Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

A Science of Ethics

Can we ever have a science of ethics? That is, some way to determine how people ought to live, and some way to demonstrate its truth? And can there ever be some way to persuade people to live according to its guidelines? Philosophers and prophets have proclaimed the truth many times, and in fact their truths tend to be broadly similar. But clearly all people don’t follow these proclamations.

That said, ethics has changed over the millenia. Slavery is an obvious example: it was once normal, and is now considered to be wrong. Although slavery has not disappeared, the people who engage it now believe they are doing something wrong, which was certainly not the case 200 years ago. I think of this as an expansion in what it means to be human, or to be taken seriously: once only the people in the tribe mattered, now all humans matter.

Could we ever backslide from our current position on slavery? Clearly anything could happen if civilization collapses, but, short of that, I think not. I don’t think there are fashions in ethics, I think there are long term movements.

Back to a science of ethics. I think the steps are to define what a good society looks like, and then figure out the rules to get there. Of course this is an iterative process. An unachievable good society is useless, as are rules that nobody will follow. We don’t know the good society, though we know plenty of bad ones, so we may need to experiment.

How can we ethically run an experiment on developing ethics? It’s impossible today, but it is now possible to imagine such an experiment. It could be run in a detailed simulation on a computer. This would require something close to artificial intelligence, and it would require many different interacting agents. We could apply certain rules and see if the resulting society seems good. We could let the agents develop their own society. We could compare the results to real societies as a cross-check.

I don’t know whether this would lead to anything useful. But it’s definitely worth trying. It could be one of the best uses of artificial intelligence.

The only people who seriously study ethics today are philosophers. In general I think philosophy is the study of things which we don’t understand. Once philosophy covered all knowledge; now it just covers a small subset. The goal of philosophy should always be to eliminate itself, by understanding the subject sufficiently that it can turn into its own discipline.

Will there ever be an end to philosophy? That is a good question to ask a philosopher.

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5 responses to “A Science of Ethics”

  1. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    The only people seriously studying ethics today (and indeed, have ever done so) are sociobiologists and game theorists.

  2. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    I think you may be using a different definition of ethics than what I am using. John Rawls is the obvious example of a modern philosopher who studies ethics.

  3. Sed Avatar
    Sed

    Some people are experimenting new social relations (or social relations maybe not new but different from the mainstream).
    There are religious groups (like the Amish or the jews of the early Israel with their kibbutz which ok was not just religious), political groups (anarchist communities, squats, and many others), and so on.
    So social experimenting exists here and now.
    The problem is that the mainstream society usually fights against other ways of behaving in a group. Or it eats so much of your time and energy that you have no more time to experiment unless you are ready to do it 100% of your time which is a big risk.
    Or most of the time, social experimenting is ignored and no one outside of the experimenters knows it exists. This is the way it happens in “modern” countries like the one you are in and the one I am in (France).

  4. ncm Avatar
    ncm

    I’m think the difference is not in my definition of “ethics”, but in the definition of “serious”. But I haven’t read Rawls.

  5. Ian Lance Taylor Avatar
    Ian Lance Taylor

    Rawls is quite serious.

    That is a good point that people do follow different ways of living. I guess none of them have been compelling yet. I don’t know if the problem is that nothing would be compelling, or that it takes too long to run experiments.

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