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shminux comments on Integral versus differential ethics - Less Wrong Discussion
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I agree with what you call an integral reasoning (if you end up with an "obviously" bad outcome, you should not accept it based on your individual steps, no matter how solid they seem or even are). But to me it is not a symptom of a flaw in your premises or logical steps. Rather, this is an indication that human ethics is a complicated mess of heuristics and contradictions, and any attempt to formalize it inevitably hits one of these contradictions, when extrapolated outside its domain of applicability.
Re your other points, it seems like a typical Sorites emergence scenario. Human life/agency/society are all emergent concepts which make no sense outside the domain of the models describing them. For example, of course there is such a thing as "society". It's a good statistical model of how thousands of interacting humans act on aggregate. No, there is no society of one or two humans. Though I don't understand what "build a rigorous definition of society as something morally valuable, rather than focusing on individual" is supposed to mean.
I was thinking aloud (or a-writing or whatever the term is). Some people value, say, the existence of "French civlization" (insert your own preferred example here). What if we took this seriously? What if we actually valued civilizations/cultures/nations/societies to the extent that we would make decisions that were in their "interests" (most likely the interest of continuing to exist), to some extent, above and beyond the interests of the people who value them?
As I said, I don't agree with that, but I thought it would be interesting to explore integral reasoning in an area I disagreed with...
Yeah, we know how this approach invariably turns out, but I see what you mean now. I am not sure it is a good example of differential vs integral, because in a thriving society individual people tend to thrive, too, even if you do not necessarily construct it by satisfying interests of the individual. It's more of a local vs global maximum thing.