The Moral Territory

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

– George Box

The map is not the territory.

– Alfred Korzybski

George Box’s aphorism points to a fundamentally ineffable Real. It isn’t that reality actually works like a model that we simply haven’t found yet, but that no models—no concepts—will ever describe what is with total accuracy. If we don’t believe concepts can produce categorically true descriptions, how can we believe that they can produce categorically true prescriptions? To deny that possibility is the core of negative ethics.

Subscribing to negative ethics means never mistaking the map for the territory. It means recognizing that the only map that doesn’t lie is the territory itself. You might deem a map adequate for the path you’re currently traveling, but you can only come to that conclusion because you can see the territory and thus verify the map. You “know” that an ethical system is good, because it matches what you immediately perceive—i.e., intuit—to be moral more often than not.

These maps—ethical frameworks—are useful for one reason above all: Giving them to people who prioritize looking at maps over perceiving their surroundings. The best way to not walk off a cliff is to watch where you’re going, but the next best thing is a map that is accurate enough for the current situation. You might suggest someone a different map that you can tell is more accurate locally, but you cannot extend that guarantee globally.

Taking negative ethics to its conclusion means personally disregarding maps altogether to instead focus on perceiving the territory itself as clearly as possible.

The Way that can be spoken of is not the real Way.

– Laozi, Daodejing, Chapter 1

In everyday life we do not scan our options beforehand, then enact the one that is best. We simply deal with whatever is at hand. We get up in the morning and put on our clothes without meaning to do so. We help a friend in the same way. . . . Outside the Western tradition, the Daoists of ancient China saw no gap between is and ought. Right action was whatever comes from a clear view of the situation. They did not follow moralists—in their day, Confucians—in wanting to fetter human beings with rules or principles. For Daoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skillfully. It has no practical purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realize any ideal.

This is, in my view, as close as one can get to the negative ethics of the Daoist moral fool in contemporary theory.

– HG Moeller, The Moral Fool, quoting John Gray, Straw Dogs