3 ms·
I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances.
by confounded 9y ago
I agree with your skepticism regarding people who express a lot of certainty about what will work, and what will happen in extreme and untested circumstances.
However, I strongly disagree that principles and morality aren’t essential. This is because when figuring out, as you say, ‘what works best’, there is no single definition of ‘best’. In fact, as a general rule, there’s thousands of competing ones. Principles are how you do a reasonable job of making consistent decisions towards meaningful change.
In addition to a system working well, it also needs to be understood to be working well by the people that live in it. If some definition of a ‘best’ metric was delivered by a Kafkaesque convoluted system that people found confusing, one which works well-enough on simple principles might be preferable.
- lifeformed 9y agoI agree. I didn't mean to imply that principles aren't important - surely there must be some metric to judge progress against. Principles should hold in a generalized, zoomed-out view of a society. But in practice, there are numerous exceptions and edge cases. Like, "maximize freedom" is generally a good rule but not always. I feel like the principles we come up with are just rough approximations of what we intuitively know but can't elegantly express. The true moral principle for society is probably a monstrous concatenation of if-else statements. If the zoom-out view of society still follows the principles, then I think that ought to be sufficient for its citizens' concerns about the society's effectiveness and direction.