Universal Ethics

I argued earlier that we can base a universal ethics on human nature, or biology. Is there anything we could use? Many universal ethical systems are based on some form of the golden rule or the categorical imperative. That itself tends to be taken as an axiom. Utilitarianism is based on a utility function, which is an axiom.

I think one way to consider whether these ethical systems are truly universal is to consider whether they would apply to any imaginable alien race, and to consider whether they would apply to a solipsist.

We tend to assume that any given person is about as ethically valuable as any other person; we certainly don’t think it is OK to kill 100 random people to save one person’s life, though the reverse may be acceptable in some cases. For an intelligent ant, on the other hand, thousands of ants would happily die to save the queen. Do these ants violate the golden rule? It seems like they do. Utilitarianism is OK if we define the utility function appropriately, and the categorical imperative is OK.

A committed solipsist could ethically take just about any other action, since no other person exists. Is there any way to show that the solipsist is wrong in doing so? Only by showing that he or she is mistaken. These ethical theories don’t help with that, though.

An ethics based on biology does show that a solipsist is mistaken–nobody can really believe in solipsism. And such an ethics doesn’t say anything about alien races, except that they will have their own ethics.

Where does this get us? I’m not sure. I like the idea of finding some sort of grounding for ethics, but grounding it in biology gives us all the problems of evolutionary psychology: we mistake what is for what should be. How can we avoid that?