Well-being and Prosperity

Related reading

for the concept of the 5 moral spheres read Jonathan Haidt's book "The Righteous Mind" for his Moral Foundations Theory & Steven Pinker's The Moral Instinct article.

for the concepts of Progressive and Conservative used in this blog, read The Marriage of Progressive and Conservative Values

 

Harm, Fairness, Community, Authority, Purity

These five spheres in some way tie back to the wellness of the individual, with harm being the most direct. I'll briefly explore them here since they're already covered extensively in Haidt's book and Pinker's article. 

• Harm sphere involves avoiding harm, specifically avoiding being the source of harm to others. 

• Fairness improves social cohesion by ensuring that individuals can trust that the benefits they provide to others will be reciprocated.

• Community involves loyalty to the group's goals and its members and it acts as the other side of fairness in terms of reciprocation. Additionally failing loyalty checks can at worst result in expulsion from the group which can mean death if the individual can't survive on their own. 

• Authority involves respect for important members of the group whose loyalty cannot be put in jeopardy. Certain members will have unique skills, influence or knowledge that make them valuable and if they don't get the respect, rewards or privileges that they expect in reciprocation then they can retaliate or defect to another group.

• Purity involves intuitive microbiology in the avoidance of pathogens and diseases. The emotion of disgust can also be metaphorically co-opted to avoid the things that could harm one's social standing, like a toothbrush mustache.

These five spheres are conservative in nature since they aim for stability and in general try to keep the group's social cohesion and the wellness of the individual from deteriorating. Conservative and Progressive values have a trend of attempting to keep a low entropy system stable for the former and attempting to further lower entropy in a system for the latter. If there are conservative moral values, could there be progressive moral values?

 

Curiosity, Exploration, Knowledge, Collaboration, Organization

In keeping with the trend of morality being a mechanism to maintain and manipulate entropy to one's benefit, where one side of the moral coin is conservative and maintains entropy low in social settings, I suggest, that these are the other side which aim to reduce entropy further.

• Curiosity bundles together several aspects of mental life into a single concept, it encompasses a willingness to listen, learn, ask searching questions and entertain different perspectives.

• Exploration ties into Curiosity in that it seeks to answer the questions and analyze the different perspectives in a curious mind. It involves testing in small increments, pushing the envelope, what works and what falls apart, pull back just before the brink to test the limits. It can be implemented in different areas of life, mental simulations or scenarios, puzzles, unfamiliar places, artifacts or animals.

• Knowledge builds up from the previous two concepts by discovering and processing Information. It is gained when assertions about information are constantly tested and fail to be proven wrong in a kind of gauntlet in the marketplace of ideas. The scientific method formalizes this into observation->research->hypothesis->experiment->data analysis->report conclusions.

• Collaboration is at its most effective when it can act on knowledge to implement effective action and it involves a willingness to cooperate with others to accomplish things that would be, at best ineffective and at worst impossible, for the individual. Collaborating people can be most effective at constructing buildings, roads, machines, ideas or resolving problems.

• Organization is implemented in and benefits the previous four concepts and it involves putting things and ideas in an order that would be most efficient to access; stuff, data, ideas and memories that have been accessed recently and frequently should be more readily available than things that haven't been needed for a while or frequently. Additionally, it benefits from Categorization.

The conservative moral spheres don't just float in the ether, they are in service of a foundational concept of well being, however, these progressive moral concepts don't seem to be in service of well being, they are instead in service of a foundational concept of prosperity. I suspect that both well being and prosperity form part of the same foundation of evolutionary survival. Nature forces species and individuals within species to compete because resources are limited; if I eat a fish, that fish is no longer available for you to eat. Reciprocity in the group, avoiding harm, etc can allow individuals to stay healthy enough to compete, and the growth that comes from learning and collaborating can allow the individual to avoid being out-competed by others; stagnation can mean death if your competitors can prosper faster than you. Competition isn't just limited to evolution, competition exists wherever resources can be benefited from and wherever resources are limited. Having a moral framework that can give an agent the instinct to seek the things that result in well being and prosperity can give them the advantage necessary to survive.