In Defense of a Non-Natural Moral Order

[John 6IX Breezy]

I'd be happy to.  There are a number of components to this so to know where to start, can I ask how much you already know about information theory / information governance best practices?

If you already know some of that I can take some short cuts; if not, this diagram might be a good starting point as an explanation:

From COBIT5 (2012), Culture is:
"Organisational Ethics determine the values by which the society (or enterprise) want to live (its code).
Individual Ethics are determined by each person’s personal values and are dependent to some extent on external factors not always under the society's control.
Individual Behaviours which collectively determine the culture of the group/society are dependent upon both organisational and individual ethics."

Thus, culture acts as both an enabler and/or a constraint on both the developing and developed (maturing and mature) individual depending on how you look at it.

The parts that relates to the immune system are the green arrows - events and alerts.  The idea being that individuals develop a baseline of 'how things should be' and when certain events happen a set of processes are triggered that generate alerts.  Some of these alerts such as 'hunger' (a capacity-related event) or 'virus attack' (a security-related event) may not register consciously and are dealt with automatically via the immune system  (event>incident>workaround>known error>standard change) and some require cognition (event>incident>workaround>new problem>new change).

A subset of these events/alerts are categorised by humans as 'moral events'.  Thus we differentiate between a preference, a social faux pas and a breach of an ethical standard.  

The latter would have grown from the fact that we are a social species where alienation from the group could mean death.  Notably, this implies that there would be no morality without mortality.

Perhaps it could be argued, therefore, that morality is the 'social immune system' at work.

Thus we can safely claim that even though existential nihilism is supported by physics, chemistry and biology, moral nihilism is not... there is an evolved difference between the preference / choice between chocolate or vanilla ice-cream and the preference / choice to kill someone or not. It's not "just your opinion, man."

Or, putting it another way, if female genital mutilation / circumcision or slavery are accepted as cultural norms there won't be a corresponding event that would trigger a moral-alert.

I can go deeper into the processes involved if that would help (the Event process, the Incident process, the Problem process and the Change process) but I find that I often lose people if I do that.

Rather than going deeper I think its more useful if you go broader and state the main point you are trying to convey. The different components and their interactions make sense, for the most part, but I'm not sure I understand what its trying to tell me. Apart from that, two things that could be clarified are the distinction between ethics and morality (I typically use them interchangeably, or at most use morality for individuals and ethics for organizations; the diagram seems to have a specific definition for them) and what the culture/high culture distinction is?

I haven't learned about information theory. But for the time being, I'm mostly struggling to understand in what context the information you're giving me fits in, or what function it has.

[DLJ]

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Rather than going deeper I think its more useful if you go broader and state the main point you are trying to convey. The different components and their interactions make sense, for the most part, but I'm not sure I understand what its trying to tell me.
...

Sure.  No problem.  
1. Your question about why I had 'immune system' in my definition of morality as a system. The diagram only notes the 'event/alert' element of an immune system simply because it would be too cluttered to show all the parts of the algorithms.

2. The diagram addresses the topic of this thread... non-natural order (and as specified by Acrobat... not supernatural but still somehow 'out there' somewhere, being all kinda transcendent and stuff).  Everything not in purple is external to an individual.  Growing up (maturing) in social groups the individual will receive many inputs regarding ethics from its environment and some of those will appear 'transcendent' or as Douglas Adams put it...



... and the same goes for ethics and social contracts. It's our memetic inheritance. They are thinking tools.

Note that he says "natural order". He was, of course, an atheist. Had he been a theist he could well have said "sacred order".

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Apart from that, two things that could be clarified are the distinction between ethics and morality (I typically use them interchangeably, or at most use morality for individuals and ethics for organizations; the diagram seems to have a specific definition for them)
...

OK. I'll quote myself from an interview conducted on a now defunct forum (called TTA). For that we started with definitions and then got into the weeds. Here, I was aiming for the shorter version.

(27-02-2018) epronovost Wrote: ...
Let's start at the very beginning, how would you define morality?

What's the difference between a moral and morality?

(27-02-2018) DLJ Wrote: ...
The Google definitions for morality are:
Quote:noun
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
"the matter boiled down to simple morality: innocent prisoners ought to be freed"
synonyms: ethics, rights and wrongs, correctness, ethicality
More
a particular system of values and principles of conduct.
plural noun: moralities
"a bourgeois morality"
the extent to which an action is right or wrong.
"the issue of the morality of the possession of nuclear weapons"

I say definitions (plural) rather than definition (singular) because the above contains a number of elements:
- Principles
- "Ethics" as a synonym
- A system
- Values
- Conduct / behaviour.

Not specifically stated but implied are also... 'judgment' and 'measurement'.

This broadness / fuzziness is possibly why there is so much disagreement when the topic is raised on TTA.

...

So that was morality. And now for 'a moral'.

To Google again:
Quote:noun
1.
a lesson that can be derived from a story or experience.
"the moral of this story was that one must see the beauty in what one has"
synonyms: lesson, message, meaning, significance, signification, import, point, precept, teaching
"the moral of the story"
2.
standards of behaviour; principles of right and wrong.
"the corruption of public morals"
synonyms: moral code, code of ethics, moral standards, moral values, principles, principles of right and wrong, rules of conduct, standards/principles of behaviour, standards, morality, sense of morality, scruples, ideals
"he has no morals and cannot be trusted"

The first one, above, is fine. Indeed, more than fine. I think it's the real thing. In the same way that our immune system is storing data regarding shit that happens biologically (events, incidents, problems) and what fixes were attempted and which ones worked, our morality system is storing data regarding shit that happens socially. The latter can be vicarious (a story) or personal (experience).

I'm less happy with the second definition and prefer to separate the two parts.

Regarding 'right and wrong', and maybe this is my nihilistic/absurdist bias showing here, but I'd prefer an evolutionary view and go for 'useful and not useful'.

The 'standards of behaviour' part can be put in the box marked 'ethics' rather than the 'moral' box.

I prefer this because it helps align to something I have seen noted a few times on TTA... that morality is about how you live with yourself whereas ethics is about how you live with others. Although having said that, ethics (unlike morality) is applicable at both the individual level and the community/organisational level.
...

Similarly, just to show that I'm not alone in using this distinction:

Ethics, Morals

So that's close to what I mean but “Morals” isn’t quite right (for my diagram) as there’s no separation of noun and verb, ‘a moral’ vs. ‘to be moral’ and a misuse or misunderstanding of ‘culture’.

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and what the culture/high culture distinction is?
...

Culture is defined in the best practice manuals as 'aggregate behaviour' but moral-alerts triggered by others' behaviour (denoted on the diagram as 'f') is not the whole picture. It is hedonistic i.e. relates to 'now'. It does not include triggers from e.g. reading about slavery in the quran or the bible.

This means there must be a different type of culture that is encapsulated in historical texts, novels, art etc. There must be a memetic inheritance (memes that last); ancient memetic artefacts that archaeologists and anthropologists dig up or that museums display. This type of culture is usually referred to as 'high' culture.

My suspicion is that it's this high culture element (memetic inheritance) that the OP is arguing is transcendent.
(although it's possible that the OP is also including "d" and maybe also "a+b")

[John 6IX Breezy]

A few more questions:

1. Can you clarify the concept of a moral alert. The term makes sense when it stems from individual ethics. An alert gives the sense that something went wrong, and the individual can experience it as guilt (listed in the description). However, moral alerts stemming from high culture are not as clear. For example, what is the violation, who is it alerting, and how are they experiencing it?

2. If we take morality to simply mean right and wrong behavior, how does the system distinguish between right and wrong behavior that is typical of moral questions (murder, rape, etc), and right and wrong behavior that is unrelated to morality (there's a right and wrong way to drive on the road, make a pancake, tell a joke).

3. Lastly, expound on the input to the system. Everything after individual ethics makes sense. But how does moral information enter the individual, say, if the system was starting from scratch and there was no organizational ethics? The diagram lists things such as homeostasis and I'm not grasping the connection.

[DLJ]

A few more questions:

1. Can you clarify the concept of a moral alert. The term makes sense when it stems from individual ethics. An alert gives the sense that something went wrong, and the individual can experience it as guilt (listed in the description). However, moral alerts stemming from high culture are not as clear. For example, what is the violation, who is it alerting, and how are they experiencing it?
...

Certainly.  There are various kinds of event, pre-programmed by evolution, with corresponding alerts or notifications.  Broadly speaking there are 5 categories:
Availability (up-time/down-time, reliability): this is binary (on/off)
Capacity (utilisation, response times, performance (e.g. speed)): this is analogue
Security (confidentiality, integrity, availability of data)
Continuity (disaster recovery)
Time

Human examples would be:
Availability: Someone steals your shit (you don't have it anymore)
Capacity: Someone steals some of your shit
Security: Someone is lying to you or breaches a confidence or is keeping a secret
Continuity: Someone tries to kill you
Time: "Shit! I forgot our wedding anniversary!"

During our development stage, due to the environment in which we grow, our 'comfort zone' develops and new events will be added and old ones will be relegated to "meh" as we acclimatise to the world around us.  

However, not all events would be categorised as 'moral' and not all would relate to "something went wrong".  Using a simply IT example, there are three types, Informational, Warning and Exception.  Examples:
Informational: Backup successful.
Warning: Backup running slow.
Exception: Backup failed.

Only the latter is a "something went wrong" scenario.  A calendar reminder that it's your mum's birthday or a hunger pang would not be considered to be 'moral' alerts.

Similarly, there can be a moral alert of something going right e.g. one sees someone handing out food to homeless people and one feels some kind of swell of approval.
Or not.  One might be Ben Shapiro and be outraged that this Good Samaritan is taking away the homeless person's desire to be self-sufficient.  
 
This implies that there must be some kind of event correlation going on.  'Patterns of normal' are being monitored by our senses and we need to distinguish signal from noise.  Some signals correlate to pre-programmed and (later) acquired events which means that we must develop an ethical baseline of what is acceptable, plus tolerance thresholds.

So it's similar to the immune system for the body and we sense these thresholds as e.g. hunger or pain.  We have developed a body schema and extended body schema (e.g. my car or my wife and children) for 'corporate (body) governance'.  In governance theory there is also 'information governance' ... I'm proposing that as humans we also develop a mental / social schema which is the basis for ethics.

Sorry.  This is getting long-winded.  Back to your question:

However, moral alerts stemming from high culture are not as clear. For example, what is the violation, who is it alerting, and how are they experiencing it?
...

In the diagram, I have attempted to show that moral events (from which lessons can be learned) have three sources (which brain chemistry will not distinguish between):
1. Current sense data
1.1 Physical ('f' on the diagram)
1.2 Logical ('e' on the diagram)
2. Stored sense data ('g' on the diagram)

Examples:
1.1 Observation of a live event e.g. seeing someone being attacked (or hearing it).
1.2 Observation of a fictional event e.g. in a movie, play or book.
2. Feelings of guilt over e.g. not protecting someone being bullied at school.

An example of 1.2 ('e') might be The Rape of the Sabine Women or The Bombing of Guernica depicted in sculpture on canvas or in film.
The individual (the witness) would be alerted and they would experience it as an emotion.

Some may be shocked, others not so much.  Proximity and salience have a lot to do with whether or how those events might be processed.  It would be a calculation of ... impact x urgency = priority.

...
2. If we take morality to simply mean right and wrong behavior, how does the system distinguish between right and wrong behavior that is typical of moral questions (murder, rape, etc), and right and wrong behavior that is unrelated to morality (there's a right and wrong way to drive on the road, make a pancake, tell a joke).
...

The former would be an Exception Event (assuming that one has grown up in a world were murder and rape are socially unacceptable... it was not always so).

Driving violations would trigger a Warning Event.  The wrong way to make a pancake, tell a joke or putting pineapple on a pizza would be Informational Events ("Oh! I didn't know people did that!") or Warning Events ("Pineapple!?!?! What a sick bastard!  Where's my coat?  Bye!") depending upon one's ethical baseline.

...
3. Lastly, expound on the input to the system. Everything after individual ethics makes sense. But how does moral information enter the individual, say, if the system was starting from scratch and there was no organizational ethics? The diagram lists things such as homeostasis and I'm not grasping the connection.

Well, I guess there are rare cases of wild children being found in the woods but in general we grow up surrounded by organisational ethics... our family, peer pressure, school rules, sporting rules, company rules, religious rules, state laws etc.  

Certainly there would be no need for anything other than survival-related event-detection if one lived as Robinson Crusoe (before the arrival of Friday... which would make it perhaps Thursday? ).  Resource availability and sharing, fairness regarding consumption, deceit-detection etc. only matter in a social setting.

In general, it's evolved and works a bit like this:



I may have not have depicted it well enough but I'm trying to show that an ethical baseline (individual ethics) is formed from evolved and learned components.

If you have any thoughts on how to make it clearer, I'd be grateful.

[The Grand Nudger]

OFC people think that their moral proclamations are “objectively true”, Acro. In the sense that you’re using the term the two words are redundant.

Thing is, that doesn’t get us anywhere as realists. Even if we uttered some moral proclamation that wasn’t true, our belief in its truth lead to its utterance or conception in the first place. If we could rustle up agreement we may still be dealing with an example of inter-subjectivity.

This is error theory. The idea that we’re trying to get things right™, and it may even be possible to get things tight™, but for whatever reason we got them wrong.

What we wonder, when we wonder about moral truth, is whether or not those things we all consider objectively true ( which aren’t always in agreement) are synthetic or analytic truths.

Properly stated, you might find that defending non natural realism is straightforward and uncomplicated. Even if it’s a little underwhelming for the recipient.

[Acrobat]

OFC people think that their moral proclamations are “objectively true”, Acro.  In the sense that you’re using the term the two words are redundant.

Thing is, that doesn’t get us anywhere as realists.  Even if we uttered some moral proclamation that wasn’t true, our belief in its truth lead to its utterance or conception in the first place.  If we could rustle up agreement we may still be dealing with an example of inter-subjectivity.  

This is error theory.  The idea that we’re trying to get things right™, and it may even be possible to get things tight™, but for whatever reason we got them wrong.

What we wonder, when we wonder about moral truth, is whether or not those things we all consider objectively true ( which aren’t always in agreement) are synthetic or analytic truths.

As the title of the thread indicates, I am defending a non-natural moral order, a non-natural reality we could call The Good. That the reason we see objective goodness and badness, is a result of the light it casts on things. We see such light cast on things such as doing what beneficial to well being, and thats the reason we see it as good. 

This non-natural reality, seems to make better sense of a variety of features of human morality, as to why goodness and badness when it comes to morality, appear to be of a different quality then when we speak of goodness and badness of our tastes and preferences, why we see it as objective, rather than our personal taste, or the taste and preferences of our particular society. It also helps to explain features like dumbfounding, and the sort of delusions, lies, deceptions common to those who defend or justify immoral things such as the holocaust. Why their  psychology is similar to truth deniers, like holocausts deniers, more so than people with difference taste and preferences, core morality, guilt as some violation of some higher principle, etc... 

It also accounts for why objective goodness and badness aren't reducible to natural facts (scientific and historical facts about x). 

The point of the thread, is to contemplate any serious or meaningful objection to such a moral reality. If you're not offering something that is trying to negate this idea, than you're not really serving the purpose of the thread.

[The Grand Nudger]

You’re offering hilariously incompetent arguments for a straightforward moral position. That’s a significant barrier to the idea, and understanding the idea.

Mostly, you’re doing this because you think that it better explains a mess if question begging assertions convenient to your Christian faith. None of the terms you’re using, however, mean what you think they do.

All in all I’d say that’s s pretty strong objection, lol.

When, instead, you could simply say that we know good and bad like we know circles. That’s non natural realism.

[Acrobat]

You’re offering hilariously incompetent arguments for a straightforward moral position. That’s a significant barrier to the idea, and understanding the idea.

Mostly, you’re doing this because you think that it better explains a mess if question begging assertions convenient to your Christian faith. None of the terms you’re using, however, mean what you think they do.

All in all I’d say that’s s pretty strong objection, lol.

When, instead, you could simply say that we know good and bad like we know circles. That’s non natural realism.

The only position I’m defending is my own, based on my experiences and observation. Whatever terms I’ve used I’ve been explained what I mean by them.

I’ve laid my case out pretty simply and plainly, which can’t be said of a lot of people when speaking about morality.

If you have any actual issues or objection to my argument, please indicate which part, and what your objection is.

[The Grand Nudger]

You’re equivocating with the term “objective” in order to make an appeal that doesn’t have the probative force to answer the question at hand.

Additionally, your argument seeks to establish that some position you call “non natural” explains items which exist, so far, as mere assertions.

Finally, it’s not at all clear what is non natural, or ordered, in any of it.

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There are fewer objections to the supernatural order that you’re actually thinking of, btw.

Food for thought.

[Acrobat]

You’re equivocating with the term “objective” in order to make an appeal that doesn’t have the probative force to answer the question at hand.

Additionally, your argument seeks to establish that some position you call “non natural” explains items which exist, so far, as mere assertions.

Finally, it’s not at all clear what is non natural, or ordered, in any of it.

---

There are fewer objections to the supernatural order that you’re actually thinking of, btw.

Food for thought.

I’ve indicated that use of objective, is to indicate that good exists independent of our mind.

And non-natural as indicating that this isn't reducible to any natural properties ( scientific and historic facts) about x. If we dissected the holocaust we’re not going to find a natural property called good or bad about it.

I not only used these terms, but clearly indicated why I used them, and what I mean by them.