That said, each of us has to decide what is better and what is worse in his or her circumstances. When doing things in groups, and for a coherent society as a whole, we need to have enough consensus about the balance of values we espouse.
As a result of a lot of reading - after a busy and varied life - I have ended up with a 5-dimensional view of what constitutes good and bad. This is in some ways an extension of the idea of 'triple bottom line' that is talked about by some businesses and other organisations.
The diagram below follows a somewhat similar pattern - but with not quite the same details - as the one in Loyal Rue's book 'Religion is not about God'.
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The five sides of the Pentagon represent five aspects of a good individual and social life. While the proposed grouping into 5 aspects is of my choosing, it is based on many years of reflection on several different philosophies and religions in a number of nations.
The five aspects, reading anti-clockwise from the top right, are: Quality and Aesthetics; Reason and Logic; Economy and Resources; Society and Manageability; and Human Motivation.
The first two aspects, at the top of the Pentagon, are termed the ‘Fundamentals’; the three aspects lower down are referred to as the ‘Pragmatics’.
In the centre of the Pentagon is the Core, which has an inner and an outer part. The inner part is the Spirit of Good, which I regard as the ultimate source of motivation for all the good things that happen in our universe. Being a spirit, it is not easy to describe or define. I regard this spirit as unchanging. It drives the evolution of both living and non-living forms in our world and in the wider universe. To us humans, the spirit offers itself to us as a way to be at one with the direction of the world’s evolution.
The outer part of the core is the ‘Examined Life’. This harks back to a saying attributed to Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It's also the title of several books; the authors include Stephen Grosz, James Hollis, John Kekes and Robert Nozick. My view is that the examined life must take account of the world as it is, and not just in our own small corner of it. So it is inevitably subject to change as the world around us changes.
Beyond the borders of the Pentagon are the conceptual dark clouds that represent estrangement from the Spirit of Good.
On the far right of the diagram, we start with a ‘will’ to do something in our world, and may make plans, possibly with other humans such as our family or social group; this ‘will’ enters the Pentagon along the blue arrow. On the far left, the dice represent ‘chance’ (since we cannot be sure how our actions will turn out) and ‘risk’ (that the result may be unfavourable or disastrous). These enter the Pentagon along the red arrow. The dice are just metaphors for the fact that the world evolves in ways that are usually only partly predictable, and often totally unpredictable, by us.
Each of the five aspects or dimensions is addressed on a separate page - the links are shown below. There are also some short essays including one discussing the term 'The Examined Life'.
The links below lead to the other components of PLOVER
| Philosophy | Language | Ontology | Value A | Evolution | Religion |
Back links to pages in the website
| Back to Value A | Back to PLOVER home | Back to Roger's Re-think home | Back to tagg.org website |
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 6