42 Ethics and Systems Thinking
this day, but has been further compounded by the subsequent introduction of a
third ‘critical’ wave (Midgley, 2000) which focuses attention essentially on to
judgements to do with social (and environmental) conditions, with the placement
of boundaries and with reflexivity in knowing. These three ‘waves’ differ very pro-
foundly from each other in their epistemic assumptions about the nature of nature,
the nature of knowledge and the nature of human nature. Ideas from all three
waves or schools of systems thinking will be significant in the conceptualization of
the critical knowing/learning systems with which this chapter concludes.
The epistemic position adopted by the General Systems Theorists and by a
generation of systems practitioners who were significantly influenced by them
(including many systems ecologists, simulation modellers, ecosystem and systems
biologists, and environmental scientists), was of the ‘hard school’. From this dual-
istic perspective, nature ‘really’ is organized in the form of coherent ‘systems’ of
integrated parts that, in turn, ‘really’ are organized as nested system hierarchies. In
this regard it is also interesting to note the definition of a human community
offered by Flora et al (1992) as ‘a place and a human system’, the claim by Daley
and Netting (1994) that ‘communities are living entities ... (that) ... like people,
go through a normal life cycle’, and their call for ‘understanding complex social
systems’ as a vital reason for introducing ‘systems thinking’ into community devel-
opment (Daley and Netting, 1994).
Such ontological realism leads, almost inevitably, to the adoption of positivist
and objectivist epistemological positions: observed systems are considered to be
independent of those doing the observations while the knowledge that is gained
through this positivist process is considered to be objective in the sense that there
must be some ‘permanent or ahistoric matrix or framework’ to which appeal may
be ultimately made ‘in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth,
reality, goodness or rightness’ (Bernstein, 1983). Moreover, because the hard sys-
tems approach was, by definition, held to be value-free, there was little that could
sensibly be known or said about what ought to be done under circumstances where
the indications were that something needed to be done (which, ironically enough,
was itself was a normative judgement, of course). The issue of judgement became
a key criterion of distinction for Vickers (1983) in his contention that human
systems were so different that it was just not possible to study them using the logic
and methods of the natural sciences, precisely because of the significance of judge-
ment to human beings. His introduction of the notion of ‘appreciative systems’ –
those sets of largely tacit standards of judgement by which we both order and value
our experiences – as unique to ‘human systems’ dictated that they depended on
shared understandings and shared cultural mores if they were to be effective and
stable. A key feature of ‘second wave’ systemic thinking relates to the significance
of human judgement to the placement, as it were, of systems boundaries (Midgley,
2000). This is in direct contrast to the ‘boundaries as given’ notion that prevailed
within the ‘hard school’, and that persisted even when the concept was extended
beyond the obvious – such as with the extension of the systems idea beyond obvi-
ously bounded individual cells and organs and organisms to include the much less