BSEC: The Ethical Manifold

The concept of the "Ethical Manifold" is one that was borne by Felix Adler, and it more or less died with him as well. The phrase is rather awkward (it evokes images of moralistic auto mechanics), but the concept is worth keeping in mind, because it is at the heart of Adler's Ethical Idealism.

The Ethical Manifold is Adler's phrase for what he also called the "infinite spiritual universe". The spiritual universe is made up of a theoretically infinite number of unique and indispensable moral agents (individual human beings), and each of these agents has an inestimable influence on all the others. There's an infinite number of folds in the human social fabric.

I see it as an infinite number of infinite moral agents. In a "frictionless" spiritual universe, all its members would be interconnected as individuals. In reality (human society), we each live within a series of spiritual communities, where individual acts are directly interconnected. On a larger scale, the actions of groups are directly interconnected with the actions of other groups, up to the highest levels of organization, nations and multinational corporations. Through human groups and institutions, our individual lives are interconnected with the lives of individuals on the other side of the globe.

Consider the concept of "six degrees of separation" which claims that we would need to go through a chain of no more than six acquaintances to find a connection to anyone else in the world, and you will have a popular expression of the idea of the ethical manifold, minus an explicitly moral dimension.

Adler felt the ethical manifold was the best description of true human reality: not physical reality, but the reality of human social interaction, in all its complex combinations of rational and irrational wills and motivations.


	The Ethical Manifold
	The concept of the "Ethical Manifold" is one that was borne by Felix Adler, and it more or less died with him as well. The phrase is rather awkward (it evokes images of moralistic auto mechanics), but the concept is worth keeping in mind, because it is at the heart of Adler's Ethical Idealism. The Ethical Manifold is Adler's phrase for what he also called the "infinite spiritual universe". The spiritual universe is made up of a theoretically infinite number of unique and indispensable moral agents (individual human beings), and each of these agents has an inestimable influence on all the others. There's an infinite number of folds in the human social fabric. I see it as an infinite number of infinite moral agents. In a "frictionless" spiritual universe, all its members would be interconnected as individuals. In reality (human society), we each live within a series of spiritual communities, where individual acts are directly interconnected. On a larger scale, the actions of groups are directly interconnected with the actions of other groups, up to the highest levels of organization, nations and multinational corporations. Through human groups and institutions, our individual lives are interconnected with the lives of individuals on the other side of the globe. Consider the concept of "six degrees of separation" which claims that we would need to go through a chain of no more than six acquaintances to find a connection to anyone else in the world, and you will have a popular expression of the idea of the ethical manifold, minus an explicitly moral dimension. Adler felt the ethical manifold was the best description of true human reality: not physical reality, but the reality of human social interaction, in all its complex combinations of rational and irrational wills and motivations.
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