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And yet, people keep trying. Consequentialism, deonthological ethics, ten commandments, civil laws. Your rules will never be complete enough to make 100% accur

And yet, people keep trying. Consequentialism, deonthological ethics, ten commandments, civil laws. Your rules will never be complete enough to make 100% accurate decisions. When will we learn to avoid this kind of nonsense?

kstenerud 4y ago
Civil and criminal laws don't try to be universally complete and accurate. Their fallibility and temporal deprecation is understood and accounted for (unlike the ten commandments). Consequentialism leads to splitting hairs as you reach the fuzzy edges (and more often long before that), giving us self-serving philosophies like effective altruism. We live in a messy world. Any rules we live by need to know and accept their limits.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  You strive for simplicity, but you just threw away any attempt at ethics together with it. Ethics, as in, a set of rules to separate the right from the wrong. I'm not aware of any ethical system which does not try to be universal and accurate. And if the world is so complex that you can't describe it in rules, then ethics is impossible. Needless to say, I disagree with that notion. Not on the grounds that it's an absurd conclusion, but because an ethical framework doesn't need to be complex in principle, and because simple rules can be accurate.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    That is where we disagree. I don't see any morality or ethical framework (existent or as-yet-invented) as capable of capturing reality. They can certainly imitate it to varying degrees (even to the level of usefulness in many cases). But they can never capture reality, and I would consider anyone who rigidly adheres to one as a dangerous fool.
    - rhn_mk1 4y ago
      If you consider that the purpose of ethics is to capture reality, then of course it can never be complete (and consequentialism in particular is trying to predict reality so it will never be). But deontological positions like the ten commandments are not trying to capture reality, yet they do try to be universal and accurate. Given that people keep coming up with ethical framworks (if even ad-hoc) and they try hard to refine them and remove internal contradictions, I don't think we're getting rid of this "nonsense" anytime soon. Except the nihilists. They already don't bother with it. But the postmodernism view of "ethics is incomplete" is an interesting one. Can a society where this is accepted exist and thrive, where two people with identical ethical frameworks can come to different conclusions? Would ethics even be worth having? I've only seen one situation where ethics stops making sense, but it was falling apart at really far-fetched edges which are not normally possible to encounter: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5iZTwGHv2tNfFmeDa/on-infinite-ethics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5iZTwGHv2tNfFmeDa/on-infinit...
      - kstenerud 4y ago
        Ethics are worth pursuing in the same way that mathematical models of the universe are worth pursuing. They can never be complete (and some are comically incomplete), but they can model certain parts of reality with sufficient accuracy to be useful as a tool (but not as an ironclad framework to live by). The Good Place [1] had a lot of fun playing with a light overview of these concepts and is a cute show as a result. Our laws are modeled after certain ethical frameworks, but with the tacit understanding that they cannot completely capture morality and justice, and that morality (and thus our ideas of valid ethics and justice) is temporal (i.e. it will naturally drift over time). That's why laws can be challenged and amended (with certain ethical and moral principles that we are pretty confident will never change codified into a constitution). It's fascinating to watch the moral evolution of humanity over time, seeing which ideas falter and which ones endure. Culture is the one living thing that evolves without dying (well, except in the case of genocide). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place
        rhn_mk1 4y ago

kstenerud 4y ago

Civil and criminal laws don't try to be universally complete and accurate. Their fallibility and temporal deprecation is understood and accounted for (unlike the ten commandments). Consequentialism leads to splitting hairs as you reach the fuzzy edges (and more often long before that), giving us self-serving philosophies like effective altruism. We live in a messy world. Any rules we live by need to know and accept their limits.

rhn_mk1 4y ago
You strive for simplicity, but you just threw away any attempt at ethics together with it. Ethics, as in, a set of rules to separate the right from the wrong. I'm not aware of any ethical system which does not try to be universal and accurate. And if the world is so complex that you can't describe it in rules, then ethics is impossible. Needless to say, I disagree with that notion. Not on the grounds that it's an absurd conclusion, but because an ethical framework doesn't need to be complex in principle, and because simple rules can be accurate.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  That is where we disagree. I don't see any morality or ethical framework (existent or as-yet-invented) as capable of capturing reality. They can certainly imitate it to varying degrees (even to the level of usefulness in many cases). But they can never capture reality, and I would consider anyone who rigidly adheres to one as a dangerous fool.
  - rhn_mk1 4y ago
    If you consider that the purpose of ethics is to capture reality, then of course it can never be complete (and consequentialism in particular is trying to predict reality so it will never be). But deontological positions like the ten commandments are not trying to capture reality, yet they do try to be universal and accurate. Given that people keep coming up with ethical framworks (if even ad-hoc) and they try hard to refine them and remove internal contradictions, I don't think we're getting rid of this "nonsense" anytime soon. Except the nihilists. They already don't bother with it. But the postmodernism view of "ethics is incomplete" is an interesting one. Can a society where this is accepted exist and thrive, where two people with identical ethical frameworks can come to different conclusions? Would ethics even be worth having? I've only seen one situation where ethics stops making sense, but it was falling apart at really far-fetched edges which are not normally possible to encounter: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5iZTwGHv2tNfFmeDa/on-infinite-ethics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5iZTwGHv2tNfFmeDa/on-infinit...
    - kstenerud 4y ago
      Ethics are worth pursuing in the same way that mathematical models of the universe are worth pursuing. They can never be complete (and some are comically incomplete), but they can model certain parts of reality with sufficient accuracy to be useful as a tool (but not as an ironclad framework to live by). The Good Place [1] had a lot of fun playing with a light overview of these concepts and is a cute show as a result. Our laws are modeled after certain ethical frameworks, but with the tacit understanding that they cannot completely capture morality and justice, and that morality (and thus our ideas of valid ethics and justice) is temporal (i.e. it will naturally drift over time). That's why laws can be challenged and amended (with certain ethical and moral principles that we are pretty confident will never change codified into a constitution). It's fascinating to watch the moral evolution of humanity over time, seeing which ideas falter and which ones endure. Culture is the one living thing that evolves without dying (well, except in the case of genocide). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place
      - rhn_mk1 4y ago