Theme: Responsibility

DRAFT: UNIVERSAL, DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE ETHICS : ETHICAL REALISM

(ethics) (this is a very tight logical box and I will make it tighter yet)

PART 1 : UNIVERSAL, DESCRIPTIVE ETHICS

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I. All moral rules in all cultures are possible to translate into prohibitions that attempt to solve the fundamental problem of cooperation: the suppression of free riding; the involuntary transfer, extraction, or destruction of assets, while at the same time facilitating all cooperation that functions as a multiplier of productivity – leading to the division of knowledge and labor, and the constant reduction of costs from that division. We are not superior to cave men. We have just made everything infinitely cheaper through the division of knowledge and labor and the application of a host of technologies.

II. Humans accumulate and defend many things, and they resent loss of them. They do so because they either must (life and kin) or because they have invested time, opportunity and effort in accumulating them. Cooperative Life cannot persist without these prohibitions.

1) Life (time)

2) Kin and Mates

3) Relationships

4) Territory

5) Material Inventory

6) Status

7) Commons

8) Norms, Myths, traditions, institutions.

9) Plans, Beliefs, Recipes.

III. Humans demonstrate vehement reaction to and prohibition of the following categories of involuntary deprivation of their assets:

1) Criminal Prohibitions (Murder, harm, destruction, theft – physical extraction)

2) Ethical Prohibitions (fraud, omission, interference – asymmetry of knowledge)

3) Moral Prohibitions (privatization, socialization, free riding – absence of knowledge)

4) Conspiratorial Prohibitions (rent seeking, corruption, extortion, protection, taxation)

5) Conquest Prohibitions (war, displacement, immigration, religious conversion, cultural competition)

IV. Variations in those moral rules are determined by a compromise between the following problems:

1) the reproductive strategy of the gender, class and group.

2) the structure of production (the economy).

3) the structure of the family unit necessary in any given structure of production.

4) the inheritance pattern once assets can be accumulated.

5) the degree of outbreeding in the polity (the extent of the taboo on inbreeding)

6) the metaphysical value judgements between man and nature that were determined during the formation of cultural norms out of feast celebrations in the ‘great transformation’ era.

7) the genetic and cultural homogeneity or diversity of the local economy (Islands vs borders vs unlanded/diasporic vs gypsy/pastoral).

V. ***All moral sentiments, in all societies, are reactions to the perception of changes in state of those assets as determined by the criminal, ethical and moral prohibitions. In all humans, in all cultures, in all civilizations.***

PART 2: UNIVERSAL, PRESCRIPTIVE ETHICS

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I. Given that moral rules consist of the prohibition of criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial and conquest behavior, what remains is voluntary exchange of assets according to the group’s portfolio of moral and ethical rules.

II. Trust. (undone)

1) (transaction cost and velocity)

2) Low trust societies prohibit only crime, high trust societies prohibit unethical and immoral transfers, and currently no cultures persist in prohibiting conspiratorial behavior since it is a consequence state function, and as yet we have no technology for suppressing state monopoly bureaucracy and corruption while preserving the state’s use in suppressing criminal, unethical and immoral behavior.

III. Humans rely upon these necessary reductions in transaction costs to continue to expand productivity.

1) Humans Signal their moral commitment with manners, language, and consumption (dress, possessions, etc).

2) Humans demonstrate preference for association with those who use the same signals because those signals communicate lower transaction costs.

3) Status Signals are cheaper with higher return in-group than out-group except at the extreme margins.

(… more on transaction costs…)

4) Urbanization appears to both decrease opportunity costs, and increase productivity by 15-20% (and all the bad things too) with every doubling of the population. People in urban areas move, as under the european monarchies, into neighborhoods ‘with their own’. This appears to ostracize the middle class to the suburbs.

IV. Moral rules reflect necessary group evolutionary strategies.

1) the group cannot survive local competition (not to mention, guns germs and steel) without a successful evolutionary strategy.

2) Groups demonstrate that they are materially different in their abilities, in the distribution of abilities, particularly verbal and spatial intelligence.

3) Groups demonstrate that they are materially different in the distribution of desirability for mating (symmetry, proportion and thickness of skin.)

4) Groups demonstrate significant differences in the distribution of impulsivity and ‘malleability’. (Appears to be testosterone)

5) Aggressiveness (Appears to be more complex than just testosterone).

6) The distribution of verbal intelligence appears to heavily determine three factors:

a) Morality since it rapidly declines under 95IQ.

b) Trust and therefore economic performance for the same reason.

c) Sufficient distribution over ~105IQ to concentrate productive capital a Pareto distribution (80/20) in the hands of those who can make use of property for group benefit.

V. It is impossible to rationally adjudicate conflicts across different moral codes. (Which is why America is ‘coming apart’.) But it is ALSO necessary for groups to follow different in-group evolutionary strategies. Therefore it is not possible to morally construct large scale societies that consist of high trust economies. (As we see the Nordic states are small homogenous absolute nuclear family states that are highly outbred). It would have been possible in American had we not destroyed the Absolute Nuclear Family as a normative requirement for citizenship, political participation, and economic survival. But since we have the only solution is fragmentation or tyranny.

However, if it is not possible to adjudicate moral rules across heterogeneous polities, without committing genocide, it is possible to adjudicate commercial exchanges between heterogeneous polities with different moral codes, since commerce between disconnected polities is constrained only by violence, theft and fraud, as well as prohibitions on conquest. While local polities and local interactions are ADDITIONALLY constrained by manners, ethics, morals, and prohibitions on corruption and conquest. And those local polities must be otherwise they would be rendered economically immobile by high transaction costs (Somalia).

VI. Meritocratic societies (that suppress free riding) that practice assortative mating and the nuclear family appear to produce sufficiently eugenic reproduction that it is possible to keep ahead of malthusian constraints and genetic regression toward the mean. While equalitarian societies (with pervasive free riding) whether they practice assortative mating in extended families or not, and particularly if they practice inbreeding, cannot appear to defeat Malthus nor the pressure of regression towards the mean.

VII. THEREFORE

Assuming that dysgenic reproduction is undesirable (and I admit that this is a preference, but certainly a scientifically and evolutionarily arguable one), the purpose of political institutions is:

1) To facilitate cooperation between groups for on means, but not ends, where the market cannot satisfy means or ends, because competition or privatization of commons would result in extraction from the commons or free riding on the commons.

2) To facilitate redistribution for consumption but not for reproduction.

3) To encourage a multitude of small populations with heterogeneous moral codes suitable to their reproductive and evolutionary strategies – each of whom can negotiate trade, and thereby compensate for their differences in ability and preference.

4) To construct a single universal commercial code (which the anglo civilization has been doing by force of arms for 500 years) that enforces prohibitions on violence theft and fraud regardless of in-group preferences.

5) To replace the natural corruption of political representation, monopoly bureaucracy, and arbitrary legislation, with rule of law, contract, insurer of last resort, and private provision of public goods via competing insurance providers.

6) To facilitate relative equality WITHIN groups with the same evolutionary strategy (if they so desire it) but not ACROSS groups with different evolutionary strategies.

AND IT FOLLOWS

When you interfere with manners, ethics, morals, family structure, and production, if you are not INCREASING the suppression of free riding, you are damaging someone’s reproductive strategy and status.

PART III : ETHICAL RULES

PART IV : LANGUAGE (undone)

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( analogy to experience, operational statements, loading, framing)

( problem of complexity and necessity of compression)

( the difference between the necessary honesty of law and exchange and the utility of literary loading and framing)