Ethical Decision making tools: are Anything we use to make ethical decisions. Examples include, but are not limited too, laws, the golden rule, personal values, asking WWJD, parents values, religion, duty, Peer pressure or Culture.

We use all sorts of ethical decisions making tools in day to day life. One of the biggest questions in ethics is what tool should we use as an overarching principle. What if two or more Ethical Decision making tools tell us to act in a different manner? Which one is correct? What if the world changes drastically and one that we used in the past no longer helps us survive and thrive.


Ethical Decision-Making Tools: Useful But Not Universal

We possess a wide array of ethical decision-making tools shaped by cultural norms, biology, religion, and personal experiences. These tools offer guidance for navigating everyday ethical dilemmas. They promote positive behaviors, minimize harm, and facilitate trust and cooperation within societies.

While valuable for everyday life, traditional ethical tools often falter in extreme or complex situations. Thought experiments, such as the classic ‘torture to save innocents’ scenario, expose their limitations. Even seemingly absolute rules, like ‘never hit an innocent child,’ can be challenged in extremely improbable contexts. These thought experiments emphasize the need for more foundational ethical principles that remain valid even in drastically different environments. Why would most people say it is both true you should “never hit an innocent child” but you would if the outocme of not doing it was so bad. The fact that we would hit an innocent child if the outcome of not doing so was bad enought shows we have some other factor bigger than this

False bottom lines

Ethical Decision-Making Tools tools often serve as false bottom lines – rules that generally promote good consequences but might need to be transgressed in rare situations. In a world where change is gradual, traditional ethical tools maintain much of their utility over time.

The Challenge of Rapid Change
The potential challenge arises in a world of accelerating change, like the post-singularity environment. Such a world might feature drastically different minds and environments, rendering traditional ethical tools inadequate or even harmful.

The post-singularity world is inherently unknowable. We can’t predict what it will hold, and we recognize the need for an ethical framework that can adapt to the unpredictable. Something much more vauge than what we generally think of absolute right now. The Existing norms and principles may no longer be reliable guides if the world and its inhabitants change significantly.

Traditional ethical tools offer valuable guidance in the world we know. However, their limitations lie int the fact they are not capable of guiding us even when faced with the completely unknown.

The usefulness of traditional rule-based frameworks in a completely unknown (post singularity) world is questionable. Here’s a breakdown of why that’s the case:

• Limited Context: Our existing moral rules evolved within a specific context – that of human interactions on Earth. They’re designed to address familiar situation given our understanding of human preferences and the environments we interact with. This may be completely irrelevant when facing minds and environments that are completely different from those these rules sprung from.
  
• Unforeseen Consequences: Even ethical decision making tools that have served us well within our own experience could have wildly unpredictable or even disastrous consequences in a drastically different context. We lack the knowledge base to assess whether a rule would lead to positive or negative outcomes. We would not expect the ways ethical decision making tools come into being with current minds and environment to be helpful in a completely different world.
  
  When we have no reliable way to predict consequences of a rule, norm or other ethical decision making tool, it might be wiser to admin that while they may useful and necessary in specific situations, no day to day ethical tool that provides utility now will be able to also be a first principle that we want to always rely on.

So, what does this mean?

• Acknowledging Limits of ethical decision making tools: It’s crucial to recognize that existing ethical frameworks aren’t inherently designed or evolved for universally unknown scenarios.
  
• Focus on the Goal: This highlights the importance of keeping the ultimate goal in mind: maximizing the well-being of sentient beings within this unknown context. We might need a new set of starting principles for ethical action in truly alien worlds

What could we want.

Traditional Consequentialists understand that if the world changes the ethical decision making tool will give us drastically different results and the results are what matter. But by useing consequences as the day to day ethical decision making tool, we often get worse results than if we just used an ethical decision making tool that is not consequences based.

good consequences are what we want …
but
aiming for them is not how we get to them

So using consequences as a north star does not always get you good consequences as reliably as non consequence based ethical decision making tool. We can see the value of these ethical decision making tool because they work for the goal, and aiming for the goal reliable does not get us to the goal.

That said, these ethical decision making tool are not the thing we want to optimise for, good outcomes are what we care about. So we sould use ethical decision making tool but change the ones we use as the environemtn chagnes.

now, the big question is
what outcome?
who decides/ who is included?
and how do we know?

what outcome?
The outcome we want is a relationship, a relationship between the environment and the minds in the environment. Some of the relationships provide more or less preference satisfaction. It is not that one mind is better or one environment is better but it is a relationship between the environment and the minds.

Example:
say two people are at a table ready to eat.

Person one (Jack) loves salads / hates pasta
and
Person two (Jill) loves pasta / hates salads.

What is the better consequences of the meal served? Neither pasta or salad is better. It is only better in relations ship to the minds. Serving Pasta is not better and serving salad is not better in and of itself. It because better or worse depending on who receives it.

1 Given any two or more posable situations, the better outcome is the one that is preferred, it is not a specific outcome but relationship between the minds that we are trying to optimize for. We can not say one specific outcome of salad or pasta is better, but the one that would be preferred is better. In this case a salad for Jack and Pasta for Jill is better.

This is what i mean about relational consequences. We can not say one meal is better at satisfying consequences in and of it self but it changes as the minds changes


2. but what if was wrong about what i preferred or i was misinformed about what food i liked? What if Jill says she does not like salads but she had never had a good salad. She is wring about her preferenaces.

okay, fair. instead of “what i say i prferer” and move it to “what i would prefer if I was fully understood the experiences in both situations. Then I would be removing the missinformations about my own preferances. We may not know these, but this is still what we are aiming for

It becomes what i would prefer if was infomred.

3. Okay, but ethics impacts more then just one person how do you deal with multiple people?

How do we do this for oursevles. We may say that currant Jack wants to drink 4 beers today and futuer jack says that is a bad idea. When current Jack is decisidng to dring the beers he may say futer jack in 30 minuets will be so happy, i mena really happy about the beers and tomarrow mourning JAck will be really unhappy. How JAck actually makes that decitions is not the question here but instead we can think of how rational Jack would answere. Rational JAck would look at futuer JAck in 30 minues and guess how much fun he will be having and then look at tomarrow jack and guess at how much misery he will be in and then he will decided is the positive worth naagive.

Admitedley people are not the rational, may care more about jack in 30 minutes then Jack tomarrow but we can still deifine the best outcome in this case one that takes both into consierations. If Jack loves Dringing, Does not ahve a problem, seldum gets hungover other than a little more tiered, then it would be rational for JAck to Drink tonight, have a blast and tomorrow be just slightless less optimal then he would be otherwise. Vise versa if jack only a little bit enjoyed drinking and was debilitated and in pain for the entire next day, it would be rational for jack to make a differenet decitions.

In each case, currant jack is making guesses (weather or not correct) about the preferences of two different Minds, Tonight Jack and Tomarrow Jack. Assuming he cars the same for each he can make a decisions on what to do.

We can do the same when thinking about consequences that impact other people.
Not with full knoledge but they can make guesses at what a mind that did have full knowledge would do.

We make guesses about the minds.

Currant decition makers can guess about things on two sides of the equations.

1. if i do this actions this will happen or that will happen and 2. we want this or that two happen.