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americanslime  1yr ago (bracero.substack.com)   1253 thread views

Nature Watching Nature

bracero.substack.com

An essay I wrote a while back arguing that dialectical naturalism offers a solid footing for ethics. Since it's pretty core to my moral philosophy, I figured what better to toss to the hounds. Enjoy!

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We simply are and to work your way from that seems good enough for the individual but how do you make such frameworks work for entire societies with varied perceptions and norms among individuals?

Those different individuals, norms, and perceptions exist in a social ecology. They compete, cooperate, exist symbiotically, and change over time in reaction to one another and to broader environmental conditions. It's not clear which of them are "right" per se, because what is "right" in most cases varies depending on a specific set of circumstances-we can and must reason about it, but making claims to knowledge is spurious. The point here is that there is a true "right way," but it changes-thus, no one culture or set of norms that I'm aware of is likely to get everything right at all times. Getting more into the weeds, the parent philosophy of dialectical naturalism is social ecology, which offers dialectical naturalism as an epistemological theory, and communalism as a related political theory.

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