Ethics assumptions, rev 1

Reading about moral paradoxes got me thinking about my ethics assumptions. These are things that I believe to be true, not because they follow from other truths, but instead because they are reasoned statements stemming from my observations of the universe.

After some thought, I came up with three assumptions, which I list here with little confidence that they're exhaustive. That lack of confidence is why I've appended to this post's title rev 1: I expect future revisions and additional assumptions.

1. Moral values are epiphenomenal. That is, what makes an action good or bad derives from the circumstances surrounding it, not from static or objective criteria against which humans are measured. As such, ethics is the theoretical side of social engineering, where the goal is to bring about the best ends for the mass of people. What those best ends are and how they should be brought about has a lot to do with circumstances beyond our control.

   For example, much of traditional morality of the last couple thousand years in the Western world has to do with reining in the inborn appetites that are good for the preservation of a hunting-and-gathering species. The ability to gorge on territory, food, and sex were once the virtues of our forebears, later necessarily turned into vices when homo sapiens settled down into agrarian lives. Consequently, it's because our genetics haven't changed much in the last ten thousand years that our moral ideals have had to change. That modern moralities are dependent upon a lifestyle choice, such as agrarianism versus hunting-and-gathering, exemplifies how morality is derivative.

2. The moral value of an action in the present partly depends upon how that action affects moral decisions in the future. Human decisions happen in a vast web of feedback loops, where what one person does now affects the likelihood of other people behaving better or worse in the future. These future decisions can't be ignored, morally. If a person does good in the present at the cost of making it likely that other people will bring about badness in the future, that badness is part of the moral value of the present action. If the future badness is significant enough, and the present good insignificant enough, then the action may be morally neutral, if not bad, despite its immediate good consequences.

   One example of a moral feedback is my choice to bike instead of to drive most places. Originally I saw my decision as a morally good act that makes the world a little better. Since then, it has occurred to me that every major city in the United States reaches a transportation equilibrium that involves jammed freeways during rush hour. That is, people collectively drive more and more until any excess road capacity is consumed. Thus, my solitary decision to drive less and bike more probably hasn't reduced motoring in the Phoenix area; rather, it has given every other motorist a tiny extra bit of incentive to drive more. Therefore, the moral benefits effected by me biking rather than driving are selfish benefits to myself, such as improved health, and not benefits to the group as would be the case if there were in fact less motoring going on overall.

3. In identical scenarios when facing the same decision, there will sometimes be multiple best moral actions. This follows from the necessity of having diversity within any ecosystem, including those occupied by humans, in order for that ecosystem to be productive and resilient. Because humans are best off over the long term in a productive and stable ecosystem, there must be a diversity of moral values to prevent the ecosystem from collapsing into fragile monocultures due to a uniformity of individuals' choices. With the human global population as large as it is, there doesn't exist a self-preserving morality that won't eventually lead to unsustainable destruction to our natural environments. People must choose sufficiently differently from one another.