System of Social Morality in the Context of the Basic Principles of Synergetics: Results of the Study

Abstract

The article is devoted to summarizing the main results of the author’s study of social morality in the context of the basic principles of synergetics. Synergetics in the given is used as the initial methodological orienting point that directs attention to specific mechanisms and patterns of social morality, inherent to all open complex self-organizing systems. There are two main levels in the system of social morality: macro level of moral consciousness (a set of collective moral ideas of community) and micro level of moral practice (it includes members of a community who, adopting its moral orientations in his/her own individual moral conscience, implement them in practice). Relationships of subordination and circular causality exist between these levels. The complexity of the system of social morality is due to quantitative indicators and complexity of relationships between its elements, because in moral practice people have a variety of relationships with a lot of degrees of freedom. The openness of the system of social morality is confirmed by the existence of the influence of one system on another, as well as their close relationship with other phenomena of natural and socio-cultural life. Those of them that have the greatest influence on the formation and functioning of social morality are defined as its control factors. Social morality is nonlinear system, because the impact of external factors isn’t unambiguous. Self-organization of the system of social morality can be defined as the process of emergence of coherence between its elements, resulting in the formation of certain structures and properties, and all of this is happening without a specific external influence, that is one that imposes certain forms. Moral chaos is such a state of the system of social morality, in which disturbed interaction, relationship, coordination between elements of its micro, macro levels and control factors.