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!
Hi Stochastic thinker,
Thanks for your positive feedback and eloquent reply. I am glad that more people are interested in the subject and have been thinking along the same lines.
I think your reasoning as to why we haven't been forced to weed out any alternative views of morality yet (but might soon have to due to globalization and automation) is largely accurate. However, I don't think necessity is a necessary mother of invention, albeit often a sufficient one. For instance, consider cosmology, high energy particle physics or pure mathematics. Neither of these disciplines have historically been motivated by practical use (although surprisingly many such discoveries have later turned out to be of unexpected use).
I think there might be some additional resistance against progress in the field of ethics that is absent in these more "detached" subjects though. As I alluded to I believe morality evolved, but not only biologically, also culturally and transmitted through socialization. As such it invites to dogma, whose questioning carry large social costs. While this has also to some extent been the case for cosmology and pure mathematics, the methods of theoretical and empirical physics as well as mathematics were already well established by the time they reached this dangerous territory. In contrast, it is hard to even start formulating ethical problem without ruffling some feathers, and while we have empirical morality (as in how people actually make moral decisions) there can be no empirical ethics until we build a solid conceptual foundation.
I am very much looking forward to your coming posts, and future discussions!
I agree with you, necessity is not always necessary for inventions. But most of the time, especially when we are talking about complex problems, we need the entire human colossus to cooperate for the generation of a solution, and most of the time, an economic motivation does the trick :D
Absolutely, one of the first things that I would mention when asked "What hinders the development of a widely accepted understanding of ethics and morality?", I would also definitely mention dogma. People, including me, are most of the time afraid to debate these things in public, because most of the time, people get offended and/or start to act prejudiced towards you. And concepts that can't be discussed, can't be developed, sadly. But hopefully, we will overcome this dogma barrier in time, and it looks like there is a trend towards this direction nowadays, at least in most of the developed countries.
Likewise! I've resteemed your post, because it definitely deserves more views! ;)
Ha en bra dag! :)
Thanks a lot for the resteem!
Yeah, I really agree with you that it's getting easier to discuss with time and human development. But in the meantime, while it is still a difficult subject to discuss with people in general, let's continue discussing it with likeminded people on the internet :)
Ich wünche dich auch einen Schöner Tag!
(only guessing German is your first language based on your introduction post in German)
Vielen Dank! :)