Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> Jef Allbright writes:
>
>> peterdjones wrote:
>>
>> > Moral and natural laws.
>> > > > An investigation of natural laws, and, in parallel, a defence >
>> of ethical objectivism.The objectivity, to at least some > extent, of
>> science will be assumed; the sceptic may differ, > but there is no
>> convincing some people).
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> > As ethical objectivism is a work-in-progress > there are many
>> variants, and a considerable literature > discussing which is the
>> correct one.
>>
>> I agree with the thrust of this post and I think there are a few key
>> concepts which can further clarify thinking on this subject:
>>
>> (1) Although moral assessment is inherently subjective--being relative
>> to internal values--all rational agents share some values in common due
>> to sharing a common evolutionary heritage or even more fundamentally,
>> being subject to the same physical laws of the universe.
>
> That may be so, but we don't exactly have a lot of intelligent species
> to make the comparison. It is not difficult to imagine species with
> different evolutionary heritages which would have different ethics to
> our own, certainly in the details and probably in many of the core values.
Imagine? Don't you know any women? :-)
>
>> (2) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is "good" is
>> what is assessed to promote the agent's values into the future.
>>
>> (3) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is "better" is
>> what is assessed as "good" over increasing scope.
>>
>> (4) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is increasingly
>> "right" or moral, is decision-making assessed as promoting increasingly
>> shared values over increasing scope of agents and interactions.
>>
>> From the foregoing it can be seen that while there can be no objective
>> morality, nor any absolute morality, it is reasonable to expect
>> increasing agreement on the relative morality of actions within an
>> expanding context. Further, similar to the entropic arrow of time, we
>> can conceive of an arrow of morality corresponding to the ratcheting
>> forward of an increasingly broad context of shared values (survivors of
>> coevolutionary competition) promoted via awareness of increasingly
>> effective principles of interaction (scientific knowledge of what works,
>> extracted from regularities in the environment.)
>
> What if the ratcheting forward of shared values is at odds with
> evolutionary expediency, i.e. there is some unethical policy that
> improves the fitness of the species? To avoid such a dilemna you would
> have define as ethical everything improves the fitness of the species,
> and I'm not sure you want to do that.
If your species doesn't define as unethical that which is contrary to continuation of the species, your species won't be around to long. Our problem is that cultural evolution has been so rapid compared to biological evolution that some of our hardwired values are not so good for continuation of our (and many other) species. I don't think ethics is a matter of definitions; that's like trying to fly by settling on a definition of "airplane". But looking at the long run survival of the species might produce some good ethical rules; particularly if we could predict the future consequences clearly.
>> Further, from this theory of metaethics we can derive a practical system
>> of social decision-making based on (1) increasing fine-grained knowledge
>> of shared values, and (2) application of increasingly effective
>> principles, selected with regard to models of probable outcomes in a
>> Rawlsian mode of broad rather than narrow self-interest.
>
> This is really quite a good proposal for building better societies, and
> one that I would go along with, but meta-ethical problems arise if
> someone simply rejects that shared values are important (eg. believes
> that the values of the strong outweigh those of the weak),
Historically this problem has been dealt with by those who think shared values are important ganging up on those who don't.
> and ethical
> problems arise when it is time to decide what exactly these shared
> values are and how they should best be promoted.
Aye, there's the rub.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Fri Dec 22 2006 - 14:19:19 PST