A Place to Stand; or, A DriverlessCrocodile Worldview

Some foundational assumptions:

• Matter matters: The world and people have inherent value and are worth caring about and caring for. In other words, there is something good (nay, wonderful!) about the world and many of the things in it. This is essentially a faith position – that is to say, I don’t know of a justification for it other than religious ones or a gut sense of conviction. If you know of a convincing materialist-rationalist justification for this position, please let us all know in the comments.
• Good and Evil exist, and in general it is possible (and necessary) to make moral judgements about things. It is not always possible, and it is often not easy, but we can make moral distinctions. A broad principle is that good things contribute towards the flourishing of humans and the world in general, and bad things damage or destroy them. This is derived from faith position 1 (matter matters).
• Limits and Uncertainty: The world is a big place. The universe is bigger. There will always be many more things that we don’t know than that we do know. We can be quite sure about quite a lot of things, but it behooves us to remember that both our experience and our capacity to perceive, reason and understand are limited (more on this below) – so we should be open to changing our minds.
• Complexity and non-linearity: This uncertainty is partly caused by the complex and interrelated nature of most of the things we care about, from the functioning of our bodies to the world’s ecosystems to our families, organisations, and societies. Small changes can have enormous consequences. We are unable to predict the effects of our actions beyond their very immediate impacts on the world around us. We can’t know with certainty where we will end up. We don’t fully know or understand how we got here. We couldn’t recreate the conditions that made us, and we can’t do anything to make things remain as they are. You might say: We are not God.
• The necessity of action: Despite the limits of our knowledge, doing nothing is not an option. To do nothing is almost the same as to die (for example, to literally do nothing is to starve). It is sometimes very nearly the same thing as to kill.
• The necessity of judgement: The necessity of action turns our ability to make moral judgements into a moral imperative. It is necessary that we choose between alternatives. We cannot avoid applying our judgement. We must apply our judgement carefully, but to avoid judging entirely is wrong. We can (we must) talk about “should” and “should not”.
• Proper Confidence: Within these limits, and facing these necessities, we must decide that on balance, we know enough to be getting along with. We can muddle through – in fact, do a bit better than muddling through – making the best out of what we have.
• Action and knowing: To act is to find out what is possible and to create new possibilities. To act is to improve your vision, and to sharpen your moral judgement.
• A price to pay: Decisions always have a cost – economists call it opportunity cost. To do one thing is to cut yourself off from alternatives. To do nothing is to cut yourself off from the possibilities generated by action.
• Grey Areas: Often, we face unpleasant trade-offs: a certain amount of damage or pain for a certain amount of gain. Often, we are faced with choices between things (or between subjective judgements about things) that are impossible to compare. Trying to make the “best” trade off available is not the same thing as being a utilitarian. It is to be confronted with the necessity of choosing something in the face of uncertainty, and to do the best we can. Once again, we must muddle through.
• Crooked timber:  At the same time that people are wonderful, we are all deeply screwed up. This is true of each of us in our own special ways, and by extension of our cultures and of humanity as a whole. Our vision is cloudy, our memories are hazy, our judgement is flawed, our will-to-good is inconsistent at best. We get tired and we get mean. We do bad things out of ignorance, out of laziness or apathy or weakness, out of incompetence, out of selfishness and out of malice. We inherit these qualities, we make them our own, and we pass them on to our friends and our children. This is an empirical, rather than a faith position, even if it looks a lot like original sin.
• Scarcity: There is not enough of most of the important things in life. This is a big part of life’s tragedy and its comedy. It makes decisions meaningful and keeps things interesting. Art is defined by constraints; life’s beauty is in part in its limits.
• Diversity is desirable and part of what it means to be alive. The extreme opposite of diversity is a (literally) a black hole. Differences between people are inevitable, and we diverge as we grow. Genetically identical fish in identical environments develop distinct individual patterns of behaviour (that is, personalities) within days of hatching. It is not only unavoidable but also desirable that people live different lives and (therefore) have different outcomes.
• Conflict of one kind or another is inevitable. The daily struggle of existence with the world and within ourselves – the agon of life – is part of what it means to be human. Most other conflict is wasteful and is best avoided, but some things need to be fought for, won and defended. Peace is not worth “all costs”.
• Randomness plays an enormous role in things.
• Destiny is out there. It’s another way of saying “how things turned out”.