Essay 26: Entropy and metaethics
Outline
1: Abstract2. Introduction
3. A mathematico-metaphysical prelude: entropy, steam engines and the limits to control
4. Wittgenstein: from analytic judgement to social synthesis
5. Murdoch: morality is a continuous complex internal process
6. From individual to society
7. Discussion: complexity, value and the sovereignty of morality
8. Conclusion
1: Abstract
In the Christian tradition, the fundamental moral sanction is the judgement of God, the sovereign power which consigns people to heaven or hell in the afterlife depending on their behaviour in this life.
New Testament Christian Churches claim a biblical mandate to be God's agents on Earth, holding “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:19, Mark 18:18). This authority was almost unopposed until the seventeenth century when the writers of the Enlightenment began to question the authority of the Churches.
Kant saw enlightenment as human emergence from childhood. A principal step in this direction is the recognition that death is real and the afterlife is a fiction. It became necessary for secular moralists to seek a new foundation for moral behaviour. We may see the consequent development split into two camps, one attempting to find a 'scientific' basis for morality and the other seeking a 'humanistic' basis, a distinction captured more broadly in the German terms Naturwissenschaft and Geistestwissenschaft, natural science and soul science. Immanuel Kant (1784)
Here I wish to explore this issue by contrasting a natural scientific approach to the more soulful approach of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch, looking for common ground. If we reject divine revelation as the foundation for morality we must find our grounds within the universe, which is tantamount to the naturalization of morality. So the question becomes 'how does nature embrace spirit as the sovereign ground for moral value?'.
Here we come up against the theory of evolution which suggests that survival of the fit may endorse what in the past would have been regarded as selfish immoral individualism. This raises the question of the relative values of competition and cooperation.
I propose an answer in terms of what Einstein considered to be the most fundamental and irrefutable law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, which expresses the fact that entropy almost never decreases. In a more morally relevant frame, this law expresses the fact that the universe is inherently creative. Human spirituality, whatever it may be, has emerged from the natural world. Second law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia
2. Introduction
Science can instruct morality at certain points and can change its direction but it cannot contain morality nor ergo moral philosophy (Murdoch 2001 page 27). Is this true? Iris Murdoch: The Sovereignty of the Good
From the beginning of the Common Era until the Enlightenment the Christian Churches were the principal determinants of ethics and morality. At their core was a History of Salvation expressed in various creeds. Christianity fused into its current doctrinal form in fourth century after Constantine established it as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The story is well known. God created the world and everything in it, including the first people. Apostles' Creed - Wikipedia
They disobeyed God, the Original Sin. God punished the world by introducing death, work and pain. Christian theologians further claimed that the original sin caused a disconnect between reason and passion. Thus began the war of the flesh against the spirit (Paul, Galatians 5:17 sqq.). Passion was understood to be a force generated in the animal body which distorted rational moral behaviour. Catholic Catechism: III. Original sin
Science, particularly inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, discounted the story of the Fall and established that life as we experience it is exactly as it is, a rational consequence of evolution by natural selection. Pain is not a punishment, it signals excessive stress, damage or disease. Work is not a punishment, it is a prerequisite for life. Jesus was wrong about the birds (Matthew 6:25 sqq). He did not notice how hard they work feeding themselves and their chicks. Death is not a punishment but a natural consequence of the enormous complexity of physical bodies which are constantly renewing themselves through time by internal communication. Occasional errors accumulate as bodies age over a lifetime, culminating in a final fatal error. Reproduction provides not only new individuals to perpetuate the species, but the variation that serves as the foundation for evolution.
Since Darwin’s time, moral philosophy has of necessity begun to deal with this radical change in our understanding of human existence.
One approach to the rebuilding of morality on a non-religious basis has been to use a scientific model. The difficulty here is that the scientific method is based on publicly observable phenomena while much of morality appears to be a personal, internal, conscious phenomenon. This essay is particularly concerned with Iris Murdoch’s critique of the behaviourist, existentialist, utilitarian analytic approach to morality that seeks to express it in terms of observable acts rather than internal states (Murdoch op. cit. page 8).
Part of the problem here is the rather narrow analytic and empirical view of the nature of sciences taken by some commentators. Here I wish to point out some support for Murdoch’s critique through the scientific concept of entropy which, as its Greek derivation suggests, is concerned with inner transformation (Oxford English Dictionary s.v).
We may detect an increasing humanistic movement throughout liberal democracies in ethics, law, justice and human security. This change may be attributed to a trend in human rights insofar as they influence human relationships. It is true that the world is still not short of criminals, extremists and violent and repressive governments, but it would appear that violence in most of its manifestations is trending down. From a moral and ethical point of view, we might say that society is softening and becoming more sensitive and responsive to human needs. Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Andrew Mack: The Human Security Report
We might see the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as the beginning of the return of human spirituality to the natural world after it had been outsourced to Heaven by ancient and violent theological traditions that see the material world as defective and inhuman.
I begin with a scientific prelude which puts the power of morality in the formal context of the theory of control, cybernetics. I then trace the application of this idea through the Wittgenstein’s life and Murdoch’s critique. W. Ross Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics
3: A mathematico-metaphysical prelude: entropy, steam engines and the limits to control
The “softening” of human relationships is a characteristic of the evolution of the universe as a whole, a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, commonly stated as entropy almost never decreases. An alternative statement might be the universe is irresistibly creative.The term entropy originated in the industrial age when steam engines began to replace human and animal power as the driver of industry. Sadi Carnot published Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance (Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire) in 1824. Sadi Carnot, Carnot heat engine - Wikipedia
Carnot developed an abstract model of a heat engine which has since come to be called the Carnot cycle. By considering a reversible system which could turn heat into mechanical energy and mechanical energy back into heat, he derived an expression for the maximum possible efficiency of any such heat engine. Carnot did not use the term entropy, but Rudolph Clausius identified the reality and coined the term, and saw that it was closely connected to the fact that the Carnot cycle is reversible. All physical systems conserve energy; reversible systems conserve entropy. The universe is not reversible. Its entropy continually increases. Rudolph Clausius: The Mechanical Theory of Heat with its Applications to the Steam-Engine and to the Physical Properties of Bodies
Ludwig Boltzmann took the next step in understanding entropy by realizing that it is simply a count. The entropy of a system, he found, is the logarithm of the number of “complexions” that the elements of a system may have. In the case of a gas, it counts the number of different ways the molecules in the gas can be arranged. It may be that Boltzmann’s inability to convey the subtlety of his concept of entropy to his contemporaries was a factor in his ultimate suicide. Boltzmann's entropy formula - Wikipedia, Cercignani: Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms
Since entropy is a pure dimensionless number, entropy can apply to any system which has distinct states. It is not confined to physical dimensions such as mass, length or time, which is why this section is called a “mathematical-metaphysical” prelude. The entropy of a gas or of a society are equally amenable to counting their complexions. A discerning and cultured individual has higher entropy than a person with a “one track mind”. Renes Descartes might say that they have more "clear and distinct ideas". Manley & Taylor (1996): Descartes Meditations - Trilingual Edition
Einstein wrote:
A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts. Howard & Steichel: Einstein: The Formative Years, 1879-1909 (Einstein Studies volume 8), page 1The next role for entropy is another way of counting that was introduced by Claude Shannon when he devised the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon 1949, Khinchin 1957). Here he uses entropy as a measure of information. The role of information is to resolve uncertainty. The measure of uncertainty is the number of possibilities from which one must make a choice. Claude Shannon: Communication in the presence of noise, Aleksandr Khinchin: Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory
Some roulette wheels, for instance, provide 32 slots where the ball may come to rest when the wheel stops spinning. If one was informed of the wining slot in advance of every spin, gambling could become a very profitable enterprise. But this is not so if the wheel is fair. Roulette - Wikipedia
The entropy of roulette is, by count, 32. The information obtained when we learn the outcome of a spin is equal to the entropy of the wheel. As noted above, entropy is expressed as a logarithm of a number of complexions. In the context of information theory, this logarithms is expressed in base two numbers and the resulting number is the measure of information in bits. Since 32 is 2 to the power of 5, the entropy of a roulette wheel is 5 bits and the information revealed each time the wheel comes to rest is identically 5 bits.
Shannon used the entropy concept to calculate information emitted by a communication source. We model a source A by the “letters” ai that it can emit and the probability pi of each letter. We presume that the source only emits one letter at a time, so that the sum of these probabilities pi is 1. The the entropy H of the source is then given in bits per letter H = -Σi pi log2 pi.
An important feature of this function is that H is maximized when the pi are all equal. This condition is realized naturally in the physical systems that Boltzmann studied. It also provides the underlying rationale for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the entropy of society is maximized when everyone has equal weight in social communication. United Nations
It is desirable that as time goes by the entropy of society increases both by increasing the complexity of our responses to one another, and by levelling social differences of opportunity so each of us has equal probability of achieving a good varied and interesting life. Entropy thus gives us a measure of both the softening of society and the sovereignty of moral value.
High entropy implies high value, that is high density of information. Entropy is closely related to equilibrium and stability. The state of maximum entropy for any system is also the state of maximum stability because every possible variation is taken into account. There are no destructive surprises. From this we may argue that the most stable society is a society of equals.
With the advent of the internet, the value of entropy has been reappraised under a new name, bandwidth. In Aristotelian terms, bandwidth is potential. A movie, for instance, may be encoded in a gigabyte of data. A gigabyte has the potential to encode any one of 2 to the power of 8 billion different movies, a huge number. The information content of an actual downloaded movie, which is, like the stationary roulette wheel, one choice out of all the possibilities, is 8 billion bits (1 byte = 8 bits), precisely equal to the entropy of the signal required to transmit it.
This increase in entropy is one of the formal foundations of the evolution of the universe. Whitehead and Russell pursued Hilbert’s formalist feeling that mathematics would turn out to be completely deterministic. Gödel and Turing showed that this is not so. This formal uncertainty in mathematics models the possibility of variation which lies at the root of the increase in entropy and evolutionary creativity. Solomon Feferman et. al.: Kurt Goedel: Collected Works Volume 1 Publications 1929-1936, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Murdoch emphasises the coupling between goodness, knowledge and breadth of vision in the following passage:
It is a deep paradox of moral philosophy that almost all philosophers have been led in one way or another to picture goodness as knowledge: and yet to show this in any sort of detail, to show ‘reality’ as ‘one’, seems to involve an improper prejudging of some moral issue. An acute consciousness of this latter difficulty has indeed made it seem axiomatic to recent philosophers that ‘naturalism is a fallacy’. But I would suggest that at the level of serious common sense and of ordinary non-philosophical reflection about the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge: not with impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline (op. cit. page 37).As moral disciplines go, science is one of the most carefully monitored, constrained by publication, peer review and refined scepticism.
In law, the sovereign has maximum control, monarchs typically claiming power of life and death over their subjects. Cybernetics is built on the notion of entropy through the “principle of requisite variety” or “requisite entropy”. To control anything, the controlling system must have entropy equal to or greater than that of the system controlled. For morality to be sovereign over all value, therefore, it must have greater entropy than all value. We return this issue in section 6 From individual to society. Ashby, op. cit.
4: Wittgenstein: from analytic judgement to social synthesis
It is common to divide Wittgenstein’s relatively short philosophical career into two epochs the first characterized by the Tractatus and the second by the posthumous Philosophical Investigations. Some authors see a much more nuanced progression, but here I will stick with the “two epoch” model. Anat Biletski and Anat Matar (Standford Encyclepoedia of Phiosophy): Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein was originally educated as an aeronautical engineer and his engineering, logical and mathematical background is reflected in the Tractatus.
The Tractatus is a rather abstract and formulaic analytic account of thought, language, logic, propositions, meaning and philosophy with no overt moral content. He had, he thought, completed a book that provided a definitive and unassailably true solution to the problems of philosophy. Ray Monk: Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, page 173
The first World war interrupted Wittgenstein’s philosophical career and after the war he abandoned academia for some years and trained as a schoolteacher in Austria and, beginning in 1920, taught in small rural schools. He also built himself a house in a remote village and spent much time living alone. Here I understand Wittgenstein’s life as a history of carefully conscious moral development, from the entitled scion of a very wealthy family to a philosopher steadfastly seeking to see a way through the complexities of human existence.
We may understand Wittgenstein’s moral transition as a move both toward human symmetry and toward the development of a new internal state. Biletski and Matar emphasise that in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein is at pains to emphasise commonplace and empirical approaches to language. In contrast to the rather technical approach he took in the Tractatus, he turns to “meaning as use”. He is concerned with particular cases, not generalizations, cases that we might call complexions in Boltzmann’s terminology.
In his preface to the Investigations Wittgenstein makes a point of the intractable complexity of his mental states:
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.——And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.—The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein’s Preface serves to some extent as an apology for the “grave mistakes” in the Tractatus pointed out to him by his friend the mathematician Frank Ramsay. Overall his attitude of humility in the face of philosophical difficulties is a strong contrast to his earlier feeling that he has once solved all the problems of philosophy. Frank P. Ramsay - Wikipedia
Here we might make a distinction between ethics and morals. Ethics deals with public constraints on behaviour, the sort of things mandated by corporate codes of ethics and the work of ethics committees. Morals on the other hand may be seen as personal qualities, internal states that guide individual behaviour. An immoral person, for instance, may feel free to ignore the guidance of an ethics committee, whereas a moral person will willingly comply provided they judge that the decision of the committee is reasonable. Ethics, in other words, is amenable to codification and “black letter” legislation whereas Wittgenstein’s experience suggests that such is not the case with our internal moral states. Ethics - Wikipedia
Wittgenstein’s moral sensitivity is illustrated by a confession he made. While he was teaching he hit a child. This incident plagued his conscience. Ten years later, in 1937, he confessed it to his Russian teacher. Wittgenstein's Confession
The sovereignty of ethics so conceived in the public domain of law and religion is reasonably clear. In liberal democracies the numbers have it. Government goes to the party that can command higher entropy and autocratic politicians who demand power without numbers are considered to act unethically.
5: Murdoch: morality is a continuous complex internal process
To learn more about the sovereignty of morality over all value, I turn to Iris Murdoch, particularly the Idea of Perfection in The Sovereignty of the Good (Murdoch op. cit.). For my purposes, Wittgenstein’s life serves as an example of the deepening process, the altering and complicating process, that she sees in the emergence of love (page 28). A common term for this is ‘growth’ by analogy to the growth of a tree from simple sapling to complex giant. Murdoch is particularly concerned with the relationship between “good” and “value”, one of the oldest philosophical questions. Plato arrived at the “form of the good” as the “transcendent principle of all goodness”. Dorothea Frede (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Plato's Ethics: An Overview
Aristotle followed a similar line, and Christianity, which learnt much of its moral theology from the Greeks, still remains (outside the specifically secular field of moral philosophy), one of the principal vehicles of moral education in the West.
Murdoch’s thesis is effectively endemic in the Catholic Church. In Catholic moral theology, at least in the fifties, it is a sin to have ‘bad’ or ‘indecent’ thoughts. An important part of the Catholic Catch 22 is to make sure we all think we are sinners. Although Murdoch does not want to let God creep into her argument, it was made very clear to us children that God saw what went on in our minds as well as the things we actually did and judged us accordingly. (Murdoch op. cit. p 18).
Murdoch is arguing against the analytic position that morality lies in action rather than thought, but insofar as education influences thought patterns, it would be very difficult for a child brought up in the Catholic mould to sympathise with Hampshire’s view that anything which is to count as a definite reality must be open to several observers, if for no other reason that it precludes us from discussing consciousness. This seems quite absurd since consciousness is a very active area of psychological and philosophical research. Christoph Koch: The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach
Catholicism also embodies the notions of love and perfection that are important to Murdoch. The high point of the New Testament is the commandment of love. When asked what is the great commandment of the Law, Jesus replied:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. (Matthew 22:37-40).
These commandments were already present in the Hebrew Bible (Deuteronomy, 6:4-5, Leviticus 19:17-18), but Jesus gives them preference over all the other commandments of the Law and universalizes love of neighbour through the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
The Catholic Church also developed the doctrine of supererogation, designed to overcome the defects allegedly arising from the original sin. God punished the first people by introducing death, the need to work, and pain, particularly in childbirth. Later theologians also concluded that the punishment included breaking the nexus between reason and passion. In Catholic moral theology sin and evil are closely related to irrationally passionate behaviour. The “evangelical counsels” recommending the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience were intended to overcome this defect in human nature (Matthew 19:21). Much of the philosophical development of morality still carries echoes of its Christian antecedence, seeking rational grounds for moral behaviour and developing the moral character necessary to overcome the abyss of passion. Aquinas, Summa, I II, 82, 3: Is original sin concupiscence?
Murdoch contests the rational analytic approach to morality which she sees as behaviourist, existentialist and utilitarian:
It is behaviourist in its connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in the assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts (op. cit. pp 8-9).
The Idea of Perfection revolves around the parable of the Mother (M) and Daughter in Law (D). M is concerned by the fact that her son has married D, whom she considers to be “common” and “beneath” him. Being perfectly English she carefully hides her disdain but expresses it internally with words that express her disappointment with D. Later, without changing her behaviour, she reconsiders her opinion of D and learns to accepts that D is worthy of her son. Belle (2013 film) - Wikipedia
The point is that M has had a change of heart with no overt expression. We may contrast this story with the real life changes in Wittgenstein’s behaviour as he coped with the demands of his own reality. The point that we have private lives and that they are the field of morality is clear.
Each of us in the social world is continuously dealing with complex moral problems which perhaps dominate our interior conversation. All our interior life is moral life:
The moral life . . . is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices (op. cit. page 36).
From biographical details we gather that complex individuals like Wittgenstein were not easy to deal with (Monk, passim).
6: From individual to society
Murdoch’s M does not ring particularly true as a human person. Her reticence is a product of much education and cultural pressure. As infants and children, we are accustomed to express ours thoughts and feelings without self censorship. Why does she hide her feeling for D? Why does she work to bring herself around to loving rather than disparaging D? It this a “natural” activity, or is it a consequence of ancient moral habits common in a certain stratum of society?
The evolutionary paradigm provides us with a framework in which to understand this human behaviour. In the beginning we are helpless infants whose only recourse is to cry for help. As we mature we become skilled in the arts of deception which often plays a central role in games, love, business and war. This line of development might lead us to think that evolution would favour the relentless pursuit of personal advantage over the sacrifice and sharing that are involved in cooperation. This though runs contrary to general observation and the nature of entropy and control outlined above. In Memoriam A.H.H. - Wikipedia
Modern cosmology sees the Universe as starting off as a very simple system of fundamental particles endowed with the ability to bind together to form more complex structures. As we move closer to the present, we see atoms and molecules cooperating to form cells and cells cooperating to form multicellular organisms like plants, animals and ourselves. Our species Homo sapiens emerged some 300 000 years ago and evolution has continued to work on us, sculpting our mental and cultural states. We have seen human cooperation expand from families to tribes, cities, nations and united nations. This process is punctuated by death, disease, famine, and war, but the trend is obvious, and points to the power of cooperation. Richard G. Klein; The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins
Why does cooperation work? The key, I think, is that entropy (and hence information and value) is additive, so that the entropy of a society is a simple sum of the entropy of the individuals comprising it. The increasing entropy of growing societies gives them, in the light of the principle of requisite variety, increasing power of control, which enhances their chances of survival, a virtuous circle. We see the opposite in failing societies where inequality and corruption weaken and break the social contract. Acemoglu & Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
One consequence of this situation is that it is in the interests of society to increase the entropy of its constituents by the implementation of education, equality, the rule of law, righteous policing, democracy, health care, disability support and maintenance of the natural environment.
Murdoch sums up her position in the following words:
. . . I would suggest at the level of serious common sense and of an ordinary non-philosophical reflection upon the nature of morals it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge; not with the impersonal quasi-scientific knowledge of the ordinary world, whatever that may be, but with a refined and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline (op. cit. p. 37).
This discipline is powerful enough in many cases to overcome selfishness. Hitler’s philosophy may have been good for Hitler but it was bad for Germany and Europe, so bad that the enormous resources expended in the Second World War were used to restore humanity.
7. Discussion: complexity, value and the sovereignty of morality
Given the death of the old God, we are constrained to explain creation by the nature of the world. Is morality sovereign over all value? Yes. Morality is the name for whatever guides our behaviour, and it is our behaviour that creates value, what we might call social capital. Some of this guidance is built in to each of us at birth through the physiology and psychology we have inherited from billions of years of evolution. Some of it is absorbed from our social environment, derived from the thousands of years of social evolution which we can trace in extant literature. The final element is a product of our own decisions and the habits resulting from them which guide our day to day behaviour.
Morality is concerned with the control of personal behaviour. As a moral person, there are some things I ought not do, but moral decisions can be very complex. “Thou shalt not kill” is a good first principle, but then there enter the complexifying issues of accident, self defence, defence of others and war. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is another simple statement that ramifies endlessly in the forest of sexual mores, particularly in our societies where genders have multiplied and the sacred exclusivity of marriage has been diluted. Moralists, like lawyers, delight in studying ever more complex fictional cases which approach the complexity of real life and become elaborate subjects of the arts and literature in all their forms from technology and sport to poetry.
The essence of science is careful instrumental measurement to extend the power of sensation. The classical physical sciences depend on counting units of mass, length and time. One might argue that morality is totally unlike science because it does not measure. Instead it is generally confined to complex artistic expressions like the parable of the good samaritan or the tale of Billy Budd, which establish complex frameworks to support a moral view. At the beginning of this essay I introduced entropy which I see as a measure that carries across all categories of human experience from science to morality. Entropy does not depend on particular units, it is simply a count, a count of complexions or complexity. Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales
Universals are symmetries. We speak of sheep because all sheep share a set of common characteristic which enable us to judge with clear certainty whether a particular thing we encounter in the world is a sheep or not. Entropy is the global symmetry. From the quantum of action at the root of physics to the stars, everything is countable. This count points the direction of the stream of creation (sometimes called the arrow of time) and shows the way to go if we want to mimic nature and grow in wisdom and grace.
The idea that each of us is a reflection of the whole is at least as old as the line in Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Each of us is a microcosm, reflecting the birth and evolution of the Universe in our own lives.
8: Conclusion
Black letter moral law like the ten commandments is usually enforced by violent punishment. Moses set a precedent which he descended Mount Sinai and slew the idolaters (Exodus 32:28). Murder is a wasteful and inefficient way of keeping the peace, and we have learnt that love and education are much more effective.
Nature may be to some extent red in tooth and claw, but, as traditional human societies often illustrate, it embodies deep spiritual significance. The naturalization of morality along the lines suggested by Wittgenstein and Murdoch is inherently natural, following the evolutionary trend in the universe toward increasing entropy, complexity and gentleness.