Philosophy

Although I have not eschewed all philosophical reading while writing Fragments of Berossus, I have scrupulously avoided anything to do with the major themes of the book, particularly ethics and jurisprudence.

Even prior to commencing the book my philosophical interests were generally in other domains (metaphysics, epistemology, language theory, identity, etc.); why, given the nature of the question, I did not seriously investigate ethics earlier I cannot say.

I did however have to make some serious enquiries for a talk I gave in 1999 on the ethics of genetic modification, and it was in the course of preparing that talk that the major problem with ethical disputes finally became apparent to me. The problem is that "good" and "right" mean many different things: there are numerous ethical systems in existence and all disagreements about right and wrong, good and bad, ultimately reflect the axiomatic premisses of each system.

To illustrate the magnitude of the problem it suffices to consider just a few of the significant ethical systems — Deontological, Utilitarian, Teleological and Emotivist.

At the risk of being misleadingly brief, deontology judges morality according to rules — the most common source of the rules being God or gods; utilitarianism, being a consequentialist theory, looks to the good or bad accruing from an action; teleological ethics references the intention behind actions, and emotivism (which is really a language-philosophical view that moral utterances express emotion) seeks to acknowledge how we feel about certain actions.

Consider then the various responses of the deontologist etc. to the genetic manipulation of animals: the deontologist may say that the animal has a god-given nature that we have no right to interfere with; the utilitarian might speak approvingly of the human health benefits of modifying a particular animal; the teleologist might be in favour of modification if well intentioned; and the "emotivist" might simply say "yuk" on seeing how "deformed" the modified animal might be — regardless of how beneficial it might be.

With such a diversity of ethical theories for people to adhere to, consensus — let alone unanimity — on any particular issue is almost impossible to achieve; yet all decisions of significance are ultimately moral decisions...

One of the tasks I set myself was therefore to seek a new way to approach such questions; in Fragments of Berossus that new approach is to emphasise process. 

And that's all I'm going to say about that.