Why do we need ethics and culture?
[ 15/6/20 ]
For me, ethics is a subset of culture.
Ethics seems to me to be some evolved approximation to a set of prescriptions on activities that are either required to be performed or required to be avoided, for the survival of a cooperative society.
In that sense, the stories that we have about ideas like right and wrong seem to be narratives that keep the behaviours present and active in our societies. Those that actually work, long term, are the ones that have stood the test of time.
And we live in exponentially changing times.
We need to start to seriously appreciate that our security and freedom are optimized in cooperative contexts; but it only works if we all accept that we have social and ecological responsibilities, and their exact nature will always be uncertain, and require us to work at figuring them out (which has kind of looped back to ethics again – biology tends to do that, if you look into it deeply enough).
