How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
[The ethos] is a code which requires belief rather than obedience. (3.17.11)
A few moments before Hip places this line in his mind for Gerry to read, Hip wondered if Gerry should choose a code to serve all humanity. But if a code defines what you "should" do, what defines the "should" by which you pick which code to follow in the first place? That circular trap seems to be why Hip says the ethos requires faith rather than obedience. He's a real smart cookie, if you haven't figured that out already.
Quote #8
[The ethos] is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity [...] Help humanity, Gerry. (3.17.12)
Gerry previously chose self-preservation, but here Hip advocates for him to choose social morality. This stuff is getting so brainy we're running out of jokes.
Quote #9
And when there are enough of your kind, your ethics will be their morals. And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them (3.17.14)
Hip argues that ethics, once widely adopted, solidify into habitual morals. It then takes a new ethical thinker to leap ahead in the evolutionary stream to break through to a new code. All ethics, he says, should be based on reverence for life past, present, and future. Gerry's acceptance of this is what leads the rest of Homo Gestalt to finally contact him so that his gestalt can join a society where this sort of view is the ordinary morality. That's probably why Part 3 is called 'Morality' and not 'Ethics.'