Relation Between Ethics and Values

Contextual Quote

< "Ethics ... is not about obedience to rules, but about maintaining the conditions for sustainable self-organization at individual, social, and planetary scales."> 

Francis Heylighen:

"Values emerge from the constraints imposed by self-organizing systems. Across physics, biology, cognition, and society, self-organizing systems survive and grow only if they satisfy a small set of universal conditions:

• synergy (their components must mutually support each other, so that they survive better together than on their own), • integration (these components must coordinate without rigid control) • differentiation or diversity (they must explore multiple possibilities) adaptiveness (they must respond flexibly to change), • openness (they depend on their environment for resources and information), • learning (they must maintain and develop useful knowledge)

These are not absolute moral commandments. They are evolutionary selection criteria, determining whether a system is fit enough to survive natural selection. Systems that ignore them eventually break down; systems that satisfy them persist. More traditional human values—such as freedom, cooperation, truth-seeking, empathy, creativity, and responsibility—are more concrete implications of these evolutionary values. They can be understood as norms that enhance the viability of self-organizing social and cognitive systems. Conversely, domination, deception, closed-mindedness, polarization, and short-term exploitation are not merely “immoral”; they are dynamically unstable strategies that undermine the systems that depend on them."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/meaning-and-values-in-the-noosphere )