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Ethics

Parachutes, Ticks & Moral Environments

Vance Morgan on how to build a moral environment of your very own.

Being a living organism is hard work. Any organism, from the simplest to the most complex, must navigate a physical environment of dizzying intricacy in order to survive, an environment whose elements gain and lose importance depending on the organism. A crab, for instance, lives in a submarine space of rocks, open sand, and hidden recesses. A ground squirrel lives in a space of subterranean holes, branching tunnels, and leaf-lined bedrooms, knowing nothing of seashores. Human beings occupy a physical space of comparable complexity, leading to an obvious question: how do we (organisms) do it?

Crabs and squirrels may not think, but they do survive in their environment as we do in ours, apparently in ways supported by physical, biological structures fundamentally similar to ours.

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