Author: Curt Doolittle

DECIDABILITY IN ETHICS AND LAW: DYSGENIC, STATIC OR EUGENIC.

(very dense but very important argument) (edited and reposted)

From David Hamilton:

—“Why not just admit that ethics is ultimately about our being in fundamental states of conflict with each other – that we are all simply trapped in the same metaphorical room preferring either Matisse or Picasso to hang on the common wall, and that ethics is ultimately about our agitating to impose our aesthetic tastes and preferences on everyone else, lest they impose theirs on us?”—

Well written, common frustration, but, No.

Determination of criminal, ethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions are universal. There exists only one universal law: the prohibition on free riding (imposed costs / lost time and effort).

It’s true that by analogy, we refer to contractual obligations, commands, and regulations as law, to grant them the same standard. Just as we refer to a host of signals as ethical or moral, when they are only analogies thereof. But this analogy conveys import by analogy not truth content.

MORAL THEORY RESULTS IN LAW

So while you are correct that we are, outside of kin, ultimately in conflict on ends and means, we can develop rules – Like monogamy, for Nash equilibria – that allow us to cooperate on means if not ends: to engage in productive conflict rather than unproductive conflict. That is, after all, the function of the market.

And if such rules are sufficiently internally consistent that (a) they can be used as general rules (b) applicable to all, for (c) a multitude of conditions we can then use such rules deductively. If these three (a,b,c) properties exist then such a general rule can be embodied in law, under rule of law. And only under such deductive, universally applicable, general rules can we live under rule of law, rather than arbitrary decision predicated upon the biases of an authority.

So ethics, politics and law constitute reasoning by which we can construct general rules of cooperation (competition:productive conflict) WITHOUT relying on individual bias, given the reality of our conflict.

So the question becomes one of ensuring that such general rules are decideable. Which is the central problem of all general rules in all logical models. The only means of decidability, is either dysgenic (socialism: the female reproductive strategy) or eugenic (libertarian meritocratic) or static (authoritarian).

As far as I know that is a logical box without exit.