A late call for the 2nd order philosophy

Our civilization has behaved like an overslept student who missed the morning class in school, in the sense that, after the nonlinear era began, we as a civilization missed the opportunity of entering the era of the 2^nd order philosophy at least one century ago, due to a crisis within the professional discipline of philosophy, which is not resolvable within that discipline as attested by the history.

The so-called 2^nd order philosophy is not as exotic as its name might sound. It’s called 2^nd order in the sense that it requires people to think one step further than the existing mainstream philosophy, which could all be called as “traditional” compared to the 2^nd order philosophy. That one further step of thinking of the 2^nd order philosophy could help people to stay within the right path of the truth. For two of the examples that I cited in a previous essay, with one further step of thinking, people will foresee that the automation and AI would inevitably create a threat to the survival of humans in a market economy, and the public would also predict ahead of time that if there is some formula to stop aging, then the reproduction would be required to stop, but that could cause our civilization to stale because of lacking the injection of new life, and thus it might end up with restricted reproduction rights and selective rights for using the formula to stop aging for socially favorable groups of people.

Right now we are experiencing widespread economical and political crises all over the world, which are all deeply rooted in the crisis of mainstream philosophy. The ultimate solution to this philosophically rooted global crisis is to inject the vitality of new philosophy into the mainstream philosophical system, and a logically very natural way of doing this is to catch the late bus for the originally programmed due process of entering the era of 2^nd order philosophy, in addition to any other spiritually meaningful remedy.

Among all potential 2^nd order philosophical theories, there is one baby crying for attention from the world, which is the 2^nd order fairness analysis. In contrast to the common 0th order fairness analysis (i.e. what is fair and what is not fair) and the 1^st order fairness analysis (e.g. the analysis made by John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Civil Government, on what would the conclusion be if we start from some commonly accepted ideas of fairness), the 2^nd order fairness analysis looks into the social impacts of the demand of fairness, while incorporating both 0^th and 1^st order fairness analyses as its composing elements.

The demand of fairness is the most fundamental force in social dynamics (like the conceptual Newtonian force in nature), which could do both good and bad, and the 2^nd order fairness analysis is developed based on the personal demand of fairness of each individual. Therefore, unlike all the philosophical systems developed in the history, the 2^nd order fairness analysis is not constructed on top of the existing macroscopic social, moral, cultural, and political systems, but rather, it could indeed be used to explain the concepts in the macroscopic systems that have been developed over the past millenniums. Thus, it could be a powerful tool for the studies of economics, sociology, theology, political science, social welfare, intellectual property protection, law and order, philosophy of history, futurism, and so on.

Because philosophy is the foundation of human civilization, any of its theories could be fully functional only if it is extensively mastered by the general public, in contrast to the fact that a few people could make a movie for millions to watch, a few scientists could create miracles in a small laboratory, and a team of employees in a factory could supply particular products to the whole world. Besides, the current crisis of mainstream philosophy is indeed caused by the long-lasting crisis within the professional discipline of philosophy for the past a few centuries, which is not resolvable within that professional discipline as mentioned at the beginning of this essay. These two factors together tell us that we have to count on the general social resources instead of the community of professional philosophy for battling the current philosophically rooted global crises, and rescuing that giant of professional philosophy has become one of the tasks in this battle for the common good of all human beings……