Dear Pedro, Michael and colleagues,
After a long silence in these exciting FIS discussions, I would like to
share with you just a couple of comments inspired in the elegant messages
exchanged.
What is the type of information required to be integral, to reach
individual's completeness? In my opinion, Integrity, in the sense referred
by Michael, requires a much deeper knowledge than just intellectual
knowledge: it requires to realize it, to deeply assume it. In my opinion it
is not either a question of, say, "blind belief" in some behavior or
something doctrinal. Integrity, in the sense I understood to Michael, comes
naturally as a result of personal maturity and experience. Therefore, in
the context of this great discussion on Ethics and Information I wonder:
- what kind or what type of information is required to reach individual's
completeness?, and also,
- where this information can be obtained?
A second comment very much connected with the previous one.
Somebody said (Socrates, I think) that human beings' evil does not exist,
it is just a question of ignorance. Again, a similar question arises to me:
What kind of information could be the "antidote" of human evil? Does this
question make a very special sense in our globalized societies?
All the best,
Luis
---------------------------------------
Luis M. Serra
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
University of Zaragoza, Spain.
At 15:04 27/04/2006 +0200, you wrote:
Dear Michael and colleagues,
Am afraid I cannot make such elegant a response to your comments as Stan
has done. Both the "integrity" of the individual and his/her
"contemplation" of the natural environment appear indeed as crucial
factors for the ethical standpoint. I do not see very clearly how to
connect them--but will try. Who would deny that the ethical discourse on
the environment is so much central, appreciated and concerned nowadays?
(Even solitary Mr. Robinson would be judged ethically by contemporary
ecologists on how respectfully he behaved and afforded his living upon the
island environment.) Cultural, economic, religious factors may be invoked
in more general terms, but perhaps the personal decorum around the
"complete" individual has been the basic engine in the development of
social ethics. It is part of the ideal of scholarship in science.
Visionary individuals who have sculpted the subtle system of rewards and
punishments --on personal reputations basically-- that propel
organizational networks and maintain cooperation in complex societies. It
is not that most people are "good" per se, but that a relatively
well-designed social order makes cheating behaviors unattractive --taking
for free group's benefits and running away.
Thus, apart from its inherent aesthetical aspects, "integrity" would
convey an untractable informational problem about the individual's
behavioral evaluation of the total milieu. The discussion on ethics,
pushing it at its most impossible or "Quixotic" extremes, takes us to
impossible or "foundational problems" of information science. Seemingly,
in order to grasp them, it is necessary that we break away from quite a
few obsolete ways of thinking and disciplinary walls.
best
Pedro
At 10:35 25/04/2006, you wrote:
Dear Pedro,
I find your statement, that Robinson Crusoe did not need
any ethics in his solitary island, very intellectually stimulating.
I actually take the opposite view of ethics. I believe that
the ethical individual is one who has INTEGRITY.
Integrity means completeness. An individual's completeness
is tested most by their capacity to be alone.
If an individual can be alone, indeed prefers to be alone,
then they are complete. This will mean that they have
no need to use another person, steal from them, exploit them,
and generally have an existence that is parasitic on
another person.
A complete individual, one with integrity, can enter society
without the need to use others, exploit them, etc.
I argue therefore that, paradoxically, ethics towards others
actually begins with the capacity for aloneness.
The unethical individual is empty - and strives always to
maintain that emptiness, by avoiding internal growth,
inward examination and self-understanding.
This constant flight from self sends them continually
in search for others upon whom they are entirely dependent.
They have no identity other than what they can steal from others.
It is the relation that an individual has to themselves,
when alone, that determines their relation to others.
By the way, Pedro, thank you so much for creating
such an interesting debate on ethics.
best
Michael
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