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Gerald F. Gaus Biography

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“Societies that have successfully coped with moral diversity at one level may well be those that can continue expanding their moral networks because they have achieved wider-based, more impartial, justification. In 'climbing the ladder' of wider appeal in a diverse society, they have crafted their rules to accommodate greater diversity. Note here that the very justificatory competency that is critical to a stable shared moral rule also can be employed to undermine the current rule and move to a new publicly justified rule. Justification must be able to perform this destabilizing role of a cooperative moral system is to learn and adapt. A recent analyses such as Haidt's, Stanford's, and DeScioli and Kurzban's have recognized, any adequate account of morality must be able to induce change as well as provide stability. Moral diversity and conflict may be an engine of moral reform, pointing toward a new cooperative equilibrium. On the other hand, we should expect continued conflict on many matters, 'As moral projects climb the ladder to broader audiences (being recast and potentially applied to increasingly broader sets of individuals), any given individual will be bombarded with increasing numbers of candidate moral rules.”

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Book:The Open Society and Its Complexities
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“To say that the Open Society is one of ever-increasing diversity and complexity is not to say that all complexity is consistent with it. We need to inquire into the conditions that facilitate the sort of bottom-up self-organization we have been analyzing. Social morality is critical in this regard. The key of ultra-social life under conditions of disagreement is reconciliation on shared rules. It has never been the case that humans were able to live together because they simply shared common goals; we are primates, not ant, and so cooperation always needs to be reconciled with sharp differences and conflicts. Socially shared moral rules, it will be recalled, allow humans to develop both the common expectations and practices of accountability on which effective cooperation depends. The moral rules of a complex society serve to dampen its complexity with some firm expectations in the midst of constant adjustments. As Hayek insisted, without shared moral rules the highly diverse reflexive actors of the Open Society could not even begin to effectively coordinate their actions. Shared moral rules allow for significant prediction of what others will do - or, more accurately, not do. Yet, at the same time, while providing expectations on which to base planning, they must also leave individuals with great latitude to adjust their actions to the constant novelty which complexity generates. These two desiderata push in opposite directions: one toward stability of expectations, the other toward freedom to change them. Successfully securing both is the main challenge of the morality of an Open Society.”

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Book:The Open Society and Its Complexities
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“In contrast to the traditional idea of creative discovery as great leaps into the unknown by the 'man of genius' - the exploration of the adjacent possible by diverse perspectives can explain autocatalytic innovation within the context of cultural learning and conformity. The growth of diversity is self-accelerating because the size of the possible exponentially increases with the dimensions of the attributes being tinkered with.”

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“That the Open Society cannot exist without extensive individual property rights that clearly identify endowments and freedom to employ them does not imply that all resources, much less all decision-making, is to be privatized. Whether privatization is the best way to make resource decisions depends on the nature of the resources and the moral norms of a population. Consequently, it is mistake to claim that the Open Society requires 'full liberal ownership rights' over the maximally large range of resources. This merits emphasis: that robust individual property rights are required for the Open Society does not entail that expanding the sphere of private property is always friendly to the Open Society.”

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Book:The Open Society and Its Complexities
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“We can now apply our lessons from our discussion of multilevel selection: if there are two levels of selection operating on a moral rule, then the strength of the different selective pressures will be critical in determining which of the two is more influential. If cultural competition decreases or moderates, then we can expect INDIVIDUAL-level selection to be a much stronger determinant. An interesting hypothesis thus emerges: if cultural evolution is genuinely multilevel in this way, then in eras of decreased GROUP competition, public justification of a rule should be a much stronger force in a rule's selection as it is competing for individual agents' endorsement against alternative rules. On the other hand, in eras of intense inter-group competition, we should expect that rules are not well-aligned with the moral commitment of individuals, but which are selected at the group level, may predominate. This in turn, leads to another important point. In multilevel analysis, effective high-level GROUP selection inherently restraints lower-level INDIVIDUAL selection. There really is no point to invoking higher-level selection if it does not. In the evolution of cooperation literature, the point of invoking a GROUP-level selection is to restrain the success of INDIVIDUAL (selfish) agents so that within-group less adaptive, cooperative agents can thrive. A mammal can be seen as a case of GROUP-level selection, insofar as the possible strategies of individual cells are constrained by the adaptive needs of the GROUP (individual mammal). A cancer cell is precisely a part that has broken free of these restraints, and because of this threatens ultimately system collapse. We might say, in a rough and ready way, that restricting the social influence of INDIVIDUAL-level preferences (in which a rule's within group fitness is determined by its attractiveness to individuals) in order to secure system-wide functionality is precisely what GROUP selection accomplishes. If GROUP-level pressures are great, the rules will be less responsive to the aims of the INDIVIDUAL agents, and indeed significantly restricting their actions will be critical to the culture's success. When GROUP-level selection is strong, it is entirely appropriate to call a culture a 'superorganism.' In such a culture, rules will tend to be more restrictive, and public justification may be less important”

IndividualRulesGroupGroup SelectionMulti Level SelectionOrganismmorality
Book:The Open Society and Its Complexities
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