Is our general level of abstraction in ethics hypocritical?

Question

We have come to discover that a high level of serotonin (the leadership chemical, and what falls during depression) improves one's ability to think abstractly.

Some of our greatest gains in thinking about ethics that make us able to deal with a wider and more varied culture have come from abstract framing of fairness: Kant, Mill, etc.

At some point is that approach itself somewhat problematic? Have we passed that point? Are we just making higher demands on those less well equipped to deal with life, and is that not in itself unfair? Where can this stop, or can it be mitigated in some way? (These are just stops along the way, and not separate questions I would like to ask.)

It seems to me that people in the modern world are either drowning in detail they cannot accommodate or aspiring for a sense of order through abstraction they cannot attain or maintain. Is this just a subjective impression, or is it something philosophically addressable?

Answer 1

I don't think that's a good characterisation of serotonin's role in leadership: https://www.forbes.com/2010/10/07/brain-science-neurobiology-leadership-managing-hormones.html

I see our most important ethical theories as founded in intersubjectivity. Kant's categorical imperative. Rawl's theory of justice. AO Wilson's development of our understanding of eusociality.

And not just in ethics. In the Buddhist metaphor for dependent origination, sunyata, and interbeing Indra's Net. And the idea of peer-to-peer reality. Objectivity is just reified intersubjectivity.

Like that, the Private Language argument can be understood and set in context: language is a kind of shared intelligence, which imposes salience landscapes on how we engage with the world that develop and extend our understanding of the differences between things participatorily, from whether blue and green are different, to understanding why qualia are not a meaningful idea (details here).

"either drowning in detail they cannot accommodate or aspiring for a sense of order through abstraction they cannot attain"

This is about having efficient and effective salience landscapes, to facilitate cognitive grip. I like Vervaeke on this, and recovering our understanding of the role and importance of wisdom. When we have a good model of our self and the world, a heurustic explanatory overlay, it makes things tractable: chemistry forms units of explanation reducible to particle physics but more efficient in it's area, and in biology there is the 'unreasonable ineffectiveness of mathematics' exactly because this field is about systems that amplify the complexity of systems beyond that of chemistry alone (ie. it's systems that harvest Gibbs free energy to maintain local complexity).

Also multi-level selection, and game-theory applied to ethics, make sense of the non-individuality of ethics. And the intersubjective picture makes sense of Deleuze's virtuality, and interdiscursivity in general framed as translating between the realities of communities embodied in different modes of life (salience landscapes).

So I look at Singer's 'expanding the circle of moral concern' as a way to act ethically which expands our reality, and invites more beings into participation with our reality-creating discourses. That is moral progress, which deepens our engagement with reality, in ways that extend and develop what it is to be.

Answer 2

A few quick points and arrows, since there's something very interesting around you're hitting upon here. (I wonder if you can't draw it out a little bit further?)

There might be a line of inquiry here around the world-historical role of philosophy: perhaps to what extent it actually arrests thinking/abstraction (or did historically, this is something Deleuze for instance is curious about); and on the other hand how philosophy "hides" its real-structure-in-the-world behind the indeterminable complexity of the concepts it proliferates.

The accelerating complexity of the world is (more or less plainly) coupled with a reduction of the scope of ethics to theories of (efficient, agile) administration. This is something Baudrillard is particularly concerned with; and framed as a more general historical phase-shift is something Foucault is also curious about (his concept of governmentality would be something to investigate around this.)

Too quickly -- perhaps Virilio's ideas about the weaponization of speed could be relevant here as well. Negative Horizon seems maybe an interesting text to investigate in this direction, in terms of how to "live" an ethics after the Disaster, after the traumatic disappearance of distance. He seems particularly urgent in terms of crafting life-practices, though again there is a sterility here, a strangely "terminal" or administrative ethics, even though it is operating in a chaotic milieu of continuously exponentiating powers. Whereas of course there are other kinds of ethical visions entirely (which it might be worth returning to Spinoza to see clearly.)

Answer 3

I think that you are all assuming that the lay want or have a intrinsic need of ethic or moral highbrow . silly, one could only assume as much from local peers , in a meeting , or in a debate in class. I will assume that most are unbothered with any type of over-complex ambiguity. contrary to belief or puff in ones breast ,(or size of coin pocket), or price of ones new coupe, there is a constant and hard beat to the drum of survival especially in a world of contemptuous snot nosed choir boys who are so laden with (i wont say privileged because i don't agree with the popular interpretation) but , in-concise thought no- a wisdom that is unobtainable for lazy and presumptuous reasons , ignorant maybe .... i wouldn't dare but before assumption to para-evils and a shameful attempt at insightful thought , instead of citing the most complex blocks of linguistical garbage at an unsuspecting population make sure your IQ is over 120 and do some soul searching because wisdom might be a better suit than knowledge for you!