Notes on the possibility of moral progress

To achieve the best possible future, we must know what that future looks like. In other words, we need to solve ethics.[1] The problem of solving ethics is so large and abstract that it’s difficult to say useful things about. In lieu of any structured analysis, herein lies a collection of thoughts about the problem. Cross-posted from my website. Acting in the face of moral uncertainty If we have persistent moral uncertainty between maximizing and satisficing[2] moral theories, then it’s not difficult to decide what to do in practice: allocate a tiny portion of the universe to satisfying the non-maximizing moral theories, and allocate the rest to the maximizing moral theories. Example: If theory A says we should fill the universe with welfareans, and theory B says we should preserve homo sapiens but it doesn’t much matter how many humans there are, then we can near-perfectly satisfy both theories by maintaining humanity in a small segment of the universe and giving the rest to welfareans. However, the distinction between maximizing and satisficing theories may be irrelevant because plausible satisficing theories still hold that it is a good thing to maximize The Good, even though it is not morally obligatory[3] to do so. Satisficing theories would still want to fill most of the universe with The Good. Given uncertainty between mutually incompatible maximizing moral theories, we have to choose. Allocating resources incorrectly would be catastrophically bad. Can we discover facts that resolve moral uncertainty? I believe so. I expect that we can eventually eliminate almost all moral disagreements purely by discovering facts. The fact-value distinction implies that we cannot 100% determine what we ought to do by discovering facts, but most of what look like terminal values disagreements are not truly terminal.[4] Some examples: Right now, we do not know how to weight different people’s experiences against each other. I strongly suspect that there are facts of the matter about how to weight experiences, and that these facts can be discovered empirically. The problem of weighting experiences is downstream of the hard problem of consciousness. I likewise suspect that there is a definitive answer to the hard problem,[5] and that we can, in principle, find that answer. What is the nature of personal identity? Certain theories of personal identity rule out classes of moral theories. If personal identity is not metaphysically meaningful, then person-affecting views must be false—there is no relevant distinction between bringing a new person into existence and changing the life trajectory of an already-existing person. Changing a life trajectory creates new person-moments, which is (in this view) metaphysically equivalent to creating a new person. There may be some way to salvage person-affecting views, but if so, that possibility would itself be a non-normative fact—i.e., person-affecting views may be permitted or ruled out purely by facts, without any moral stance required. Another important (although slightly obscure) question is: given two identical copies of the same mind, are they experiencing “twice as much” as if there were only one copy, or “the same amount”?[6] This seems like a factual question, not a moral one. I have no idea how we would answer this question, but it seems answerable in principle. Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem (see also Harsanyi (1955)[7]), which showed that if individuals have VNM utility functions, and if the Pareto principle[8] holds over groups, then a version of utilitarianism must be true. The Pareto principle is a normative principle, not a factual one; the question of whether individuals ought to care about their own welfare is also a normative one. But I strongly suspect that there is a fact of the matter about whether an individual’s welfare can be described as a utility function, and there is a fact of the matter about how exactly that function is specified. Discovering those facts would get us at least part of the way toward a fully-specified theory of ethics. It matters whether the universe is finite or infinite, and whether our actions can have finite or infinite influence. Infinite ethics poses troubling problems, but some (maybe all) of those problems can be resolved factually (or if they’re unsolvable, then their unsolvability is a factual question). Note: I don’t think they can be resolved purely empirically. For example, by our understanding of the laws of physics, our actions cannot have infinite influence.[9] But there is a nonzero probability that we are wrong about the laws of physics and that our actions can have infinite influence after all. No amount of empirical investigation can reduce our uncertainty to zero, but there may nonetheless be a mathematical solution to the problem. Standard formulations of deontology may break down in light of the fact that you do not have certainty about the consequences of your actions, so you can never be sure that