10.5281/zenodo.3514912
https://zenodo.org/records/3514912
oai:zenodo.org:3514912
Clément Vidal
Clément Vidal
0000-0001-6689-5570
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Francis Heylighen
Francis Heylighen
0000-0001-5823-5898
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Ethics and Complexity: Why standard ethical frameworks cannot cope with socio-technological change
Zenodo
2019
complexity
philosophy
ethics
cybernetics
transhumanism
universal ethics
systems ethics
2019-10-21
10.5281/zenodo.3514911
2.3
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Abstract: Standard ethical frameworks struggle to deal with transhumanism, ecological issues and the rising technodiversity because they are focused on guiding and evaluating human behavior. Ethics needs its Copernican revolution to be able to deal with all moral agents, including not only humans, but also artificial intelligent agents, robots or organizations of all sizes. We argue that embracing the complexity worldview is the first step towards this revolution, and that standard ethical frameworks are still entrenched in the Newtonian worldview. We first spell out the foundational assumptions of the Newtonian worldview, where all change is reduced to material particles following predetermined trajectories governed by the laws of nature. However, modern physical theories such as relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory and thermodynamics have drawn a much more confusing and uncertain picture, and inspired indecisive, subjectivist, relativist, nihilist or postmodern worldviews. Based on cybernetics, systems theory and the new sciences of complexity, we introduce the complexity worldview that sees the world as interactions and their emergent organizations. We use this complexity worldview to show the limitations of standard ethical frameworks such as deontology, theology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, evolutionary ethics and pragmatism.
Keywords: Complexity, philosophy, ethics, cybernetics, transhumanism, universal ethics, systems ethics.
Vidal, C., and F. Heylighen. 2019. "Ethics and Complexity: Why Standard Ethical Frameworks Cannot Cope with Socio-Technological Change." In Investigating Transhumanisms and Their Narratives, edited by P. Jorion. To appear.