premises but Peterson’s motivation was to continue to critique atheistic ethical systems as either “corrupt” or “not really atheistic”. I, in part, saw Dr. Peterson as playing sophomoric games with semantics (defining one’s highest ideal as their “god” while critiquing people who [rightly, in my not so humble opinion] who reject the metaphysical presuppositions of an existent, supernatural deity, particularly as the dictator of our morality.

I wanted to jump in, especially at the point where Matt was explaining his basis of secular ethics in terms of well-being and Peterson was, to some extent rightly, objecting to the assertion that such claims of objective well-being independent of faith.

I believe I have the resolution of this difference between the two positions which may, in turn, undermine Dr. Peterson’s larger position.

My position begins with the understanding that, by the definition of agency, any agent is a goal seeking entity and thus a value holding entity, I assert the following:

• Value is only meaningful in the context of the holder of value.  Statements like “this is a good choice” are only meaningful when you implicitly or explicitly acknowledge under who’s value system this choice is being evaluated.
• All ethics is individual ethics and is the manifestation of their values and knowledge/beliefs in their actions. (as Matt Dilahunty brought up in the debate, even if a real supernatural agent calling itself ‘god’ lays down ‘the law’ one must evaluate their own ethical code to decide if obedience vs rebellion against that law is warranted.)
• Ethical choices are based on our ability …
  • to act, power
  • our ability to predict the consequences of our actions, knowledge and
  • by the system of values by which we weight the likely and even unlikely effects of our actions, our ethics.

Now I believe these are unarguable definitional essentials in any discussion of ethics.  There is however a level of agency that we describe as consciousness. This is above the unconscious power, knowledge, and ethics which dictate the behavior of, say a lobster.

I believe one of the primary essential skills of a conscious entity is some degree of abstraction.  The use of symbols as, firstly icons for concrete objects (and with it, or more accurately, prior to it, the invention of mental models of an objective reality). And then of nodes in a hierarchy of abstractions upon that concrete world.   Conscious entities then can via abstraction symbolically model their values, knowledge, and power.  They can symbolically model their actions and consequences to the point of modeling their own cognition about these.  This opens up a transcendent infinite regress of reflection.

A side note:  Transcendence is an interesting word we throw about very often.  We typically use it where there exists a context in which also apply the prefix meta but are forced into an infinite regress thereby. 

Consider the simple example of the “ethics” of chess.  You have the rules for chess which is, in effect the natural laws of the game.  Then there is the ethics, the objective of winning first, and if that is unobtainable then the stalemate, vs the worse case of loosing and possible gradations of this in terms of winning in as few moves as one can down to, if there is no other alternative, loosing as slowly as possible. But then there is the meta-game of wanting to teach the game of chess to a child or novice.  Then the meta-game is to win often enough to maximize that child’s learning as measured by the ever increasing likelihood that the child can win against random opponents. At another level of “meta” one views the child’s chess skills as a proxy for their intellectual development in general which correlates to their life success. At a next meta level one might ask why I, the chess instructor value the child’s success as I define it.

One can push the valuation further and further like the petulant child who continues to reply to prior answers with “but why?” until one decides one of two courses. One course is to simply abandon the line of thinking, to literally break out of the infinite loop, acknowledging it as a futile, never ending, never resolving, dilemma. The second is to transcend the iteration of questions without abandoning them. This is “meta” to the power of “meta” in that one is abstracting not only on the individual questions but on the meta-analysis of each question. One transcends the regress, adopting a view which acknowledges the value of each iteration without either abandoning the process or being trapped in the process.

I can, of course construct a long essay about the nature of transcendence itself but that is not the objective of this article so I’ll stop here. But I brought it up now to set the stage for its occurrence in this discussion of values. Naturally one, in considering one’s own values may attempt to evaluate their value system and thereby invoking an irreducible recursion of valuation questions which one needs to transcend in order to step beyond the trap of that question itself.

Back to the main discussion: So we were (or I was, at least) considering the question of ethics of agency and nature of consciousness in that context. I posit that there is a transcendent aspect to conscious which is not mystical in any sense of souls existing in a domain apart from material actuality. It is transcendent in that conscious entities are capable of recognizing their own willful influence on their own value systems. Once that is acknowledged they must resolve the regress dilemma it invokes.

“What is the best ethical system?”, “What is the best meta-ethical system to evaluate a given ethical system?”, “What is the best metaⁿ -ethical system to evaluate a given meta^n-1 -ethical system?”…

This discussion is, in point of fact, an attempt to transcend this infinite regress. In that transcendent perspective we consider all these valuations to be at the same (abstract) level. “How does one, at any level, choose to evolve their ethical evaluation?” One answer, and I believe the best answer, is to say that we start with the current default, perturb it in some way and see what happens. Then, in investigating the results we look at how this applies at all levels of ‘meta’ analysis.

This however is getting way ahead of the game. We must play the “meta” game before we can take the “transcendent” fork. So lets consider a few stages of the conscious agent’s ethical questions as they recurse their way toward a transcendent understanding (of, at least, what they can never fully understand.)

In considering ethics we begin by adopting a fully agnostic position at the meta-level of the ethic in consideration. One man may adopt an altruistic ethic, another an egoistic one. If we adopt an agnostic perspective we can move beyond the various justifications of either and note that, for example, certain social systems will allow each man to best actualize their values and maybe even demonstrate an independence in the final valuation of specific actions from the source perspective from which they are adopted. (This is my contention as to the ultimate value of a capitalistic economic system as it unifies these two particular moral positions in terms of their application to behaviors within society. In capitalism the altruist and egoist will behave very similarly and, I believe, both have the best chance to actualize their values.)

Whereas we can acknowledge that in order for ethical valuation to be relevant there must exist the three ingredients of power, knowledge, and ethical value; we must also acknowledge that each of these may be limited. While we have finite power to act, we are not omnipotent. Where we have knowledge of circumstances and of cause and effect, this knowledge is necessarily stochastic. Every act intended to cause an effect has a probability for unforeseen and unintended consequences. And we as conscious entities recognize that the values we take for granted may, under further analysis be imperfect in some larger context. It is in this last issue in particular that understanding of transcendent perspective is important.

We can argue that refinement of our value system is crucial to right action but we can also acknowledge that there is an infinite regress which also puts into perspective our decision to suspend action for the sake of cognition about the values of that action. This itself is a choice of action given our limits and we must at some point invoke a heuristic that says, “better to act sub-optimally than to meditate on the optimal choices until no choice remains.”

[MORE TO SAY… The ethics of agency in the presence of other agents, the emergence of society and social norms… politics and social structure. Economics as the quantification of ethics… etc.]

Moral Singularities (Example of the soldier jumping upon a grenade to save his comrades.) I am specifically thinking of the sixth passenger later identified as Arland D. Williams of Flight 90 which crashed upon the Potomac river in Washington DC in 1982.

(Yet another digression) And here I paused to regain my composure after re-reading the account as I was, yet again moved to tears by the emotional intensity I feel for his decisions. Let any man declare that we have no free will and I point to Arland Williams and dare them to say he didn’t choose to forsake his own safety for the sake of the welfare of the others he chose to value over himself. You can even disagree with his evaluation and I can’t argue the invalidity of your position but I will be sorely tempted to slap you in the face for implying that he was merely a clockwork orange ticking along according to his deterministic program. And if you should object to my act of violence I would say, “sorry, I was predestined to hit you. I cannot avoid following my nature, (which, by-the-way includes my belief in free will!)”

But now back to the concept of moral singularities. By moral singularity I mean a singular action which trades off all possible future acts for the sake of the value of the result of the singular act. The hero sacrificing his life for several others may intuitively or consciously evaluate that the potential good in them, even next to the potential bad, outweighs in his own value system the potential good he could accomplish would he forsake them for his own continued existence. There are finer gradations of this evaluation where there is a risk vs. benefit calculation of some sort, with reward and sacrifices weighed by likelihoods. But the terminal result is the same. And though we may, in our own value system decide the weights differently, say that the police officer who risks and loses his life to stand between the mob and the lynching of an obviously guilty and reprehensible charge, we can respect and even weep for the intensity to which that person acted exceptionally in the actualization of his notion of virtue.

But be aware, we are agnostic on the claim of intrinsic virtue in any moral value to an action no less so a singular one. The suicide bomber who actualizes his hate by sacrificing his own life to best bring harm to those he views as enemies is no less actualizing a moral singularity than did our Potomac hero. By my personal ethic I condemn one and celebrate the other but by a different value system someone may very well hold the reverse position. So take this as a descriptive definition without automatic valuation.

Social Ethics: So at the point where we consider conscious agents, one may imagine either of two circumstantial categories. There is the lone agent, existing and acting independent of others and, alternatively we can imagine the social agent who in evaluating the consequences of his acts must account for the activities of other conscious agents. Much more digression could be invested into the pre-social and individual ethics but, in order to address how ethics manifests for the one conscious species of entities about which we know, we shall skip to the more relevant investigation.

An agent acting consciously in the presence of other conscious agents must account no only for his own value system but of the possible value systems of the other agents. Several scenarios may emerge. Five in particular obvious points on the spectrum of possibilities comes to mind when distinct individual entities with distinct value systems collide.

• War: an entity may decide that the other agent’s value system may or in fact does conflict with his own and his best course of action is to strive for the elimination of the existence of that agent as such.
• Dominance: an entity may decide that the other agent’s values should be tolerated only where and in so far as they serve or do not interfere with his own values. The entity may go so far as to dis-empower the other agent from seeking any value incompatible with his own or enslaving that entity by enforcing only such action that serves his own values.
• Cooperation: an entity may determine that the risk of either War or attempts at dominance may result in their reversal and negotiate a non-confrontational interaction with another entity. Further the two agents may, via discourse reach a condition of mutual trust and common values that both can better actualize by working together rather than in conflict with one another.
• Submission: This is the reverse side of dominance. The submitting entity decides to pursue only those of his values which do not conflict with the value system of the other agent and or to further his own values only through the mechanism of promoting the values of the other agent.
• Subsumption: This one is hard to name as it is not typically identified since the practitioners don’t exist for long. The entity in recognizing another agent may subsume his own values to those of the other. They abdicate all values they hold to the other agent taking its values system as their own. This is, for example, what the religious worshiper does to their deity. It is also the position of the defeated enemy when unconditionally surrendering.

Note, all of these forms of interactions of values may occur for unconscious agents as well as conscious ones.

[MORE LATER]