Pragmatism to Enlightened Self-Interest (post 26)

Pragmatism is a essentially an ideology concerning truth.  It states that truth exists but we can never know with certainty what it is.  The best we can do is move closer to it by developing theories and models and then evaluating their accuracy through the testing and tracking of their predictions.

While pragmatism is mainly about truth, there is an extension to morality which states that while we can be wrong about what is and isn't moral, we move closer to a "true" morality as we evaluate and synthesize various moral systems over time.

The evaluation of factual outcomes at the societal scale, an extremely contentious endeveour, is far less controversial than the evaluation of moral outcomes. Those involved with such evaluations use terms such as happiness, wellbeing, justice - all difficult to define and more difficult to measure. A pragmatic approach to these difficulties is to admit they exist and to continue to work to mitigate them. We are fortunate that there are so many people and organizations doing exactly this. Happiness studies have exploded over the past few decades. We can thank the efforts of psychologists and economists involved with both the Positive Psychology movement and Happiness Economics such as Martin Seligman, Daniel Gilbert, Richard Layard and Daniel Kahneman, and we can also thank their critics such as Kirk Scheider, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Davies and Barbara Held. Measuring social justice is more explicitly political and not nearly as high profile, but there are many interesting efforts - mostly concerned with the impact of philathropy and social entreprenuership. Such efforts include those by The Center for Effective Philanthropy, The Open Philanthropy Project, The Social Inclusion Monitor, The Peace and Collaborative Development Network, The DME for Peace, and The Ashoka Network.

The data amassed by such individuals and organizations is yet ambiguous, contradictory and subject to diverse, self-serving interpretations. For the purpose of changing policy or cultural ethics, this body of data is akin to religious scripture - it can used to justify just about any doctrine imaginable. Nevertheless, as long as these efforts can, for the most part, evade conscription by hegemonic powers, then the ongoing amalgamation of data and the scientific process should lead to a clearing of ambiguity and a facilitating of moral concensus.

My current working hypothesis - the hypothesis at the heart of Pragmatic Ventures - is that the eventual moral consensus these efforts are leading to is in line with the doctrine of enlightened self-interest.

That is, people are able to do the most - both for their own sense of wellbeing and for social justice within their society - when they are able to see themselves as connected to others, their fates as entwinned, and by working for their own wellbeing and justice via working for wellbeing and justice for all.