Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the purpose of this web site?
- Why you? What are your qualifications?
- Isn't it already clear that [consequential | deontological | virtue] ethics points us in the right direction?
- Aren't you just starting with your assumptions about how morality should work, then building a support structure around them?
To promote more effective thinking and discussion on the subject of deciding the direction of "what's right" within a world of increasing instrumentality and increasing uncertainty. Personally, the last several years I've been poking at these ideas and attempting to stimulate useful discussion and it became clear that I was just spinning my wheels without a repository of related matter and a scaffold for this developing structure of thought.
I'd like to see significant refinement and acceptance of the core concept, such that we can direct our attention to questions and challenges of implementation.
I searched and didn't find anyone else doing this. I found a long line of academic work, most of which appears mainly about career-extension, with lots of analysis and very little synthesis. I found a few relatively narrow branches which seem intended to support particular points of view based on libertarian, economic, religious and traditional feel-good beliefs, each offering to overcome uncertainty. And of the growing body of work supporting an evolutionary perspective on ethics, I found none that dealt directly with an evolving self of moral agencyi.
I don't profess to having any pertinent academic credentials or qualifications. Let this work stand, and inspire others, on its own merits.
Each of these suffers from acknowledged problems of inconsistency and/or infinite regress when extended. This indicates that they are not so much wrong as lacking in context. They fail due to reductionist approaches to "maximizing expected utility" when their application is deficient in the context necessary for effective specification of their goals. They fail also in their transparent assumption of a system of values somehow independent (static or outside) of the environment of interaction.
[TBD: Can we make this more concrete?]
No,...