In Defense of a Non-Natural Moral Order

[DLJ]

Do you want the long answer or the short answer?

The short version is the definition of morality:

An evolved, human governance / continuity management system.
This system is an evolved extension (in the cognitive domain) of the pre-human immune system, endocrine and limbic system architecture and requires an ethical baseline (requiring memory), emotion-based thresholds, event-detection (e.g. deception detectors; a conscience) and reasoning (hence consciousness). It is enabled / influenced by chemical inhibitors and inducers and social constraints and drivers.

A longer answer would include the interaction of the individual and the environment.  It's the latter that gives the illusion of 'objective'.

If you want a complete answer, it would involve algorithms (how we get from sense data to ethics) and a tentative map of the above mentioned 'ethical baseline', which hints at an explanation for transcendence, holocausts etc.  Lemme know if you're up for that level of detail.

I don't know if Acrobat is interested in hearing the long answer, but I am. I would like clarification because it isn't very clear to me what you're trying to describe. You seem to be describing a basic human brain structure (with the addition of the immune system which I'm curious to know the role it plays). But everything else, cognition, emotion, consciousness, memory, is not exclusive to morality.

I personally would like you to expound on your statement a little more.

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:



This is an expansion of best practice definitions (incorporating 'event' management theory):

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.