Chapter 10. Moral Community

My father loved dogs. We had border collies on the sheep farm where I grew up, and their

instinctive skill in managing flocks was a marvel to watch. My father also ran a stockyard, and

every farmer who came in brought a dog whose first order of business was hustling around to see

what was up and then letting it be known that he or she was ready to help if needed.

My father also shot dogs. He kept a rifle by the back door. When dogs get into a flock of

sheep, the effect is horrifying. They crowd them into a corner and gnaw at their hind quarters.

They generally do not kill any directly or eat them. Most of the destruction is from stress and

disability or from slowly bleeding to death. It is brutal cruelty with no redeeming justification.

My father’s view was just the opposite of the wag (perhaps it was Pogo) who said “I love

humanity. It is people I don’t like.” I never heard of a single dog getting into the sheep; it was

always a pack. It is legal in most places to shoot dogs collectively, but not individually. There

were tense times with neighbors who insisted that their pets were incapable of such barbarism.

And in a way, that was right. By instinct, the individual dog is companionable and eager to

please. By instinct, a pack of dogs is a vicious hunting machine, often does this just for sport.

One cannot understand the behavior of three or four dogs by studying the behavior of one dog

and extrapolating.

Just so, getting a good theory of what makes an individual ethical in a particular situation

leaves a lot of work undone in explaining moral communities. Political philosophy is not as

fashionable as it was about the time of American Independences and the French Revolution. In

part, I imagine, this is because the ideals of the Enlightenment that were framed by gentlemen in

their clubs were tarnished by the mass brutality of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The evil of a totalitarian regime, a cult, or a mob is that it disables the moral apparatus we

expect when two agents interact with each other face to face. 1 At the same time, a family, a

church, a school or place of work, the town where we live, and larger groups are so obviously

necessary for bringing out our human potential that only a few make a false show of going it

alone. The Hell’s Angels are a gang and libertarians have political parties. They are not against

community: they just like their kind of community better than others. Community provides the

stabilizing influence, the common structure, and enforces the rules. Most of the time this is for

the good, always it is inescapable.

Communities are also moral agents in their own right. The policies of companies can be

blamed and challenged; they also win public awards. We pledge allegiance to the United States;

but we can also sue it. It is no accident that none of the examples discussed in the previous two

chapters involved moral engagements between individuals. The discussion was about clubs,

public entities, firms, and groups of nations. It seemed natural to speak of these mass nouns in

the same language used in the early chapters of the book where agents were assumed to be

individuals.

But there are issues regarding moral relationships across different levels of community.

Society sticks its nose into private affairs. Pat and Dale want to get married -- it is a Win-Win

for them -- but their families are against it and the state does not recognize gay marriage.

Communities sponsor moral engagements by sanctioning some rules, magnifying some value

preferences as most worthy, and even setting aside some private arrangements as not being in the

best interest of the community as a whole. And individuals stick their noses into the public’s

business. Given the opportunity, some folks would rather bribe corrupt officials on an “as

needed” basis than pay taxes annually so everyone gets a fair shake. Surely there must be some

role for civil disobedience, or at least embracing unpopular causes. And all of us belong to

multiple communities. The politician can vote with the community of constituents, the

community of the registered political party, the community of the financial and lobbying

backers, and others. Because we live in multiple communities, it is certain that the moral

standards in one will be at odds with the standards of others from time to time.

There are also issues to be worked out over where communities come from and why they

seem to float in endlessly varying combinations. One wonders about the Garden of Eden, if

instead of just Adam and Eve there had been Adam, Eve, and a guy named Ralph – perhaps

Ralph the Snake who was peddling a notion that knowledge of good and evil would be a useful

thing to have. Which came first, communities with standards to judge members or individuals

who create communities to advance their needs? Why are some communities almost unstructured

and others steeply hierarchical? What is the right size for communities, and when should they

cease to exist? The Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase 2 is famous for seriously

asking the question, “If firms are such an effective form of social organization, why is there not

just a single maximally efficient one in the whole world?” This gets right at the question that has

been present but unasked throughout this book: why have we so far failed to arrive at a single,

universally accepted set of ethical principles? Why do we keep changing our mind about this and

applying what we profess generally in personally customized ways? Everyone who proposes a

new stable, better world is in some sense a schismatic.

In this chapter, I will make a case that we already have everything needed in the

RECIPROCAL MORAL AGENCY basic building block. We can solve the problems of conflicting

reference groups, size dynamics, group agency, and even account for the creation and

configuration of various moral communities without adding new rules and assumptions.

Morality and Money

Is the market moral? That is not exactly the right sort of question. It is like wondering whether

the stock market was right yesterday. The market is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It is one

of the places people go to find out whether they are good or bad.

Economists assume it works on the RMA method, where exchanges are always mutually

beneficial to both parties who pursue their informed self-interests. We already know that there is

a difference between self-interest and mutual self-interest. But there is wide-spread ALTRUISM in

markets as well. At charity fundraisers, it is now fashionable to have a portion of the live auction

devoted to people just giving away money in exchange for nothing at all. “Raise your paddle if

you want to donate $10,000.” RENEGING is everywhere. The practice known as wardrobing

costs almost $20 billion annually. That is where a dress, for example, is purchased on Thursday

afternoon, worn to a function on Friday, and returned for a full refund on Monday, because “it is

the wrong size.” COERCION takes many forms, but the most chilling is kidnapping for ransom.

The note says “If you want to see your daughter alive again, deposit $50,000 into the account

designated below.” Getting your car repaired, paying a parking ticket, and having an emergency

appendectomy are hardly Win-Win engagements. They can be RMA or something else.

DECEPTION is built into modern marketing. We call it advertising or may even think of it as

public service announcements. But the point is to change the rank preferences of others so they

will choose a strategy they otherwise would have overlooked. And that strategy by others allows

us to realize a better world for ourselves than we would have otherwise.

A market is nothing more than a potentially structured moral engagement. There are lots

of ways to play it. It is where we go many times every day to find out how moral we are.

Exchange mechanisms have a very long history. At first, they were rare and haphazard –

maybe once or twice a year to trade some obsidian for dried fish or women. Throughout most of

recorded history, taking was more common than exchanging, and people could live their entire

lives without mutual interactions beyond the immediate family or tribe. Whatever expectations

might have governed exchange were mostly local tradition.

The earliest surviving writing, usually on fragments of dried clay, are records of

exchanges. Loans in the early middle ages were like today’s bonds – “In accepting 800 credits

today, I agree to return 1000 credits.” These were due on a specified date and location, as “at the

York fair on Michaelmas next.” Banking, the idea that X could collect money from B because B

owed A and A owed X, did not begin to take hold until the Renaissance.

Taxes have been around for several thousand year as a form of concentrating power in

the hands of rulers who used tangible valuables in the game of trading benefits for loyalty. The

first taxes were corvee – so many days of labor each year. They shifted to more “liquid” form

when the business of harvesting taxes were sold at a fixed price and the tax farmers made a

living (often a killing) by collecting more than they paid for the opportunity to collect. The Qing

Dynasty in seventeenth century China enslaved farmers by decreeing they could no longer pay

their taxes in grain or produce. They had to convert their payments to silver. This created a

merchant class. 3 By the seventeenth century, governments were granting monopolies to

businesses as a means of generating money for war, in hopes of multiplying commercial

advantage through conquest. Only hundreds of years later did they add the functions of creating

rules to regulate exchange among businesses. The idea of governments providing services in

competition with business, say roads or schools, came later still. Public enforcement of private

agreements for exchange only took hold in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 4 Before then

private interests enforced private exchanges. Jails and police are very modern inventions. Federal

regulation of private exchange in areas such as food safety, health, and enforcement of contracts

started in the West about a century ago. General credit (credit cards) is even newer. Perhaps we

are still working on truth in lending, fraud, information security, and fair trade. 5

We can trace similar genealogies for religion, government, health, the arts, creating and

passing on knowledge, and even that spring chicken, reason-giving institution of philosophy. All

have developed by nesting the fundamental 2 x 2 engagement in multiple layers of community.

Even before we could talk and before there were institutions with formal rules, the basics of

exchange based on self-interest, caring, cheating, RMA, and other ways of resolving the same 78

engagements. Same building blocks, more elaborate buildings.

For as long as they have existed, families worried about how members treated each other.

Tribes and bands set up expectations to favor some of the things families did and to discourage

others. Nations, at first as very fluid and scantily organized groups, began to take an interest in

what tribes did. We began to talk about belief systems as though they existed as permanent

entities, distinct from anyone’s actually believing them. And so it continued with ever more

sophisticated structures arising from the interchange of basic exchange units at lower levels.

Governments, international movements such as religions and corporations, and even pop culture

“care” about how their parts work together to make effective wholes.

It is unlikely that human nature has changed much in the past dozen centuries. But we

have built moral communities to support our better human natures. Moral engagement builds

community; community strengthens moral behavior.

Generalizing the 2 x 2 Moral Engagement

The 2 x 2 matrix of a moral engagement has fundamentally desirable properties for guiding

moral action. It is reassuring that there is a process that identifies the joint actions that neither

agent has reason to abandon under the circumstances. And as long as we restrict ourselves to the

2 x 2 case, we escape the various diseases of situational inconsistency that pester more complex

models. There is a way of finding the mutually best way forward in every case. Although not

always perfect, this approach has the strongest claim to being the policy for maximizing joint

outcomes and is most likely to result in a world that everyone would prefer to live. It is the

process that we would naturally select if we were uncertain what role we were to play (it is fair)

and, as such, it is the one the community would be most apt to sponsor. We would like to be able

to say, “Around here, we decide what to do to maximizing the common good and make sure

everyone gets a square deal based on the circumstances.” Despite the fact that humans interpret

their circumstances in a biased manner, we should never be required to tell little lies that we have

the objective truth before we can proceed with moral actions. The touchstone is not revealed

truth: it is the result of a process of natural correction that comes from working things out

together over time.

Our first impulse when thinking about generalizing the 2 x 2 matrix might be to consider

larger matrices. Perhaps 3 x 3 would be useful; and why not 6 x 47 matrices? That has been tried,

but the results were not very promising. 6 There are both technical and conceptual difficulties.

Matrices with more than two agents are certainly possible. Committees are based on that idea.

But committees conjure up images other than efficient and stable decision making. They

naturally break into factions; coalitions form spontaneously. There are many potential divisions

into sets of two or more agents, and if we allow a little horse trading, these coalitions can become

unruly. Philosophers have studied partitioning of 2-alternative, n-person engagements, and they

have found that it is possible to identify RMA in some cases, but mega-engagements tend to be

shaky, too complex to work with, and in many cases it is impossible to rationally work out what

the optimal arrangement is, even with the help of a computer (Maschle, Peleg, and Shapley

1979).

Equally discouraging news awaits us if we want to extend the matrix in the other

dimension. N-alternative, multi-person engagements are also prone to be slippery and

unmanageable. The last chapter rehearsed some of the proofs that consistent choices are

impossible when there are more than a few alternatives (see note 1).

Rationality is a fine sounding ideal, but it will not reach far enough – not even in theory.

Very quickly, the principles go to war with each other when they see an opportunity to play

others off against each other. We humans simply lack the mental capacity to sustain our interest

in these matters. For the most part, only people who are on salary for solving complex problems

persist beyond first approximations. The Nobel Prize in Economics went to Herbert Simon in

1978 for his demonstrations that it is human nature to approximate anything more than the

simplest of decisions. Simon popularized the terms “bounded rationality” and “satisficing.” Their

meanings are clear: humans are incapable of maintaining rational consistency beyond some very

small number of variables and are happy and reasonably successful acting on small models that

get the job done most of the time. The 2 x 2 matrix of moral engagements meet Simon’s criteria.

There are only a few moving parts and we need only rank ordering of preferences. We have

already seen in Chapter 2 that the 2 x 2 moral engagements always has a solution that leads to

the mutually most preferred world (Nash 1951).

Moral engagements can compound vertically as well as spreading horizontally by nesting

one engagement inside another. This can be done if we make four assumptions. The first

requirement is that there will always and only be two agents, even when one or both of them is a

mass nouns such as “the family” or “my profession.” Second, engagements can be nested one

inside the other so there are still two agents. For example, a banker’s relationship with customers

can be nested in the bank’s relationship with the FDIC. Third, communities concern themselves

with what their members do and members care about how the community will respond. Such

cross-level considerations can be written into the framing matrix. Finally, time matters. More

properly, repeated engagements make it possible to adjust as we go. We become improved moral

individuals and communities over a lifetime of engagements. Communities come into being and

fade based on the way their constituent agents behave. They become more moral through the

rich, diverse, continuous play of multitudes of engagements over time.

Community as Patterns of Nested Moral Engagements

Consider a hot rock thrown into a swimming pool. It has the capacity to raise the temperature in

the pool, at least a little. But holding the rock over the pool will not get the job done any more

than the existence of a norm of courtesy will make people behave nicely. If the right person

speaks up under the right circumstances a lot of courtesy will happen, but it would be a mistake

to attribute that to the principle. The hot rock has to be dropped in the pool.

It is equally obvious that the rock does not have the same effect everywhere in the pool.

If the pool is of any reasonable size, nothing will happen at the other end. The action of the rock

is local and involves an exchange of properties only between the rock and the immediately

adjacent water. The water at the other end is warmed, if it is eventually warmed, by direct

contact with adjacent warmer water. Morality similarly spreads by the contagion of direct

contact. Principle ethicists are wrong to believe that the existence of principles per se makes for a

better world. 7 Utilitarians are equally mistaken in believing that everyone counts the same in

moral engagements. Touch matters. The principles held by people about whom we know nothing

at all are morally irrelevant. Both time and space are dimensions of morality. 8

But the hot rock has more to teach us. If the rock is retrieved after a few minutes, its

temperature will be found to have fallen. There is an interaction between the rock and the water

around it – there is a mutual exchange of properties. In this manner we must see moral

engagements as involving two agents, each with the capacity to affect the other. The same

exchange ripples out, in diminuendo, between the water next to the rock and the water next to

that water. There is also an effect of the water on the rock. In the exchange, each becomes more

like the other. Morality follows the rule that agents are contexts for other agents. 9

The active edge in the moral reclamation of repeat legal offenders, citizen-like behavior

of illegal immigrants, entrepreneurial efforts by women in third-world countries, and public

health initiatives is down and dirty personal human contact. Most often it is one of les

misérables -- someone known by name and just a few steps in life removed from those they help

– that get the work done. The network chain extends from ex-gang members working with

troubled youth to those organizing local self-help nonprofits in the community, to civic leaders,

to local authorities and financial backers, and then to the politicians, and ultimately the theory

crafters. The various interactions throughout this network are multiple exchanges between

individuals regarding their particular visions of a better world. Multiple overlapping

communities play various roles. The elites give money, open doors, create good policy (or block

it), and articulate theoretical justifications. They almost never touch the part of community that

hurts the most, and there is no reason to believe they would be especially effective there. Ethics

may very well be the story about special positions in the network, the hook that we seek to attach

to something higher and more permanent. But morality is about every person’s unique place in

the community and each personal act that makes it better. We negotiate, continuously and with

those around us, and only gossip about the rest. The agent that adds the most to the moral

community is the one who authentically resolves engagements at the point where the chain is

weakest.

Narrow Framing

The narrowest way to frame a moral issue is in terms of a single principle. This is the

stock in trade of the politician and many theorists. For them, each framing of an engagement

contains a single entry, or if there are several, a single one is presumed to dominate all others.

One-note ethics only works where there is prior overlap in values among those involved or

where the issue is so vague that real differences remain below the surface. This single-value

approach is like a group’s casting a unanimous vote for the winning position after it is

determined how the matter will split or declaring that the dissenters were really unqualified to

participate.

Nowhere in this book have I made it a requirement that prior consensus on values is a

precondition for moral progress. Real moral issues are much too complex for this to make sense

(Goldstein et al, 2010). Abortion will remain an insolvable issue as long as the folks who define

it as a matter of choice do not also at the same time frame it as a matter of life and vice versa.

There are two ways to see a researcher who has an equity stake in a firm that sells the highly

effective cure that has been discovered? Oskar Schindler was not a successful industrialist by

conventional standards. Of the firms he managed, the only one that showed a profit was based on

massive bribery and state-sponsored forced labor. He was also a humanitarian, saving more than

a thousand Jews. It would be unrealistic to paint his portrait with a single brush.

Principle is easy, but too often inadequate.

Multiple Communities

A paradigmatic case of unrealistic narrow framing involves role conflict. Wind turbines

in the desert may annoy the ecologist who wants natural beauty and be favored by the ecologist

who wants clean energy. Sometimes this might very well be the same ecologist. King David

trampled all over the sixth, seventh, and tenth commandments when he seduced Bathsheba and

then ordered her husband, Uriah, put in the front lines of battle to ensure his death. The high

priest Nathan told David a little parable about a rich man who stole a sheep from a poor man

even though the former did not need it while the latter certainly did. David went through his

righteous indignations routine and vowed to have the head of the morally depraved rich man who

had done this. When Nathan explained the literal meaning of the parable, David thought better of

his vow. This is classical moral decision making by the RENEGING rule. How was he to be both

the supreme head of government and enforcer of morality at the same time he had to submit to

such rules? David felt the need to frame the engagement so he could either play the role of giving

the rule or following the rule – but not both. As Bathsheba became the mother of King Solomon,

we can see how King David worked out these conflicting roles.

Consider a youth in an urban ghetto forced to make an all-too-common and difficult

choice. He is under surveillance by law enforcement as a potential gang member. The members

of the gang have their suspicions that he is soft. The youth attends high school just enough to

stay on the football team because he dreams of playing professionally. His mother and sisters

pray for him. He uses a bit of alcohol and semi-legal substances, but not enough to prompt the

authorities to do anything. Who is this man? Is he any different from the executive or politician

who has one foot in each of many camps each demanding inconsistent loyalties?

Project GoodWork at Harvard University (Fischman et al. 2004) has studied for several

decades how young professionals make the transition from school to career. Their interviews

with those going into journalism, neurobiological research, theater arts, and other fields suggest

that there is an ethical code peculiar to school, a different suite of conduct norms for established

professionals, and rough and ready temporary patchworks for starting out. The transitional set of

norms is flimsy, being described by the young professionals themselves as necessarily expedient.

They frankly cheat in order, as they say, to make it to a place where cheating is no longer

necessary. We play the engagements we encounter in our communities, and we belong to

multiple communities.

“The right thing to do” for the youth in the ghetto is different depending on whether he is

wearing gang colors, the school’s football uniform, or pajamas around the project. A particular

action might be right for one reference group and wrong for another. It is unfair for us to jump in

as uninvited third parties to insist that our framing is the right one, unless, of course, we intend to

do something about it.

Assume that the gang is planning to cruise a rival gang’s territory this evening and

mentions it to the youth in our story. He knows that there will be guns in the car. His sister and

mother know about the planned ride, and perhaps the police do as well. The boy’s football coach

has just given a talk about getting tough on players who have gang affiliations.

At first glance, it appears that the logic of moral engagement developed in this book has

run into a situation it cannot manage gracefully. It would seem that multiple simultaneous

engagements reach beyond the basic unit of the 2 x 2 matrix. Perhaps we must first assign the

youth to the right community, one where the dilemma looks less complicated. The community

we belong to is an attractive possibility.

Instead, we need to construct the right sort of 2 x 2 framing matrices. Figure 10.1 shows

how this might be done. The engagement between the youth as marginal gang member and the

gang is shown on the left. We begin by allowing the youth two strategies: “Ride” and “Duck,”

the latter involving an excuse that everyone can see through. The gang might be watching this

carefully as a serious “Test” of loyalty or it might be just an “Incidental” offer dropped without

much concern and in hopes to recruiting someone with a high profile. The youth as gang member

would be attracted to “Ride” / “Test” because of the thrill and the honor of being invited. Despite

a possibly heavily discounted downside risk of arrest or even being killed, let’s call that [4].

Making an excuse without recognizing that the gang is seriously testing him would be the worst

combination [1] because the consequences of retaliation could be serious. Likely, the gang would

most favor [4] the youth wanting to go but the gang turning him down. That shows power. On

the other hand, if they extend an invitation that the youth declines, power shifts to the youth and

the gang is left with a [1]. 10

Gang Family All Others

“Test” “Incidental” “Test” “Incidental” “Test” “Incidental”

“Ride” [4 2] [2 4] “Ride” [1 1] [2 3] “Ride” [4 1] [3 2]

Youth Youth Youth

“Duck” [1 3] [3 1] “Duck” [4 2] [3 4] “Duck” [2 4] [1 3]

Figure 10.1: Framing for various perspectives on gang cruising.

By now readers will know to first check the upper “horns” of the matrix. This is a Mixed

Equilibrium, Engagement #75 – a nice blend of “damned if you do” and “damned if you don’t.”

We expect in these cases that the agents will vary their responses randomly so as not to become

type-cast and thus easily manipulated. It is important to maintain a tension. Because Engagement

#75 is what is called an asymmetrical Mixed Equilibrium it would be best all-around for the

youth to stay pretty close to a 50:50 split between riding and offering an excuse in such

situations. The gang is better served by making the majority of such invitations serious “Tests” to

preserve the illusion of power. 11 But we just do not know on any given night what the outcome

will be. This would make a good movie, such as “On the Waterfront.”

The central panel in Figure 10.1 displays the moral challenge facing the youth as

responsible citizen and his relationship with authorities such as Mom, the police, and Coach. The

youth has the same two strategies: “Ride” or “Duck.” Those who represent the “responsible”

community also can react as though this were a “Test” or an “Incidental” matter to be watched

from a slight distance. Skipping the cruise through the rival gang’s neighborhood, knowing that

Mom, Coach, and others are carefully watching is the best for the youth. He can prove himself

[4]. Knowing that he is under the microscope, but going anyway is the least attractive and might

even involve the police or Coach [1]. That is also the outcome with the lowest preference rank

from the perspective of the community that supports law and order. I have assumed that the best

outcome for Mom and others would be for the youth to decline the ride regardless of whether he

feels he is being watched – the youth “just naturally” does the responsible thing without pressure.

Use Rule 3 from Chapter 5 to find RMA in the lower right corner. This gives an attractive

Next Best solution with the youth slipping out of the engagement while those who care about

him watch nervously but say little. We see this in the movies as well. The role of the virtuous

nail biter is often give to the priest.

But we have not finished the job we set out to do. So far all we have is two parallel

universes, one for the youth as gang member and one for the youth as part of the community. We

could mount an argument that one perspective takes precedence and that the youth “should” use

the gang framing or the family framing. That simply reveals our prejudices and forces the youth

to play by our rules. This is totally unrealistic because picking either world will not make the

other go away. As with Billy Budd, kibitzers need to be very careful not to conflate their

solutions to ethical issues with the real challenge faced by the agents actually involved.

The solution is to combine the two framing matrices into one. It is important to keep the

same four outcomes. But we can add relevant values to the framing matrix. The combination of

“Ride” and “Test” still includes gaining status and risk and thrill from the framing matrix

involving the gang. It also includes a chance of run-ins with the police, being hurt, and

suspension from the team from the framing matrix for those in authority. But there is a new

element derived from combining the two: the youth will have disappointed those in authority by

appearing to show preference to the gang’s position. That is a richer depiction of the joint

outcome than either of the other more narrow framings. To continue providing this more

nuanced picture, consider the youth’s analysis of how others would see his offering an excuse.

The gang would have lost a little status and his “upright” friends would rejoice. In the new

framing the youth must weight how the two communities will react to each other.

Continuing in this fashion, a new and more detailed single framing matrix can be

constructed. The matrix also has to include both worlds. If there are three or more such worlds,

only the most live ones needs to be detailed – the ones that gives the agent [4] -- as one

alternative and all combined effects of all others are mapped as the alternative. Of course the task

of assigning rank preferences to the cells in the framing matrix must still be completed.

Invariably, this will be a more difficult task because the picture is more complete and contains

more conflicts. But this is the honest thing to do.

The right-hand panel in Figure 10.1 shows an example of such a combined matrix for the

youth who is in both the gang world and the family world. It will come as no surprise that this is

a crummy Imbalanced Compromise [3 2] solution to Engagement #50 where no one is really

satisfied. Often life is like that when individuals straddle conflicting worlds. In this case, we

anticipate that the youth will try to escape his ghetto culture and be torn down in the process.

Novels, plays, and other stories that hold our attention are often built on exactly this

framework. It is hard to think of examples in great literature where the framing is a Win-Win or

any other simple pure RMA resolution. And the best literature makes full use of one agent playing

RMA and others going for cheating strategies while the hero’s love interest or sidekick plays

ALTRUISM. Often the agents work out a best but not nearly ideal solution in a morally complex

world. Greek tragedy and its descendants are a special case where a sub-optimal decision has

already been taken and the consequences are worked out as a moral lesson. A variation on this is

the hero’s personal growth in coming to accept the inevitability of degraded solutions. Light

literature too often has the feature of a last minute resolving clause that comes out of nowhere to

secure a Win-Win. Such is cliché for the one-hour television crime drama.

What Are Communities?

Philosophers generally give two kinds of answers to the question, “Where do communities come

from?” Those in the Enlightenment tradition emphasize that humans exist in various states of

nature and contract for something better. Thomas Hobbes (1651/1962), Jean Jacque Rousseau

(1754/1964), John Stuart Mill (1859/1974) to an extent, and more recently John Rawls (1977)

imagine an initial position where fully rational individuals try to get the better of each other in

non-cooperative interactions. For some reason, they decide they would be better off working

together and they create a social contract. Of course, whole communities do not sit down at one

place and write out an agreement, 12 but it is understood that many promise to behave generally

to some minimal standard of the common good. This produces a little social structure to interpret

and enforce the agreement.

The other kind of answer is the currently fashionable scholarship in evolutionary biology

(Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Elster and Hylland 1986; Maryanski and Turner 1992; Bicchieri

1993; Field 2004; Churchland 2011). What evolved was not the agreement but the capacity to

form agreements. And it would add even more credibility to the ethics as altruism if we could

point to a biological mechanism that plays that performed that kind of work. If it could be shown

that a neurological basis for this type of behavior evolved in a Darwinian sense, that would

demonstrate that humans “should” care for each other in communities such as families or larger

groups. Of course we have no way of knowing whether societies and patterns of behavior

millions of years ago unfolded in precisely the fashion they are theorized to have done. No one

recorded the behaviors, only the results and only in the crudest of fashions and with a frank

acknowledgment that other behaviors could have had the same effects. Mostly this is

anachronistic thinking. From our perspective today, the arguments go, it is plausible that this

sequence of events could have occurred and it pleases us believe it did.

All of that is good work, but it does not exactly answer the questions we are interested in

for day-to-day morality. 13 Why are there gangs in some cities and not in others? How many

layers of appeals courts exist in Maryland and the District of Columbia? Should the Crimea be

part of Russia or Ukraine? Why did the Moose Lodge in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, cease to

exist as an institution? Only actual communities that have the potential for direct effect on our

behavior matter when we are working out problems in morality. As we saw in the case of the

ghetto youth, there can be several in play at the same time. They certainly need not be formal in

the sense of having bylaws or IRS tax filing status. We are also interested to know where moral

communities from, how they evolve over time, and how they affect each other.

Consider ancient Greece. Meaning no disrespect to current Greek citizens, it is

impossible to read Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War (1998) without entertaining

just the slightest impression that many of the Greek city states of the fifth century BCE were

essentially gangs. The coins of the realm were individual or small group violence and honor.

Alliances shifted on the whim of the charismatic and opportunity for gain. Deception was not

only tolerated, it is vaunted. Laws were really codes without formal administration or

enforcement. Ulysses, for example was praised by Homer for his lying and skipping out on

promises. Virtue ethics (Annas 2011), as expressed by Aristotle, consisted essentially in

embodying the characteristics of the group. One was virtuous if one’s behavior permitted

unambiguous identity of the individual as belonging to a particular Greek community. In a

similar way the Goths “ruled” the Western Roman Empire from about 400 and the Vandals

“governed” north Africa about the same time in much the same way that eastern Nigeria is

governed by Boko Haram, large parts of Iraq and Syria are controlled by ISIS, and drug cartels

are the dominate organizations in parts of Mexico, Colombia, and another countries. The idea

that there is a single, enduring, formal organization in every particular area is a friction primarily

useful for purposes of theoretical analysis.

When young men ride with gangs or observe ritualistic displays and pass loyalty tests, the

gangs grow stronger. When gangs lose their power to influence behavior, they are diminished,

perhaps even to the point where it could be said “we no longer have gangs here.” The same

equation of identity with strength of impact could be said of homeowners’ associations,

universities, and businesses. Federal laws concerning medical marijuana are not enforced in

many states. Church denominations follow a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy concerning ordination

of gay ministers in some jurisdictions but not in others.

I define communities functionally. 14 Where there is a pattern of mutual influence on the

moral behavior of individuals in at least semi-permeant direct contact, there is a community.

Community is a pattern of behavior coordinated to achieve desired future worlds that are general

favored by those participating. Communities do not exist prior to or independent of members’

behavior. In fact, when there is no interaction, when the ranked value preferences of relevant

others no longer have power to bend the behavior of individuals, it makes no sense to even speak

of a community’s existing. Some people, for example, would say that family matters and they

honor traditions going back generations; other would say they have no family, even though there

are living relatives. Communities do not exist in an objective sense to give the rules for

members’ behavior. They are the totality of members’ behaviors that has the potential for

influencing future behavior. And the behavior of members have the reciprocal potential for

shaping community. That is what leadership, loyalty, and betrayal are.

A functional definition of communities bypasses the problem that a community cannot

always be defined by naming its parts. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Prague,

Czechoslovakia, retain their identities as communities despite the fact that their members turn

over completely on a regular basis.

This is a technical definition in the naturalistic tradition. Communities are patterns of

moral influence. They are memes (Dawkins 1989). They exist as regularity as action extending

over time. Television is a meme, and so are political parties, war, romance novels, and charity

work. They can be weighed only in the figurative sense. They are self-organizing. They are

clusters of values that generally work to perpetuate themselves by rewarding or causing

difficulties for various behavior. Memes are patterns of behavior: patterns that selectively

enhance other patters. Sometimes we are misled by the names we give to memes that disguise

their true function. A “book club” may act more like a socializing self-help group and a trade

association that talks about serving the public may act to maximize member economic self-

interests. Communities can act as agents, affecting their members and other communities.

Nested Moral Communities

Now we know that individual agents interaction with communities, including multiple

communities at the same time, to work out moral futures. 15 It remains to explore the mechanism

by which this happens and how communities can interact with other communities in a moral

fashion.

An extended example will be used to make this clear. Every student who is accepted into

a professional school should not be guaranteed a degree. There are a complex set of rules about

test scores, payment of fees, attendance, performance standards, moral character, and

professional demeanor that are set by schools and then monitored. It makes no difference where

the lines are drawn on these things, someone will always be so close to the line that a judgment

will be necessary. And with so many different dimensions to the standard of professional

competence, some candidates will fall on both sides of the lines at the same time, as the ham

sandwich story prepared us to expect. Schools have multiple relationships, signaling their

simultaneous participation in many communities, ranging from individual students; to other

students (including those denied admission), and including faculty, and alumni generally; the

university and other schools; state legislatures and the community and the public, etc. It would

seem that there is no easy way to make this a 2 x 2 moral engagement.

Typically decisions about whether students are competent are nested. Faculty grade

students. A committee makes a recommendation to an administrator. The administrator’s

decision can be scrutinized at the campus or university level. Further review is possible in the

civil court system, with appeals all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. An example of this

intricate kind of multiple nesting is the 1978 case of Horowitz vs. the Curators of the State of

Missouri. A student was dismissed from medical school for failing to demonstrate competency in

the way she treated patients on hospital rotations. The faculty said she had crossed the line into

being habitually unprofessional and voted to dismiss her. The student preferred a different

decision by which she would at least be granted an appeal of the decision. The case worked its

way through multiple layers of communities each of which had a stake in the decision.

Ultimately this reached the United States Supreme Court. The justices ruled that the

courts have no business substituting their opinions regarding qualifications to practice medicine

for the opinions of those who are trained and entrusted by society to do that (the schools). But

the courts retained the privilege, on behalf of society, of reviewing procedures used in coming to

the dismissal decision in order to ensure that a fair process is used. Procedural rules, called due

process, involve such practices as being informed about the standards in advance, being judged

by the same standards used to evaluate others, and being allowed to speak on one’s own behalf.

This case established the famous doctrine allowing authorized organizations and their agents to

act freely, as long as the actions are not “arbitrary or capricious.” Essentially, the Supreme Court

affirmed the RMA approach to moral engagements that has been developed in this book. It also

laid down the law for some of the elements required in an adequate framing of such moral

engagements. All of this was done in the name of the community.

The practical application of nesting works like this. In the framing at the most primary

level there is usually mention of higher level standards such as “no arbitrary or capricious

decisions” in academic disciplinary matters. The norm is inserted into the framing matrix along

with the facts of the matter, school policy, and extenuating circumstances. The actions of each

group might become framing elements at the next level. Most of the time, superordinate

communities care little about the actions of their members. The overwhelming majority of moral

engagements within community are Win-Win between the engaged parties and the community.

They usually pass unnoticed; sometimes with a grumble as “irregular but not worth more than

bad press.” Occasionally, the sponsoring community becomes involved because it perceives a

general challenge to its collective interests.

It is quite possible that the first committee that reviewed Horowitz’s performance had

questions regarding the clarity of their expectations or whether she, as a female student, was

being judged differently from her male colleagues. Such considerations would have entered into

the decision-making process of faculty and may have led to a split vote (we do not know).

Because Horowitz appealed, both within the university and then through the civil court system,

groups at various levels reperformed the analysis of the engagement matrix based on their own

framings. At each level, some interpretation was made of the standards for arbitrary and

capricious decisions. In other words, moral considerations are both preserved and extended by

being rolled up into the next level.

A detailed example of nested moral engagements is sketched below. This is a

hypothetical and not an interpretation of the Horowitz case. At the first, school committee level,

a student of marginal ability is passed through by a committee that would just rather not have to

defend its grading standards. They know that the student is weak but are afraid of an appeal

because the academic records contain gaps. “Let somebody else make the hard call if it troubles

them” is the attitude. This Win-Win resolution at the lowest level, even while it does not feel

quite right. See the left panel in Figure 10.2.

Student Student and Faculty University

“Accept” “Change” “Accept” “Change” “Accept” “Change”

“Keep” [4 4] [2 3] “Keep” [4 1] [3 2] “Keep” [4 2] [3 3]

Committee Dean School

“Dismiss” [3 1] [1 2] “Dismiss” [2 4] [1 3] “Dismiss” [1 4] [2 1]

Figure 10.2: Nested framing of an appeal of a decision to dismiss a student.

Assume that the decision and support information are passed on to a hard-nosed dean

who takes responsibility to the university and the professional community very seriously. The

recommendation from the committee appears to be at odds with the data and would be

embarrassing to defend in public. The administrator reframes the engagement. But the reframing

is not simply second guessing the committee’s decision using a different decision rule. The rank

priorities of the committee and student are not rearranged. Rather the outcome of the

committee’s work is nested within a wider framing. Among the new items that we could expect

to see in the dean’s framing would be “faculty are on record as not wanting to defend a strong

disciplinary action,” “the student can presume good standing,” and “no first-level due process

procedure was initiated.” Other new items that did not come up from the committee action but

are useful to add at the review process might include “criticism of lax standards among alumni”

and the dean’s dislike of faculty who are thought to be currying student favor for personal

popularity. The dean makes a new framing that includes rolled up elements from the nested

frame used by faculty.

This is how moral community is developed by means of nested engagements. We accept

that agreements at one level are appropriate concerns for the more general community. Patty

Hearst, the granddaughter of wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was

kidnapped in 1974 by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army. She agreed to

participate in armed bank robberies with them. We could imagine several framings for that

engagement, but something like a [4 2] Wide Imbalance is most likely. Although the

resolution may have been optimal from the point of view at that time of Hearst and her captors,

the larger community certainly did not see it that way. Everyone, Hearst included, served jail

time.

This is how communities coordinate moral behavior across levels to include wider

interests. Even RMA resolutions of engagements at one level can be overturned by RMA, and

other, resolutions in more inclusive communities. We nest communities within nested

communities. President Carter commuted Hearst’s sentence, and then President Clinton pardoned

her, thus erasing the original criminal conviction. In some cultures, elders, tyrants, shamans, or

talk show hosts are considered by parts of the community to hold a position as the highest level

of integration in nested moral engagements.

The administrator in the example of uncertain academic dismissal might integrate the

first-level engagement and an interpretation of his or her responsibilities to the wider community

into a new matrix. The action of the committee is nested in the cell on the lower left in figure

10.2. Note that the “Keep” / “Accept” joint strategy carries a value of the engagement of [4 4]

at the committee level and [4 1] at the level of administrative review. It is unsurprising that the

value of the engagement changes depending on the level of analysis. These are rank preferences

that depend on where the ranking is being performed. The available alternatives are not the same

at each level of analysis. This explains the fact that a dispassionate, third-party review of a moral

action can be at odds with the analysis of the actors, without the actors “being wrong.” Other

cells reflect considerations unique to the administrator, such as having to go against faculty

sentiment and the tradition of accepting faculty primacy in matters of student academic

performance. Nonetheless, we will imagine that the administrator feels that it is important to

uphold high standards. So the new matrix might look like the central panel in Figure 10.2. The

new RMA solution is a thoroughly degraded [3 2] Imbalanced Compromise, signifying that the

administrator is somewhat satisfied and the faculty and student are smoldering, probably enough

so that the decision is appealed to the next highest level.

Let’s assume for the sake of example that there are general concerns at the university

level over consistency in standards across academic units, public perception, and legal

challenges. The facts of the two previous decisions must now be nested within the context of this

more inclusive community. The rolled up nested engagement is in the lower right-hand corner.

At this higher level of nesting, a Balanced Compromise is reached as shown on the right in the

figure. A student of acknowledged marginal ability is retained, at least for the present, and the

faculty and the administration in the professional school are put on notice concerning due

process and the need to provide defensible evidence. They also have been warned about

discussing and reaching clarity on future academic standards. This is not just compromise; it is

exercise of the nesting feature in moral communities to harmonize decisions and build stronger

communities through successive, multi-level moral engagements.

The three arrangements involving nesting in this example are Engagements #13, #43, and

#38. Notice that the agents engage in a rolled-up set at each stage. This example is a bit artificial

in the tidy nature of the handoffs between nested levels. In reality, there is a continuous, vague,

and multiform pattern of nesting that flows and jerks toward ethical progress and building moral

community. No claim is made that one resolution of the three above is the “correct” ethical

solution.

Corruption

Another example will further demonstrate the flexibility of nested moral engagements as

a means of building moral community. Corruption is the nefarious use of common resources for

personal gain. It is stealing from the community.

A motorist is pulled over for speeding or a businessman needs a permit to hook up the

factory to the sewer system. The public, at some higher level, has put in place rules for managing

these rough edges and the rules are intended to benefit the community at large. They sacrifice

some private resources in order to maintain a system that maximizes the common good.

Corruption means the agents in the lower level engagements split among themselves the benefit

intended for the community that sponsors the engagement. In corruption, individuals resolve the

moral engagement as though there were no nesting reflecting the common good.

Figure 10.3 shows the framing for a crooked police officer on the take and a local madam

paying “protection” money. On the left side is a classic victim-less crime or dirty cop case. Both

the madam and the cop benefit at the expense for the public. Considering only the lowest level of

nesting, this is a nice Stag Hunt, Engagement #60 with RMA at both [4 4] and the defection

point of [3 3] which neither party is likely to use.

Madam Madam and Cops

“Bribe” “Clean” “Bribe “Clean”

“Take” [4 4] [1 2] “Take” [4 1] [1 4]

Cops Department

“Arrest” [2 1] [3 3] “Arrest” [3 3] [2 2]

Figure 10.3: Analysis of a case of nested police corruption.

T. J. English (2011) writes about corruption in the New York Police Department. He

recounts the story of fixing an arrangement putting the overly well-known madam Xavier

Hollander “on the pad.” In his account, there is a transcription of the police informant’s secretly

taped conversation with Hollander: “All it’s gonna cost you is two hundred for the precinct, five

hundred for the division, three hundred for the borough, and a lousy one hundred for me” per

month. The itemization is enlightening. It shows four levels of nesting within the corrupt

community. Each higher level must be bought off for the process to work well. The origin of the

term “bagman” is a reference to the individual who goes from the precinct to the division to the

borough with a bag full of cash to ensure the proper alignment of incentives in the nested

engagements. Cheating is expected across the levels in nested corruption, but too much of it is

not tolerated.

If this engagement is nested in a larger community which will not tolerate corruption, the

bigger picture can be framed as shown on the right in Figure 10.3. At first, this appears to be a

case of Balanced Compromise, with everyone going for a light penalty and a promise to stop

this sort of activity. But as so often happens in cases of “institutionalized” law bending, this is a

Mixed Equilibrium, Engagement #77. It does not make economic or public policy sense for the

authorities to devote resources to investigating and prosecuting criminal or police officers who

are not engaged in frequent or large-scale corruption. Applying Rule 1 again, we confirm the

slimy nature of engagements that everyone knows are “wrong” but have persisted since ethicists

first labeled them as such. There is no one pure resolution that always works best. The

“Equilibrium Finder” at davidwchambers.com/interactive can verify that, in the long run,

crooked cops and madams in such situations will often collude against the public and many such

cases are not investigated or prosecuted. That would be the most stable “understanding.” These

estimates are subject to adjustment based on the relative actual benefits of the payoffs and the

savings to the public of enforcement, but the basic point is that “gaming the common good” is

built into moral communities in a great many cases. As much as we would prefer that it were

otherwise, if corruption were as easy to uproot is it is to say it is wrong, it would have been

eradicated long ago. 16

Societies have adopted various strategies to reduce the costs of managing “dirty”

interactions at lower levels. Lawyers and prisons are Johnny-come-lately phenomena in human

history, and they are immensely expensive. Throughout most recorded time the enforcement of

restitution or retribution for violations of social norms was the responsibility of the victim or his

or her family. Long-term incarceration was rare, except for politically (by blood relationship)

significant individuals who might have future transaction value. The extensive use of capital

penalties probably did little to keep down offenses, but it significantly reduced costs to society.

Current lengthy trials, even for confessed violators, and incarceration with full medical and

educational benefits are a comment on how society defines itself (at the higher community

level). This is only possible in societies that have evolved mechanisms for spreading the cost of

enforcement across a wide enough base to make it acceptable.

The Poorly Built Moral Community

When individual agents substitute suboptimal decision rules such as SELF-INTEREST or

“cheating” instead of RMA, they act immorally because they degrade potential common future

better worlds. The same can happen when communities act as collective agents and when

engagements are nested in higher-order engagements. 17

Consider “pay to delay” drug marketing settlements. A large and successful

pharmaceutical manufacturer faces revenue losses when the patent on one of its drugs expires. A

smaller manufacturer announces plans to market a generic version, which typically sells for

about one-sixth the cost. The larger firm threatens legal action over patent infringement.

Although the case is recognized as having no merit, introduction of the generic will be delayed

while the suit is pending. The large company continues to make a profit since high-priced sales

minus legal costs are greater than no sales or sales at the generic price. The smaller firm will

eventually prevail if it has deep enough pockets, but is at an increasing net minus cash position

the longer the legal action lasts. The lawyers on both sides benefit the longer the matter is in the

courts regardless of outcome. Courts generally frown on this kind of maneuvering and attempt to

expedite resolutions. This can result in settlements where the generic manufacturer agrees to

delay introduction of the competitive product for a period, say seven years, in exchange for

several millions in cash payments from the larger firm each year.

At the base level of analysis, this is a negotiated Win-Win resolution for both

pharmaceutical firms. The holder of the expired patent gets a reduced income stream, but more

than they would have otherwise. The generic manufacturer gets a net revenue flow less than

expected from unopposed marketing, but greater than the net cost of marketing after legal delays

and costs. The function of the suit is not for the large firm to win a concession from the smaller

one but for both firms to cooperate in reframing the engagements to harvest money from the

public that ultimately owns the game, packaged as a court-sanctioned agreement.

The United States government does not take such an optimistic view of the matter and

has brought the practice to the Supreme Court. In the two-party (brand and generic

pharmaceutical) analysis, the prize has been shared in a fashion that neither party has any reason

to want to change. But the public is putting up the money that the pharmaceutical firms are

dividing between themselves. If “pay to delay” settlements were illegal, the cost of medications

to the public would be substantially lower. In the summer of 2014, a partial curb on this practice

was established. 18

Drug manufacturers also partner with consumers in a scheme to extract money from

insurance companies. When patients select a brand name drug they are often charged a co-pay on

their insurance plan because the insurance company has to pay the pharmaceutical firm a large

amount for such products. If an equally effective generic is available, the insurance company will

not charge the co-pay. Drug makers now advertise programs where they subsidize the co-

payment on behalf of patients if the patient will request the more expensive brand-name

alternative. It is a wash to the patient (a bit of paper work for a marketed brand name). The

pharmaceutical firm takes a small loss on each sale (co-pay), but receives much more by selling

the brand name product (larger profit margin). The insurance company must pay for brand drugs

at a high cost (with a slight discount from the makers of the brand drugs) under contracts

stipulating that the patients are free to choose. They pass the increased costs on to patients

generally, and primarily to employers, in the form of higher premiums. These are all cases where

it is in a community’s interest to block a RMA agreement reached at the base level. The

community as a whole, at a higher nested level, is unfairly subsidizing corruption at the base

level in the form of siphoning off community resources. Morality is a matter of perspective.

The Power of Nesting

Moral conflicts among agents where the best future for one may involve a second-best

future for another are not the same thing as moral conflicts about moral agents. In community,

we often have something to say about how others resolve their differences. These are legitimate

concerns in the sense that communities themselves are moral agents. We build moral community

by nesting engagements within engagements in productive ways. 19

This requires no new explanatory apparatus beyond what has been developed in Chapters

2 through 9. The community that sponsors lower level engagements acts with all the same

characteristics as any agent might. The community must frame the engagement subject to all of

the requirements and patterns laid out in Chapters 7 and 8. They may select from the full range

of decision rules, including self-interested strategies, cheating strategies, ALTRUISM, COERCION,

and CONTEMPT, as well as RMA. Communities and components of communities, per Chapter 9,

participate in mutual reframing and in bargaining over the particulars. Generally, higher level

communities use more abstract and general definitions of better future worlds. This is necessary

because the scope of concern must cover more diverse cases.

It might be possible from this new perspective to address a background problem that has

been niggling the conversation from the beginning of this book. “How,” we have been

wondering, “can we avoid ethical relativism without some mechanism that makes some moral

behavior good and alternative behavior bad? Must we not at some point eventually come to an

agreement on which are the right norms? If you and I disagree, must not one or both of us be

‘wrong?’”

We now have in hand an alternative framing that manages these cases without

presupposing an absolute standard which may not be appreciated by everyone. Agents participate

at various levels and in various communities, and when these overlap they work toward

harmonizing moral behavior without using hard and fast rules. The problem when a bad actor

refuses to go along with the norms of a relevant community is often not one of force feeding the

deviant a view of the world he or she finds distasteful. It is more likely a matter of whether the

nesting community will act morally at its level in dealing with the outlier. Communities

generally get exactly the level of moral behavior they are willing to tolerate. It seems that it is

just as difficult for communities to consistently act morally as it is for individuals; and for the

same reasons.

Point of View: Emergence

I realize I have run the risk of overusing the word “antinomy.” It is an unfamiliar term for an all

too common way of expressing things. When we put together two or more perfectly sound

thoughts there is no guarantee that the combination makes good sense. What a waste of time to

try to figure out whether it is hotter in the summer or in Florida.

Pickwickian comments are public insults that are somehow not meant to be taken offense

at. 20 We want to look good at another’s expense without being responsible for damaging them.

Of course, it cannot be done. Some of professional philosophy is based on antinomies. Kant

(1781/1993; Transcendental Dialectic II, II), for example, warned us against the danger and then

dived into a lengthy discussion of “things in themselves.” The Book of Job has baffled modern

readers. Job was allowed to be punished in excruciating ways precisely because he was the best

man around and he was expected to follow God’s will even when God appeared in a cloud to

make it clear that his will was inscrutable. Ethical realists advance a view that normative

principles exist independent of what humans happen to think of them (Shafer-Landua 2003).

When I poke at antinomies, I am calling attention to the fact that it is not always safe to

say “I know A and I know B, so I must know A + B.” For ordinary living, this reductionist view

21 is quite serviceable. But it is anything but a universal truth. When A and B is different from A

+ B, we are speaking of emergence. Baking soda and vinegar are both stable, but the

combination is what we used when kids to make that volcano for the science fair. Together they

have properties that neither has alone.

It is human nature to simplify complex problems. We bracket off the qualifications and

overlook the inconvenient interactions, and we refine our view of nature until we have something

we can work with as a form of understanding that we understand. This is perfectly fine. The

danger comes in missing the fact that others are doing the same thing, and there is a risk that

their simplification will not overlap sufficiently with ours or we may change our minds when it is

convenient to do so. There is an even greater risk that we shift out own reconstructions to meet

changing circumstances and carry over the former analysis as though it were still valid.

In its most essential form, emergence means there are characteristics of the combination

of two or more elements or of elements in different contexts that are not characteristic of the

elements themselves. The prototypical example is water. It is just a blend of hydrogen and

oxygen. Neither element has the property of wetness, but water is wet in a quintessential fashion.

A cartel can manipulate the market in ways none of its members can. Hot objects such as frying

pans are not composed of hot atoms, but of heatless atoms in very rapid motion. Wetness,

control, and heat are emergent properties; they only exist as characteristics of the relationship

among component members and not as characteristics of the members themselves. They

certainly do not exist in the abstract. That would be like having a beautiful . . . but insisting that

no noun exists that could complete this sentence.

The burden of the argument in this book has been that morality is an emergent property.

Plato knew nothing of the notion of emergence. He was a reductionist who tried to build

up the community as a collection of individuals with no expectation that there would be anything

left over to explain once we knew how each person would behave. Descartes, Spinoza, and

Leibnitz used clear and distinct ideas as their atoms and arranged everything as the rational

combination of them. Hobbes, Locke, and Hume started with simple ideas and worked out

everything there was to know empirically. Kant suspected that there was something fishy about

this project. So he imagined a transcendental world where emergent properties exist. But he

could not account for how we get from the world of practical reason to the world of pure reason.

Hegel solved the problem by suggesting that everything is just one big idea. Alfred North

Whitehead (1929/1957) was the first mainstream philosopher to speak in terms of emergence.

Scientists, not philosophers, developed the notion of emergence, and that is why this

book draws on neurobiology, social psychology, economics, game theory, quantum mechanics,

the psychology of perception, and agent-based computer simulations.

It is also why so many of the examples I use come from literature. Art is emergence. 22

Emily Dickinson (1924/1993 XXIII in the “Love” set) speaks of a love letter where she only said

the syntax and left out the verb and pronoun. Literally, this is just nonsense; but we know exactly

what she means and delight in it because all meaning is emergent. If it were not so, what is a

meta for?

Many people know little more of quantum mechanics than Einstein’s theory of relativity

– space, time, and mass are somehow substitutable characteristics – or Heisenberg’s

indeterminacy principle – we can know the trajectory of a particle or its location, but not both at

the same time. This is high-grade emergent thinking about what is commonly taken to be the real

nature of the world. The idea is that knowledge of reality depends on the conditions of

observation. Until a particular atomic particle is observed, it could take any value across a

distribution of possibilities. It only has a “real” value once it is observed. Perhaps the easiest way

to understand this seeming paradox is to meditate on Warner Heisenberg’s (1952) deceptively

naïve question: “How can we know that two events take place at the same time?” He argues that

we cannot. There would need to be a means of comparing the timing of event A and event B that

would have to take place faster than the speed of light in order to ensure that there was no

physical distortion. Even if there were a measurement system that operated faster than the speed

of light, our brains, where this little thought experiment is now taking place at milliseconds, is

orders of magnitude too slow. Judging that A is so long and B is longer, therefore B is longer

than A involves several processes and several neurons. The logic just keeps stacking up. The

easiest, and perhaps the only, way to get around this is to see relationships as single elements.

Sensing that B is longer than A is a single lightning fast event. That is the nub or my preference

for rank preferences in moral choice rather than reasoning from principle. We can “see” ranks in

a single gulp. We sense what is right rather than judging it to be so.

Systems theorists insist that it is inadequate to characterize processes without paying

attention to time or the iteration of events. Often, the world is subject to change during the

intervals between events in a process. A rough inventory of these effects, ranging from the

simple to the complex, would consider both presence or absence of randomness and what the

effects of operations as Time 1 are on the situation at Time 2.

Deterministic processes have parts that run off in invariant sequence. If one knows the

initial conditions and all the rules, there is only one possible outcome and that is also knowable.

Completing one’s IRS tax filing is an example. We cannot see immediately what the outcome

will be, but once we have figured out what each of the steps actually means, there is only one

correct final answer. Stochastic processes, by contrast, introduce random variation at the joints

where the rules are applied. In the IRS example, if there were a stochastic instruction it might

sound like this: “Flip a coin, if the result is heads, multiple the amount on line 38 by .85,

otherwise multiply by .90.” There could be many such random filters in a given stochastic

process. Tax preparation is actually often stochastic because human error is random, although the

curve is skewed in our favor – we are more apt to double check unexpected results that work to

our disadvantage and to accept happy surprises. The result of running many cases of a single

determinist process is the identical outcome each time. For stochastic processes, there is a

distribution of outcomes around a central point, or sometimes more than one point. Newtonian

mechanics was deterministic; quantum mechanics is stochastic.

Both deterministic and stochastic processes can be linear, nonlinear, or emergent. Linear

models are straight-line applications of the relationship between input and outcome. Linear

systems are composed of rules that look like this: “Apply Rule 1 to the Situation A and keep

doing so every time Situation A is detected.” The vast majority of science is the search for good

rules of this sort, and science is characterized by “experiments,” set-up cases designed to isolate

only the principle being studied in pure form. Much of modern academic philosophy uses the

same model. Nonlinear processes add a little wrinkle: “Apply Rule 1 to the outcome of the

previous application of Rule 1 and Situation A and keep doing so every time Situation A comes

up.” Nonlinear processes bring their history with them and they compound like interest in a

savings account. They have internal feedback loops. When these loops are all positive or all

negative – when they all point in one direction or another – the process quickly accelerates.

Unlike formal science where cases are treated in isolation, daily life is dominated by nonlinear

processes where positive and negative feedback loops tussle with each other and produce swings

back and forth in a self-correcting and generally workable range. Think of weight control, the

political process, or fitting into polite society as examples. We carry the benefits or

disadvantages of forward and that changes the conditions we face. Situation A becomes

situation A’.

Emergence is an even more complex process, but also very common. The operating

principle here is “Apply Rule 1 in Situation A and use Rule 2 where the resulting Situation is

appropriate.” Emergence simultaneously generates new outcomes and new rules. Think of the

relationship between a particular man and woman. When dating, each move is followed by a

favorable outcome or not (linear). As the relationship develops, perhaps into marriage, new rules

emerge, each partner altering his or her personality, or at least behavior repertoire, to

accommodate or even to dominate (nonlinear). Mature relationships have new rules borne out of

the way previous relationships were worked through. Something like a nuclear moral community

created that provides a context in which new generations are nurtured and civil society is built

(emergence).

Building the moral community entails stochastic emergence.

1 Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem is a study in the dehumanizing effect of totalitarian

regimes on individual morality.

2 Coarse (1937) argued that management overhead in organizations grows inexorably with their size

and complexity, thus precluding organizations becoming ever larger and more effective. At some

point the costs of maintaining hierarchical control exceeds the costs of moving some activities to a

market or moral engagements in the terms used in this book. No culture has maintained hegemony

over the world for any period of time. No set of principles has been able to guide a community

beyond a limited time and number of participants. Communities and their norms have a natural

limit, and plurality with negotiated multiple, nested relationships is the inescapable ultimate

organization of things. See also the discussion of fit between agents and their environments at the

beginning of Chapter 12 here.

3 The requirement for paying taxes in silver beginning in early seventeenth century China had

international repercussions. The former home and colony relationship between Spain and the west

coast of South America became a triangular international trade relationship involving China and the

Philippines because China needed the Peruvian silver (Mann 2011).

4 In many parts of the world today the powerful still look to private means for personal security and

enforcement of contracts.

5 The sketch of the evolution of markets over the past few centuries has drawn on Will and Ariel

Durant’s (1939-1975) 11-volume Story of Civilization.

6 A fine reductio ad absurdum is found in work by John Harsanyi (1977), one of the early writers

who tried to explain ethics in game theoretic terms. He proposed that an optimal solution to any

ethical issue could be found by writing an equation that included every possible contingency and

value for every possible individual involved and then solving a set of mathematical equations.

Harsanyi presents a multi-page proof of this solution, complete with assumptions that the world is

not allowed to change while the calculations are being performed. In the end, Harsanyi confessed

that he thought this might not work in practice, so he fell back on a set of rules as approximations.

Harsanyi is absolutely silent on where the rules come from or why one would be better than another

or why one person’s rules should be honored by others. Completely rational approximations are not

necessarily completely rational.

7 In July 2015 Baron John Sewel resigned from the House of Lords. He had been deputy speaker

and an author and advocate of the Code of Conduct for the House. His resignation was prompted

by photos coming to light of his snorting cocaine from a prostitute’s breasts.

8 This idea was developed in the Point of View essay at the end of Chapter 7, “Point Blank

Thinking.” Literally we do not respond to events in the past or to hypotheticals, we only react to

their present residual or constructed representations as a current neurological pattern. For action to

take place, one part of the brain must be in direct contact with other or with action potentials in the

basal ganglia, just as the hot rock affects the pool.

9 See the work of Patrick Grim and colleagues (2009) for an introduction to computer simulation

models where communities are created by patterns of interaction at the boundaries of various

communities. Such models have been used to explain, among other phenomena, racial segregation

in neighborhoods (Schelling 1969), the spread of disease (Meyers et al 2006), and language learning

(Cagelosi and Parisi 2002).

10 In this and following examples I will only sketch the most prominent feature of the framing

matrices. Attentive readers know that these are subject to modification and are presented largely to

illustrate what would happen if a particular rank preference were adopted. Because moral

communities can be nested, the number of engagements, one per each relationship, can grow in

number. In order to highlight the unfolding relationship between sequential reframings I will

sometimes ignore the rule of thumb for finding RMA by beginning with [4] in Row’s upper left cell

so that the engagements can be displayed consistently to make its comparisons clear.

11 A program for certain identification of solutions to such engagements and information on

distribution of actions across Mixed Equilibria is available at davidwchambers.com/interactive.

12 The Magna Carta, the American Declaration of Independence, The Rights of Man promulgated at

the beginning of the French Revolution, and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human

Rights come close to fulfilling the role of a written social contract.

13 Some of the early voices for morality in community were the American pragmatists, including

John Dewey (1908/1967; 1927) and George Herbert Mead (1935). See also Joas (1997) and Blumer

(2004).

14 See Garrett Harden (1977); Jürgen Habermas (1984); and Len Fisher (2009) for variations on this

idea.

15 Herbert Simon (1962) argues that the degree of complexity observed in the world cannot be

understood other than in terms of hierarchies. It is generally accepted among Darwinians that

evolution cannot be accounted for by random, one-off events; changes in structured hierarchies

seem to do the job, however.

16 I have never encountered an analysis of corruption used as an example in the academic ethics

literature. This might just be an accident. It might reflect the tradition of considering ethics as a

private matter. It is also possible that there is recognition that corruption is endemic in communities

and analyzing it is complicated, while eliminating it is impossible. It has been wisely said that every

community has exactly the level of corruption that it will tolerate. When the cost and benefits of

eliminating corruption are divided evenly across all members of a community, many would prefer

not to go there.

17 A good example of the “rules of war” is the U. S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency

Field Manual (2007). Hold your hats, this is one of the best statements of liberal democratic

principles in action I have ever read.

18 Recall John Williams’s remark, reported in Chapter 6, when the first formal recorded Prisoners’

Dilemma game was played: “He doesn’t realize that we are playing a 3rd party, not each other.”

Agents may “cooperate” to suck all the resources out of their community.

19 I have presented nested engagements in the basic 2 x 2 form. They can also be developed in

extensive form game theory language. I have stayed with the basic form because it has been used

throughout the book and thus requires no new explanatory development. There are two additional

advantages to the nested basic moral engagement approach. First, flexibility is permitted at

superordinate levels, including the possibility that the larger community will react not only the

actions of groups but to the way these actions were taken. Formal extensive form games also make

an assumption of subgame perfect knowledge of the values higher in the community. This is a

practically unreasonable assumption, and unnecessary (in the 2 x 2 moral engagement approach).

Agents at each level act based on their framing, not on perfect knowledge. See Briggs, Workman,

and York (2013 for an application of extensive form games as a theoretical analytic tool for

describing collaborative cheating in business schools. The primary driver of cheating, on their

analysis, is the failure of faculty members and others to enforce rules against cheating.

20 For several weeks in April of 1823 two members of Parliament named Broughton and Canning

excoriated each other, but “all in the best of senses, you know.” The exchange was taken down by a

young newspaper reporter assigned to that beat named Charles Dickens.

21 Reductionism is the view that occurrences in one domain can be explained completely in terms of

laws in another, more fundamental domain. The claim that all of biology can be reduced to physics

would be an example (Wilson 1998). Emotions are only physiology would be another. At the

beginning of the twentieth century, there was an effort championed by Bertrand Russell to reduce

all of logic to mathematics (Whitehead and Russell 2011). Both Russell and Whitehead, as well as

many others have given up the idea of reductionism (de Caro and Macarthur 2004; 2010).

22 Richard Rorty was one of the brightest lights of late twentieth century academic philosophy. He

held positions as professor of humanities at Virginia and comparative literature at Stanford.