Understanding morality and ethics
E-book .pdf available here, blog here
This web site is the home of the e-book, “Understanding morality and ethics”.
If you would like to read the e-book all the way through, which will take months,
it is recommended to first read “The Social Instinct - how cooperation shaped the
world” by Nichola Raihani. This readable and entertaining book is easily finished
in two weeks, and gives the novice a feel for the general cooperative landscape.
I disagree with Dr Raihani on only two points: 1) cooperation is not only for the
purpose of competing against others, but is more usually for the purpose of thriving
and surviving together; 2) there is no evidence of warfare before the rise of city
states around 12,000 years ago, although there is possible evidence of long range
trade and personal care throughout prehistory (see: Penny Spikins, 2015).
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This is an attempt to describe, in as complete a fashion as possible, the evolutionary
basics of the everyday moral and ethical landscape. I describe morality by its parts,
from which we can derive the following structure of evolutionary ethics including
some meta-ethics. We may continue to derive further moral philosophy from this highly
fruitful and empirically consistent paradigm.
I introduce the idea of the “Healing Principle”: the near-universal, biological pressure
to thrive, survive and reproduce. This pressure – instrumental normativity – unifies
morality and makes it intelligible in an elegant and parsimonious way, as it supplies
the normative pressure for cooperative, fair, competitive, kin-selected/inclusive,
and patriarchal/sexual normativities. Emotionally it translates into a pressure
to seek pleasure. In fact, it is normative in all the three domains of psychological,
biological, and social/moral well being.
Normativity is should-ness or the pressure to achieve goals. Morality, and the need
for moral values, principles, and virtues, are generated when we achieve our instrumental
goals (thriving, surviving and/or reproducing) jointly or collectively. Goodness
is defined as maximising the well being of all concerned individuals including the
self, by putting the right conditions in place; or maximising the well being of the
group in general; or maximising the achievement of sacred values.
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I have decomposed morality and ethics into constituent elements. The chapter headings
on each page allow the reader to associate elements with their subject areas.
