ethics

Ethics as an Emergent Property

(First Pass: “Chapter of the Week” 2011) Ethics is a curious cultural creature. What is ethical for one group may well be immoral for another. Certainly there are some ethical rules which span most groups, at least on the surface. ‘Thou shall not kill’ is almost universal, except for the many exceptions, e.g., it’s all […]

Skullduggery is rampant in nature

Google [Nature’s recourse: How plants and animals fight back] to see how plants and animals fight back when mutual arrangements between them go sour. Here’s a short excerpt… Nature has a shifty side. Bees cheat flowers. Flowers cheat bees. Fish cheat other fish, and so on. The more biologists look, the more skullduggery turns up. […]

Tao As Emergent Property

Generally, emergence occurs when something has a trait that its parts don’t have individually. The emergent property exists only when its parts interact in a combined whole. In a Taoist version of this, the ‘simple’ forms the basis upon which the ‘complex’ emerges. Here, I see each layer of existence as an emergent property modeled […]

Innately Ethical

Chapter 38’s A man of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why he has virtue served as a model for raising my sons. Yet, given their Taoist upbringing, it is odd to see how rigidly law abiding they are at times. For example, we headed down the street to order […]