Nature, including humans and human society, evolves in ways that are intrinsically chaotic, which means that small variations or fluctuations can push evolution in entirely new directions, at any moment of time and in myriad ways. Some of these appear to be productive and sustainable, at least for a certain time. Relatively recently in the evolutionary process, `intelligence' has arisen as the most effective driving force of evolution, for better or worse. The book aims at exploring what the philosophical consequences are of these basic biological facts, together with new insights in logic and semantics. The book starts out with the Socratic question `what does it mean to lead a good life?', which defines ethics as the quest for how humans can deal with what they experience as their and their society's life. The book is then devoted to a more detailed discussion of the scientific and philosophical components of this quest, to end with a detailed treatment of ethics as `quality control' on what can be seen as the design of one's and society's actual goals and plans. It motivates and adopts a humanist approach to these questions.
