Preliminary Modelling

The Story so Far

So far, we have clarified and formulated the following:

I can now consider how to the transform ethical choice so as to understand political maturation.

Setting up the Model

Ethics and politics are both about obligation. Ethics for persons can be converted into politics for societies by looking at the approaches to ethical choice in a new holistic way. This involves working out a specially designed Table of Typology Essences (TET) as explained in the next topic and those that follow.

Here is a summary of the move that the TET enables:

  Ethical Types Political Modes
Focus The Person The Society
Power Integrity-based Consensual &/or coercive
Delegation Not permitted Required
Quality Content - method Context - institution
Relations amongst Types/Modes Co-existence accepted
to manage antipathy.		 Cumulative incorporation to enable maturation.

While ethical choice types, being methods, are prone to generating passionate arguments and conflicts between people, political modes, being values, are more general, inclusive and easily accepted (in principle).

Different methods cannot be combined for practical reasons, but different values can be. Simple inspection reveals the presence of relevant social values embedded within each of the ethical choice approaches.
ClosedExamples

The steps in understanding ethical choices holistically will be as follows:

  • Step 1: Determine necessary axes in the Typology Essences Table (TET).
  • Step 2: Plot the ethical approaches on the TET.
  • Step 3: Analyse quadrants to understand antagonisms and affinities.
  • Step 4: Clarify differences between ethical approaches lying on each diagonal.

The TET is a way to view all the Ethical Types simultaneously. It becomes a scaffold for appreciating how the Political Modes can be progressively cumulated.

What is to come, the story of political maturation, is about the progressive incorporation of each of the political modes into society via social institutions. Each political mode provides new values essential for that particular Stage in society's maturation. 

The inquiry task will involve clarifying how each political mode:

  • can provide governance and institutions that benefit people generally
  • can ensure commonality and cohesion amongst the populace
  • can handle individual differences and inter-personal interactions
  • necessarily entails certain civic values and virtues

Read more about Typologies and Spirals in The Hub. The nature of the Principal Typology and Spiral Complex is currently being examined in in more detail in the Architecture Room.

This is a brief abstract summary to explain why the preliminary task is to develop a TET.

  • All Types have a content and a context.
  • Type-Contents are methods used within a relevant social situation for an entity (i.e. person, group, organization or society).
  • Type-Contexts contain or imply values justifying the methods for the entity.
  • The set of any Type's contextual values are called a Mode. Having all Modes operative simultaneously is desirable but does not occur spontaneously.
  • The TET enables all Types and hence all Modes to be represented on a relevant field of psychosocial reality.
Blank spiral of development developed from a THEE 2x2 Typology Essences Table.
  • The Mode that emerges from Type 3 is spontaneously present and serves as the starting point i.e. Mode-1/Stage-1.
  • The entity context can strengthen over time by incorporating new Modes in a series of discontinuous Stages.
  • Values are cumulative; earlier mode-values may be adapted, but nothing that has been won by effort is ever lost.

When the progress is plotted on a TET (Typology Essences Table), the result is a Spiral trajectory showing discontinuous Stages of development. There are two Cycles in any Spiral: Stage-1 is entered twice and the final (third) re-entry completes the maturation process.

Originally posted: July 2009; Last updated: 27-Feb-2014