The Morality of Networks versus the Morality of Atoms

If Nietzsche contrasted slave morality with master morality and ridiculed the concept of good and evil through historicization and genealogy of morality, it is precisely the use of the history of moral examples as a philosophical basis that can solve the problem of relativity and historicity of morality. Indeed, the perception of morality changes historically - but out of philosophical justification for ethics built on moral learning. And what we are learning today about humans causes us to see the group as the new moral atom - and to retreat from individualistic morality

The Moral Committee Regarding Books (Source)

A person from the Middle Ages who found themselves in the present might be surprised by the smartphone, but it wouldn't cause them philosophical difficulty. What would truly be a conceptual break for them is the emptying of the moral framework, meaning that we no longer think of a person as good or evil, nor of a group as good or evil, nor of an action as good or evil.

On the left, the individual has been emptied of ethical meaning, because every specific Palestinian (for example) is suffering and a victim, and every person is broken down into false consciousnesses that have been implanted in them. Every system that is broken down into components loses ethical meaning, because even a terrorist organization is composed of misled and unfortunate individuals, and the person themselves is composed of psychological, educational, genetic problems, etc. On the right, the anachronistic insistence on viewing the person as ethically responsible, without interest in components and factors, is a matter that doesn't actually help in treating their problems and contradicts the knowledge accumulated about them - that is, the current perception of the person.

Therefore, morality focused on the person as the moral atom has lost its validity, and the person and all their actions are perceived as part of an external network. Thus, we must understand that morality applies not to atoms but rather to networks. The Palestinian is not guilty, but their national movement is guilty, and only regarding it can we discuss moral responsibility. Only the group should be punished or rewarded and judged, not the individual (who suffers or benefits as part of the group). The individual has no moral significance, and their suffering or guilt or intentions or desires have no relevance to the moral discussion, only those of their group. Morality is the judgment of a system from the outside, not a Kantian morality of intentions, because even Hitler intended good.

The idea of Hitler as an archetype, and the use of the Holocaust as a paradigm, are suitable for a morality of philosophy of learning, in learning based on examples. In such a philosophy, every moral theory must rely on authoritative historical examples that we have already learned are the embodiment of evil, or the embodiment of good, or have an agreed-upon value, and show that it succeeds in giving them all the value we agree upon, and on the other hand, predict future examples better, or at least in significant new directions.

Therefore, every moral theory is essentially a hypothesis of a machine learning algorithm that learns from examples, and the discussion progresses as history advances and brings new examples that previous theories did not correctly predict, or not with sufficient intensity. For example, a theory that doesn't strongly oppose the Holocaust - is not moral. Not because our goal is to find the morality that will take us furthest from the Holocaust (and therefore we compete on deeper and more basic explanations for it, in the mistaken thinking that depth will distance us from surface errors), but simply because it is not valid enough in terms of learning. And this is a new demand from morality (and therefore learned!), which did not exist before the Holocaust - that it present the Holocaust as the most negative moral category, qualitatively different from others.

In exactly the same way, aesthetic discussion should rely on masterpieces and poor works as examples for the basis of discussion. And what about epistemological discussion? For that, as with Kant, we need to use sciences and mathematics as agreed-upon examples. And in political science: Nazism and democracy (once - Rome was the example). That is, philosophy is an empirical learning field that learns from examples and develops from them much more than it is willing to admit.