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A Universal Set of Ethical Standards? (piefed.zip)
submitted 19 hours ago by to c/philosophy@lemmy.world
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I awoke this morning with a question mulling in my thoughts of why there isn't a universal set of ethical standards for all. It seemed like a simple concept, but as I came to my senses I realized the error. The reality that this isn't a new problem, it may be THE problem society has struggled with since the dawn of consciousness.

What I took away from the thought experiment I conducted between waking up and getting around is that from Hammurabi's code through the advent of the major religions to the Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution, we keep building on the answers to this question and refining the processes of acceptance and fairness. But even though global societal rules are more consistent than they may have been in the past, these ideals still drive conflict that individuals are willing to die to maintain.

What I also took away is that I live under a substantial rule set. Some unwritten, some written. Some I am aware of, but some I can only trust are reasonable by my standard set. I spend a substantial part of my day navigating right and wrong, from the morning commute to interactions at work, home, and points in between.

The last takeaway was about an individual whose personal standards become separate from the standards of the society/community in which they live. This one I didn't resolve, other than that it's the test of individual courage. Why it's not simple is that an individual with the courage to challenge is an anomaly and will face societal friction. Only time will show if the societal system backs their ideas or rejects them. Examples that came to mind were Paul Revere and Joan of Arc, whom society "revered" over time, and Robert Owen who initiated the New Harmony experiment in Indiana, an idea that didn't survive the test of time.

Why isn't there a universal set of ethical standards? Because there isn't universal Providence, this was my conclusion.

Ultimately I decided to quit thinking about it and just watch football. The oblong kind and probably a good word to illustrate why there will never be universal consensus --> 🏈

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[–] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 child)

I think Gödel’s incompleteness theorem applies just as well to ethical rules as mathematical ones: there”s no possible set of rules that will completely coincide with our intuitive sense of good and bad behavior in all potential scenarios.

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  • [–] 1 point 16 hours ago

    I must say I'm slightly irked by yet another vague and unfitting application of Godel's incompleteness theorems (GIT). The first one roughly states that given a consistent system F there will be some sentence GF such that you cannot derive in F that GF or not(GF). You can then add GF as an axiom to F resulting in F' but then you will be able to construct GF', and so on. This GF you can construct is called the Godel sentence of F.

    If you were to encode some rules of ethics in a formal system E you could interpret it such that X is ethical (or not) if you can derive some sentence S (or not(S)) and that sentence S represents X. E will not decide on everything indeed if E is consistent (thus never deriving both some S and not(S)) and capable of basic arithmetic (what does that mean in terms of ethics?!). However, to conclude anything non-trivial from this is dangerous. First of all everyone then has to interpret what the sentences in E mean in an universal way. Then if you construct a GE does that sentence even mean anything intuitively? Will there even be any other sentence not derived from GE that is not decided upon? It is likely that E, while not deciding on everything, decides on much more than any persons ethical intuition. Surely if E is non-trivial there are some complicated sentences that it decides on that no person could interpret. And don't forget the arithmetic issue. If you just include arithmetic in E then all undecided sentences may simply be sentences of arithmetic. If the ethics part of E and arithmetic part are one whole, what would that even look like?

    GIT is quite technical and applying it is troublesome. I have only read a bit of actual literature on the topic and even with my limited knowledge of it I can tell that the applications I see in the wild are shaky at best.

    there”s no possible set of rules that will completely coincide with our intuitive sense of good and bad behavior in all potential scenarios.

    If you just want to come to this conclusion, all you need is a counter example. Take some system of ethics E. If there is any situation such that some person A asserts S and some person B asserts not(S) then either E only decides on at most one making E not universal or E decides on both making E inconsistent. Basically if there is any disagreement on ethics (which there certainly is) you simply cannot construct a consistent and universal set of rules. We really don't need to open Pandora's box and get GIT involved.

    Sorry for this wall of text. I'm not angry and I don't want to start a fight lol. I just think that people are a little too eager to apply GIT to all kinds of things. A little pet peeve of mine I guess.

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