From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Sat Nov 30 2002 - 10:56:38 MST
> Samantha Atkins:
>> Complexity as such is no meaningful measure of "rightness" at
>> all. It certainly will not help us make moral decisions,
>> difficult or otherwise.
>
> My sense is that a "higher" ethics or morality does have some relation
> to increasing complexity (or consciousness or intelligence). On an
> intuitive or perhaps esthetic level I feel this is the "purpose" of
> sentience -- although I wouldn't propose that as an objective,
> measurable reality.
In the search for higher level meaning, for a moral system that is a closer
approximation to "universal truth", the overarching measure of goodness is
consistency.
Evaluating consistency is inevitably a successive approximation scenario.
Just as a parent's concepts are are (generally) broader than a child's.
(Speaking in general, as this group of gifted children know from
experience.)
The best we can do in our search for a rational moral system is the
following:
To a backgound of consistency (a growing approximation of "universal truth")
we apply values that are local (limited context) to arrive at our (current)
goals.
What may be disconcerting to some is that conventional human values are not
central to the larger moral system.
- Jef
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:41 MDT