DxLaughRiot t1_ja8qrdj wrote
Study philosophy - people have been trying to come up with an objective theory of ethics for thousands of years unsuccessfully. We’re not going to suddenly stumble upon one now, especially in a day in age where people can’t even agree that vaccines during a pandemic are “ethically required”.
Just look at how two supposedly objective ethical systems like utilitarianism and deontology try to answer simple ethical questions like trolly car problems. Despite both supposedly being rooted in objectivity they come up with very different answers to the same ethical dilemmas.
I get that you want to say “education is the answer”, but that just opens up new ethical questions to answer. Who defines what education is “needed”, how does science even play a role in ethics, what happens when there isn’t scientific consensus, etc.
gobbo t1_ja92bh9 wrote
You might be weighting unevenly important ethical questions as falsely equivalent.
Sure, the trolly problem is a great way to emphasize a certain framework, but it's an outlier in practice, as it's useful for certain designs like safety devices or predictive measures.
However the baseline of behaviour regulation around basic legal frameworks is perhaps less sensitive to these variables and more easily fit into a roughly acceptable set of global standards and norms.
An example might be child sexual abuse proscriptions. It doesn't really matter much if your culture is authoritarian about family relations, that's a line we can likely agree should never be crossed.
DxLaughRiot t1_ja9ar9s wrote
I use trolly problems as an example because it’s un-nuanced, straightforward, and still yields huge differences in supposedly objective systems of ethics. If objective systems can’t agree on something as basic as that - whether the scenario is common in real life or not - how are we supposed to find objectively ethical solutions for even the most slightly nuanced questions in the world?
Even your “we should all agree sexually abusing children is bad” has issues with it. On the surface, yeah no duh people shouldn’t sexually abuse children, but start digging even a little bit and you start to see cracks in the statement. What constitutes a “child”? What constitutes “abuse”? Ancient Greek philosophers had sex with young boys as young as 13 on the regular and thought it was ethical as long as both consented. Was that child abuse? Age of consent in Germany is 14 - in parts of Japan it’s 20. Whose legal framework is correct and why?
If the basis of your ethics is “legal consensus” you’re going to have a hell of a time trying to consolidate a global ethical framework.
gobbo t1_ja9c5mh wrote
I am pretty sure this is an excellent example of "perfect is the enemy of good".
Sometimes you just have to get shit done and compromises are necessary. Again, alignment is not necessarily about lining things up perfectly.
DxLaughRiot t1_ja9dh5c wrote
I’m trying to say we can’t even figure out perfect something as simple as “don’t sexually abuse children”. That was supposed to be easy!
More what I’m trying to say is it’s naive to think that with as messy and complicated life is that anyone will ever agree on a universal moral framework. Humanity has tried to for millennia, and typically what happens when people try to trot out their new super awesome objective morality is that people go to war over whether it’s right or not.
gobbo t1_ja9rky6 wrote
I'm saying
"Pay attention to trends. What you state as impossible is happening incrementally despite the protests of theory."
cf. xeno's paradox; theories limited by excessive parameters will fail.
Also: maybe the universality doesn't need to be as totalizing as you assume for a global ethics platform to succeed. We aren't talking about total consensus; as hominids we are wired to have some kind of minority opposition to keep evolving. In practical terms a consensus can be 'good enough'--how you decide where to draw the lines is an interesting but necessarily drawn out discussion.
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