RE: Ethics is an optimization problem

Hi Raz, thanks for this thought-provoking post!

I believe, with the following great excerpt from your post:

"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."

you're absolutely touching the essence of why we still don't have any widely accepted understanding of ethics and morality.

I think the reason we could reach a consensus in biology and chemistry, for example, is because, with the increasing world population growth, we simply couldn't "afford" grasping at the first heuristic we could find about biology/chemistry and hold on them to survive. Through the scientific method and the available technological tools, it was possible to weed out the wrong first principles and reach the accurate ones and build a widely accepted theory based on that, and survive.

The problem with ethics and morality is that, I believe, so far, until this century, it was just fine to not admit we don't know. We could survive doing that without serious repercussions. People were not travelling much intercontinentally anyway or they were not in great awareness of other people's lives through social media, unlike nowadays.

But, agreeing with Nietzsche, I think, we have already reached a point where we are being forced to "throw our hands out and admit we don't know" with respect to our understanding of ethics and morality, because nowadays, due to the scientific and technological advancements of our civilization so far, only few of our pre-established notions of ethics and morality are relevant. To demonstrate just one of the many examples showing why this is true, I'll be actually posting an article soon about an ethical dilemma that we have to face with the emergence of self-driving cars.

I agree with you on the fact that ethics is an optimization problem, and this was the exact conclusion I've reached. But luckily, we finally have the theoretical understanding, technological tools and the motivation, necessary for potentially tackling such problems.

In short, I believe that we are on our way of reaching a consensus with regard to ethics and morality in the coming centuries, because I see the whole situation like this:

In biology we had several complex problems like the one between vitalism and mechanism, for example. Back then, we didn't have the tools and the economic motivation to tackle such issues. Now we have, and the conflict doesn't really exist anymore.

So, we haven't had a widely accepted understanding of ethics and morality so far, because it was a complex problem and we couldn't. But now, we are getting close to being able to tackle this problem, because:

There is an economic motivation, because globalisation combined with divergent ethical or moral views lead to conflicts that cause economic harm.
We are now potentially capable of tackling complex optimization problems for complex adaptive systems, with our the technological and theoretical progress so far.

I'll be looking forward to your next posts!