Q&A: ARE DOOLITTLE’S ETHICS OBJECTIVE? AND ARE THEY NORMATIVE OR DESCRIPTIVE? (f

Q&A: ARE DOOLITTLE’S ETHICS OBJECTIVE? AND ARE THEY NORMATIVE OR DESCRIPTIVE?

(from reddit)

PERSON’S REPLY

—‘Doolittle’s ethics are descriptive’— AND —‘his morality is objective’—

CURT’S RESPONSE

Understanding this requires understanding three concepts:

1) The necessity of preserving the disproportionate rewards of cooperation, by preserving the incentive to cooperate, by suppression of the imposition of costs, that would eliminate the incentive to cooperate – is purely objective. Humans instinctually evolved to disproportionately retaliate against ‘cheaters’ for this reason – those proto-humans who didn’t are gone, and those who did survived.

2) Local rents (imposed costs), normative exchanges (norms), evolve in every society (myths, rituals, norms). Some of which are neutral (attending rituals), some of which are objectively moral (caring for orphans of relations) and some of which are objectively immoral (slavery,and its many lighter variants.)

3) However, whenever there is a conflict between individuals or groups with different norms (contracts moral and immoral), all such conflicts are objectively decidable between them. In other words, groups may construct whatever internal contracts that they choose to, but between groups those contracts do not apply – only objective morality does: the non-imposition of costs stated as the limit of transfers to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of unproductive, uninformed, unwarranted transfer by externality.

So this definition of morality is **descriptive** in that it is universally demonstrated by humans as retaliation against thieves, and as groups as disproportionate retaliation against ‘cheaters’; correspondent with demands of evolutionary biology; correspondent with logical necessity, provides universal decidability in matters of retaliation; is a sufficient basis for universal law of conflict resolution (and loosely reflects the history of the western common law); and therefore is a sufficient basis for eliminating demand for an authority to render discretionary judgments in the absence of such decidability.

Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine (L’viv Ukraine)