When society changes it alters a lot of previously established conceptions. A common thing to say is that ”Content is king” but this is something that belongs to the past and not for our fast-paced world. Content is still very important but it is no longer sovereign. In our society today it is more important with Context.

The problem is that there are no exact answers, only approximations and guesses according to the ruling paradigm at a certain instance of time. Many people ”project the world as a deterministic black box — linking preordained input parameters to a predictable output”. Management in organizations ”try to ‘manage change’ or ‘engineer knowledge’ with tidy quantitative methods” without coping with subjective subtlety, ambiguity and complexity. People most of the time try to fit the world into black-and-white instead of the many grey-zones that exist. It’s natural to want to categorize into different parts but doing that one also strips away essential parts that might change the meaning of the object in a different context. ”All facts are context sensitive. Contexts are personal.”

We try to control society by imposing ‘proper control procedures’ but according to Goodhart’s Law: ”Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed on it for control purposes.” ”Models can only [...] be a pale shade of what actually happens.” ”Each of us experiences a different world, albeit with ’similarities’”. This gets further complicated when we believe we use the same schema as someone else but since everyone experiences things differentially there might be an essential anomaly in the two schemas. When we agree upon some parts of the world a fact is created. ”A fact is merely an approved communal judgement, positioned within a context.”

”Is being forever wrong a problem? No! For ‘[a]ll models are wrong, [but] some models are useful’”. We need to recognize that everything constantly changes and leads to new opportunities; ”you can never step into the same river twice.” One needs to adjust the thoughts to the current context and profit from that status quo instead of looking for an ultimate solution.

[source: Solution is the Problem: A Story of Transitions and Opportunities]
[pic:  CC-BY-NC-SA, donut2d]

Another post I wrote a few years ago about one of the branches of ethics. Enjoy.
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“That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing” – brilliantly said by Pliny the Younger, which wisdom acts as one of the cornerstones of Ethical Individualism. We believe that many people follow this principle to a degree in this world even though they are unaware of it themselves. These people are usually said to be forgetful, selfish, lazy, egocentric, greedy, and in more friendly words: laid-back and utterly enjoys fishing.

The Ethical Individualist tends to keep a positive attitude towards his own incompetency, especially when it comes to short-term memory. He is often considered to be street-smart, a scavenger, and a brute. In other-words, he is a survivor. He pillages the weak, trades with the strong; what he can’t remember, doesn’t exist; what he finds, is what he keeps. And of course, he likes to spend his days by the lake and fishing.

Most people mistake Ethical Individualism with Anarchy. Although similar, the statement is false. For example: an Ethical Individualist would never consider robbing a big bank. The bank is strong and therefore a true follower of Ethical Individualism would try to trade with the bank and rob the old lady coming out of the bank with her month’s pension in her purse instead.

If the Ethical Individualist doesn’t feel like going to school in the morning and instead wants to go fishing – he will. He will be considered selfish because now his lab partner will have to do without him and he will be considered a lazy and forgetful coward for not having done his English homework, skipping school and not facing the consequences of his actions. But to him, he is just enjoying life… and fishing.

Now one might also see Ethical Individualism as the ultimate ethical principle to follow. However it does have minor flaws. This is best demonstrated with another example: If our ideal Ethical Individualist wants to marry another person, he can no longer rely on Ethical Individualism for moral judgment. If the individual’s happiness depends on another individual, Ethical Individualism will not apply because according to the principle, it is oafish to depend on other people for your own happiness. This flaw is only minor because people “are dishonest and do not keep faith with [other people]” -Niccolo Machiavelli. These kind of foolish reliance will not occur often in this world, at least not by Ethical Individualists.

Another example would be using Ethical Individualism to judge the moral correctness of ”A Modest Proposal”. To those who are not familiar with this work by Jonathan Swift, here comes a brief summary:

“The author argues, by hard-edged economic reasoning as well as from a self-righteous moral stance, for a way to turn this problem into its own solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland’s rich land-owners. Children of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of child-bearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic well-being of the nation.”
-Jonathan Swift

To the Ethical Individualist this brilliant proposal by Jonathan Swift is arguably satirical. This way the poor people would transform their former financial burden into a profit, all for greed of money and every bit selfish. The rich would then have a delicacy on the dinner table for them to enjoy. This form of enjoyment would almost match fishing. According to Ethical Individualism, Jonathan Swift is quite ingenious in coming up with this proposal, making him the ideal Ethical Individualist. Eating babies might seem barbaric and inhuman, but it has to be taken account that just because something is judged to be morally correct doesn’t mean one has to actually perform these deeds for other reasons. One might not enjoy eating babies, therefore one might consider it to be morally incorrect because, in the end, one should enjoy life’s pleasantries.

Now.
Enjoy life, and remember:
your happiness is worth a thousand times the happiness from others.

[pic: CC-BY-ND, jaroslavd]

”No morality can be founded on authority,
even if the authority were divine.”
- A.J. Ayer

Ethics is very hard to define. The view of what is right and wrong differ from person to person. It depends on the environment one grows up in, the influence from friends, religion/atheism, parents, living situation and a lot more. There is no universal ethical law which fits everybody. There are general ethical rules applied by countries, called laws, to keep order in society and try to benefit everybody as much as possible. This laws are never perfect.They try to strive for what Jeremy Bentham once said:

”The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”

There are always objections to some laws and they never cover all the possible situations. General ethical rules are also applied by the religions. Some rules seem obvious at first thought but might not work in specific situations, for example one of the most common rules used is “thou shall not kill” but even though this law seems obvious there are situations where people are in such pain that they would rather be killed then to continue being tormented under the pain. Everybody needs their own ethics to follow and this shall come from ones heart, through experience. One shall do what one feels like but with respect to other people and their feelings.

I conclude this with Alfred North Whitehead’s words:

”What is morality in any given time or place?
It is what the majority then and there happen to like,
and immorality is what they dislike.”

[photo cred: rememberthrough, CC-BY-NC-SA]

What is true and what is not, that is the question.

This will be analyzed by applying our question, “are human beings born evil?”, to three different concepts of finding if the statement is true or not. The three ethical theories are: the pragmatic, the coherence and the correspondence theory of truth.

The Pragmatic theory of truth can be defined as “concepts or propositions, that are proved to be worthwhile or useful, are true. This is only known through subjective experience.” Applying it to the question “are human beings born evil” one can not find it true since there is no benefit to be made by it. This theory is all about subjectivity and totally depends on who looks at the question.

A good definition of the Coherence theory of truth is that “concepts or propositions are true if they are consistent with other established truths, which are accepted as truths, they cohere with them.” According to this theory church can be considered as a voice of truth and since they say that human beings are born evil one can establish that it is true. The problem with this is that one has to believe that the statement about the church being a voice of truth is true and some people, for example nihilists, might find it untruthful. It all comes down to what one believes was true before one saw the question.

Defining the Correspondence theory of truth: “Truth occurs when the concepts or proposition correspond to the objective reality which it describes.” Applying it we see that the question can not be established as a truth since one is incapable of knowing if human beings are born evil with the senses we have. This relies totally on your senses but some statements can not be determined by senses at all. All theories are very vague and none is perfect. It all comes to whether you think it’s true or not.

The different theories should be used but they should have limits on what they could be used as. Truth is a very subjective and individual concept. Stay true!

Been reading some on Organizational learning lately for an essay I’m writing. Very interesting to read about and makes you think a lot. Argyris is one of the main persons behind the concept and writes brilliantly on it. Sharing two great paragraphs with you from the book titled ”On organizational learning”.

”Learning is defined as occurring under two conditions. First, learning occurs when an organization achieves what it intended; that is, there is a match between its design for action and the actuality or outcome. Second, learning occurs when a mismatch between intentions and outcomes is identified and it is corrected; that is, a mismatch is turned into a match.
Organizations do not perform the actions that produce the learning. It is individuals acting as agents of organizations who produce the behavior that leads to learning. Organizations can create conditions that may significantly influence what individuals frame as the problem, design as a solution, and produce as action to solve a problem. Individuals, on the other hand, may also bring biases and constraints to the learning situation that are relatively independent of the organization’s requirements. An example of constraint is the human mind’s limited capability for information processing. An example of bias is the theories of action with which people are socialized and which they necessarily bring to the organization. These theories significantly influence how individuals and groups solve problems and make choices.”

(photo cred: Chicagogeek, cc-by-nd)