Not to wax moralistic about it or anything, but here is Rick's
recent post, reformatted so that the rest of us can read it 
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[Rick Marken (921201.1300)]
I invited a fellow named Tom Zentall to join csg-l. He wrote a
friendly review of my "Blind men" paper to Harnad (I still don't
know if that paper was accepted -- but I can guess) and I found
out that he has done research on "hyperactive kids" -- his theory
being that they are (in PCT terms) trying to control a perception
called "stimulation" at an unusually high level and their
"hyperactivity" is just the observable effort to control that
perception. Anyway, I hope he joins; always nice to have "real"
psychologists (or whatever) examining PCT. ------ Now. To the
title story.
On the way home from work last week I was listening to a piece on
the news and a very bright sounding person was being interviewed
about something (forgot what) but at one point he felt it
necessary to say some- thing like "this is not moral relativism
or anything". The fellow was talking about some pretty liberal
stuff (hey, it was Public Radio) so it stuck me that this "moral
relativism" thing is something that is fairly equally despised by
right and left -- ie. just my kind of stuff. So it got me to
thinking about moral relativism in PCT terms.
The first thing I ask myself was "what is a moral"? It seems to
me that morals (from a PCT perspective) are a kind of perceptual
variable. The word probably refers to several different types of
variable -- program (rule), principle and even system concept.
But let's just consider "lower order" perceptual variables --
rules. One moral "rule" variable was mentioned recently; honesty.
Different levels of honesty can be perceived in our
relationships; and we can act to produce different levels of the
honesty perception in our own relation- ships. Honesty is a
controllable perceptual variable; a particular setting of this
variable would probably be referred to as a "moral"; "Thou shalt
not steal", "honesty is the best policy" are phrases that refer
to states of a rule which can be seen in the behavior of people
as a particular level of honesty. In this context, moral
relativism simply refers to the fact that one CAN (not should)
control the perception of honesty at different levels.
"Relativism" also implies that the variability of this variable
is relative to "other things" -- in PCT these "other things" are
what make the reference for a perception vary, viz. 1)higher
level references and 2) disturbances to the corresponding higher
level con- trolled perception. The higher level controlled
perception, in this case, might be a principle, like "justice"
(also a variable - but let's assume a fixed reference for the
perception of a certain level of the "justice" perception). If
the higher level reference is fixed, then the only thing that can
cause variation in the reference for "honesty" is a disturbance
to the perception of the justice principle. A disturbance to the
perception of justice might be learning that Mr. X made you broke
by swindling you. If the opportunity presented itself to you, you
might be willing to steal back the money from Mr. X --
temporarily controlling your honesty at a lower than usual level
to keep up the perception of justice in the world (of course, you
might not if other principles would be violated by doing that).
The point is that moral relativism simply recognizes a fact about
human organization at higher levels of control; it's not a matter
of whether people should or should not be this way; it is whether
they ARE this way -- ie. are they control systems? When we start
thinking about control of higher order variables like this (and,
hopefully, studying it too) we will see how PCT takes us beyond
morality (Thus Spake Zarathustra -- I bet ol' Nieztche would have
liked PCT) to functionality; from behaving by rule to behaving
with grace (Zen behavior?) --ie. being in control.
Regards
Rick
---------
Richard S. Marken US Mail: 10459 Holman Ave
The Aerospace Corporation Los Angeles, CA 90024
marken@courier4.aero.org