Dear John and all,
please let me walk around the idea of ethos as a predictable pattern of
decisions among two alternatives which cannot be reconciled with each other.
"ethos" has as its basic meaning "home", the place - and customs - of one's
upbringing. The concept refers to a specific way of behaving, which is
pleasant. Someone with an established culture (a home set of values he
refers to habitually) is indeed predictably behaving according to his ethos.
Ethical behaviour can only be expected of a free organism. If one has no
alternatives, or one's actions do not derive from a free decision, the
action cannot be subject to a judgement re the extent of ethos.
The ethical act is neither always preferring the emotional, nor always
preferring the conceptual. The optimal ethics usually tries to keep an
equidistance to both the instinctive urges and to the rigid formalism.
The ethical decision evaluates both aspects and decides with a preference to
one alternative, although other alternatives would appear more rewarding to
the - less ethical - spectator.
The ethical behaviour forgoes a kind of immediate pleasure for the acting
person and thus allows a - different kind of - pleasure to be experienced in
the other person, the object (target) of the behaviour.
We ascribe to ethical behaviour that it follows rules, even in case we do
not understand deeply the rules we suppose to be behind the ethical kernel
of the actor.
The rules do not stick mechanically, neither to the impulses, nor to the
defences. An unjustly biased attitude is not ethical, irrespective of the
direction of the bias: neither the person who always prefers satisfaction,
nor the person who always prolongs the wait until satisfaction confront the
world in an ethical way.
The term "de-mixing" refers to an emotional polarisation within the subject
which is well schematised in the figure/s of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. An
ethical person is integrated and acts according to both sides of the coin.
In a statistical sense, ethics is then the description of the interplay
between two sets of logical relations, which have TWO mass points (central
elements, schwerpunkte). The order within the two subsets is by nature
different. Then, a continuous flip-flop takes place, while the system
maintains its central degree of predictability.
In this model, emotional wishes and insight into duty are in a constant
deviation respective to each other. (The ethical behaviour can be seen as a
solution to the problem: "I want to do A but should do B"). This fits very
well into general concepts about the organisation of the brain, which regard
the emotions as a biochemical, hormonally describable state, and the thought
patterns as sequenced entities which have grid-like relation among each
other.
Again and again the idea of interregulation shows itself to be quite fitting
to explanations of behaviour of intelligent systems.
And intelligent AND ethical system finds a reasonable balance between
choices referring to present or future satisfaction. It takes into account
that the moment and the future cannot fit into each other, that there is
always a residual of unpredictability, and that ethical behaviour happens
then, if one is ready to deal with the unpredictable in a non-dogmatic, open
way, with no undue preferences towards one of the extremes.
For information theory it may be noted that the two swarms cannot be made
into congruence with each other.
Karl
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Received on Wed Apr 5 15:50:45 2006
