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13 - Habits of Goodness

How We Come to Be Virtuous Without Moral Laws

from Part II - The Enactment of Habits in Mind and World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Teed Rockwell
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

I propose an ethics that is based on stories rather than rules. The things we do in our daily lives (our motor routines) do not require articulatable goals expressible in language. We develop the “good habits” that make us good people by developing/inheriting a set of prototypes, then responding to each life situation by comparing it with those prototypes. Such a multidimensional prototype system could be realized in a connectionist network embodied in a brain/body and embedded in a world. It would not require logical reasoning as such, but rather a form of skilled coping very different from anything else considered by ethical theory. Once we realize that ethical judgments are based on prototypes and stories, rather than rules and justice, we can rethink how best to empower the revolutionary changes that are now taking place in our concepts of ethics and courtesy.

Keywords

Deweyhabitsconnectionismethicsrule-based cognition
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 277 - 294
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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