The natural order concept and a discussion of moral mathematics

The natural order of things

What is the natural order? The concept of natural order relates to the concept of natural law. Natural law is the law which exists in absence of man made law. Natural law in this philosophical context is meant to represent the law of nature, of dog eat dog.

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say, while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered, little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodelled by early and continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not top-down dirigisme.

In philosophy, the natural order is the moral source from which natural law seeks to derive its authority. Natural order encompasses the natural relations of beings to one another in the absence of law, which natural law attempts to reinforce. This is related to Dharma.

The concept of the natural order provides the moral source behind natural law.

Natural law (Latin: ius naturale, lex naturalis) is a philosophy asserting that certain rights are inherent by virtue of human nature, endowed by nature—traditionally by God or a transcendent source—and that these can be understood universally through human reason. As determined by nature, the law of nature is implied to be universal,[1] existing independently of the positive law of a given state, political order, legislature or society at large.

An example of natural law could be the concept of might makes right. Another example could be the ends justify the means. What does this mean exactly? In my previous post I discussed the concept of moralism. Morality takes different forms and moral realism is based in that moral sentences are speaking about some objective reality. This idea of objective morality is an idea that I myself have never found sufficient evidence to show it exists. What I have seen that does exist are moral sentiments and a concept which I'll label as moral consensus. This moral consensus could be based on facts, or based in ignorance. The moral consensus could be arrived at based on disinformation (misinterpretation of facts) or misinformation (lies) or deliberate black propaganda from clandestine forces seeking to create instability in society.

My opinions on morality align more closely with moral skepticism. I do not believe human individuals can truly be moral.

Moral skepticism (or moral scepticism) is a class of metaethical theories all members of which entail that no one has any moral knowledge. Many moral skeptics also make the stronger, modal claim that moral knowledge is impossible. Moral skepticism is particularly opposed to moral realism: the view that there are knowable and objective moral truths.

I think for most people morality is hit or miss, learned from self experience or experiences of people around at the time. There are also traditions, norms, best practices, but no one really has in my opinion perfect knowledge, perfect understanding, perfect wisdom, and perfect morality. It may be the case that perfect understanding is impossible and in fact the human brain has physical limitations in areas critically necessary for morality. I think human beings at best spend a lifetime of self improvement trying to develop an ever improving moral compass. I do not think the human brain by itself can scale to have enough awareness of even some simple sounding situations in order to make the highest quality decisions.

The model based approach to decision making

The concept of decision analysis works based around the individual decision maker (the individual responsible for the decision) relying on the methods of mathematics to improve decision quality. The concept of a mathematical model is the specific method by which a proper decision analysis can take place. Managers are people in position to make important decisions for organizations which may effect others within and or outside of that organization. Managers may be familiar with time series analysis, spreadsheet solvers, discriminant analysis, etc. Management scientists may be familiar also with a category of problems classified as LP problems and with the technique called linear programming.

Linear programming (LP, also called linear optimization) is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements are represented by linear relationships. Linear programming is a special case of mathematical programming (mathematical optimization).

Linear programming is a mechanism which can take advantage of a mathematical model in order to produce a mathematical optimization. If you're aiming for maximum profit, or lowest cost, for instance, then you're trying for a linear optimization. This is in essence mathematics but it is also morality. In morality there are values, and there are choices. The values are whatever the individual decides is important to his or her or the organization's interests. The choices are always changing of course but these choices are most often not equal in terms of costs and rewards in relation to those interests.

Profit and cost are something related to morality as well because bad decisions are bad because the costs are high and profits low. In other words if it's a decision which leads to a loss against the short and or long term interests of the entity making the decision then thats a cost. Sometimes there are even situations where all the decisions are bad (costly) and there is no win. These are called no win situations, such as if all doors lead to a painful death or increased suffering in life.

A no-win situation, also called a “lose-lose situation”, is one where a person has choices, but no choice leads to a net gain. For example, if an executioner offers the condemned the choice of death by being hanged, shot, or poisoned, all choices lead to death; the condemned is in a no-win situation. This bleak situation gives the chooser no room: whichever choice is made the person making it will lose their life. Less drastic situations may also be considered no-win situations - if one has a choice for lunch between a ham sandwich and a roast beef sandwich, but is a vegetarian or has a wheat allergy, that might also be considered a no-win situation.

Human beings face these messed up situations all the time. Human beings can seek advice from other human beings who can give advice but if all choices are "lose lose" then there is no choice which is a net positive. Indeed some human beings set other humans up to be in these no win situations as a kind of attack:

Setting up to fail is a phrase denoting a no-win situation designed in such a way that the person in the situation cannot succeed at the task which they have been assigned. It is considered a form of workplace bullying.[1

Being set up to fail is to allow someone to assume a position of authority on a sinking ship. At first this person might think they are winning the game because they were promoted only to find out that they were only promoted into an undesirable position which none of the other players wanted to be in.

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_order_(philosophy)
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-win_situation
5. https://www.spectator.co.uk/2009/01/the-natural-order-of-things/