I don’t want to be pulled into a rut of self-help. It has all the warning signs of introspective self-annihilation—no contributive justice. I would rather talk about Eudaemonia. Throughout this book you will notice should italicized. Should implies ought, and ought implies ethics, although I am careful not to imply any supposition, No is/ought claims here! A micro anthology of my Ethics is included in the Summary Statements of this book. For me, Eudaemonia and Ethics are one and the same. It’s a perspective that Daniel Dennett should connect with his suppositions of moral compatibilism as Free Will. Flourishing is a good starting point. What are the preconditions, and future conditions necessary for individuals and societies to flourish? We need to move beyond the echoes of the Nature-Nurture debate. Steven Pinker proposes a structure illustrating genetic and environmental influences with a feedback loop, making the process more complex than initially outlined in the nature/nurture model.
Moving beyond Pinker, I suggest applying models of gratification versus delayed gratification to this model and collecting the data. Also, the individual must be studied in conjunction with the social. Correlation does not imply causation, yet patterns, if they emerge, are worth noting and discussing. Similar, yet not directly related to Pinker’s (and Chomsky’s) work on innate human traits, Libet's experiments on the response in relation to the readiness potential is another opportunity for further peer review and re-search. I suggest expanding the scope of the experiment. Taken out of a lab situation, what happens when adrenaline is pumping through the individual's bloodstream? Is the readiness potential highlighting our capacity to reason and nothing more? How does Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of Blink skew the results? My vote would be exciting and worthy of additional research; sadly, Science is not a democracy.
This watch doesn’t run, even though I used the best butter.
— Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - Through the Looking Glass (1872)
