In Defense of a Non-Natural Moral Order

[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?
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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?
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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.

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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).
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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.

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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.