The most important unsolved problems in ethics

Great post William! Two comments:

1. The link to part II seems to be broken
2. Could you post a citation to theoretical problems 3 & 4? (That the universe has infinite value.) I have not heard of this before.

I’m confused about what answers to the theoretical questions would look like.

Are things like 1-4 supposed to be within utilitarianism? Additionally, do things like 5-8 seem to presuppose some sort of moral realism?

I’m surprised by the lack of meta-ethics on here, even in the theoretical section. On the face of it, that seems pretty crucial to working out the correct answers to first-order moral questions. Unless we think meta-ethics is solved, of course!

Link fixed

Philosophy and I don’t usually get along too well, so getting involved in a discussion here is perhaps unwise for me. But I can’t help myself.

On theoretical question 4 (“How should we respond to the possibility that the universe actually has infinite value?”):

1. We won’t ever have certainty that there’s an infinite amount of utility/disutility in the universe. Say someone is wedded to the idea that we should evaluate actions by how they change the aggregate utility in the universe, and wedded to the idea that an in infinite-utility universe, all finite actions have zero change to this utility. This person could then take an expectation value over the two possibilities (finite universe with non-zero change to aggregate utility; infinite universe with zero change), and conclude that murdering a human should be treated as wrong, regardless of whether the number of aliens is finite or infinite.

2. I only wrote point 1 to show that even accepting some rather bizarre and unnecessary premises, we don’t have to conclude that we have no moral reason to do anything.

My main point is that we can just re-cast any ethical system so that it only applies to the beings affected by your action. For utilitarianism we’d just add up the utility of the people on Earth (the probability that donating to the Against Malaria Foundation will affect distant aliens by some quantum randomness is tiny, and would be tiny even with a sum over an infinite number of such aliens).

In practical terms, this means that everyone could carry on with their ethical judgements just as before. That the finiteness or otherwise of the number of aliens is considered to have important consequences for ethics suggests to me that there are problems with academic philosophy. It is definitely not a “high-impact” question.

(Formatting issues in my previous comment - I don’t mean to have the numbered paragraphs indented. Point 2 runs for three paragraphs.)

A very fundamental question: Should the numbers count? http://philpapers.org/rec/TAUSTN

interesting list, but questions 3 & 4 are not even meaningful, let alone among the most important

Nice list, Will! I personally think many of the theoretical questions have obvious answers, but not everyone agrees with my answers, so at the very least, there’s work to be done in coming up with more persuasive arguments. :)

A few questions I would add:

1. Do insects suffer? Which future computer programs will suffer? In general, what criteria determine the boundaries of our considering something to be suffering? (http://www.utilitarian-essays.com/consciousness.html)

2. Should we care more about suffering by more powerful brains? (

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   ) If so, what are the relevant factors? I personally think maybe we should not weight by brain size, but this has its own set of objections.

3. What are scenarios that might result in astronomical amounts of future suffering? (http://felicifia.org/viewtopic.php?p=4454) What can we do now to best reduce the likelihood of these possibilities?

How do we know whether an ethical system is true (or accurate, if you prefer) or not?

What basis can we build ethics on? If ethics can only be based on intuition, what do we do with the fact that some people–psychopaths–have different intuitions; and do all people who are not psychopaths really share intuitions, or might there be slight differences even among ‘normal’ people? And the worst-case scenario: what if those differences exist and are biological in origin?

Of course, a lot of that is psychology, but once you get into intuitions, there’s no escaping that.

There was an extensive discussion of this list over at Less Wrong:

Also, as some commenters there noted, the list is strikingly consequentialist in is assumptions without much acknowledgment of that fact.

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments! Responding just to some.

Carl: thanks for letting me know about the LW discussion - I hadn’t seen that. In terms of the list being consequentialist in its assumptions - actually, I don’t think that’s true. It’s perfectly compatible with thinking that people have both rights - things you may not do to people even though it would be better, impartially considered, if you did them - and options - things that it’s permissible to do, even though they aren’t the best options, impartially considered, available to you. You can think that X is more important than Y even if you think that it would be impermissible to violate someone’s rights in order to achieve X over Y. And you can think that X is more important than Y even if you think that it would be permissible to choose either X or Y if nothing else was at stake. How ‘important’ solving a question is is an evaluative question - like saying “how good would it be to solve it?”. But it’s not only consequentialists that are interested in evaluative questions.

What would be typically non-consequentialist (or non-utilitarian) issues that arise on these lists? Whether equality is of value? But almost all views agree in practice that equality is of value - they just disagree on why that’s so (whether it’s valuable in and of itself, or merely for instrumental reasons). Whether there are side-constrants on action? But again, almost all views agree in practice that you shouldn’t go around killing people, or stealing - they just disagree on why that’s so. The question Adriano mentions: “should the numbers count?” is a good one which could plausibly be added - perhaps I’d state it as “is it even possible to aggregate wellbeing?”. If it weren’t, that would have pretty radical consequences - and there are quite a lot of non-consequentialist philosophers who are at least somewhat sympathetic to that idea.

Over on LW, Daniel Burfoot suggests: “Is it ethical to pay taxes? Is it ethical to send your children to school? Is it ethical to associate with governments?” Other commentators suggest that something like “is egoism true?” should be added to the list. But these aren’t really open questions within moral philosophy. And, even if they were, would failing to know these be catastrophic, in the way that failing to know some of the things I’ve listed above would be? If non-human animals and humans have equal moral standing, then factory farming is probably the most horrific wrong ever caused by man. But if it’s wrong to pay taxes, then is the fact that governments tax people an atrocity of the same scale? No moral philosopher (not even Nozick, who raises the slavery analogy) would think that.

Finally, you might say that my list is consequentialist because it’s concerned with what, if solved taken seriously, would make the greatest difference to the way the world is currently run (rather than say, the solving of which would have the greatest intrinsic value). But that’s how I defined ‘importance’ before stating the lists.

Michael: it’s fair to criticise me for leaving meta-ethics out. My thought was that the importance of meta-ethics (as I defined importance), was in how it impacts upon normative ethics. In which case it’s highly relevant to (6), though not mentioned there.

David: I’m actually sympathetic to something similar that you say in (1). But it’s got some really bad problems. It would be too lengthy a discussion to go into here, but it’s discussed in Bostrom’s paper (linked to above), in section 4.2 onwards. Your second suggestion, in the paragraph after (2) - which I think is quite different from the first - is also discussed in that paper.

Of interest in the comments to the LW thread, someone has set these up as a multiple choice poll. Most answers won’t be surprising to people familiar with the community, although I exhaled pretty sharply on seeing that 28% of them think future people should be valued less than present people.

Will, some examples of less consequentialist possibilities:

How much should we balance our personal projects and particular loyalties (kinship, group allegiance, reciprocity) against the demands of others?

What sacrifices can be demanded of us, when, and by whom?

You glossed over issues of distribution, fairness, and rights as not so important (in consequenialist fashion) today. But the same could be said of population ethics, infinite value, and so forth. At the moment many things are tightly coupled that may become less so in the future, and that we can affect to some degree. If we try to steer the future in one direction or another we may be pushing probability mass between worlds of tremendously different welfare, equality, etc.

The deontology of probabilistic harm is worth mentioning. A great number of actions have some small chance (subjective or objective) of harming people. How does this fact interact with side-constraints? It seems like it may vastly extend the range of situations in which deontology conflicts with utilitarianism.

Prisoner’s Dilemmas, bargaining problems, “fair divisions” and so forth are of immense practical importance in politics, international relations, and elsewhere.

universe if infinity! then all tings not start form zero coz ‘infinty! =0