Dear Clive
While I appreciate the artifice drift of your perspective on ethics, I pause over a few matters and reflect that perhaps Simon's hankering after design as an account of the human is indeed an attempt to simplify the deeper and more ancient question he wishes to avoid which, again, is still, the proper study of human kind is humans.
As simple action based existential ethics is ok, as far as it goes, but the proposition that consciousness is not simply "natural" needs a bit of torture.
If by "natural" we mean "self-arising", then consciousness is self-arising like all other natural things. When this self-arising becomes self-reflective and capable of self-direction then it doesn't avoid the given nature of its arising. That is, along with contingency and the un-finished nature of consciousness, there is also the experience of consciousness as its own configuration. That is, while "everything is dependent on the configuration it is given" equally, everything is dependent on configuration. That is, consciousness leaves its traces on everything it touches and hence in any and all actions there is a beyond the ethical which is the mark of the human. (I am thinking here of Hegel's Phenomenology.)
Ethics then is bound not to artifice but rather to artifaction.
cheers
keith russell
Newcastle OZ
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