The complexity of the concepts introduced in this chapter are presented here to introduce the reader to the integrated system of values that are innate to Homo sapiens, that also provide for an logical and integrated system of morality and ethics. Juxtaposed to that complexity is the simplicity of those values that will be provided in Chapter 2, “The Innate and Universal Values of All People,” and more fully developed in succeeding chapters in Part 1, The Mechanics For Creating Socially Sustainable Democratic Societies. Only an integrated set of values and the morality and ethics that emanate from that integration are capable of providing humanitarian answers to the humanitarian crises that are now engulfing Europe.
Introduction
Perhaps the greatest problem involving uninvited immigrants has been the lack of an integrated morality and ethic to address the cascade of social problems from their unanticipated arrival.
The second greatest problem has been the lack of clearly defined distinctions between societal morality and ethics, personal morality and ethics, and humanitarianism.
What follows is a simplified introduction of a proactive, integrated morality and ethic that are adequate to answer the moral and ethical problems of more than just those surrounding the massive waves of uninvited immigrants.
As all business executives and business consultants know, values always underlie all decision-making, whether that occurs in a milli-second or takes years to execute. Knowing those values before decisions are made helps assure that outcomes are in alignment with those values, or not. The simplicity of the logic of the proactive morality and ethic that is explained in this paper comes from seven values and their characteristics.
That combination provides the missing elements for making more reliable and consistent decisions for long term strategic planning with positive results. Those values are comfortably familiar to all of us because they are innate to our species and have been for over 200,000.
The morality and ethics that erupt from those values are logically and immediately universal to all people of all past, present, and future generations for all people of all races, cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, and genders. When they underlie our decision-making they offer a proactive morality that anticipates the future. Until now, there has never existed a proactive unified theory of normative ethics that is based on our seven innate values to tell us “how we ought to act” to provide logically consistent answers to moral and ethical situations. 5
Normative ethics is the study of ethical action. It is the branch of philosophical ethics that investigates the set of questions that arise when considering how one ought to act, morally speaking. (Source: Wikipedia)
The term “uninvited immigrants” applies to immigrants everywhere, but here it applies more directly to the vast migration of people into Europe. Globally, in the coming years, we can expect more great migrations will be an almost constant development. As the planet becomes increasingly over-populated and as greater swaths of land become deserts, or flooded along ALL coastal areas that are less than 3 meters above sea level, it won’t be tens of thousands of people migrating, but many tens of millions. Predictably, the present migrations set an example of what is to come. The moral dilemmas will become excruciatingly difficult. The universal morality and ethics that are briefly described here will not make those decisions any easier, but they will be based on the values that are innate to our species.
Even before coming to the end of these pages, you will begin to form many questions about the incredibly difficult decisions that will have to be made in the future. Very likely those decisions will not be made by the present older generation, but will be made by our children. What do we need to do to prepare our children for making moral and ethical solutions that will surely involve many millions of lives?”
Priorities of Moral and Ethical Decision-Making
When we are confronted by a moral or ethical problem, our first question must be, “Is this a societal moral problem, or is it a personal moral problem?” Concerning the moral problem of uninvited immigrants, it is a societal problem.
As a societal problem, democratic governments working on behalf of the public have the moral authority and proactive obligation to protect the public by means that may be immoral if exercised by an individual. The moral justification for doing so is to protect the survival and social sustainability of the public and the social institutions that integrate the function of their societies for this generation and all future generations. What is missing from this agenda of moral priorities is the moral obligation of government to become proactive to protect the public. Reactive “hindsight morality” works against the public’s best interests to become socially sustainable. “Hindsight morality” indicts a democratic government as being callous and unprotective of its citizenry, i.e., immoral.
The societal moral and ethical decisions made by a hosting government will be far different from those made by individual citizens. In the following example you will see the two sides of this proactive personal morality.
If a bystander, who was armed, witnessed another person light a fire-bomb and was preparing to throw it at a school bus full of children, the bystander would be morally justified but also personally morally obligated to immediately kill or incapacitate the terrorist. If the same bystander who was armed chose not to kill or incapacitate the assailant, the bystander would be morally derelict and would be passively complicit with the assailant in the deaths of the children. With a proactive morality, the acts of commission and omission carry obligations and responsibilities that cannot be ignored when survival is involved.
The two sides of societal morality are apparent in the following example. If the assailant was arrested, charged with terrorism and murder, found guilty of the same, incarcerated, and eventually released, then again commits an act of similar proportions, the government would be morally complicit with the assailant for his or her new crimes. The omission of using its authority to permanently remove social predators is a moral obligation of the government to protect the long term survival and social sustainability of present and future generations of its citizenry.
For more detailed explanations of societal morality, see Organic Morality: Answering the Critically Important Moral Questions of the 3rd Millennium. Available from the author’s website.
- No individual shall diminish or impede the social sustainability of another person, organization, or association of organizations without moral justification.
- No organization shall diminish or impede the social sustainability of another organization, individual, or association of organizations without moral justification.
- No association of organizations shall diminish or impede the social sustainability of another association of organizations, organization, or individual without moral justification.
In the above, the first part of each sentence is a caution. The second phrase “…without moral justification” is stated to obligate the individual or government to proactively take moral action to sustain the life of another individual, or self, or public. “Being a threat” is not morally sufficient to take that action by an individual. At the far end of “protecting the public” the rise of nationalism and fascism is morally UNjustified and are in themselves a threat to the socially sustainability of a democratic nation’s families, communities, and societies.
Priorities of Moral and Ethical Decision-Making, Continued
The illustration below is an organic decision-making tree that is based on the seven values for moral and ethical decision-making.
It provides individuals and organizations with a logical and rational process for reframing human motivation collectively from the simple task of sustaining the species to sustaining the social existence of our communities and societies. The illustration makes it clear that there is a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship involved between the individual/family and organizations to jointly support the sustainability of communities and societies in which they both exist. As you can see from the illustration, “Community,” and “Society” are not involved in the decision-making. This is an important distinction. The sole decision-makers in any community and society are the individual/family and organizations. Moral liability for the decisions of an organization can no longer be projected to that organization, but are in this moral reality solely that of the executives, individually or severally, who made them. To mitigate that personal moral responsibility in a democracy, it is vital that citizens are proactively invited into the process of option-development and choice-making before those executive decisions are made.
Concerning “the problem of uninvited immigrants” the priorities of our questions must point the way to answers that strategically sustain the long arc of the nation’s social evolution into the future. The following question is probably the most succinct. “How do we preserve our nation’s cultures and societies so that future generations of our children have the same or better quality of life as we have today?” Any answers that are developed must as well address the moral and ethical context that uninvited immigrants have brought into our lives.
The First Priority is always to sustain the species because it holds the genetic program of our species. The primal motivation of the individual is to reproduce to sustain the continuation of the species. At the early animal survival level of our species that does not require a family, community, society, organizations, or morality and ethics.
Question: Are uninvited immigrants morally necessary to sustain the survival of the species of the host nation?
Answer: No.
For organizations to sustain the species, that means not polluting or endangering the species in any way that would cause damage to the genetic program. For families that means teaching children how to live in a functional loving family, and how to live peacefully in the community and the larger society.
It may seen as though I have stated the obvious. The other side of that statement is raising children without any direction for establishing their own functional family, and raising children who do not know how to live peacefully in their community and society. When that occurs, that is the initiation of the disintegration of families, communities, and societies. In a nation that has voluntarily accepted huge numbers of uninvited immigrants and their children, their adequate socialization and enculturation is crucial to the social, political, and economic stability and sustainability of that nation.
Question: Is it immoral to reject uninvited immigrants?
Answer(s): No, it is not immoral. The exception exists for those immigrants whose original motivation for emigrating from their homeland was due to their physical lives being threatened.
Question: Is it immoral to reject uninvited immigrants whose lives are not in jeopardy as they travel the seas or deserts?
Answer: No, it is not immoral. For those who emigrated without their physical survival being threatened politically, it is immoral for those uninvited immigrants to obligate the host nation to take them into their care. The moral responsibility of uninvited immigrants who made that decision is upon themselves with attendant risks involved. In stark terms, it is not the moral responsibility of humanity to save people from their own decisions that may also jeopardize the survival of their children in transit. Further, it is immoral to separate those children from their parents, as doing so morally violates the bond and responsibilities between the parent and their children.
Question: Is it immoral to ignore uninvited immigrants whose survival is in jeopardy when they are in the water after their boat has sunk, or when they are stranded in the desert without water and the means to travel to safety?
Answer: Yes, it is immoral.
NOTE: The examples given here provide only the very briefest of descriptions for examining and validating morality and ethics. In depth analysis would require a much more detailed examination using the seven values, moral definitions, ethics statements, and expressed ethics. The full spread of moral and ethic definitions and statements will provide the opportunity to weigh-in on the moral and ethical responsibilities and obligations of all parties involved.
The second priority is to sustain the social fabric (functional families) that holds communities and societies together; and to support their symbiotic and synergistic relationship with organizations. For an INvoluntary hosting nation, this situation is the most critical and must be answered as promptly as possible in order to sustain the current quality of life for its citizens.
Because individuals and organizations are the only decision-makers in the decision-making tree, their individual and joint responsibility is to support the social sustainability of their communities and societies. The reason organizations are directly responsible arises because families are the primary socializing and enculturating social institution that can produce well qualified, socially capable, responsible, and competent employees of organizations. The source of all future generations of directors, managers, executives, middle managers, supervisors, team leaders, consultants, and the great body of employees come from families. If the quality of the child’s preparation for entering into the work force is high, whether as a laborer or as a member of a board of directors, then those organizations will benefit from the good work that the parents have done raising that child.
Questions: Are the uninvited immigrants prepared to become a reliable and responsible party to the symbiotic relationship of individuals and organizations? Also, is the involuntary nation prepared to fulfill the needs of those individuals to fulfill their responsibilities in this symbiotic relationship?
Answers: Here, the involuntary hosting nation must assess the capability of uninvited immigrants to become viable sustaining members of that nation. For nations that have consciously and voluntarily accepted the influx of uninvited immigrants, the responsibilities and projected outcomes become onerous.
Question: Is it immoral to reject uninvited immigrants once they are in the host nation?
Answer: Only when doing so puts those uninvited immigrants under immediate threat of their physical survival.
Being rejected by a potential host nation is a logical risk uninvited immigrants accept when they decide to emigrate from their homeland.
Discussion
“The problem of the uninvited immigrant” is largely the consequence of unthinking potential host nations not having anticipated the current situation BEFORE it occurred. National over-population in other nations that lack food production to sustain their growing populations, desertification, climate change, political unrest, economic collapse and so on are surely precursors that will produce immense waves of human migration.
Now that these waves of human migration have and are taking place, those unthinking, non-proactive nations now have humanitarian crises exploding around them. And those crises now directly affect the social, cultural, political, economic sustainability of the citizens of those host nations ! Uninvited immigration then becomes very person.
A priority that must be answered for the hosting nations, as well as for the whole earth, is this, “How much ‘load’ of new people can our nation/planet carry and still remain viable socially, culturally, politically, and economically to assure those who are here, and those of future generations, can grow into the innate potential they bring into life”? In this case, it is not the physical survival that is at stake, but the nation as a functional whole that can sustain itself in those parameters while maintaining equality of opportunity for everyone to unleash their innate capability to grow into the potential they brought into life, and to sustain a thriving quality of life for the uninvited immigrants as well.
For hosting nations, whether or not they consciously and voluntarily made the decision to accept the huge influx of uninvited immigrants, the situation of V.U.C.A., (Volatile, Unpredictable, Complex, Ambiguous), is at its most powerful. Many questions arise that must be anticipated and answered. What happens to our nation if we do not staunch the flow of uninvited immigrants? Can we adequately assure our citizens and the uninvited immigrants equal opportunity for a continuing high quality of life so that our own children and their children can explore and develop their own innate potential?
How hosting nations address the huge number of uninvited immigrants who are already in their nation must use the criteria of the seven values for everyone, while incorporating the criteria of this logical and proactive morality and ethics that have been briefly explained here.
The Missing Factor For Attaining Social Sustainability
The organic decision-making tree includes all of the players who make the decisions that affect our species, our way of life, and the well being of our families, communities, and societies for this generation and all future generations. It illustrates a system of decision-making that is necessary to sustain our families, communities, and societies into the distant future. What is missing from the organic decision-making tree are the criteria, or rules, for making moral and ethical decisions that will keep (sustain) families and organizations of our communities and societies running smoothly so that everyone arrives in the distant future with the same or better quality of life as we have today.
The combination of the Organic Decision-Making Tree, the seven values, and subsequent morality and ethics provide primary social institutions with the capability to transform themselves into coordinated engines of social evolution. Public and private education, for example, can now use the Tree to mold educational programs and curricula to teach pupils and students how to make personal and organizational decisions that contribute to their own personal lives, their eventual children and families, while being morally and ethically consistent. When that is in place, then the primary elements of social evolution and sustainability will begin to make good progress for everyone.
Where once there did not exist an integrated and logical way to make moral and ethical decisions to answer the problems surrounding uninvited immigrants, that capability now exists. That capability will expand immensely as democratic nations engage moral and ethical problems that threaten the survival of nations and their sustainability. What is fortunate is that once these moral and ethical tools are embedded into the primary social institutions for addressing the problem of uninvited immigrants, that capability will remain in place in democratic processes. That will give them a far greater ability to develop answers that are just and fair as the future unfolds.
Social sustainability
is a process and ideology
that integrates the disparate parts of society
into a congruent system. 5 Raphael, Daniel 2018 Making Sense of Ethics — A Unique, Unified Normative Theory of Ethics, Morality, and Values. Free PDF, link