Society is a Non-Zero Sum Game
I finally decided to give Democracy player a go. It’s pretty good, especially as you can go down a channel just clicking one download button after another.
I’ve been using it to watch TED talks, which, between download binges and being arsed to transfer them to other devices, I’ve only watched sporadically before.
Robert Wright makes a lot of sense to me: Society is a non-zero sum game (globalisation correlates wellbeing), moral acts are grounded in self interest, moral evolution is required if societies are going to cope from now on. He skates by 4th Generation Warfare and P2P too.
Ethical behaviour as socially enlightened and self interested action has been my defense for years against religiously grounded arguments claiming that atheists have no morality.
I’ve been reading on and poking models of universal human needs for a while as empathic tools that encourage moral behaviour, along with the implication that morality emerges from our biology rather than being thrust upon us from on high.
One thing that has been clear to me is that cultures are largely too immature to deal with globalisation. It takes individual will to counteract pathogenic cultural values.
To find a big picture argument converging on the same area is fairly exciting. Robert’s “Business class morality” encourages me.