Follow-up to Reaction to Caso & Solano’s ‘… Delusion of Progress’ - expanding circle

In a recent reaction, I glossed over an incomplete thought I had in reading a mention of the expanding circle. I just nodded it away, yeah, Singer.

But then as often happens, I woke up thinking about it the next morning, drove to work thinking about it. It festers and expands in my notice.

In itself, it is a good example of the worlding urge in itself, in its positive reinforcement, in its active hope…

See also "Do it for the house." on how this parasitised by parasites and psychopaths.

Better whack in some context… --via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanding_Circle : "The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains. The expansion of the moral circle should therefore be pushed out until it includes most animals." Singer ¹

[It requires an increase in economic complexity.]

The idea of this circle, expanding or shrinking, is older than Singer and Kant and Rawls and Wilson. We do it natively, starting with kin, and with altruism project it onto kith, and they all say this factoid without necessarily pointing to, or pointing out as to why we expand, or how. They are more focused on the what.

Of course, in order to expand a baseline is required. Who is in and who is out. The line figure is thus defined against a background of what is not 'human'.

"What do you people call yourselves?" 
"We are human beings."

The notion of 'human' fits well into this weltering confusion; calling people subhumans is not regarded as a good thing, not a good thing that a good human would do, worse almost than calling some of us not humans. However, we do regard a lot of examples as not human, and a lot of not-humans are treated as human, from time to time and place to place.

Put simply, being human does not mean you will be treated as one. Just as it means you may well be treated as if human even if you aren't. And that doesn't make you human, even if it makes you a person.

This is further confounded by a more taxonomical and thus legal approach in which the range of human behaviors includes very bad behavior, especially in treatment of those considered human. Bad human behaviour is often grounds for exclusion from being considered human, even if it is a totally human thing to do. Indeed, basic humanness defined in terms of empathy— still includes narcissists and psychopaths who by definition have no capacity for empathy at all. Even though it is empathy which humans the world and worlds the place for humans, and others.

Of course, our domesticated animals (an ethical dilemma for some in itself) have become more like us through time. The empathy of pet dogs is well-storied as examples, but we do not let them vote. If it is our pet dog we treat them as persons, or fur-babies, who like child vampires never grow up. And working dogs? They do not get the same inside-house benefits. as the house slaves.

Human, types of:

• human-but-no-empathy,
• person-but-not-human~animal,
• human-but-not-one-of-us-human-beings (not recognised as kith or kin, but as only of kind of ape)
• human as in not-subhuman (barely included)
• fake humans (various non- or sub-humans who pass as humans),
• humans-but-not-citizens (humans from aorund here)
• humans but not fully citizens like
  • slaves
  • children
  • women (license for rich women however)
• or, not-human because they are not the pharaoh, and only sovereign demi-gods are actually human.

Sovereignty is a type of humanity reserved for the one whose violence is never wrong.

The idea of this expanding circle of humanity based on altruism meta-ethical algorithms seems somewhat simple, there appear to be a whole bunch of circles spreading out like waves or the surface of water.

Perhaps the expanding circles are actually a fuzzy set of indistinct bubbles, all ready to burst as soon as you look at them.

As these indistinct bubbles all sheen iridescent examples as they drift, we do not see that the air that keeps them inflated and floating along is our worlding urge to include those we tend to include, and only at that point do we notice we have excluded, or at least not included something in the empathy playbook from the list above and go, hmmm, that is curious, maybe they are people too.

We breathe in until we breathe out.

Calling all this a circle is a giveaway: around what? a hearth? a heart?. Calling it a bubble would not call on those ancient things in which we daily decide the fate of the world.

The world is a group heart. Glossing over it as a "circle of altruism," as Singer calls it, misses the main game, even as it channels that very thing it doesn't quite get.

I mean, it might be got but it would be too romantic to mention.

Altruism is a way of organising things, and can lead to cross-insurance. Now my 'worlding' includes organising stuff with empathy, but if you just focus on altruism and membership, then you miss that the expanding circle is an example of worlding more generally.  (Without empathy altruism is just very odd co-ordination).

Now claiming the high moral ground is always an example of worlding. This can be at odds with its intent, but regardless of any hypocrisy or hypocrisy-ironing-out in the name of coherence or consistency (themselves examples of other worlding methodologies) this shows the worlding urge is primary and the ethics, or meta-ethics are derivative, are secondary. They are not the meat of our life, but they do help tend, move and adorn the body of our lives. This is why they can be double down on (hypocritically or not) and turned into doctrine and practices that, oddly, denatured empathy (narcissists do this all the time) in the name of the good.

For a worlding to actually expand the circle, it needs to police these holes in the expansion that pop up like bubbles within bubbles.

The psychological reality is that the world exists before creation. This is how we can have stories of how things come to be, into being, how the sun and moon are 'created'. The world begins even before the dream of it, which is why so many human beings claim to have always been here since time began. This may be somewhat unsupported in terms of big history, but it belies the psychological truth of our own individual lives: the world existed before we each came into it, so we must have always been here.

Our ancestors are parents to us, but they are but like children to us with our hindsight.

How did we get here? Well, children will be children. They played in the sun but still hid from demons in the night. Did you hear the lion roar just now?

Progress is a worlding outcome. It reverse engineers the past into a simpler (golden) time in support of its argument of increasing goodness, as ahead, so behind.

Just like how a baby grows into childhood into adulthood, collecting human kindness along the way, let's expand the circle that gave us birth.

The metaphor of living a life (born, grow, learn, mature, bear witness, age) carries us into ideals of progress. "Progress" is a abstracted lifepath. Perhaps it is not all bad.

Notions of progress and betterment, melioration and even individuation or self-help (and their crossover with health and fitness) are obviously metaphors of movement, but movement within the life of a body. Its development and getting better, or at least maturing, and we all know that kids always want to be their older selves, until we look back and go, well then, maybe adulthood is not all we felt it was cracked up to be, where did I put my inner child?

The movement, the growth, the change, the recurrence:
            tide and time & swell and wave~
you can't stop it…
         —a halting problem at life's core

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