Judging ethical theories by update rules, not by action rankings

TL;DR: It’s useful to think of ethical theories as online learning algorithms rather than specific action-recommendations. As finite beings, we use them to compress accumulated moral judgments and incorporate new ones; different representations update differently. We can expect to spend our entire lives mid-moral update rather than in reflective equilibrium. So theories should be judged by their updates in the expected information environment, not just their initial checkpoint. Asserting the ought Assertion of recommendations. Some advocates of utilitarianism, deontology, etc. will tell you their ethical theory is superior because it produces the right results. Assertion of form. Others will tell you their theory is correct because to take the right action is to follow the right rules / to maximise welfare itself. What it means to be moral is to have an ethics shaped in the form of their theory. I believe these are confusing ways to think about ethics, for the meta-ethically curious. Meta-ethically curious meaning being curious about what the hell ethical theories are anyway, where they come from, and what our interest in them is. The ethical theories were made by man, not man by ethical theories If you make the phenomenological move of bracketing out all your previous intuitions and potentially flawed concepts and simply observe what is the case: Social primates began forming a multi-agent society. Those that developed elementary notions of empathy got selected for by evolution. This proto-empathy developed into moral intuitions felt and expressed strongly by members of such societies. As man developed reflective verbal intelligence, he developed systems for further reflecting on his intuitions. He did this out of the same instincts towards the beautiful and right that evolution produced in him.[1] Ethical theories are cognitive assists created by man. They ultimately answer to the extended moral reflection of man. This extended moral reflection has something to do with both the universal reality of multi-agent societies and with the contingent historical facts about man’s evolutionary niche. Sorting algorithms All sorting algorithms output sorted lists, but the ways they do it are very different you’d recommend different sorting algorithms under different circumstances some algorithms are just generally better than others You can think of ethical theories the same way. All ethical theories try to approximate the “true ought,”[2] but the ways they do it are very different you’d recommend different theories under different circumstances some are generally better than others Seen this way, disagreements between ethical theories aren’t only about substantively different facts of the matter, but about different properties of estimators. What algebra did for numbers, theory did for oughts The problem ethical theories solve is that we are small, poor, grovelling, mortal beings, endowed with some basic moral intuition, capacity to deliberate, and a knack for systematisation. We began with a million messy judgments: it seems right to give children food, to consider the intentions behind actions, to care for those closer to us more, no, wait, to care for those further away too. We assembled these into dramatically simple overarching principles: Maximise welfare. Be nice and normal. Act with honour and integrity. These appealed to our varying sensibilities, and moreover, they structured the sum total of our moral reflections into a framework we could use every day and reflectively adjust over time. Like algebra let us represent in a sentence sums that took us pages to describe, our ethical systems let us represent vast domains of judgments in dense symbols. mjx-container[jax="CHTML"] { line-height: 0; } mjx-container [space="1"] { margin-left: .111em; } mjx-container [space="2"] { margin-left: .167em; } mjx-container [space="3"] { margin-left: .222em; } mjx-container [space="4"] { margin-left: .278em; } mjx-container [space="5"] { margin-left: .333em; } mjx-container [rspace="1"] { margin-right: .111em; } mjx-container [rspace="2"] { margin-right: .167em; } mjx-container [rspace="3"] { margin-right: .222em; } mjx-container [rspace="4"] { margin-right: .278em; } mjx-container [rspace="5"] { margin-right: .333em; } mjx-container [size="s"] { font-size: 70.7%; } mjx-container [size="ss"] { font-size: 50%; } mjx-container [size="Tn"] { font-size: 60%; } mjx-container [size="sm"] { font-size: 85%; } mjx-container [size="lg"] { font-size: 120%; } mjx-container [size="Lg"] { font-size: 144%; } mjx-container [size="LG"] { font-size: 173%; } mjx-container [size="hg"] { font-size: 207%; } mjx-container [size="HG"] { font-size: 249%; } mjx-container [width="full"] { width: 100%; } mjx-box { display: inline-block; } mjx-block { display: block; } mjx-itable { display: inline-table; } mjx-row { display: table-row; } mjx-row > * { display: tabl