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Let’s give virtue a hand

In our high schools and colleges you will often find that the BMOC (Big Man on Campus) is a student engaged in the central attraction of that institution. On the campus where football is king the BMOC is a football player, on the campus where basketball is king the BMOC is a basketball player, on the campus where scholarship is king the BMOC—wait a minute, who ever heard of a campus where scholarship is king. This is, perhaps, a slight exaggeration, I am sure such a campus must exist, somewhere.

In the 1920s the campuses where “the most far-reaching revolution of the twentieth century was born in an idyll: a picturesque park in Copenhagen, a quiet side street in Berne, the shore of the island of Heligoland, the meadows and tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the…” In these European campuses the young geniuses of physics, the BMOCs of the century, gave birth to “the tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could only be compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus.” The age of the atom was midwifed by this small group of geniuses.

If a high school or college were to shift emphasis from football to basketball, over night the BMOC would change. I think that we Americans, and probably others, need to shift emphasis from what Kuhn identified as Normal Science to those domains of knowledge that are commonly called the Social Sciences. Physicists have been our BMOC but I claim that we need to develop a climate that fosters public concern upon matters that are identified as virtue.

Virtue, according to John Dewey, is “Every natural capacity, every talent or ability, whether of inquiring mind, of gentle affection, or of executive skill, becomes a virtue when it is turned to account in supporting or extending the fabric of social values”. In other words, the virtuous person is s/he who directs a personal talent toward the betterment of the community.

I am informed by Ernest Becker that many social scientists have accepted the notion that ‘value judgments’ or ‘moral questions’ are rationally undecidable. As such, most social theorists “simply assume that any agent, who acts on the basis of a moral principle, or a social norm, is not rationally justified in doing so. This is what underlies the widespread tendency among social theorists to assume that instrumental action is the only form of rational action, and that norm-governed action must have some kind of nonrational source, such as conditioning, socialization, or habit.”

I am not schooled in the social sciences but I have spent some time trying to learn these ideas about which the social sciences deal. I know enough about these matters to conclude that our society needs to put much greater emphasis in these domains of knowledge. Our focus seems to be entirely on the natural sciences and that emphasis is reveled in the success of these sciences. However I think we overemphasize the natural sciences at the expense of the social sciences.

I think that society needs to reevaluate our value systems in order to create a consensus about how to reevaluate our value systems, i.e. we need to make social scientists our new BMOCs. What do you think?

One problem I've had with 'values' and 'ethics' is the idea that people have that they are immutable properties of the cosmos and not a human convention. We decide what is "good" in its own right using the best judgment. The idea is that if people follow the abstract good that society will better itself.

Of course these fellows respond to my concern with assertions about my thinking "it's okay to rape, murder," etc. Of course that's not what I think - nor is it a reasonable inference from the opinion I stated without making a lot of other assumptions which I do not hold.

However, I was at a complexity conference this weekend and heard a world leader in simulation talking. Without our current level of processing power, Agent Based Models (ABMs) using evolutionary algorithms can simulate on the order of 100s of millions of entities. Soon we will be able to do 10s of billions. We can either simulate 10s of billions with simple rules or a few thousand with complex rules. This will give us the ability to understand the landscape of potential consequences of our making policies that reflect our values. In a few decades our entire democratic process can change.

As with the weather, social systems are chaotic. The early predictive weather models were not very accurate, but they were a stepping stone to what we have now - models that are accurate out to a few days or weeks. We have different models, of course, that operate with less precision (and possibly also less accuracy) over a much coarser time frame (thousands or millions of years).

There already exist some primitive social models.