Interview with a Posttranscendentalist Ethicist

Today on Face the Music, I interview Urzhwon Wrengwreathe, currently considered to be the leader of the pack of the school of Post-Transcendentalist Ethics. She has refused the Proongveltes Award, the Stavvans Prize, and the Niueve Citation. She is the Master Ethicist at Solvons Univeristy, Kathavaldy-on-Brioso. Her book, Conversations with Conwren: Demythicised Ethics Auditing, is currently fifth on the most-read lists. Let us begin.

FM: So, Ms. Wrengwreathe, hello!
UW: Hello!
FM: Could you explain to us what the difference between Transcendentalist and Post-Transcendentalist ethics happens to be? I thought Transcendentalism was a good thing!
UW: For the most part it is... with respect to dhyana and human experience it's essential, but in some cases, ethics in particular, it's somewhat backwards.
FM: And why is that?
UW: Well, the problem with first-stage ethics, that is, the type which gets codified into neat little lists of disapproved behaviours and the like, is that all of that usually has a religiously derived moral schema lurking in the background, usually smoking some type of cigar and wearing a dark coat, slinking off into the shadows.
FM: Haunting!
UW: Yes: the extension of primate social hierarchies into rule based control and approved behavior lists determines systems of ethics on the basis of what is not allowed, and the processes involved in assigning fault and blame. Cultures that have to live with the constant specter of blame tend to suffer considerably. The point being an entirely incorrect metric is employed because it has always been employed with little analysis being focused on it.
FM: go on
UW: In the cultures in which blame is a commodity, you are constantly looking to assign fault, or to mitigate the risk of fault by insurance -- which is a preventative measure taken against the putative and imagined foreshadowings of harm. On this shallow stratum, conventional, that is transcendentalist ethics systems have been floated.
FM: Why are they called Transcendentalist?
UW: Because ultimately they do not have any means of measuring what they purport to quantify and qualify by any other means than the behaviours and incidences of parents which have been scarred/scared into the muscle memories of children. And maybe thirty million years of primate behavior, too. Morals sway religious and then there is an even more tenuous basis for those systems of ethics.
FM: How does Post-Transcendentalist Ethics differ from Transcendentalist Ethics?
UW: Because we can measure how ethical something happens to be by quantifying how much happiness it produces. Of course, we cannot measure happiness directly these days because we cannot examine the endorphin content of all the people affected by the given process/object which we want to examine the ethics thereof. But what we can do is to put the interactions between the given object or process under examination and then ask: how does this object interact with its environment? The level of analysis which this version of ethics does is very detailed and would have been practically impossible to do in the 21st century.
FM: Can you give us an example of a PT ethics analysis?
UW: Take for instance, a bottle of body-odor-modifier. We examine the energetic sources of the bottle, the ingredients, the power that powers the plant which manufactures it. We calculate the energetic imprint of the production of the ingredients: we know exactly how many joules it takes to produce this, starting from sunlight, petrochemicals, throughout every stage of the refining process.
FM: So it's just another Odume(interrupt)
UW: Oh no! Then we do the kicker. We find all the people whose lives are involved in the production of one of these, and we find out how happy they happen to be. We ask them how the object/process affects them. How they feel about it. Does their relation to this object improve them? We can answer a question that chresmatistics would never be able to answer, more important than the decision problem.
FM: Which question?
UW: The allocation problem. We have enough information (or will when this method is employed widespread) to say whether or not a given thing/object/process is beneficial or not.
We can say how unethical something happens to be on an erg-by-erg and person-by-person basis.
FM: A little idealistic?
UW: Damn right. But having this level of analysis available just slices the traditional approaches of budgeteering out of the water. The reason that it is mostly unimplementable at the moment is that the primate hierarchy party line is still in session. Which I happen to hear is on the way out in around ten to twenty years at this rate.
FM: two to four I hear, with the current jumps in sensory apprehension and intelligence: right now we're waiting for those meme-complexes to percolate through the populace.
UW: Excellent.
FM: I see we're out of time. Thank you.
UW: Chagga-Bagga-Ballovo!
FM: Next week on Face-the-Music, we'll be interviewing Syllepsia F. Hernwhorl, author of f(x) : Hit-Apes for Hire