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1 results

  • 13 - Habits of Goodness

  • from Part II - The Enactment of Habits in Mind and World
  • Edited by Fausto Caruana, Italo Testa, Università degli Studi, Parma
  • Book:
    Habits
    Published online:
    24 November 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020, pp 277-294

  • 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.