Main mechanisms and manifestations of white ethics

The main mechanisms and manifestations of white ethics (ethics of relations) are universal for all primates, from macaques to humans. What is the subject of ethics of relations? - Emotional relationships between people or members of the pack. Nuances of facial expressions, voice, and behavior that decode the nature of these relationships. Attention to public opinion. Who sits closer, who sits farther away. Who sits higher, who sits lower. Who gets more grooming and stroking. Who has more friends and allies, who has fewer friends and allies. Whom one can turn to with a request, whom and how one can influence in order to get something. Where, as a result of deformation of the established structure of relations, a weak link has appeared - due to someone offending someone, committing an act unacceptable from the point of view of social roles, betraying someone’s expectations, or losing friends. Also - the desire not to spoil relations with other members of the pack or collective, to accumulate friends oneself and to commit socially approved actions in order to raise one’s status. The ability to effectively please situationally high-status individuals and to grovel before them in case of their anger. Readiness and even love for accepting strokes and grooming from others. Increased social suggestibility. A fairly high degree of expressive mimicry and vocal emotionality in order to convey approval to high-status individuals and to threaten low-status or offending individuals. Developed social instincts - in particular, when some threat arises, one such social instinct encourages approaching one’s pack, rather than running in the opposite direction. This also includes the prohibition against killing “one’s own” and those similar to oneself. The development of specifically social emotions - for example, feelings of humiliation and shame, as well as the feeling of gratitude. Everything listed here is a generalization of purely empirical research into the semantics of white ethics (that is, it is not postulated or invented; the details of the research can be found in our article of the current series on white ethics).

What was said in the previous paragraph is quite enough to make the main generalizing conclusion: the main subjects of white ethics are the tracking, use, and maintenance of the complex structure of social relations in a primate pack. The main species-specific task of white ethics is maintaining the complex structure of social relations in the pack, which helps the species survive as a whole. In order to successfully cope with these tasks, the brains of primates (and some other social species of animals) have, in the course of evolution, learned to create a model of the structure of complex hierarchical relations among individuals in the social pack. This model is static, that is, stable, but flexible - current changes in it are possible. Moreover, each individual is interested in and continuously tracking, and even deliberately creating, such changes in order to use them to raise their own social status.

Presumably, the areas of the cerebral cortex associated with carrying out the structure-reflecting mechanisms of white ethics are located in the left hemisphere, adjacent to the semantic zones of the visual and speech centers.