Ethical Subjectivism: Part 4

The Social Conscience

In previous articles, I claimed moral judgement inheres in the individual. The various parts of morality - judgement, motive, intention, decision and act - are traditionally considered in different and separate ways with respect to what is 'good' or 'right' as determined and enacted by an individual. I haven't prescribed much about what is good or right because I believe each individual construes morality arbitrarily. On the desert island, anything goes.

Most ethical considerations arise in social relations; i.e., whatever the process by which individual moral judgements are made or practiced, they are only observable in public. Put another way, there is a fundamental difference between private and public morality, variously represented in relations of the first and higher orders. Ethical relations between individuals always supposes there are at least two autonomous individuals - moral agents - who influence each other. Moral agents pay attention to each other and thereby receive feedback about themselves; i.e., relations in public are recursive because they are reflexive. The behavior of moral agents evolves whenever it is modified by social feedback; i.e., the resultant behavior is a result of trials and error correction.

There is a small point I wish to overlook at this time: relations between moral agents and amoral creatures. These relations are essentially the ethics of dealing with the environment or, for some, animal rights. Individuals and society may adopt ethical principles and moral maxims concerning other creatures and the environment generally, but I believe they are always derivative from the arrangements moral agents make among themselves. The reason for this dependency is simply that the environment and unintelligent creatures do not participate in making judgements: they are just there. The extent of their participation is limited to the advocacy moral agents provide for them. This limitation does not, in itself, force any particular conclusion about dealing with the natural world. In past eras, most men believed the environment was theirs to conquer and dispose as they would, without regard for the well-being of the natural world. There was no concept of "environmental well-being" until recently, perhaps because H. sapiens had not yet reached a point of control over the environment that threatened destabilization or extinction. In our time, it has become obvious to Earth's peoples that environmental abuse is suicidal, and that the well-being of H. sapiens is intimately connected to the well-being of our fellow creatures. So, even though the natural world cannot speak for itself, moral agents can observe the effects of their actions on it, and from those effects draw conclusions about what intelligent, ethical creatures ought to do. The ultimate motives for such a morality are simply self-preservation and projection of the will to live onto other creatures and our Earth, considered as Gaia.
 

I have harped on the Principle of Equality, because it is the essential ethical principle that takes us from individuals to society. This principle is ethical because it is not discovered in nature, nor is it obvious from observation that all humans are equal. In fact, the overt evidence is quite the contrary: each individual is not only genetically unique, but is equipped with a distinct set of abilities and inclinations, modified during a lifetime of learning. Therefore, to declare that all moral agents are equal is to make an astounding claim about qualifying intelligent creatures. This claim has been at the center of controversy since the beginning of recorded History. The ancients generally rejected it, believing, as did Plato, that there were gradations of people. The same rejection is implicit in tribal and religious values, which define "person" as a member of the group and all others as unworthy, infidels, soulless or lacking a persona. To accept the Principle of Equality, as I do, is to refuse the division of moral agents into in-groups and out-groups based on certain characters. To avoid that invidious discrimination, I invoke the principle of self-declaration: moral agents are those who declare themselves so. It is important that, in declaring oneself a moral agent, the declarer implicitly recognizes itself as a member of some society or is simply making an utterance. That is, either self-declaration is just a noise, a scream in the wilderness, or it is assumed to fall on ears that hear. In the latter case, self-declaration is immediately an act which creates a social world. Whether and to what extent that world is a figment of one's imagination does not matter, for each moral agent must rely on its individual experience in its relations with others. A priori, each moral agent cannot assume others are any different from oneself, although that does not preclude judging others differently later on. That is, initially, moral agents must see others as replicas of themselves, for they have no other basis of comparison. The Principle of Equality only requires us to assume the minimum about others: that they are sufficiently intelligent and autonomous, like ourselves,  to make moral judgements and act in non-mechanical ways. (This makes moral agents dangerous, because they are not explained by cause and effect; they might do anything.)
 

Many philosophers, conservative, liberal and otherwise, have proposed the essential equality of all humans, at least with respect to moral capability, if not capacity. That is, people are considered to have the mechanism of making moral judgements, but may differ in their ability to formulate or carry them out. People differ in their knowledge and reasoning ability, so might be expected to come to differing conclusions about a test case presented sight unseen. On the other hand, the traditional assumption is that people will arrive at the same or very similar conclusions when they are presented with the same facts, and taught the relevant theories. The implication of such an assumption is that the "moral faculty," the mechanism by which moral judgements are made, is the same in everyone. This assumption underlies the system of trial by a jury of peers. I mark that as an assumption, because I doubt the evidence supports the claim.
 

In fact, people have different worldviews in which the facts and theories of a case are interpreted. Thus, in one culture marriage for love is considered ideal, whereas in others it is considered undesirable. People strongly disagree whether certain crimes and criminals warrant the death penalty. There is strong disagreement about what duties, if any, are owed the State and others. These and many other instances show, I think, that moral judgement is influenced by a myriad of background factors which are assembled into one's worldview. Members of the same culture have very similar worldviews, because they have almost always been acculturated. This is why trial juries very often come to agreement, especially in simple matters (did he or didn't he run that red light?). Still, each individual develops variations on general cultural themes, which shows up in groups more broadly representative of the population. For example, Christians and Muslims disagree strongly about what the law should be and how it should be implemented. This is exactly what I would expect to be the case, based on ethical subjectivism. Those who advocate some sort of ethical realism or universalism are left with the difficult problem of explaining away such disagreements.

It is often objected to these particularist views that they justify anything. Those outraged by the Gulag or the Holocaust complain there is no basis in ethical subjectivism for condemning such acts. The rebuttal is simple enough, for it is true that we cannot condemn monsters, taken separately. The moral agent, by itself on a desert island, is free to believe or do whatever it wants, including acting out NAZI or Islamist fantasies about Jews. But, on that desert island, there is just one moral agent, just one person, so there are no Gulags or Holocausts. In other words, there are different ethical principles and moral maxims for moral agents taken separately and for moral agents taken as groups. Nothing in the subjectivist philosophy prevents this distinction. All that subjectivism proposes is that the seat of moral judgement lies in each individual. Nothing prevents individual judgements from being combined in social settings to produce what we call morality. Nothing prevents the generalization of morality into ethical principles they apply to everyone.
 

It is a more serious objection, that societies might adopt NAZI policies, but there would be no ethical basis for criticism. In this I have to agree with the critics of ethical subjectivism. Nevertheless, I reject the idea that cultural relativism is a fatal objection to ethical subjectivism. To see that this is so, we must consider some examples and thought experiments.

In fact, human cultures vary dramatically in their ethical precepts, both over time and at any time. NAZI genocide seems grossly evil to most modern Western observers, but the same sort of horror was common in the ancient world; e.g., the Roman "final solution" to Carthage. The ancient Persian King Cyrus was considered a good ruler, even a liberator, because he did not destroy the cities he conquered. (He co-opted local power structures.). In the German wars following the Reformation, whole nations were destroyed before the 1648 peace of Westphalia. It was, and still is, a common belief that victors have the right to kill, rape and enslave the defeated, who were, after all, proven inferior by their loss. Anyway, the victors write History, so who would know the difference? The Japanese Rape of Nanking was motivated by a philosophy of Japanese superiority to their long-time antagonists, the Chinese. In those sentiments and violent acts, the Japanese were no different from the White occupiers of Northern California, who were paid bounties for Indian scalps until early in the Twentieth Century. It was not illegal to kill an Indian because those murders  were not prosecuted. (cf. Ishi, Last of His Kind.) A basic tenet of tribalism - provincial culture - is that  the initiated are people, whereas others are not. There is no more moral opprobrium attached to killing an infidel than butchering a cow. In strict Islamic traditions, women have no souls, so may be treated a cows.

We may suppose that there are societies, even civilizations, based on a different set of ethical principles than we take for granted in the First World. Suppose there is a civilization of Extra-Terrestrials (ETs) in which, strange to our way of thinking, individuals have no concern for their own lives. This is not contrary to evolutionary processes as, for example, many species cannibalize their dead. Ants and other social insects enforce roles on their members based on  pheromones, and attack non-conforming individuals. An intelligent, space-faring species could arise which, from our point of view, was as emotionally cold as a can opener. Most people think of computers that way, so it would not be strange when intelligent computers are developed that they behave like our hypothetical ET. Such creatures are not concerned for themselves, so are not likely to have rules about termination (murder). On the other hand, an important reason for the evolutionary success of social insects is exactly their emphasis on social order. By assembling replaceable individuals into teams, such a society is capable of great things.  What's probably illegal in such societies is undermining social order; i.e., ruining the machine. In such societies, probably whatever personae exist are the machines, the social combinations, not faceless individuals. During the 1930s, this notion was illustrated in the great NAZI demonstrations in which masses of people were organized to 'act as one man.' I believe one of Hitler's themes was "one people, one voice, one will." While the possibiklity of such a society seems far-fetched when compared to our everyday experience, it is not impossible. Our brains, after all, are organizations of just a few varieties of neurons. Our personality is a matter of cortical organization, not some intrinsic property of neural cells. By analogy, it is not unreasonable to suppose there are intelligent, technical civilizations in which the internal processes of our brains are externalized as the organizations of individuals.

This last example brings us back to a central point: that social ethical principles and morality are different from those applying to individuals. In the sort of ET civilization just constructed, there are probably no principles applicable to individuals, as individuals are "by nature" totally integrated into society. Those individuals probably cannot survive on their own, on a desert island. For that  kind of society, we must consider the social organization in order to discover any personae. Thus, it is only in society that ethical principles and morality as we understand them might exist.
 

I think that is a universal principle of ethics: the Social Principle. This principle collapses on the desert island, because one being is not a society; i.e., it only applies to societies. While this principle is most easily discerned in societies such as our hypothetical ET civilization, it applies equally to societies composed of individuals capable of survival without the assistance of others. Whenever a freestanding individual enters social relations with others, the problem arises of how to interact with others. This problem is the same for all concerned, whether Swift's Gulliver or the Lilliputians. Robinson Crusoe was certainly written from a European point of view, so does not consider what is going on in Friday's mind. As I hope we've discovered by now, it is not preordained that Friday would become the White Man's servant. The outcome of their encounter could be otherwise because they start from an equal footing: castaways on a remote island. They could become friends or enemies or simply live separately, depending on unforeseeable circumstances and the special abilities of each person. Whatever relations develop, any ethical implications are drawn from their society, not from their individual judgements.
 

In parallel to the Range of Judgements (see Part I), there are ranges of Moral Maxims, M(r₀, r₁, .. r_n), where n is the order of the relationships r. Each of the different r's represents a relationship among n individuals, all of which have some common characteristic which assembles them into the set M. There is nothing to prevent the further extension of M by inclusion of some r'_m; thus M(r_n,r'_m), etc. In that extension r'_m represents a different relationship r' obtaining with the same or different set of individuals m, but inclusion in M occurs because of the common characteristic defining the set. Having defined the set M this way, it should be clear that we form an equivalence set M'(p₀, p₁, ... p_i) of moral agents (persons) p enumerated by i, provided that all of the individuals included in some representation of M are now enumerated in M'. I claim these sets are M-equivalent for the reason that M' abstracts the common characteristic in all the other representations of M.
 

In psychological terms, M' is the gestalt of M. The existence of M' allows us to talk about the application of Moral Maxim M to individuals, other things being equal. This is essentially the Social Principle under Equality, or Moral Equivalence
 

Another way to look at this formulation is to consider it a collapse of complex internals. In a society of moral agents, there are potentially multiple relationships of moral significance going on simultaneously between subsets of agents. If there are i persons in the society, the total number of number of possible single linkages of each person to others is just π(i) -  the permutations  of  i - and the total for multiple relationships is something like π(i) * π(r), where π(r) is the permutations of the relationships. Clearly, even a few people entering a few relationships quickly generates a very large number of possible cross-connections. This is of major importance in ethics, because it allows of many examples and counter-examples, and both confuses and obscures moral reasoning. So, it is very desirable to have a rule of Moral Equivalence to simplify cases and allow clear judgements about the matter at hand.
 

The major moral philosophers have struggled with this concept because it is at the heart of every system of governance that proposes justice defined in the rule of law. The militaristic founder of the Chinese Empire, Qin Shi Huangdi, instituted the written, Legalist system of laws which codified the will of the Emperor. Plato's Philosopher King is supposedly an interpreter of Laws which have their own ethereal existence. He is not an arbitrary ruler, but a guru. Virtue theorists, such as Aristotle, try to step aside from the concept of rule of law by claiming that virtuous men will make virtuous judgements; i.e., a virtuous man is just. Hobbes follows Aristotle in Leviathan, by conceding all authority to the Sovereign whose will must be just on account of that grant. Virtue theory solves the problem by appealing to the rule of just men, not laws. Theology tries to resolve the issue by claiming that laws are the will of the gods, even if that changes from time to time. Justice is done when men act according to the laws, which is the will of the gods.
 

The modern experience is one of rebellion against the authoritarian regimes justified by virtue, religion and Imperial will. People have learned from experience not to trust the powerful, so they insist on the rule of a codified, public law which is based on popular participation. That is a fundamental condition of democracy. The assumption of such a notion of justice is that each person is free to examine the law, and make one's own judgement about it. That is, the rule of law presumes citizens are the sort of moral agents I have previously described.

The preeminent modern philosopher and starting point of theories of democracy is, again, Immanuel Kant. His Categorical Imperative is inescapable, for it captures the essentials of the legislative process by which laws are formulated in a democracy. While there are many problems with the Kantian philosophy, just two are of concern here: the Principle of Equality and Similar Circumstances. Both of these are involved in Moral Equivalence.
 

In Kant's Categorical Imperative, each moral agent is assumed to be a person of Good Will - someone with Good Intentions - so all moral agents are equivalent. I think Kant's ideas about the  legislation and Good Will involved in the Categorical Imperative are inherited from European Christian traditions which suppose each person has a soul and Free Will. Kant did not, however, want to acknowledge that tradition as his source, for the task he set himself was to find an independent basis of morality. Of course, he preferred the result to be consistent with European tradition in which he existed. In setting about his task, Kant assumed, as did most other Enlightenment philosophers, that each person comes equipped with faculties of Pure Reason and Moral Judgement (Practical Reason). Pure Reason was considered infallible, as it followed the iron clad laws of logical deduction. (But, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason sets many limits on what reason alone can accomplish.)  In a similar mode, it was considered that each person had a faculty by which correct moral judgements were always made. Despite this Panglossian picture of Man, people did not, and do not, agree about much of anything. Even the most rational scientists often have opinions differing from those of colleagues sharing the same expertise and information. Kant's solution was to retreat into the subjective: in one's mind one attempts to come to correct conclusions and determine to do right things. If things don't come out exactly as intended, that just shows the disconnect between noumena and phenomena.

The foregoing is not intended to be a shabby treatment of Kant; rather, it is just to get to the crux of the matter quickly. Rawls deals with the same problem in A Theory of Justice  how to get things to come out right. Rawls does not accept the Kantian persona, but allows in his discussion the notions of rationality, reason and respect for others. Those things are requirements for those confined in the pressure cooker he calls the "original position." The first difficulty with the Kantian tradition, and with Rawls, is rationality, or Reason. Based on my understanding of recent intellectual History, there are serious doubts about the concept of rationality, and there is little scientific evidence that people have any faculty of Reason. I believe what passes for reason or rationality - rational behavior - is culturally dependent. I think almost everyone is capable of learning how others think and behave, so an Australian Aborigine can become a leading Western physicist. But, Western physics is not implicit in Aborigine culture or even Chinese or Indian culture. Were it so, Sir Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein would probably have another name.

What is most crippling to the Enlightenment idea of Reason and more tenuous notions of rationality are the Twentieth Century discoveries in Foundations of Mathematics. Gödel's proof eliminates the possibility of a closed system of mathematical and logical truth: there are statements that cannot be proved true or false. The invention of non-Euclidean geometries in the Nineteenth Century undermined the Newtonian view of the world, disconnecting the seeming certainty of geometry from our experience of the Universe. Quantum Mechanics has destroyed whatever regularity was once thought to underlie all processes. Information theory, particularly Turing's model of computing, has given a new twist to what we mean by "deduction" or "proof." Reason no longer operates by Aristotle's syllogisms alone, nor is it confined to fixed and mechanical modes of expression. What we think of as reason is actually human reasoning, quirky events in the neural cortex which could be otherwise.
 

So, sitting in that conference room Rawls imagined, in the "original position," no one really has any prima facie evidence for the notion that the others present think the same way. There is no rational process for determining the right or best answers, so we cannot be assured of any particular result. We must consider all those conferring in the original position as confined to a Tower of Babel. This implies the first problem with Kant's notion of independent legislators: none of them are able to conceive what anyone else would do. In the absence of some universal faculty or process of reason, each legislator is only able to decide what it would do.
 

My solution to this impasse arises straight out of modern communications technology: CDMA is the most widely used protocol in telecommunications, and is at the heart of TCP/IP used on the Internet. It is a strategy used in relaying messages: Be quiet for a set period, listen for messages, and then transmit in short bursts. The set period and burst size are determined by algorithms. In addition, any message structure and encoding are determined by algorithms. In using CDMA, we are attempting to make sure we hear any messages sent our way by not blocking communications channels. We only send our messages when it is probable they will get through (based on a calculation of channel use). Ideally, we adjust the size and structure of our messages to what the channel can carry. We are always prepared for failure to communicate, so will repeat any messages that are garbled or unacknowledged. All the other participants do the same thing. Finally, when receiving messages, all of which are available to everyone on the network, I try to make some sense of them. If I determine a message is solely directed to me, I hang onto it. Otherwise, if I don't understand the message or it's not solely mine, I just pass it on when I am not the last receiver in the chain.

This procedure does not assume there are any listeners other than myself. It does not assume anyone understands my message. Perhaps even I do not fully understand my message. It does not presuppose much of anything about those connected to the network (the nodes), except that there is a communications network. The network is indifferent as to what is communicated; i.e., the "information". In modern digital networks, the information is passed one bit at a time, configured as a series of 0s and 1s (two distinguishable signals). What each node does with the stuff it receives is its business, but nodes acknowledge receipt of signals. Thus, the only thing that "happens" is the passing of signals from one node to another by a series of transmissions. The nodes may respond uniquely to each signal, both internally and externally.

It should be obvious that there are various states of a network, depending on what the nodes are like. Suppose that all of the nodes are randomly programmed, that they are all solipcists. In this case, the steady state network may look like white noise as each node randomly delivers its message, acknowledges others and retransmits all of them. From our pont of view, very little meaningful "communication" transpires on this very busy network. Lots of signaling is going on, but it does not change the internal states of the nodes; i.e., none of it is understood. (I assume that meaningful messages would result in some change at a node.) If a node assigned some meaning to the signals, it might change its behavior on the network. Under network rules it could signal acknowledgement of receiving a message, as distinct from signaling acknowledgement of receiving a signal. A node might also just examine or store the message without acknowledgement, if the message seemed directed to it. This latter case requires some sort of mechanism by which the node identifies itself, or some property of the message that activates internal processes of the node. Either way, such a message is associated with changes in the node. Some messages might activate more than one node in one or more ways. Seen from the outside, multiple nodes may consider themselves the node designated in the message. Confusion of identity probably leads to network overload or synchronicity depending on unforeseeable timing factors. This sort of network is unstable with respect to passing messages unless each node has a unique identity, or there is a pattern of identities over the network which is unique at any given time. (This last method is currently in common use on the Internet because it helps to defeat hacking.) When a node has an identity, it also has an internal state.
 

Networks that pass messages must at least develop a system of assigning identities, whether static or dynamic. Each node need not make any assumptions about the internal states of other nodes, except that I am I and you are you. This minimalist communication scheme obviates the difficulties of original positions and Kantian assumptions about legislators. We do not require rationality or reason, or even a Good Will. What we do require is a mechanism for sending and receiving signals, an attempt at acknowledging signals, and, if we decide something is a message - if a signal has a meaning - an attempt at acknowledging that event. If we distinguish messages from signals, we require an identity that survives in a networked environment long enough to receive and acknowledge the message. That is all we have to assume about others. With that, we wait and see what happens. The system will evolve depending on what individuals (nodes) do with the messages.

This brings us to the second problem of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: what are the Similar Circumstances in which the proposed legislation will apply? Kant's critics attack this phrase with vehemence, trying to force defenders into one or another extreme position. Either it is impossible to define what is similar, thus extending application  to everything or nothing, or it is impossible to fit the situation exactly into the definition because of some small difference (loophole). In the old world before Fuzzy Logic, Similar Circumstances was a suicidal tool for those who used it. But, I must ask, what is wrong with a fuzzy definition? The notion of similar circumstances is deeply embedded in law as precedents. Each precedent is an example of what was considered an important (just or unjust) decision at the time it was rendered; e.g., Dredd Scott and Plessey v Ferguson. Legal scholars study those cases to see how they apply in the administration of law, and what implications they have in cases pending. Fmr. Justice Thurgood Marshall famously and successfully argued Plessey v Ferguson was unconstitutional in Brown v Bd. of Education. That we detest racial segregation does not mean there is no merit whatsoever in the doctrine of 'separate but equal.' What Marshall showed was that there was no way to implement separate but equal without contradiction, as a result of the way human beings and their cultures are. It is not that, in  some other world, the policy could not have arrived at a happier conclusion. It is that, in our world, it always ended in bad behavior and even promoted wickedness. The Warren Court changed the policy based on evidence that it did not work; i.e., upon examining the "similar circumstances" of policy application.

There can be no doubt that we evaluate similar circumstances all the time. Is this product substantially the same as another (cf. listed contents)? Will this wood or steel do in the construction of this building? Is the safety factor sufficient to warrant building this structure? Should I illegally run the red light to avoid being hit from behind? When does the law apply, when not, and what risks am I willing to take? Rather than throw out the concept and methods of similar circumstances, I believe it better to adopt it as an heuristic - a collection of empirical methods - represented in cases. What analysis of situations reveals are patterns, if we have brains that can tease them out, remember them and compare them. In looking through the cases, motivated by our interest in another, present case, eventually we arrive at "ah-ha!" Some pattern - a combination of points - emerges that identifies this case as similar to that one. The recognition of similarity allows an argument by analogy to be made.
 

Rejecting the overly precise demands of those who denigrate Similar Circumstances need not open the flood gates of all-inclusiveness. I think there is always some sense in which everything is similar to everything else. Those who believe in some form of wholistic spirituality seem to sense a oneness in the Universe. For our purposes, that sort of thing goes too far. To prevent that response to the problem, all we need adopt is a rule of "good enough." Such a rule might be analogous to limits introduced in the calculus, never to be reached, but always to be approximated as closely as we like. Good Enough resolves the problem of Similar Circumstances if we are able to find methods and standards appropriate to the problem at hand. Of course, that leads to the secondary criticism that the ultimate judgement of a case is arbitrary. I accept that criticism as true, but not fatal. We have to live with error.

This brings us to the heart of the centuries old arguments about Similar Circumstances: do we live in an inexact world? My answer to this question is, in a profound sense, yes. I think those who don't like the workings of Similar Circumstances prefer an absolute world, in which every judgement is Right or Wrong, and Facts are always True. That is, the critics are absolutists or desirous of absolute standards. But anyone who does not accept absolutism has to accept approximation as a fact of life. The modern world is dominated by science, construed as an experimental philosophy, which has built-in procedures to assess, report and correct error. Scientific experiments involving measurement always reports methods and statistics; e.g., we used microliter pipets calibrated to 0.1% accuracy, we sampled 10 aliquots, we surveyed a statistically significant population, etc. This sort of language is so common in our present day world that we no longer notice it, but it is the language of empiricists who assume observations are always inaccurate. Further, now that Quantum Mechanics is well known and applied in many technologies, it is assumed that our perceptions are not just accidentally inaccurate, but that they must be so. In the light of our modern outlook, Similar Circumstances makes sense as an assessment of the risk of error, and as a predetermined criterion of fitness. When we make a moral judgement that this is good or right, we have in mind a model of what "this" would be like, a criterion by which we know it when we see it. Further, we must have weighed the risks of being wrong in this judgement. This process, I believe is similar to what happens in juries assigned to capital cases, instructed to come to a verdict "beyond a reasonable doubt." In the process of justice, Good Enough is Good Enough.

From this discussion so far, certain features of my ethical theory should be solidifying from the mist. Traditional ethical theories focus on the individual. Traditionalists worry about people making rational judgements and being worthy company. They looked for objective standards by which one could determine the plausibility of moral judgements. In addition, they wanted clear cut rules by which Moral Maxims could be applied. But, in this ethical subjectivist theory, none of that is a concern. Prima facie, we have to accept that moral agents are competent to make the moral judgements they says they do. We have no a priori reason to question the plausibility of any agent's moral judgements, nor is it wrong when one person makes different, even opposite, judgements from another person. Not much can be said about morals that only involve an isolated individual, except that they are its.
 

In my ethical theory, what counts is the social determination of morality using ethical principles. We need not make any a priori assumptions about the rationality or intentions of individuals. What do need to do is observe public behavior in all its forms: speech, acts, body language, etc. Society is modeled as a network of individuals, who try to communicate with each other. This sort of arrangement is an "ecological niche," so one might think of this ethical theory as an ecology of morals. As in ecology, we study the interactions of the creatures that inhabit a niche, noting the evolution of individuals, species and the niche. We might find, as with forests, there are phases of development and cycles of  birth, growth and death. Or, we might find a steady state as often happens in deserts and other sparsely populated regions. Whatever the ecological history, it is always recorded retrospectively, and only predicted prospectively. This asymmetry, when applied in ethics, means that there are no a priori moral judgements or ethical princples. All that we know is a matter of experience.
 

Humans might seek perfection in their thoughts and actions, but we are prone to making mistakes. Therefore, risk and error must be accounted in an ethical theory. It is important not just to fix responsibility, but to attempt repairs. Ethics must include some notion of amelioration and procedures for correcting wrongs. More importantly, the fact of error entails that ethics cannot be absolute and certain. Risk assessment has to be part of the subject. A fair starting guideline would be not to perform morally irreversible acts unless there is no other choice. Risk and finality are multiplied together in a hyperbolic curve: the more final something is, the less risk there should be of going wrong. (This is an ethical analogue of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.) Because nothing is for certain, we must qualify every judgement by the probability of success. Ethical principles should not only account for risk, but suggest ways to calculate and reduce it.
 

When all these things are done on a society, and imbedded in culture, we call the result Social Conscience. Ethics resides in culture.

Next: Norms