People have made some good points and they have shifted my views slightly. The focus shouldn’t be so much on seeking convergence at any cost, but simply on achieving the best outcome. Converging on a bad ethical theory would be bad (although I’m strawmanning myself here slightly).
However, I still think that something should be done about the fact that we have so many ethical theories and have been unable to agree on one since the dawn of ethics. I can’t imagine that this is a good thing, for some of the reasons I’ve described above.
How can we get everyone to agree on the best ethical theory?
Perhaps it would be easier to figure out what is the worst ethical theory possible? I don’t recall ever seeing this question being asked, and it seems like it’d be easier to converge on.
Regardless of how negatively utilitarian someone is, almost everyone has an easier time intuiting the avoidance of suffering rather than the maximization of some positive principle, which ends up sounding ambiguous and somewhat non-urgent. I think suffering enters near mode easier than happiness does. It may be easier for humans to agree on what is the most anti-moral, badness-maximizing schema to adopt.
This is a good point Dony, perhaps avoiding the worst possible outcomes is better than seeking the best possible outcomes. I think Foundational Research Institute has written something to this effect from a suffering/wellbeing in the far future perspective, but the same might hold for promoting/discouraging ethical theories.
Any thoughts on the worst possible ethical theory?
People have made some good points and they have shifted my views slightly. The focus shouldn’t be so much on seeking convergence at any cost, but simply on achieving the best outcome. Converging on a bad ethical theory would be bad (although I’m strawmanning myself here slightly).
However, I still think that something should be done about the fact that we have so many ethical theories and have been unable to agree on one since the dawn of ethics. I can’t imagine that this is a good thing, for some of the reasons I’ve described above.
How can we get everyone to agree on the best ethical theory?
Perhaps it would be easier to figure out what is the worst ethical theory possible? I don’t recall ever seeing this question being asked, and it seems like it’d be easier to converge on.
Regardless of how negatively utilitarian someone is, almost everyone has an easier time intuiting the avoidance of suffering rather than the maximization of some positive principle, which ends up sounding ambiguous and somewhat non-urgent. I think suffering enters near mode easier than happiness does. It may be easier for humans to agree on what is the most anti-moral, badness-maximizing schema to adopt.
This is a good point Dony, perhaps avoiding the worst possible outcomes is better than seeking the best possible outcomes. I think Foundational Research Institute has written something to this effect from a suffering/wellbeing in the far future perspective, but the same might hold for promoting/discouraging ethical theories.
Any thoughts on the worst possible ethical theory?