The present is the sum of past actions. The passage of time alone doesn’t change ethical value, positive or negative. The sum of those actions may be rewarded or punished over time, gradually moving back toward a neutral point in the process.
The purpose of ethics also isn’t behavioral modification, though that may be a byproduct. Behavioral modification is game-theoretic, and still rests on an individual choosing to become more ethical, or not.
Ethics as I define it also isn’t a welfare maximization game. Positive value is increased by improving quality of life multiplied by scale and over time, but the punishment is negative value that is of equal importance. Any system where there was an imbalance between the treatment of positive and negative value would be discriminatory, unstable, and unethical.
I’m also not claiming that ethics has any relationship to legal systems today. Today’s legal systems are just enforced moral systems, as they’d never consider beliefs or intentions to have any relevance if they were based on ethics. There is a small mountain of evidence related to cognitive bias research that documents the problems with legal systems today, but I don’t address that in this paper.
It is baked into a few different papers I’ve written since 2020. I think part of the disconnect here is that the fundamental purpose of the system of ethics I’m talking about isn’t an intention to alter future behavior. The purpose isn’t to optimize human behavior, but rather to measure it.
A system that can’t measure the ethical value of actions, positive or negative, can’t react appropriately to them. A system that can measure them and chooses not to react appropriately isn’t ethical, and if it reacts only to some fraction according to bias, then it is unstable and unethical.
“Power” as most people use the term is trivial, and collective intelligence always wins against a standalone system, no matter how “powerful” it may be, since Perspective “Binds and Blinds”, while collective intelligence reduces cognitive bias. But again, the purpose isn’t behavioral modification.
People will make their own choices, regardless of what attempts to modify their behavior are deployed. It isn’t the mandate of ethics as I use the term to modify behavior, but rather to measure ethical value, and react according to that value.