I am new to this platform but I like it so far, and thought I might try it out to share something that has been on my mind a lot lately. Let's see if anyone will be interested (or even find it in the first place).
As an engineer and a computational physicist it has always bogged me that we as a society haven't progressed much in our understanding of ethics and morality since the ancient Greeks and their contemporaries in other parts of the world. Sure, a lot of philosophers have added their two cents to the debate since then, but the problem is that the field doesn't seem to have converged to anything like a consensus.
While the last few hundred years have seen a lot of new ideas pertinent to morality (deontology, utilitarianism, hedonism, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, nihilism etc.) it is still common practice for people to whip out the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad or the bhagavad-gita as their primary moral authorities. It is also not the case that the new systems of ethics have converged to any significant degree compared to their older counterparts.
This is a markedly different development compared to natural philosophy, which we now call the sciences. There have been a lot of disparate ideas in physics during the same time, most of which have since been retired or refined. Phlogiston, geocentrism and the luminiferous ether were all at one point or another widely accepted but have all been sent to the dust bin of history as the scientific method has ruled them out. Nobody with any rights to call themselves a physicist would ever vouch for any of these ideas today.
The same sense of convergence can also be observed in chemistry, biology, history and even economics (albeit to a much lesser extent).
Does this mean that we are forever confined to a post-modern moral relativism where we can never truly agree on the rightness or wrongness of any action or state of the world? I desperately hope not, and I do think there is a way out of the conundrum.
I have always had strong disliking for any theoretical edifice without a strong foundation. To my mind the only reasonable way of trying to understand anything is to start from first principles. It seems to me that most often when intelligent and knowledgeable people disagree, it is primarily because they don't start from first principles. Instead they start from different heuristic vantage points and try to optimize for a proxy, rather than moral good itself. For socialists it is fairness, for liberalists it is individual freedom, for monotheists it is God's will (however one interprets that), for nationalists it is the people (whatever that means) and so on. Ideologies diverge when they are extended to the absurd.
Of course no one willingly takes their arguments to absurdity. But what is obvious to one is patently bonkers to another. How can people living in the same world (and often enough in the same nation, culture and socioeconomic class) disagree to such an extent?
When one takes a more pedestrian view, it strikes me that people are more inclined to agree with one another. When it comes to personal matters we seem to have a quite well calibrated sense of what is right or wrong and we most often sympathize with the same characters as most other people in works of fiction.
My hypothesis is that complexity is what hinders people from agreeing on the theoretical foundations of ethics. Different ideologies exist because different aspects of human experience seem to be most important for different people. Multidimensional optimization of complex adaptive systems is not something for which the human mind is adequately equipped. But Homo Sapiens, ever the explainer and problem solver, refuses to throw her hands out and admit she does not know. Instead we grasp at the first heuristic we can find and hold on for dear life. Unfortunately, this will lead to completely different prescriptions from different people.
The renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking once said that the 21st century will be the century of complexity, and I could not agree more with this statement. This is the time in history where we have largely exhausted the pieces of physical science that can be explained solely with pen, paper and an avid mind. At the same time, we are at the point where our computers and our sophistication in using them to model real systems have matured to the point where they can be successfully used to tease out the dynamics of almost unboundedly complex problems, using a combination of interaction modeling, large scale simulations and statistical analysis. Using this flavor of scientific inquiry, the true nature of ethics seems painfully obvious.
I think we can all agree that the goal of ethics and morality is to improve the predicament of sentient beings. If there were no sentient beings at all ethics would not even make sense. If our universe was inhabited by a single feeling being, it would be well defined, but trivial. Obviously, ethics would be a matter of fulfilling the wants and needs of this single soul. The complexity begins when many sentient beings interact. As is usually the case for complex systems, it is not so much about the parts, but about their relations.
If the nature of the world was a Hobbesian all against all, ethics could still be identified by a detached outside observer. The less these self interested beings needed to get in each others' way, the better. But morality, in the sense of codes of conduct, only comes about as a consequence of the existence of social beings. This is how the observed morality in our species (and to some extent others) evolved. For a social species to thrive, especially on the gargantuan scale of modern human society, there needs to be some ground rules for how individuals interact with each other. This is the backdrop of against which the folk psychological notions of morality came about.
However, the personal notion of morality is not my main focus here. I am interested in a more impersonal sense of ethics. From my point of view as an individual, I am inclined to put myself and my loved ones first. Yet I can cognitively zoom out and realize that in the grand scheme of things, I am not special. I am but one of many with the same stake at well-being. From this zoomed out perspective, ethics will mean negotiating the state of the world in such a way that some measure of the maximal total good is maximized, where good for each sentient being is defined according to their individual preferences and the total good is some kind of weighted resultant of all these individual goods.
There are a lot of details left to bone out. Nevertheless, when considering ethics from this perspective, a clear picture emerges of an optimization problem that can be defined, solved and objectively agreed upon. The only obstacle left (admittedly no short order) is to find a consensus on how to relate the interests of different moral stakeholders. If we can agree on such a schema we can finally agree on a system of ethics from first principles which any reasonable intelligent being should subscribe to. If anyone turns out to be interested in these musings of mine (and maybe even if no one is) I will take a stab at these challenges in coming posts on this blog.
Let me know if you found this interesting at all and make sure to weigh in with your own two cents!
