Do (a) and (b) mean the same thing? — Michael

While I don't want to invoke the naturalistic fallacy, it's hard for a human to look at nature and think that we inhabit a fair world. — Tom Storm

If he is an Immanentist regarding abstract concepts --- God being just the most common example --- any reference to something transcendent may be meaningless to him. — Gnomon

But you have to clear up why your saccharine image illustrates anything in the first place. — apokrisis

This is a quite normal political question. Any fool would say we want a society that is balanced, fair, equal and just. The question then becomes well which version of a society is that which you have in mind? — apokrisis

Is unfairness or injustice really just the product of human action? — L'éléphant

There’s also a sort of latent animism in some of our expressions in that we do attribute intent to things around us as well as to people. — Banno

So do we only address those unfairness caused by human actions? Or do we also address those that are the products of the natural world? — L'éléphant

Are you suggesting that "I promise to do this" means "I am obliged to do this"?
Are you suggesting that "I promise to do this" entails "I am obliged to do this"? — Michael

Is "I promise to do this but I am not obliged to do this" in some sense a contradiction? — Michael

Does "promises exist" mean the same thing as "people say something like 'I promise to do this'"? — Michael

First up, logic does say that balance is what emerges from the very possibility of a dichotomy or symmmetry breaking. If you have a dividing, this in itself brings the further thing of a mixing. There has to be a unity of opposites as the final result. The action going both its way has to arrive at its own equilibrium average state.

So forget good and evil for a moment. This just is the logic where a symmetry-breaking must play itself out to become a symmetry-equilibrating. The wrinkle then is that the equilibrium balance is then itself a new ground of symmetry – now raised a level – that can once again be broken and equilibrated.

Hierarchies of structure can arise in openly growing fashion as each level of symmetry-breaking below it becomes some closed and stable balancing act.

This is a tricky kind of causality to contemplate. It is not the reductionism of "cause and effect". But it was already where metaphysics started with Anaximander and his pre-socratic cosmology.

So there is a general metaphysical model of division and its balancing. And then the further possibility of stacking up these "phase changes" on top of each other in hierarchically complexified fashion. A rich cosmos can emerge from its simple dichotomous origins.

And then we get to the vexed issue of good and evil. Which is problematic because it replaces the complex systems causality of the natural world with the polarised story of a cause and effect world. A mechanistic viewpoint. Instead of a pair of actions that are complementary – as in a dichotomy or symmetry breaking – we have just a single arrow from a here to a there. There is a high and a low, a good and a bad, a wonderful and an awful. There is a place to leave behind and a place to approach.

So we have now the reductionist causality that seeks to encode reality in terms of a one-way traffic system. If you discover that two directions exist, one of the ways has to be the correct way, the other thus the opposite of the correct.

But the systems approach says the only way anything is caused to exist is by it going in both its directions in a symmetry-breaking fashion, and the place that this dichotomising "leaving behind" then approaches is the symmetry-equibrating thing of its overall dynamical balance. A holistic state of globalised order ... which then can be the ground of departure for yet another rung of hierarchical complexity in the form of dichotomising~rebalancing.

So in terms of human moral social order, good and bad would be arrows pointing between some lower level and some next step level of stabilised equilibrium balance. The arrows wouldn't be the simple and brutal monotonic ones of reductionism. One path mandated and the other path forbidden. The arrows would point the way from one state of naturalistic balance to the next more complexified state that might be attained.

The lower level isn't intrinsically bad as it has proven itself to be a stable platform for some kind of higher aspirations. But the goal is to break it as symmetry so as to step up to some higher equilibrium state – that likewise is good to the degree it can prove itself a stable platform for steps even beyond that.

So in that organic or thermodynamic context – which moral discussions can at least dimly grasp in terms of a Maslovian hierarchy of needs – good is to be building community to a degree of stability that creates the potential of further steps, and evil is the back-sliding destabilisation of the teetering house of cards that already exists as the relatively stabilised platform on which we stand.

Good~evil is tarred jargon as it does speak to the simplicities of reductionist models of causality. But we can sort of get what the terms are getting at from a systems perspective and its ecosystem style, richness constructing, hierarchical complexity.

There is no need to climb an endless ladder of complexity or goodness of course. But for a natural system that must exist in an uncertain and destabilising world, there is a value in maintaining a potential for taking next steps as situations demand. We have to be able to step up because there is a reserve to spend.

This trade-off between stability and plasticity in organisms that live and act is certainly yet a further wrinkle in the whole causality deal. But who says metaphysics has to be simpler than it actually is? — apokrisis

What you are not answering is which equilibrium do you have in mind? Gaussian or scalefree? — apokrisis

Clean out your ears. — apokrisis

...justice as transcendent truth independent of its material basis — apokrisis

There is nothing that exists beyond the act. — AmadeusD

if both parties to a 'promise' forget that it was made, the there aren't even these brain states and te claim that the 'promise' still exists becomes risible to the point of perhaps being an indicator of sillygooseness. — AmadeusD

...brain states... — AmadeusD

No, he didn't. Stop with the provocative crap. — frank

"the promise" does not exist. — AmadeusD

If you can only read three words out of a post... — AmadeusD

You misunderstood me. — frank

For no particular reason. — Leontiskos

In that case one must still provide principles for the interaction of those values. — Leontiskos

Do you mean algorithmic, or rational? — Leontiskos

...if we make unprincipled decisions then we are not being rational. — Leontiskos

...one cannot think about morality without principles. — Leontiskos

The physical analogy between a Fair & Just distribution of social states, and thermodynamic equilibrium (balanced measure) is a philosophical metaphor, not to be taken literally — Gnomon

Folk hereabouts regularly confuse something's existing with something being known to exist. — Banno

• Fairness is not found in the world, it is found in what we do about it.
• The way things are does not determine what we ought do about them.

Hence, the necessity for a moderate philosophical attitude toward the extremes of Good & Evil. :smile: — Gnomon

The Principle of Double Effect is utilitarian. — I like sushi

We do not require evidence for existence. — Tobias