For those of you wondering where our moral compass comes from, and where
society is heading, the essay The Human Agenda:
The Social Justice of Survival.pdf, explores the relationship
between human nature, society, the free market, and productivity gains as an
expression of a deep seated human survival trait. We in the year 2012 are
already part way in to a major social transition where productivity gains are
creating surplus labour that cannot be utilised by businesses for further
progress because of fundamental growth limits. This is creating an unstoppable
social dilemma that will require a serious redress of our governing and
financial structures to fix, and we have less than twenty years to do it. A
method is given to address this major structural problem inherent and becoming
apparent in large social structures.
I argue in this essay that societies can exist long term only because the
principle of reciprocal altruism in human nature confers improved survival
prospects to a person in a society, than on their own. By providing benefit and
receiving benefit from specialisation in work we do better together than going
it alone. This alone is what raises us above Tennyson's "Nature Red in Tooth and
Claw" I also argue that any social engineering that does not also embed altruism
as a cultural value in our governing bodies is ultimately doomed to fall when
challenged by circumstances from without or within.
I further argue that greed is a natural human trait and survival strategy
that need only be managed and which cannot be eradicated; but it must be
controlled so that it does not compromise the productivity gains accruing from
the cultural altruism of larger social structures. Practitioners of greed must
be taught when and how to switch survival strategies to this cultural altruism
in order to avoid the destruction of both their society and themselves.
The conclusion is that we should base our governing and financial principles
on a cultural altruism I call "The Social Justice of Survival" that has stood
humanity in good stead throughout history, which has delivered us growth and
survival as a human species through the free market economy using technological
change and productivity gains to act, and finally and most importantly can
affordably deliver a social justice based on equality of opportunity, and not on
equality of outcomes. Social justice derived from a moral principle of equality
on the other hand fails to deliver the same human rights outcomes because it
fails to account for human nature.