Abstract
This Chapter has three sections. The first section puts ethics in a system-theoretical perspective. It deals with the basic question ethics seeks to answer: how are Is and Ought related to each other? Answers matter insofar as they provide different frames for analysing what goes wrong with morals in unbound morphogenesis.
The second section gives an evolutionary account of how moral values came (and still come) into existence. It presents anthropological considerations on the origin of morals. Animals seem to have no morals, at least in the human sense. How then could human morality emerge? An unsolved debate gets support from empirical research: it is about the specifics of human co-operation that makes the difference.
The third section analyses the state of morals in today’s society. It comes to the conclusion that the neoliberal project resulted in a deep moral-ideological crisis.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aboulafia, M. (2012). George Herbert Mead. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mead/. Accessed 5 July 2015.
Aswestopoulos, W. (2015, July 4). Warnung an alle Fotografen, bleibt den Kamerateams der Sender fern. Telepolis. http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/45/45348/1.html. Accessed 4 July 2015.
Barrow, J. D. (2002). The constants of nature. New York: Random House.
Bertalanffy, L. v. (1933). Modern theories of development: An introduction to theoretical biology. Oxford: Clarendon.
Bloch, E. (1972). Vom Hasard zur Katastrophe. Politische Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1934–1939. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bloch, E. (1985). Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Vol. 3). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Brunkhorst, H. (2015). Weil Europa sich ändern muss. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Davies, P. (2010). Universe from Bit. In P. Davies & N. H. Gregersen (Eds.), Information and the nature of reality, from physics to metaphysics (pp. 65–91). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Franciscus. (2015). Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ on Care for our Common Home. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Accessed 27 June 2015.
Habermas, J. (2015, June 22). Warum Merkels Griechenland-Politik ein Fehler ist. Süddeutsche Zeitung. http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/europa-sand-im-getriebe-1.2532119. Accessed 25 June 2015.
Haug, W. F. (2004). Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Vol. 6/II). Berlin: Argument.
Hofkirchner, W. (2012). Sustainability and self-organisation: Sustainability in the perspective of complexity and systems science and ethical considerations. In T. Nishigaki & T. Takenouchi (Eds.), Information ethics (pp. 190–217). Nagoya City: V2 Solution Publisher.
Hofkirchner, W. (2013). Emergent information. Singapore: World Scientific.
Hofkirchner, W. (2015). “Mechanisms” at work in information society. In M. Archer (Ed.), Generative mechanisms transforming the social order (pp. 95–112). Cham: Springer.
Holzkamp, K. (1983). Grundlegung der Psychologie. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.
Hörz, H. E., & Hörz, H. (2013). Ist Egoismus unmoralisch? Grundzüge einer neomodernen Ethik. Berlin: Trafo.
Klaus, G., & Buhr, M. (1974). Philosophisches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: VEB Bibliographisches Institut.
Milne, S. (2015, July 1). Syriza can’t just cave in. Europe’s elites want regime change in Greece, the guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/01/syriza-cave-in-elites-regime-change. Accessed 3 July 2015.
Niedenzu, H.-J. (2012). Soziogenese der Normativität. Zur Emergenz eines neuen Modus der Sozialorganisation. Weilerswist: Velbrück.
O’Brien, M. (2015, June 25). Europe strikes back: It seems to be trying to push Greece out of the euro, Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/25/europe-strikes-back-it-seems-to-be-trying-to-push-greece-out-of-the-euro/. Accessed 1 July 2015.
Pfaff, J. (2015, July 1). Politik wird durch Zwang ersetzt, Freitag. https://www.freitag.de/autoren/jan-pfaff/politik-wird-durch-zwang-ersetzt. Accessed 4 Jul 2015.
Pinker, S. (2011). Gewalt. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit. Frankfurt (Main): S. Fischer.
Sandkühler, H. J. (1990). Europäische Enzyklopädie zu Philosophie und Wissenschaften. Hamburg: Meiner.
Smolin, L. (1997). The life of the cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stix, G. (2014). What makes human different than any other species. Scientific American, 311(3), 73–79.
Tomasello, M. (2014). A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Traywick, C. (2014, May 28). President Obama at West Point: Watch the speech, read the transcript, foreign policy. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/28/president-obama-at-west-point-watch-the-speech-read-the-transcript/. Accessed 5 July 2015.
Vernadskij, V. I. (1997). Der Mensch in der Biosphäre. Zur Naturgeschichte der Vernunft. Wien: Peter Lang.
Weingartner, P. (1971). Wissenschaftstheorie I. Stuttgart: Frommann Holz.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hofkirchner, W. (2016). Ethics from Systems: Origin, Development and Current State of Normativity. In: Archer, M. (eds) Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity . Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28439-2_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28439-2_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28438-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28439-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)