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Ideals-based decision making
How can a person fulfil their desires most effectively? With the help of other people! How can one do it least effectively? Create conflict with everyone else by breaking all the ethical rules!
But how is this cooperation to be achieved? How can a set of ethical rules and practices be devised that people will follow voluntarily, with a minimum of conflict and low costs of enforcement? How can this be achieved when different people and groups often have different standards of behavior and different traditions?
An effective way to address this problem is to identify shared ideals. The ideals describe desirable outcomes that appeal to the motives of all people, and which are achievable by foreseeable means.
Typically agreement on the ideals is readily achievable. Once that is accomplished, then one can identify various means of achieving the ideals. Each proposed method must be evaluated for its effectiveness and its lack of unwanted side-effects. This evaluation is done using an evidence-based approach. Use of evidence and scientific proof helps people get past conflict over differing opinions. Any person can examine the evidence themselves if they wish to, so that they don't have to rely solely on the opinions of self-proclaimed authorities.
Where Ideals come from
The foundation for developing shared ideals is understanding that you have the same basic motivators as other people. This enables you to develop shared ideals.
In order to bring these ideals to reality, people develop rules of behavior. They also set goals for the work that is necessary, and define various roles so that the work can be divided across members of a society.
The relationship between the motivators, shared ideals, rules, goals and roles is shown in the following diagram:
The first box in this diagram is the "common motivators". Every person has some basic desires that have evolved in them. In primitive animals those desires include hunger and thirst, which also occur in people. But people also have capabilities for learning and large-scale cooperation, which are supported by additional motives such as curiousity and caring. For a list of common motivators for humans, click here.
Ideals are more specific than motivators; ideals describe a world in which multiple motivators are fulfilled without adverse side effects. Ideals are an invention, and shared ideals are ideals that are attractive because they produce happiness for all the participants. Ideals work together as a collection to describe a preferred situation that people aspire to have.
As an example, to fulfil the motivator "abundance vs hunger", we might set an ideal whereby each person will have food readily available to them at all times from a stocked kitchen. An alternate ideal from a past era might be that each person should have access to land so that they can harvest their own food whenever they are hungry. That latter ideal doesn't work so well in a modern society where people specialize in different roles that don't all involve agriculture. Typically ideals are improved over time to reflect the best that is possible with the knowledge and technology that is available or under development.
A basic set of ideals
What are the most basic ideals, that form the foundation of a society that people will like the best? It's hard to say for sure, because there is no limit to the imagination's ability to invent an ideal world, ideal community, ideal family, or ideal person. However, if we keep this to the most basic level--a widespread ideal that can be shared by an unlimited number of people, that are durable across multiple generations--then we might arrive at a short list.
To test a very basic short list, some fundamental ideals were defined that fulfil important human motivators. This was referred to a group of volunteers via an online survey, to get their feedback back in 2014. This survey remains open to anyone who wishes to offer an opinion. Hyperlinks to these are here:
| Some Basic Ideals |
| Ideals to Motivators Cross Reference |
| Ideals Survey |
These ideals were intended to have obvious appeal, kind of like platitudes. That makes it easy for people to support them as goals. If you want to see the survey results you can click the Ideals Survey hyperlink. It's not a huge surprise that people mostly agreed with them. If you wish, you can respond to each of them yourself; go first to the survey hyperlink, and then select the Ideals questionnaire.
The ideals offered in the survey are designed to fulfil the standard motivators that are found in humans, and also they are compatible with motivators in animals that can cooperate with humans (i.e.: pets). Thus, in the ideal world humans and pets can coexist cooperatively, without either one preying on the other. To see how the ideals from the survey fulfil each of the motivators, select the cross reference hyperlink above.
It is also possible to define additional ideals that are specific to a particular group. Any kind of organization can have ideals that are specific to the mission of the organization which are also compatible with the overall societal ideals. Similarly, a family can define ideals among themselves for a higher standard of love among family members than is found among people in society overall.
Ideals are defined that satisfy motivators, which results in happiness. When there is agreement on the ideals as goals, people work together toward them, and this produces mutual happiness.
Achieving the ideals
When people think of ideals, they tend to think of improvements to the status quo. Perhaps there is a lot of good within the status quo too, which we can keep by continuing to do what we're doing already. But to make progress toward ideals, we need to plan for new initiatives.
There are two basic approaches used to achieve the ideals:
- Creating an action plan.
- Defining of rules of behavior.
Action plan
The action plan defines a step-by-step series of activities that need to be carried out to bring the ideal into reality, and to maintain it afterward.
The action plan may require a variety of different skills to complete. Therefore, it is divided into roles and goals. This enables the work to be divided up among different members of society, who may each choose from among the various roles. The goals are the specific outcomes that are to be achieved.
The Pathways Planner software is one tool you can use to develop specific action plans for achieving goals. It supports a step-by-step methodology for making detailed plans and tracking progress. To download your free copy of the planner, go to the Pathways Planner web site.
Rules
In addition to planning specific actions, it is also necessary for all participants to know what to do when various unplanned circumstances arise. For this purpose, it is necessary to have rules. Rules also help us to preserve the good things that we have already implemented.
Rules work together with rights and ideals. Here's how the pieces fit together:
- An ideal describes a preferred condition. Achievement of all ideals together promotes mutual happiness.
- A right is something that each person is entitled to, that is necessary for them to have in order to achieve the ideal state.
- Rights can be defined for both people and animals.
- There are rights of prohibition, where it is sufficient to retain the right if people are prohibited from taking the right away from someone.
- There are rights of obligation, where fulfilling the right for one person requires action on the part of one or more others.
- Rules are defined that more specifically state the behaviors necessary to support the right and ideals.
For example, the "Defence; courage" ideal has the goal where each person can live in a world where they are not at risk of being intimidated, hurt, or killed by others. Because there are some people who act in opposition to this ideal, the ideal condition requires ongoing action in support of the ideal. People at times need to defend each other.
Associated with this ideal is the right to not be harmed. That right has rules associated with it, such as prohibition of murder, assault, etc. The rules themselves define the specific prohibitions and exceptions (for example, self-defence is an exception to a prohibition against killing another person).
Societies develop long, detailed list of rules in their legal systems. However, the legal system is typically a subset of moral standards that people observe in everyday life. Within the moral standard, there can also be levels. People people can start of with a basic standard, but through wisdom they can learn better behaviors that will bring greater mutual happiness.
It's fairly easy to define basic rules in support of basic ideals. On this web site, the Online Ethics Checklist is built on rules that support the basic ideals. If you view the details for any topic within the checklist, you will see a description of the ideal situation that the rule is meant to support.
It is pretty much impossible to define rules covering every conceivable situation that might exist in the universe. There are a few broad rules that are widely applicable, but for specific unusual situations, it is necessary to apply some discretion. The decision maker must determine if applying the rule in that situation supports their ideals or is counterproductive.
It was mentioned above that ideals can also be defined for specific groups such as organizations or families. In support of those ideals, the groups or families can define their own polices, which extend the rule set overall.
Rules can be refined over time. To refine rules, it is necessary to determine what is the effect of the rule, and whether it achieves what it was intended to achieve. To judge this, one traces back from the rule to the rights it supports or the ideals that it attempts to implement, and from there to the desires that it fulfils, and finally what is its impact on mutual happiness.
Moreover, it is not just a point-in-time happiness that is sought for a few people, but happiness spread across time and space as far as we can manage it. Once cannot acheive that goal all at once, but by pursuing ideals we can make progress.
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