I think there is definitely potential to the idea, but I don’t think you pushed the analogy quite far enough. I can see an analogy between what is presented here and human rights and to Kantian moral philosophy.
Essentially, we can think of human rights as being what many people believe to be an essential bare-minimum conditions on human treatment. I.e. that the class of all “good and just” worlds everybody’s human rights will be respected. Here human rights corresponds to the “local rigidity” condition of the subgraph. In general, too, human rights are generally only meaningful for people one immediately interacts with in your social network.
This does simplify the question of just government and moral action in the world (as political philosophers are so desirous of using such arguments). I don’t think, however, that the local conditions for human existence are as easy to specify as in the case of a sensor network graph.
In some sense there is a tradition largely inspired by Kant that attempts to do the moral equivalent of what you are talking about: use global regularity conditions (on morals) to describe local conditions (on morals: say the ability to will a moral decision to a universal law). Kant generally just assumed that these local conditions would achieve the necessary global requirements for morality (perhaps this is what he meant by a Kingdom of Ends). For Kant the local conditions on your decision-making were necessary and sufficient conditions for the global moral decision-making.
In your discussion (and in the approach of the paper), however, the local conditions placed (on morals or on each patch) are not sufficient to achieve the global conditions (for morality, or on the embedding). So its a weakening of the approach advanced by Kant. The idea seems to be that once some aspects (but not all) of the local conditions have been worked out one can then piece together the local decision rules into something cohesive.
Edit: I rambled, so I put my other idea into another commend
I think there is definitely potential to the idea, but I don’t think you pushed the analogy quite far enough. I can see an analogy between what is presented here and human rights and to Kantian moral philosophy.
Essentially, we can think of human rights as being what many people believe to be an essential bare-minimum conditions on human treatment. I.e. that the class of all “good and just” worlds everybody’s human rights will be respected. Here human rights corresponds to the “local rigidity” condition of the subgraph. In general, too, human rights are generally only meaningful for people one immediately interacts with in your social network.
This does simplify the question of just government and moral action in the world (as political philosophers are so desirous of using such arguments). I don’t think, however, that the local conditions for human existence are as easy to specify as in the case of a sensor network graph.
In some sense there is a tradition largely inspired by Kant that attempts to do the moral equivalent of what you are talking about: use global regularity conditions (on morals) to describe local conditions (on morals: say the ability to will a moral decision to a universal law). Kant generally just assumed that these local conditions would achieve the necessary global requirements for morality (perhaps this is what he meant by a Kingdom of Ends). For Kant the local conditions on your decision-making were necessary and sufficient conditions for the global moral decision-making.
In your discussion (and in the approach of the paper), however, the local conditions placed (on morals or on each patch) are not sufficient to achieve the global conditions (for morality, or on the embedding). So its a weakening of the approach advanced by Kant. The idea seems to be that once some aspects (but not all) of the local conditions have been worked out one can then piece together the local decision rules into something cohesive.
Edit: I rambled, so I put my other idea into another commend