Thank you so much for sharing. I can deeply relate to the experience you described—how waiting can stir up a whole stream of emotions and thoughts. I’ve been reflecting on how to reconnect with nature and surrender to what is. In the process, I’ve become more aware of how my patterns of control can lead to unnecessary suffering, and how vital it is to remember our true nature as human beings—part of a much larger, natural reality.
Letting go of control and asking myself what truly matters in the present moment has been one of the most meaningful lessons I’ve gained from Prosocial World. The nine elements of Prosocial Spirituality help me stay grounded in the awareness of my interconnectedness with all things and remind me of the importance of humility and the quality of my presence to claim my place in the cosmos and become part of the natural order and its harmony.
Thanks to Prosocial, these priceless lessons continue to shape my life each day. I’m deeply grateful for the work you’re doing.
In answer to your closing question, I thought #3 (Beyond Rigid Rules) and #4 (Values Give Direction and Motivation) resonated most strongly with me. As an evolutionary philosopher, I think these fit very well with my thoughts on linking morality to epistemology in order to bring different moral systems together into a cohesive whole. The three main philosophical camps of morality are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Rigid rules are a kind of deontology, but since the universe is always evolving, these can easily get stuck and become a mismatch. As for consequentialism, we can't always know the consequences of our actions. Or we may be working in new spaces where deontological rules haven't been developed yet. In these uncertain (epistemologically opaque) situations, it may be best to rely on virtue ethics (akin to organizational values) to guide us while we conduct trials and errors to see what does end up working best. I wonder how that all lands with you and if it might be helpful to expand on it.
Thanks Ed, So you are linking the CBS worldview most closely to virtue ethics rather than consequentialism or deontology. If I have read you correctly, I totally agree re deontology but your post got me thinking about consequentialism. CBS is most closely aligned with American pragmatism, so doing 'what works' is to develop a set of contextually related goals that are a bit more specific than some kind of acontextual 'thriving' or 'utility' . So yes we often do not know whether something has truly worked or is likely to work, but we keep on checking to make sure if it has . In that sense, I suspect CBS is more consequentialist than virtue ethics based but I am not sure. I would love to hear what you think.
So, what I was actually (inartfully) driving at is that your post touched on all three of the major camps of ethics. I wouldn't want to favor one over the other. In my ethical writing, I am working on showing how all three of these camps (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics) can be united by recognizing that they are each useful in some epistemic contexts and not useful in others. That is why all three have developed and all three continue to stand. To restate it quickly, I might say the CBS worldview is concerned with consequences so it could be deontological when we are sure that rigid rules will work, but we might have to lean on virtue ethics to guide our actions through uncertain times towards the consequences that we will evaluate as they become apparent. Hopefully that makes more sense.
As a further point, I would poke and prod to ask "which consequences" are CBS concerned with? "Contextually related goals" are fine if there is no fear of having an amoral goal. That may be fine in most therapeutic situations. But that isn't what moral philosophers wrestle with. They look for a "summum bonum" or "highest good" (such as thriving or utility, or "more and more robust survival" for me), which helps one make decisions between two actions that will each cause some kind of harm. Deciding which one is necessary for the greater good is the tricky part. To attempt to steel man CBS, I would guess solving such questions would entail another level up of contextually related goals. My search as a philosopher is to keep going up and up (or down and down) until I've found the elusive summum bonum. It's a bit like "root cause analysis" in the business world where Toyota famously instituted a "7 Why's" principle to really solve their production problems. It doesn't always take 7 iterations, but the point is to keep asking why until you get to the root cause.
Thanks Ed. I understand your position much more clearly now in relation to "I might say the CBS worldview is concerned with consequences so it could be deontological when we are sure that rigid rules will work, but we might have to lean on virtue ethics to guide our actions through uncertain times towards the consequences that we will evaluate as they become apparent."
But in relation to your second paragraph, isnt the problem though that one gets lost in abstraction? I could say that my highest good is 'thriving' or 'utility' but neither of these things means anything without context. How do I know I am thriving? Because I am healthy in context. How do I know this has utility for me? Because I behave as if it has utility in a context - I smile, I ask for more etc. I get the search for absolutes, I just wonder if it is to lose oneself in abstraction when in actuality we are complex adaptive systems operating in contexts.
That's great that you get my first point about uniting the three traditional camps of morality because that is a big deal. (At least I think it is.) Thank you!
As for the further point about abstractions vs concrete context, I think this is another case of "yes and" rather than "either or". It would be impossible to live only in abstraction — one would be oblivious to the world around you. As evolved creatures, we are certainly linked to a past where no abstractions were cognitively possible and so those earlier animals were indeed "complex adaptive systems operating in contexts." However, now that we have abstractions open to our minds, and we can look further and further into the future for our consequences, we are faced with difficult questions of how to trade off some actions for others. I think searching for the right abstract "summum bonum" is crucial here.
Take for example the fact that liberals democracies are built on "the harm principle" of John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians. Attempts to avoid harm are how we build legal codes and judge actions. But as the legal scholar Bernard Harcout wrote in 2000, we have seen "The Collapse of the Harm Principle."
Without an agreed upon definition of (the abstract term) harm, our legal systems have started to resort to might makes right — whoever is in power gets to define which harms matter most: to God and country, to America, to LGBT+, to traditional values, to the economy, to humans, to wildlife, to ecosystems, etc. etc. etc.. To rectify that, i.e. in order to rebuild the harm principle, I think we need to work on the abstraction of a proper definition of harm. Individual contexts alone won't get us there. That's a paper my criminologist wife and I published in Australia's top legal journal in 2020:
"Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice"
Of course, one still has to apply this abstraction down and down into all sorts of contexts, which is hard. So I developed another framework for that based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs for individuals, E.O. Wilson's consilience to account for all of life, and the Balanced Scorecard by Harvard Business School professors Kaplan and Norton to weigh multiple concerns at once. I called that an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs.
"Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs"
Sorry for dropping all of those articles at once. You don't need to read them to get my main points, which are that that I think we need to 1) consider all contexts, in order to 2) draw the right abstractions, which can then 3) be applied to future contexts, in 4) an ongoing, iterated, evolving fashion.
I hope I haven't gone too far into philosophical abstract land to make sense there! It happens all too easily. : )
Ed - I so appreciate you taking the time to share this, and I would welcome anyone else reading this to jump into the conversation (if there is anyone else seeing this gold you are creating! :-) Your Maslow article encourages us to step outside the frame of the individual and imagine universal needs of all life. I love it - not least because it is about shared purpose. You argue in both your papers together that humanity must align with an evolutionary purpose that transcends individual or species-level interests to ensure the survival and flourishing of all life. I think you have convinced me that the effort to find abstracted general principles of 'good' and 'harm' is a worthwhile pursuit, if for nothing else than it gets people to talk about what these terms mean to them. As you know, this kind of discussion about what really matters to me and to us is at the heart of the ProSocial approach. You and philosophers like you are really calling on humanity to do the work to try to come to agreement about what thriving really is. Fantastic!
This means the world to me, Paul. Thank you so much for your generous comments and for taking the time to read what I wrote. I was slow to respond because I've had some health issues lately that have taken all of my attention. But they have also put me in a reflective mood about my life and purpose so your kind words have landed in a deeply meaningful way for me. Thank you again. When I'm a bit healthier, I have a paper to finish for ProSocial World's peer-reviewed journal, which I hope will spark some more discussion. Until then, I'll keep following you for more of your gold too. Cheers!
It has been said of myself that I "want to know the far end of a fart" and so it is that without any education in psychology, with only my intense interest in helping humanity through the bottleneck it's approaching, I have ordered The ABC's of Human Behaviour. (:
Great Allan, I look forward to learning how it lands for you. I think you will find it very clear but please do know it was written with clinicians in mind so you will need to do some translation to your context. Still I think it is clear enough that that should be easy. Thanks so much for the paid subscription too. We are building a great little cohort there.
I’m familiar with CBS, but the application to group dynamics was really clear and helpful. The ‘Look for this’ section made it so easy to think about the relevant behaviours. Thank you.
Oh wonderful! thank you so much for the feedback Toni. I am trying to make it as clear and useful as possible so this really helps to know I am on the right track. Thank you.
Dear Paul,
Thank you so much for sharing. I can deeply relate to the experience you described—how waiting can stir up a whole stream of emotions and thoughts. I’ve been reflecting on how to reconnect with nature and surrender to what is. In the process, I’ve become more aware of how my patterns of control can lead to unnecessary suffering, and how vital it is to remember our true nature as human beings—part of a much larger, natural reality.
Letting go of control and asking myself what truly matters in the present moment has been one of the most meaningful lessons I’ve gained from Prosocial World. The nine elements of Prosocial Spirituality help me stay grounded in the awareness of my interconnectedness with all things and remind me of the importance of humility and the quality of my presence to claim my place in the cosmos and become part of the natural order and its harmony.
Thanks to Prosocial, these priceless lessons continue to shape my life each day. I’m deeply grateful for the work you’re doing.
thanks for sharing Andrea, it is wonderful to have you in our community!
In answer to your closing question, I thought #3 (Beyond Rigid Rules) and #4 (Values Give Direction and Motivation) resonated most strongly with me. As an evolutionary philosopher, I think these fit very well with my thoughts on linking morality to epistemology in order to bring different moral systems together into a cohesive whole. The three main philosophical camps of morality are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Rigid rules are a kind of deontology, but since the universe is always evolving, these can easily get stuck and become a mismatch. As for consequentialism, we can't always know the consequences of our actions. Or we may be working in new spaces where deontological rules haven't been developed yet. In these uncertain (epistemologically opaque) situations, it may be best to rely on virtue ethics (akin to organizational values) to guide us while we conduct trials and errors to see what does end up working best. I wonder how that all lands with you and if it might be helpful to expand on it.
Thanks Ed, So you are linking the CBS worldview most closely to virtue ethics rather than consequentialism or deontology. If I have read you correctly, I totally agree re deontology but your post got me thinking about consequentialism. CBS is most closely aligned with American pragmatism, so doing 'what works' is to develop a set of contextually related goals that are a bit more specific than some kind of acontextual 'thriving' or 'utility' . So yes we often do not know whether something has truly worked or is likely to work, but we keep on checking to make sure if it has . In that sense, I suspect CBS is more consequentialist than virtue ethics based but I am not sure. I would love to hear what you think.
So, what I was actually (inartfully) driving at is that your post touched on all three of the major camps of ethics. I wouldn't want to favor one over the other. In my ethical writing, I am working on showing how all three of these camps (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics) can be united by recognizing that they are each useful in some epistemic contexts and not useful in others. That is why all three have developed and all three continue to stand. To restate it quickly, I might say the CBS worldview is concerned with consequences so it could be deontological when we are sure that rigid rules will work, but we might have to lean on virtue ethics to guide our actions through uncertain times towards the consequences that we will evaluate as they become apparent. Hopefully that makes more sense.
As a further point, I would poke and prod to ask "which consequences" are CBS concerned with? "Contextually related goals" are fine if there is no fear of having an amoral goal. That may be fine in most therapeutic situations. But that isn't what moral philosophers wrestle with. They look for a "summum bonum" or "highest good" (such as thriving or utility, or "more and more robust survival" for me), which helps one make decisions between two actions that will each cause some kind of harm. Deciding which one is necessary for the greater good is the tricky part. To attempt to steel man CBS, I would guess solving such questions would entail another level up of contextually related goals. My search as a philosopher is to keep going up and up (or down and down) until I've found the elusive summum bonum. It's a bit like "root cause analysis" in the business world where Toyota famously instituted a "7 Why's" principle to really solve their production problems. It doesn't always take 7 iterations, but the point is to keep asking why until you get to the root cause.
Thanks Ed. I understand your position much more clearly now in relation to "I might say the CBS worldview is concerned with consequences so it could be deontological when we are sure that rigid rules will work, but we might have to lean on virtue ethics to guide our actions through uncertain times towards the consequences that we will evaluate as they become apparent."
But in relation to your second paragraph, isnt the problem though that one gets lost in abstraction? I could say that my highest good is 'thriving' or 'utility' but neither of these things means anything without context. How do I know I am thriving? Because I am healthy in context. How do I know this has utility for me? Because I behave as if it has utility in a context - I smile, I ask for more etc. I get the search for absolutes, I just wonder if it is to lose oneself in abstraction when in actuality we are complex adaptive systems operating in contexts.
That's great that you get my first point about uniting the three traditional camps of morality because that is a big deal. (At least I think it is.) Thank you!
As for the further point about abstractions vs concrete context, I think this is another case of "yes and" rather than "either or". It would be impossible to live only in abstraction — one would be oblivious to the world around you. As evolved creatures, we are certainly linked to a past where no abstractions were cognitively possible and so those earlier animals were indeed "complex adaptive systems operating in contexts." However, now that we have abstractions open to our minds, and we can look further and further into the future for our consequences, we are faced with difficult questions of how to trade off some actions for others. I think searching for the right abstract "summum bonum" is crucial here.
Take for example the fact that liberals democracies are built on "the harm principle" of John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians. Attempts to avoid harm are how we build legal codes and judge actions. But as the legal scholar Bernard Harcout wrote in 2000, we have seen "The Collapse of the Harm Principle."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=232124
Without an agreed upon definition of (the abstract term) harm, our legal systems have started to resort to might makes right — whoever is in power gets to define which harms matter most: to God and country, to America, to LGBT+, to traditional values, to the economy, to humans, to wildlife, to ecosystems, etc. etc. etc.. To rectify that, i.e. in order to rebuild the harm principle, I think we need to work on the abstraction of a proper definition of harm. Individual contexts alone won't get us there. That's a paper my criminologist wife and I published in Australia's top legal journal in 2020:
"Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice"
https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/article/view/1280
Of course, one still has to apply this abstraction down and down into all sorts of contexts, which is hard. So I developed another framework for that based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs for individuals, E.O. Wilson's consilience to account for all of life, and the Balanced Scorecard by Harvard Business School professors Kaplan and Norton to weigh multiple concerns at once. I called that an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs.
"Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs"
https://www.evphil.com/replacing-maslow.html
Sorry for dropping all of those articles at once. You don't need to read them to get my main points, which are that that I think we need to 1) consider all contexts, in order to 2) draw the right abstractions, which can then 3) be applied to future contexts, in 4) an ongoing, iterated, evolving fashion.
I hope I haven't gone too far into philosophical abstract land to make sense there! It happens all too easily. : )
Ed - I so appreciate you taking the time to share this, and I would welcome anyone else reading this to jump into the conversation (if there is anyone else seeing this gold you are creating! :-) Your Maslow article encourages us to step outside the frame of the individual and imagine universal needs of all life. I love it - not least because it is about shared purpose. You argue in both your papers together that humanity must align with an evolutionary purpose that transcends individual or species-level interests to ensure the survival and flourishing of all life. I think you have convinced me that the effort to find abstracted general principles of 'good' and 'harm' is a worthwhile pursuit, if for nothing else than it gets people to talk about what these terms mean to them. As you know, this kind of discussion about what really matters to me and to us is at the heart of the ProSocial approach. You and philosophers like you are really calling on humanity to do the work to try to come to agreement about what thriving really is. Fantastic!
This means the world to me, Paul. Thank you so much for your generous comments and for taking the time to read what I wrote. I was slow to respond because I've had some health issues lately that have taken all of my attention. But they have also put me in a reflective mood about my life and purpose so your kind words have landed in a deeply meaningful way for me. Thank you again. When I'm a bit healthier, I have a paper to finish for ProSocial World's peer-reviewed journal, which I hope will spark some more discussion. Until then, I'll keep following you for more of your gold too. Cheers!
It has been said of myself that I "want to know the far end of a fart" and so it is that without any education in psychology, with only my intense interest in helping humanity through the bottleneck it's approaching, I have ordered The ABC's of Human Behaviour. (:
Great Allan, I look forward to learning how it lands for you. I think you will find it very clear but please do know it was written with clinicians in mind so you will need to do some translation to your context. Still I think it is clear enough that that should be easy. Thanks so much for the paid subscription too. We are building a great little cohort there.
I’m familiar with CBS, but the application to group dynamics was really clear and helpful. The ‘Look for this’ section made it so easy to think about the relevant behaviours. Thank you.
Oh wonderful! thank you so much for the feedback Toni. I am trying to make it as clear and useful as possible so this really helps to know I am on the right track. Thank you.