One value system to rule them all
Is it possible, or little more than a pipe dream? And importantly, how might you think about this complex landscape in your daily work?
Upfront caveat: This is a very concise attempt to describe something that is deeply nuanced, often hotly debated, almost certain non-linear and perhaps even ‘unanswerable’. The purpose is to begin a discussion that might help you better frame your personal and / or organisational approach to practical ethics (the everyday process of assessing different directions / choices relative to your purpose, values and principles, such that you contribute to more of what you believe to be ‘good’ and ‘right’ through your actions).
Many before me have debated the nature of ethics and morality. In fact, this largely falls within the ‘branch’ of moral philosophy called meta ethics. Many will continue to do so (hopefully long after my particulate matter is usefully composted).
I cannot do justice to this entire space in one of my typically short, time boxed posts (45 mins today). So, what I’m going to do is attempt to describe the most basic version of why I believe it’s practically constraining to lock yourself into a specific normative theory (i.e. we only assess what is ‘good’ and ‘right’ through a utilitarian lens) that very likely has a bunch of meta ethical claims or ontological assumptions associated with it (many of which are likely implicit).
This is very clearly not for you if you’re a professional philosopher. This is for you if you want to find a practical, meaningful and engaging way to start doing more of what you believe to be good and right.
To be clear, reading this post won’t magically translate into an operational ethics framework that suits your needs and aspirations. This post is being written to help you frame what I hope can eventually - after time and deliberate effort - become an actionable point of view that directly contributes to the activities you engage in (specifically in the context of ‘work’).
To begin this journey, I’d like to briefly discuss Ontology (which of course has different conceptions. I make no claim anywhere as to the ‘fixed’ nature of these ideas / models) and Epistemology.
For a funny, and rather awesome take on ontology and epistemology (thanks to my mate, Adrian Hindes - who will soon be wrapping up his PhD at Australian National University!!! - for sharing this), check out this post, and the PDF the post links to, from Tom Fryer).
Ontology is concerned largely with the nature or reality. Epistemology is concerned with what can be known about reality. If you’ve studied formally, you might have interacted with the following framing:
This describes one specific view of the sequence informing a ‘research paradigm’. It is important to note that this clean, linear process is far from universally agreed. The reality is likely messier and much harder to ‘get at’ (again, everything we understand about the world through science - and arguably more generally, even in any phenomenological sense - is a model of some sort or another).
In a context more relevant to today’s post, such as a product development team considering how it explores values and engages in ‘value sensitive design’, ‘ethical design’ or some such framing, I’d argue that Ontology and Epistemology precede Axiology (as always, it’s important to note that this is not a attempt at a universal statement. I make this point on deeply pragmatic grounds, largely due to the fact that I interface with organisations every single day and strongly believe that this can be a helpful starting point, mostly because this area gets close to no attention. Folks don’t talk about it at all. So the basic claim here is that this is an opportunity to more deeply ground aspects of your moral reflection, deliberation, imagination and imagineering. We can explore this in future posts).
What I’m basically saying here is that our sense of reality and what can be known about reality has the potential to impact what we value (this is not to suggest that what we value doesn’t impact what we believe to be real or what we believe can be known. It almost certainly does. And it’s almost certainly not linear, but rather the result of interaction with various system dynamics - including mythology, religion and many other ‘artefacts’ or ‘isms’ of humanity - that shape, frame and encourage the formation of certain mental models and belief systems, that have their respective neural correlates etc. So there is no one right starting point. Again, I’m using what we have in the form of basic models to describe one, what I believe to be fairly 'uncommon way, of beginning to engage in a more formal process that leads to some type of operational ethics framework).
For now, I ask that you think of this in a more practical, rather than theoretical sense.
By having some type of view about reality, what it is and what you and others can know about it, you are better positioned to describe and progressively operationalise an ethics framework that makes sense in your context.
Before moving forward, let’s run a little activity. From the below, which camp would you say you fall into?
[room for a witty, yet surpassingly profound response]
Why did you give the answer above?
[room for a deeply thoughtful answer that leaves me scratching my head for the next three weeks…]
Through this very short activity you’re beginning to explore the basics of Ontology. And when you ask and answer questions about ‘why you gave the answer you gave,’ you’ve begun exploring Epistemology.
For some of you, the answers may have helped you reveal some type of worldview. For others, those that have deeply explored this territory already, it may be a reinforcement of an explicit(ish) position you hold.
If you find yourself towards the far left of the Ontological spectrum, you are more likely to fit into a moral / ethical realism (absolutism, objectivism etc.) like category. In short, you may believe that there are such things as objective moral facts or truths. You may believe that we have uncovered some of them. You may believe that we can uncover those that are still out there, likely through scientific means.
If the opposite is true in terms of where you sit on the Ontological spectrum, you may think that there is no such thing as moral facts. You may believe that we - whatever ‘we’ are - socially and culturally construct these ideas (it may all, in fact, be little more than an illusion). An important note here is that this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll fall into a nihilistic camp (you may find meaning, beauty and genuine awe through myriad phenomenological experiences). You may still relate to certain value systems or moral beliefs as deeply important, but you might not necessarily hold one value system over the other, or go as far as suggesting that one moral position is inherently superior to another because of its ‘objective truthfulness’.
Not everyone has to fit into a neat box…
This - your beliefs about reality and what can be known about reality - I’m going to argue today, form a type of foundation (or root system, or mycorrhizal network, or heartwood, which is the centre of a tree trunk. Select whatever feels right for you). These beliefs can inform and impact your meta ethics. Your meta ethics can, and hopefully should, directly impact your practical ethics framework (the normative theory/ies you draw from, the specific activities you engage in to explore a moral landscape, the way you weight certain values and principles relative to others, the actual end to end processes you execute to make decisions etc. I’ve written plenty about these types of frameworks in the past).
But, this need not be a binary thing. We can hold diverse perspectives in healthy tension.
By grounding our worldview in a fairly deep humility, we can draw on different moral theories, benefit from their strengths, and potentially avoid some of their shortcomings (after all, there is no one value system to rule them all, at least as far as we can tell today. There is no perfect normative theory etc. You get my gist).
To be specific, within the context of our operational framework, we may want to conduct consequence scanning, applying a systems literate lens to the process. We may use the outcome of this activity, and the specific views we develop about net benefits that we might ‘quantify’ probabilistically, to directly inform various decisions and actions.
We may build on the process of consequence scanning by overlaying this approach with a lens of cultural diversity, exploring how specific actions that may lead to certain net benefits interact with value systems across the cultures that are relevant to our work (this could be done with something as simple as a spider diagram that visualises the weightings across different values systems and cultural contexts. Keep in mind, even if you are based in Melbourne, like I am, Melbourne is not ‘one culture’. Melbourne is a geographical region that is diversely populated by people with a wide array of worldviews, cultural values etc. So in this case, even though you might be a food delivery startup or some such thing, you are not just catering to one culture).
We may even step back and deeply questions the ‘ends’ due to the discomfort we feel about proposed ‘means’ (suggesting that both intentions and outcomes matter. We can of course take this further by suggesting that the intent, its universalisability etc. is all that morally matters. I don’t think you’ll ever find me making that claim…).
All of this, and so much more is possible, if we take a pluralistic approach to ‘doing’ practical ethics.
It’s for these basic reasons - that no one value system reigns supreme, and that no one normative or other ‘tight’ ethical theory gives us all that we might possible benefit from - that I believe (in a deeply practical setting such as building a startup, or attempting to launch a new product etc.) we are better served by exploring different values systems, holding certain values in tension and using the tools and approaches from different normative theories to make decisions about what we believe to be ’good’ and ‘right’.
It’s for these basic reasons that I believe selecting one specific normative theory, at the expense of other normative theories or approaches to moral deliberation, limits our capacity to most fully explore moral landscapes, such that we can best align our intended actions and their likely consequences to our purpose, values and principles (why the thing we’re doing exists, what we believe to be good and what we believe to be right).
Importantly this need not mean that anything goes, that all is permissible because of ‘strong relativism’ or global scepticism. You will still need to take a stand about what is good and right. It’s just that the ground you’re standing on will benefit from greater microbial diversity, thus delivering greater nutrient density into the process itself ;)
Okay, now I’m out of time, fully recognising I haven’t even landed on the surface. If you’d like to dive deeper, especially in the context of how I attempt to bring these views to life in practical, everyday contexts, let’s talk.
P.S. A slightly different, yet very beautiful way, to think about this (ways of knowing, and importantly, ways of experiencing) comes from Wilbur’s Four Quadrants. Worth a watch!
Oh, and please excuse the lack of diversity in the cover image. It is, however, largely representative of certain knowledge contributions in certain parts of the world at certain times throughout history. Here’s to continually changing that representation and resulting contribution to what we think we know about what is and what ought to be.