Or to put it another way can any form of ethics be established all the way down including it premises?
I was looking at Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and he says that “a rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realized that questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and suffereing of sentient creatures.” But why should we accept this? And why should we care what other sentient creatures feel?
The answer cannot be that it will help our happiness (why should we care about that) because we could increase that by hurting other sentient creatures in some cases.
Does any form of ethics have to accept its premises as axioms and not based on rationality or evidence?
Could an ethical system just as easily be built on the idea that the ethical thing to do is that which will increase the chances of the survival of humanity )or any other group)?
I agree with Sam Harris in general, but you’re right: you have to accept as an axiom that suffering is bad and happiness is good. It all comes down to chemical reactions and electrical impulses, and there is no objective way to say that those are good or bad any more than electricity in a power cable or boiling water in a kettle are good or bad.
I also largely agree that is a good basis for ethics. I also agree with Harris that this creates complicated issues about what sort of duty we owe to animals (since we don’t really know how sentient they are).
But then I am left with questions I cannot answer.
What do we do if we see a small goup of people about to be tortured and killed by large group of people and the only way to stop the large group is to use deadly force that will spread more death and pain than would the torture and killing of the small group?
Or what if we are in a conflict with another society and the only way to win the conflict is by spreading massive amount of death and pain throughout the world. Can we do this in the hope (what if it only a very unlikely hope, a one in a million chance) that we will win and end up with a balance sheet with less pain and destruction than if we did not fight the other society?
Is that system impossible to sustain for everybody? It seems to be an evolutionarily unstable strategy.
From what I can tell Harris is proposing this system as the best ethical system for the world to take. And I agree it would be very good for the group (humanity as a whole) but the individuals who make up this system could extract benefits by defecting from the strategy. The system would only work if individual humans were to start acting different from how they always have.
I’ve read this thread all the way through (it’s short, after all) three times in the last 24 hours. I’m not clear what is the question/debate. As I read the OP, Harris (with whose work I’m not familiar) is arguing for a pragmatic theory of ethics, as distinguished from a purely logical one. If that’s the issue, I tend to agree. Ethics is a rubric we use for establishing rules for getting along with one another. If the rubric works, it’s a good one. If not, then not.
Are Ethics subject to a form of Darwinian Evolution ?
like are Ethics innate because that leads to survival
as a joke ‘The Selfish Ethic’
I did not know about Harris, but I ran into this in the lateish 1970’s, and was extremely interested. If you do a search on SD for FRDE and PARFITT you’ll find a crude explanation of what got my attention.
Somehow I suspect that the ideas were evolving in the mid 1970’s and that the attributions are based on survival.
To explain, it is possible that we are programmed to behave in certain ways because of evolution - this would be handy because ‘God’ only seems to want to communicate with us by musty tomes, much mis-transcribed, or some strange people with chemically dissordered brains.
Crudely put, ‘I behave this way because otherwise my grandfather would have died before producing my father’ is quite a neat way of explaining things.
There are interesting by products, marrying Game Theory with Evolution gives one enough of a glimpse of ‘The Meaning of Life and Everything’ to come up with a framework for despising quite a lot of assertions/assumptions that just don’t stand up.
In some ways, this is all old stuff, consider the Vampire that walks in daylight
yet there is more in it, the mechanistic framework of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a simple way of demonstrating that ‘Justice is not Fairness’
it is just the consistency of the rules that matter