Applying Value Incrementalism to Today's Society

In "Value Incrementalism, Perfectionism, and Sentient Nonhumans" the authors, Matt Silliman and Dave Johnson stressed the importance of empathy, morality, moral valuers, social relations and nurturance in relationship to individuals and groups. Matt made the statement, “to build a normative moral theory you will need to bridge the is-ought gap.” Dave’s response asks us to “Consider the process of becoming reflectively conscious… for such beings as ourselves (at least), socially significant facts are already evaluative, and moral values are facts of the life we are born into.”

We are individually born into a society. Today, there is grave concern about the number of people in our society who exhibit the constellation of symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. This term is often used interchangeably with "sociopathic" and "psychopathic" personality disorder. The disorder is characterized by preoccupation with one's own concerns and insensitivity to the needs of others, lack of empathy, lack of conscience, and absence of guilt or feelings of remorse even after harming other people.

Hervey Cleckley's basic criteria of the psychopathic personality are:

1. Superficial charm and good intelligence
2. Shallow emotions and lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse
3. Behaviors indicative of little life plan or order
4. Failure to learn from experience and absence of anxiety
5. Unreliability, insincerity, and untruthfulness

The disorder is considered to be influenced by both genetics and the environment. Currently, the medical community is especially concerned about the influence of our social environment on today’s youth relative to the disorder.

It seems to me that the constellation of sociopathic symptoms can easily be applied to many national and international mega businesses and political systems. Cleckley's basic criteria of the psychopathic personality accurately describes most corporate and political entities as well as the people running them.

Given the significant rise in sociopaths in today’s society, should we consider the process of humankind becoming reflectively unconscious? In what context can we place sociopaths, evaluative, socially significant facts, and the current moral values as facts of the life into which we are born?

Can value incrementalism be applied to today’s societies? Could it be useful in diagnosing current destructive societal patterns? Are we creating a self-perpetuating disorder and deconstruction of society and self? Could the process of societies becoming reflectively unconscious and amoral be the next natural step in Peirce’s principle of self-perpetuating order? Will this facilitate the rise of nonhuman sentient, empathic beings into active volition following a natural ontogeny of value?

Are we approaching a threshold where categories of moral status as agents and valuers will include empathic sentient beings according to a construction by social empathic, beings? Will this new construction dis-include all unempathic sentient beings - including human beings from level 4 on the crude scale of natural objects?