Ethics and Science

Science and Ethics. Put those two words together and lots of issues pop up. (I write this as part of my ongoing inquiry into the Ethics of Integrity which I have outlined elsewhere.)

1. Experimentation and its unintended consequences: like nuclear weapons and Frankensteins.
2. Bad means to good ends: using humans and their parts (embryos, cells) or animals (especially higher conscious ones) for experimentation.
3. Irreligiousness: proposing solutions that conflict with religious beliefs, Creator God, divine revelation, supernatural.
4. Science as faith; Scientism, alternative to religion, without transcendence.

The first two are important issues and we do need to attempt to find and/or accept universal standards in dealing with them. And I hope we do this in the course of our inquiry for a human nature foundation for ethics.

The second two I will deal with in a separate section on Ethics and Religion.

Here are two more that I want to deal with in this section:

1. Scientific Method as insight into the human way of knowing and adapting in and to our environment: i.e. epistemology as part of the universal Model for Ethics.
2. Biology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and information theory as providing evidence to a model of human nature/existence and so a model of a universal ethics.

With respect to number one, I will use Bernard Lonergan's Insight, Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity among others. Human knowing of reality involves observation, imagination, insight, hypothesis, and verification. The medium (image, idea, concept) does not separate us from the "really real." It is our way to it. Also we will discover what makes a good model--including a model for ethics.

With respect to number two, I will use Steven Pinker's Stuff of Thought, Doug Hoffstadter's I am a Strange Loop, Terrence Deacon's, The Symbolic Species, and Paul Bloom's Descartes' Baby among others to show the scientific evidence for our Ethical Model that includes interiority and exteriority, past and future, individuality and communality, real and ideal, existence and transcendence in dialectical relationship.  (As I presented earlier.)

This will then move us to the next section on Ethics and Religion.

Another Philosophical Interlude

My philosophical interlude a couple of days ago was stimulated by Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? He and we wrestled with something from nothing. One of the answers we considered was: you can't have something without nothing--or, as it turns out, nothing without something.

How do we know this? By examining our human existence (Dasein--where Sein or Being appears). Sartre called existence néant, nothing. Things in the world become only through nothing; i.e. in the words of evolutionary psychology, symbolic activity aware of itself cuts the world into things through words, gestures, images and other symbols. But human existence itself is not a thing because it is the objectifying act that denies the objectifying of itself. The thing or being is what has been symbolized, but not the symbolizing act of consciousness--which is not a thing; it is no-thing.

Lonergan makes a distinction that I think is helpful between notion and concept. A concept is an objectification of a thing, the word spoken (parole parlée), the symbol that fashions a reality. A notion is the word-in-the-speaking (parole parlante); it is the symbolic activity transparent to itself in all its intentionality, i.e. as it tends to reality through the use of symbols, words, icons. So you can have a notion of existence, consciousness, spirit, god, but not a concept of them. The concept points to something. The notion points to nothing. The concept if verified explains something. The notion if verified explains nothing.

Ha! Take that in your pipe and smoke it. I promise you a high experience or, better, the experience of a high.

Carry on! Beliefs are in the dimension of concepts. Faith (hope and love, too) is in the dimension of notions. And so with faith, we believe in nothing. Without faith or with bad faith, we believe in things. Let your beliefs go, and you will have faith; you will be more fully conscious; you will be in touch with the nothingness of existence by which you transcend all beliefs and stretch to infinity.

Now I know this sounds pretty weird. Certainly paradoxical in the root meaning of the word: Para=beyond; dox=belief. A Zen koan? Words of mystics? Yes.

I am nothing. I believe in nothing.
We are nothing. I believe in nothing.
God is nothing. I believe in nothing.
The world and filled with somethings. I believe in some things.
All my beliefs are transitory. I need to transcend them in faith.
In faith, I believe in nothing, not even something.

Well, meditate it. I assure you it makes sense. Or is it nonsense?

_______________________________

Another answer to the mystery of being is the Hindu (and other eastern thought) answer that reality is an illusion. We are all characters in the dream of Vishnu. The more modern scientific parallel to this is that the universe, including us, is a hologram formed by bits of information. The Beatles sang that "we all live on a yellow submarine." Well, maybe "we all play in a rainbow holodeck." Nothing really exists.

So go play and have fun!

No-Growth and True Conservatism

I just read Al Fritsch's reflections on "no growth" and "true conservatism." (Al is the founder of the Kentucky non-profit Earth Healing whose website I commend to you earthhealing.info) I certainly agree with his comments which prompted my own following reflection.

In the San Joaquin Valley of California which is threatened by the Bay Area, LA area, and Silicon Valley to become the bedroom community for the businesses of those areas, the issue we always said is not "growth or no-growth."  It's how and towards what we grow. It's how do we preserve farmlands, the great national parks, the water, the air, the earth as we grow.  

And it was recognizing that growth should not be measured by one capital (financial), but by much higher capitals--social, political, educational, and spiritual capitals. When I worked in that conservative heartland, I always told people that I am definitely a capitalist. But I don't think that American capitalism takes the most important capitals into account. 

We need to consume in order to live and that takes money; but it is so sad to see people measuring their success and that of their region and nation by the amount of GDP and accumulated money. 

That's where the Jesus-mind comes in. (Remember, while I don't consider myself a Christian, I do consider myself a companion of Jesus.) The Jesus mind is I think "wired" into our nature by Evolution or God or Nature or Humanity, a higher power more than the individual alone can produce. That mind is the foundation of the revolution in culture, religion, economy, politics that we seek--the revolution that will release us from our homemade destructive economy and the money-mind or religion that sanctifies it. Jesus and the other great-souled persons we have encountered in our history were/are only recalling us to our fundamental consciousness--or, if you want, "Jesus-mind" or "god-given spirit."

That is "true conservatism" to me. It is the recall through contemplation in action to our fundamental consciousness, our existence, our soul, which has been given to us at birth with our em-brained body and our first interaction with parents and others and which we have been charged to grow through "soul-making." 

This is why Jesus and the great-souled persons, who return us to our consciousness and the fundamental structure of our existence, are in their very persons (their way of being/acting in the world) and not necessarily by their words or doctrines or by the institutions that take their name, the Word and Way to truth, full consciousness, infinite love, god or whatever analogy you like to use.

But we have observed earlier that mind or consciousness or existence is itself a tension among various end-points or ideals and can only be expressed in analogy (images, metaphors, parables, stories) which is why I try to reject all absolutes in beliefs, formulas, institutions, or anything else we humans come up with (and why all the great minded souls discouraged idolatry) 

Of course my own habits and those of my society get in the way and I have to keep coming back. Our idolatry today is the American money economy. And we all get caught in it. I need to be reminded often, recalled back to basics, stimulated to practice fundamentals. 

Conscience is nothing more than the awareness of the tensions of my existence and to what it calls me in rebelling against the American and now global idolatry. The old spiritual practice of "examination of conscience" is nothing more than comparing my/our actions with the task of soul-making, contemplation, taking the path of becoming, and creating the place where truth, infinite love, the fullness of consciousness, or God can appear.

It's where true conservatism and growth come together.

Have we failed the human experiment?

Friends: 3 articles came to me today.

Here is one that requires me to ask if we have already failed the experiment of humanity: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/science/earth/carbon-dioxide-level-passes-long-feared-milestone.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130511&_r=0  

Here is a short video that may show a way out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEGpUBRIYk&feature=player_embedded

Here is a beginning spirituality for a way towards:http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-would-nature-do/inside-the-down-to-earth-economy/

In two groups in which I participated last week, we discussed that All Souls Church, we, need to stand for something bold. Yes, we need to continue our commitments to housing, environment, youth, the aging, excluded minorities, health care, New Orleans, Haiti, jobs, immigration reform, accountable institutions. But we also discussed that, in doing what we do no matter how small, we have to get behind all these issues with an analysis and strategy that is radical. I think that analysis and strategy has to do with the present money accumulating economy that is starkly dividing rich and poor and consuming our earth and our humanity and with the religious mind that sanctifies that economy. We need to advance a counter culture and new politics that will change the present economy that consumes us. 

For example, at this time some of us are committed to increasing and maintaining diversity in Columbia Heights and other local communities through affordable housing. But to do that I think it is important to understand the patterns of urbanization in DC which makes specific actions in our communities necessary; and how those urban patterns are part of the wasteful, consumptive, money economy. And we need to understand the underlying spirituality or mind or religion that sanctifies that economy and those patterns. I think we need to go there in any ministry we choose. We need to confront that mind and economy with a new spirituality and experiments in new economy. We can't just be about doing good. We have to stir the pot and make change.

I think these articles are getting to that but we need to grapple in our covenant groups, our committees, and our own reflections with what that means in practice. What do you think?

A Philosophical Interlude

In between my work with the All Souls Housing group and my writing on ethics and society, I received a notice from the library that a book I had reserved was ready for pick up. I couldn't remember what book I had requested. When I went to the library I found it was "Why does the World Exist?" by Jim Holt. I couldn't remember the review that prompted me to get it so I started reading it among the five other books I have going.

This one was fun; and, dropping everything else, I finished it in record time for me. It was definitely written for me, a former Jesuit, a former philosophy major, the writer of a thesis on French Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was in dialogue with existentialiste exemplaire Jean Paul Sartre, a frustrated quester of being who has never given up. As the jacket said, the book is an existentialist detective novel with lots of wit.

So after much examination of witnesses, some of the best physics scientists and theoretical philosophers of our time, and after the assemblage of clues gathered in the evidence provided by these witnesses, Detective Holt comes up with the following suspects in his investigation into why the world exists or, in the words of the great philosophers, "why is there something rather than nothing?"

So here are the suspects to solve the mystery of being over nothing:

1) Quantum fluctuations.  0 = -1+1 > BANG (See Lawrence Krauss A Universe from Nothing)
2) Eternal Universe/Multiverse. There always was something. (String theory)
3) It from Bit. There is not something: world is illusion, dream, hologram. (Information theory)
4) Nothing requires Something. No nothing without something.
5) God.  Eternal Being--self-caused and contained. Bonhoeffer and Coulsen's "Gap filler."
6) Invalid Question: unanswerable (Lonergan's inverse insight)
7) Just is: get over and on with it.

And so in the spirit of the last response, let's just accept that things are and get on with it.

If the first philosophic question is "why is there something rather than nothing," the second is "what kind of a being asks such a question?" That is: "What does it mean to be human?" This leads to: "Who am I and who are you?" Which leads to "Who are We?" And then to "Where are we going?"

Here then are levels of rational inquiry in philosophy and in science:

1. Question of Being:    Ontology, Cosmology--Physics, chemistry
2. Question of Human:  Philosophy of Man--Anthropology, Biology
3. Question of Mind:      Epistemology--Psychology, Neuroscience
4. Question of Social:     Epistemology--Social Science
5. Question of Becoming: Ethics, Politics--History, Political Science

Okay, its the second question that is the pivot for the others. Heidegger puts it that we need to question Dasein (human existence) where Sein (Being) is present (Da).  Who am I who am asking the question of Being? Or what is human?

Answer:

Human is a being that can ask a question; something that can talk, use images, i.e. imagine or make and combine images, therefore a being which finds and explores the world through symbols. Dasein, human existence, is symbolic activity.

Human is a being that experiences a "self" in, but different from the external world; therefore has a sense of interiority, self-awareness, consciousness.

Human is a being that is aware of other interiorities, and being joined with them in approaching the world; therefore we are beings with a sense of others not as objects in the world, but as joined selves engaging the world.

Human is a being that is aware of coming out of the past and going towards a future; therefore aware of itself as a project between nothingness and nothingness thus making Being present--Dasein.

And that is the project of ethics and politics with which I am occupied in these blog reflections.

Metaphors for Morality

You may have wondered earlier when I said we think in metaphors or analogies (words I am using synonymously). In my early student years I learned that there were two main theories of cognition and speech: univocal and analogical. Univocal presumes fixed concepts in some Heaven of Ideas or the Mind of God to which the human mind corresponds through some sort of illumination from within (idealists) or without (realists). It's called the "look theory" of knowledge. Plato, Augustine and their realistic or idealistic followers took this way.

Analogical thinking, the second theory, doesn't have fixed ideas out there somewhere, but gathers observations into categories or collective, higher images which become abstractions standing for many images, and then those abstractions link to others through higher abstractions and so on towards a ever wider complex of abstractions that allow us to talk in a sort of code with lots of shortcuts--like "tree," "animal," "planet,""number," "angel," and so on. Aristotle, his followers in the high Islamic period, and then Aquinas and the neo-scholastic tradition pushed the analogical way of knowing. Truth in this theory is not the correspondence of the idea in the human mind with some Platonic or divine idea, but with the reality on the ground, that is, through testing by observational evidence. And so the scientific revolution was a vindication of the analogical over the univocal.

In the mid 20th century, philosophy played a "new key," in the words of Suzanne Langer. And that new key was "symbol" no longer as the sign of something else more real out there, but as the very embodiment of reality. Symbolic behavior is what defines human cognition whether in science, art, architecture, religion, ordinary language, politics, philosophy and all other avenues by which humans deal in and with the world and each other. Symbolic interaction theory is but a further development of the theory of analogical thinking.

Maybe you can find more; but I find five main metaphors that have been used and still are when describing our moral behavior and devising an ethical theory.  1) Foundation, 2) Balance, 3) Tool, 4) Contract, 5) Icon.

Foundation with connecting images "ground," "spring," "principle," envisages a base on which the structure of human behavior is built. It is the metaphor for natural law and divine law ethics, an ethics that is universal and not subject to change or relative to changing conditions. It is sometimes called "deontological" or "virtue" ethics and certainly represents the main ethical tradition with its search for and enumeration of principles grounded in reality or springing from tradition that can guide all human behavior.

Balance was a favorite of the ancient Greeks with their consideration of beauty as proportionality and harmony. But it can also be found in the Yin and Yang of Eastern thinking, the code of Solomon, and carried down in the dialectical tradition from Socrates to Hegel and Marx. "Nothing to excess"; "Find the center between the extremes" are canons of this ethical theory portrayed by the blind goddess of justice and her scales weighing the right from the wrong.

Tool or "instrument" or "utility" is the image of practical reason. What is the usefulness of a behavior? How will it lead to greater happiness for the most people (often interpreted as increasing pleasure and avoiding pain). This is the criteria of an ethic, perhaps going back to the notion of happiness in ancient times, including the pleasure principle of hedonism, but forged above all in the mercantile age when money becomes the gauge of utility and followed up in the industrial age with its rational economy of utility.

Contract (or in Biblical times "covenant") is the foundation for the liberated society--free from Pharoah, free from the King free from the Oligarch. This ethic takes note of humanity as not just natural or rational, but as social in its essence, only able to live and act in the world in relationship with others all of whom are participants in the same venture. There is a implied or formal agreement or constitution that binds us all together and governs our behavior. Besides ancient Athens and Israel, this notion is carried into the Liberalism of Locke and the Progressivism of Rawls.

Icon or "image" or "ideal" can be the metaphor for a Univocal Mind seeking the "absolute" or "real" idea that is not obscured by matter or other people with limited viewpoints. But for the Analogical Mind  it is the notion of metaphor, analogy, symbol itself. In the search for an ethical theory that is universal as foundational thought, proportional as balanced thought, useful as utilitarian thought, and communal as contract thought, we can unite all these metaphors, analogies, symbols in the theory of metaphorical, analogical, symbolic behavior itself.

And what I mean by this, I will explain later.

The Progressive Republic and the Ethics of Integrity

To further discuss my proposal for a Progressive Republic Party (PRP), as one vehicle to achieve my vision for a Progressive Republic (PR) (see last blog) built on a combination of libertarian, social democratic, and conservative republican principles, each in their own realm of culture, economy, and politics, I inquire what is the ethical foundation of the PR and the strategies to achieve it.

I am sure you are surprised that I advance my theory of the Ethics of Integrity (EI), outlined earlier in this blog series, as the ethical foundation of the PR and the PRP. How so?

You remember I hope that EI arises from the nature and existence of humanity and especially its special and peculiar capacity to deal with (adapt, know, act in) its environment through ever-complexifying symbolic forms, e.g. metaphors, analogies, images. It is in this fundamental capacity of our nature/existence that we analyze at least four characteristic and universal dimensions, which I shall call the axes of human existence.  Like a diamond, each axis cuts across the others to form the whole. Like a wagon wheel, each axis pushes out to the outer rim; but all are held together at the center hub.

Axis 1: inner and outer space; interiority and exteriority.  This is the axis by which the more we push out to matter in the world through our symbolic forms of language, science, art, and others, the more we become present to our own awareness, consciousness, our interior life.  (I gave many examples of this and the other axes, as well as the neuroscience explanations for them, in earlier posts.)

Axis 2: past and future time; before and after. This is the axis by which, in symbolic action in our world, we inherit or remember the genes and memes that make us what we are now along with the recognition that we not only are who we are, but also will be all we can be by accepting and realizing our past. It is also the axis that propels us into the future, to surpass the memes (ideas, symbolic forms) and even perhaps the genes that we have inherited in order to become a new humanity in a new world.

Axis 3: self and other society; individuality and communality. This is the axis by which, through communication of language, mathematics, dance and other symbolic systems, we are aware of our organism projecting in space and time as a singular and unique body and consciousness. But at the same time, through symbolic behavior, we are able to interiorize other unique patterns of human existence.  We grasp that our creative, unique individuality is achieved only in interaction with other unique conscious bodies in an ever widening circle of relationships. Our "I" is inherently connected to the "you" and the "we."

Axis 4: real and ideal; the empirical and the visionary. This axis may be a sort of summary of the other three. It is the axis of our existence through which we experience in all our thought and action the the tension of existence between the real and the ideal, the world as it is and the world as it should be, we as we are and we as we could be. This is the axis of transcendence in which the dynamic character of human nature and existence is realized in all its dimensions or axes, along with its center, its point of unity or integrity.

And so, let me now talk about the relation of the three principles of libertarian society or culture, social democratic economy, and conservative republican politics and how these intersect to achieve Justice in the Progressive Republic.

The libertarian (or just "liberal" some say) Progressive Republic, with its primary value of liberty, appeals to the sense of inner space and creative individuality, often placing its ideal in an imagined past where there were no restraints or regulations (e.g. Rousseau). It pushes back on the encroachment of a mass society and its government or Leviathan. It carves out a space of privacy in which the public cannot enter.

The social democratic Progressive Republic, with its primary value of equity, appeals to the sense of other and communality, focuses on the external structures imposed on the world and society that retard the progress of all persons, often placing its ideal in the future where there will be no class or in the Pauline vision of "neither Jew nor Gentile, neither master nor slave, neither male nor female." It pushes back on rule by plutocrats and a dividing society between rich and poor.

The conservative republican Progressive Republic, with its primary value of power (e.g. capacity to act, local self-determination, vibrant communities) appeals to the sense of local community and outer space, a public as a free association not to be confused with government and its agencies, though protected by and holding accountable government, often appealing to the foundations of publics in the past. It pushes back on mass democracy or populism, rule by poll of unchallenged opinions.

Justice for the PR and the PRP is the "right ordering" of these three principles and the balance-in-tension of all the polarities and axes of human existence.  I suggest that the right order is libertarian principle for culture, social democratic for economy/ecology, and conservative republican for politics while at the same time all are subject to the no-harm mandate and holding tension among themselves--each limiting the others.

I think that the greatest impediment to the USA in becoming a just Progressive Republic is the main two national parties that are swayed by big money and by driving policies that enrich the rich and leave the poor behind. This also leads to a sense of powerlessness at the local level among people who cannot counter wealthy organizations and plutocrats who command the attention of politicians and mass media. It also promotes thoughtlessness in which so-called liberals and conservatives accept an ideology, often against their own self-interest, because they do not have the means or occasion to challenge and refine opinions based on knowledge not only of facts (which are often ideologically interpreted), but also of dominating ideas.

The remedy and the restoration of justice is multi-leveled and multi-centered with many avenues and vehicles of reform or transformation. The PRP is merely a figment in my own mind game. I do believe that real transformation (and maybe a kind of PRP itself) must come through self-legitimating local publics which act by and for the libertarian, social democratic, and conservative republican principles. Integrity is the uniting and homeostasis of these three principles with their values of liberty, equity, and power in our persons, our institutions, our communities, and our nations. Integrity is the face of justice.



PS--Am I just reaffirming my lifelong vocation of promoting community organizing? As I did when I worked for churches, for non-profit neighborhood groups, for social and urban planning organizations, for schools and universities, and for government. Yes, I am. But I hasten to say that my understanding of that vocation has changed over time with my experiences and is still developing now.

I must add that when Sarah Palin attacked community organizing and Newt Gingrich attacked Saul Alinsky as a "liberal," it demonstrated their lack of knowledge of their subjects. I realized then that Gingrich, whether or not you consider him a good politician, is no historian. Community organizing, especially as inspired by Alinsky, is based on the conservative republican principle and is focused on preservation of and agitation for local engaged communities, i.e. publics that bring the powerless into positions of influence in public life and action. Nothing is more conservative than that. And nothing more republican.