Complexity and Chaos
Complexity and chaos are intuitive notions not easily rendered into formal definitions, and yet they have become increasingly important to both science and technology—and thereby to ethics. One useful way to approach complexity is through the analysis of dynamic systems.
Dynamic or changing systems are of two types: those in which knowledge of current states enables the prediction of future states, and those in which knowledge of current states does not enable the prediction of future states. In general ethics has attributed the first type of system to the world (because this appears to reflect a large part of reality, and in the absence of such a system it would be hard to hold human beings responsible for the consequences of their actions), and the second type to human beings (again because this appears confirmed by some aspects of human behavior, and without it humans could not be held accountable for voluntarily choosing to perform one action rather than another). Only since the last third of the twentieth century has scientific understanding of dynamic systems been advanced enough to explain the intellectual framework behind these two attributions.
Linear Dynamics and Its Limits
In the wake of the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, science projected that all natural phenomena, including human actions, could be fully explained with the same logic used to predict planetary motion.
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