Monday, November 28, 2016

Decision-Making in Context and across Contexts

One creates nested default groups to make moral judgements and decisions. These groups become the contexts in which to apply principles or analysis to decide, and the final decisions comes from the group which wins when its contextual relevance is given supremacy. For example, if we discuss whether to kill someone is wrong, the universal contextual answer is, "It is wrong." Or perhaps, the universal answer is unknown or is both right and wrong together, and the context of an environment filled with humans, the context of humanity, makes killing wrong. Looking further inward, killing in accordance with the death penalty is right, if we accept that laws are the societally accepted moral framework relevant in a given time and place. If the individual executioner has inside knowledge about the inmate's innocence which was known to be excluded from the legal process, the killing becomes wrong again. So, how does the executioner make the decision.

The spectrum of default groups must reach from the context of the individual to that of the universe. In between the two extremes, there are several natural intermediates: earth, life, animal life, humanity, jurisdictions of law, companies, families, tribes, etc. The time-limited process of making a decision must be imperfect.

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