[sudo-discuss] Friday Filosophy, 1/18; The Imperative of Responsibility

[Eddan Katz]

Dear Sudo folk -

A reminder that Friday Filosophy will start at noon again today at Sudo Room.  This week we’ll be talking about the Imperative of Responsibility. The filo dough entree today will again be Spanakopita from Bacheeso's on Grand (http://www.bacheesos.net/).

Last week we focused on how we would go about describing the shift from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy. We started by watching the "Fear the Boom and Bust" video clip - a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem, at http://youtu.be/d0nERTFo-Sk. We also read an excerpt (included at the bottom) from Joel Mokyr - The Gifts of Athena. 

We ended with a pretty useful question - How do we know, or rather how should we demonstrate, that openness is in itself good?  We consistently assume that open means good, but it’s actually used as descriptive of engineering principles and even of entire systems, but without any explicit sort of moral claim. Though we didn’t arrive at a confident answer at the time, we were able to conclude though that best practices for Sudo Room initiatives would be at the intersection of -- (1) openness as a more efficient means of developing technology;  and (2) openness in terms of transparency for democratic reasons.

To start us off somewhere on the relationship between openness and ethics, I’ve suggested below an excerpt from Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility. We can of course, as is now traditional, go with whatever else people want to talk about as well.


-sent from eddan.com

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Friday Filosophy, 1/18; The Imperative of Responsibility

Knowledge, under these circumstances, becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, that is, that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technical knowledge that nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the evermore necessary self-policing of our outsized might. No previous ethics had to consider the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the race. These now being an issue demands, in brief, a new conception of duties and rights, for which previous ethics and metaphysics provide not even the principles, let alone a ready doctrine.

[1. The Altered Nature of Human Action; III. The New Dimensions of Responsibility; (2) The New Role of Knowledge in Morality]
Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (1984).  [http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Imperative_of_Responsibility.html?id=sRP3uJkxydQC]


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Friday Filosophy, 1/11; Post-Industrial Society

How should we think of resistance to new knowledge? Knowledge systems are self-organizing systems that in many ways can be thought of in evolutionary terms. The idea of self-organizing decentralized systems, or "catallaxy" as Hayek has called it, is one of the most powerful and influential ideas of the modern age ... Outside economics, self-organizing systems appear throughout our social system. Language, for instance, is such a system, as are science, technology, the arts, manners, and so on. These systems are all information systems that are organized in a particular fashion. They are, in effect, conventions, and as such self-replicating. Conventions are not chosen; they evolve (Sugden, 1989). Ex ante, an infinite number of ways of organizing the information can be imagined, but once the system settles on a Nash equilibrium, certain rules are observed that give the system its coherence. Ideally we would like it to be an ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) in which no single individual or knowledge systems, they do change, although it is possible for such systems to lapse eventually into complete stasis.

Joel Mokyr - The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002), pg. 221 [http://books.google.com/books?id=ivmaEn7vTT0C&pg=PA221&lpg=PA221&dq=%22how+should+we+think+of+resistance+to+new+knowledge]
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