I’m also pretty skeptical of convergence, largely because I’m a moral anti-realist. I don’t see why we would converge to any view in particular, except by coincidence or mechanisms that don’t track stance-independent moral truths (because there are none). It’s just people weighing their own particular moral intuitions. Humans differ in our most basic moral intuitions and leanings.
Barring value lock-in, I suspect there would be convergence towards the recognition that unnecessary suffering is bad and worth preventing (when cheap enough) because this seems pretty widely held and something societies move towards, but I’d guess there will still be disagreement on some of these:
population ethics
hedonism vs preference views vs others
whether non-sentient/non-conscious things matter terminally, e.g. preserving nature
whether groups of moral patients have special status beyond their aggregates, e.g. ethnic groups, species
deontology vs consequentialism vs virtue ethics
what counts as conscious/sentient (I think this is partly normative, not just empirical)
decision theory, attitudes towards risk and ambiguity, fanaticism
Or more basic things like religion, nationalism. People will want to shape their utopias in the image of their religious concept of heaven, and the idealised versions of their countries.
I’m also pretty skeptical of convergence, largely because I’m a moral anti-realist. I don’t see why we would converge to any view in particular, except by coincidence or mechanisms that don’t track stance-independent moral truths (because there are none). It’s just people weighing their own particular moral intuitions. Humans differ in our most basic moral intuitions and leanings.
Barring value lock-in, I suspect there would be convergence towards the recognition that unnecessary suffering is bad and worth preventing (when cheap enough) because this seems pretty widely held and something societies move towards, but I’d guess there will still be disagreement on some of these:
population ethics
hedonism vs preference views vs others
whether non-sentient/non-conscious things matter terminally, e.g. preserving nature
whether groups of moral patients have special status beyond their aggregates, e.g. ethnic groups, species
deontology vs consequentialism vs virtue ethics
what counts as conscious/sentient (I think this is partly normative, not just empirical)
decision theory, attitudes towards risk and ambiguity, fanaticism
Or more basic things like religion, nationalism. People will want to shape their utopias in the image of their religious concept of heaven, and the idealised versions of their countries.