Are there similar theory to Nikolay Bugaev's idea of "emergent morality"?

Question

I need someone's insight to put into perspective the thoughts of an author I discovered only recently. Although this author's idea seems very intuitive - the kind of idea you might have as a child or teenager - I'm not sure I've ever heard it developed in these terms by another philosopher.

The mathematician and philosopher (also chess player and Andrey Biely's father) Nikolay Bugaev (1837-1903) had a theory on the origin of moral intuitions that greatly appealed to L. N. Tolstoy. He expounded it in a lecture entitled Foundations of Evolutionary Monadology (ru : Основы эволюционной монадологии, 1889).

His main thesis is that the laws of nature, positive laws, customs and instincts are forms of regularity resulting from the interactions of an infinite number of monads. The laws of nature are the most stabilized results of those interactions, and no longer have any exceptions, while the others, which are less stable, still do. Bugaev's idea - and this is what appealed to Tolstoy (see his diary from the 28.05.1884 (Complete works, t. 49, p. 94) or the letter to V. G. Chertkov dating from the 18.05.1884 (t.85, p. 60)) - was that, in the course of history, the interactions that give rise to positive laws, moral instincts, etc. would become increasingly stable, until they became as certain as the laws of nature. It would thus become possible to predict that, in a given situation, an individual will behave "morally" with the same certainty as we can say that a stone dropped at altitude will behave "physically", i.e. fall.

My question is simple: do you know of any other thinkers who have defended those two propositions ?

• Physical and moral laws emerge in the course of history (whether or not as the result of an underlying metaphysical process).
• Physical laws and moral laws are ontologically the same laws, but there is simply a delay in the development of moral laws compared to physical laws (thus, different degrees of "firmness" in the application of those laws).

Thank you very much for your help.

Answer 1

Sam Harris thinks there can be some kind of objective moral science, to guide moving around on a local moral landscape. He can only sustain that claim by not understanding Hume's Is-Ought Distinction, though.

The closest I'd say is the Moral Foundations Theory idea, based on research, that humans have biological drivers that push us to develop behavioyrs that support us cooperating and living well together.

On interacting monads, the closest I can think of is the antique Indian metaphor, Indra's Net. In this picture, the jewels can be simple, perhaps representing human awareness, but each one is reflecting every other one, making the entire network meaningfully present at every point. In modern thought we can relte this to peer-to-peer networks.

There is a hierarchy problem in implying moral rules can be like laws of physics. We have to share the same number of spatial dimensions, for our bodies to work the way they do: The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in most sciences But the morality of a group is more like biology, where all that is required is supporting replication, and so a vast landscape of possible options is present - although there are some examples of convergent evolution, the vast scale of contingencies makes them rare (that octopuses dream might make an interesting point).

Intersubjectivity seems to be deeply linked to intelligence and learning, and to support communication and language, and morality. Discussed here: Is the Categorical Imperative Simply Bad Math? :) That can be related to monism, the idea we are all faces of one being. Buddhist thought shifts away from that Hindu idea of transcendental unity in a single divine consciousness; Indra's Net can help us understand a different idea, which is perhaps comparable to monads.

The only way then for there to be immovable moral laws though, would be for all individuals to be the same, to interpret 'do unto others as you would be done by' in exactly the same way, and for evolution with individuals as the units of selection to have ended. That only makes sense for systems that use individual minds like multicellular organisms use cells, so like hives, or like the Borg..