This is still currently being edited.
How do we choose a particular set of ethics? In my experience, young Effective Altruists and Rationalists, choose consequentialist ethics based on what is prima facie attractive about them. After all, if I’m already purchasing fuzzies and utilions separately then why not do the most good? This leads to repugnant conclusions which they inflict upon themselves to their detriment.
This can range from the rather benign “Between the death of my family and N people stubbing their toe, there is a finite number of people where the former would be preferable” to the more damaging “Am I killing someone because I chose to buy Starbucks today?”. While I know both are naive, studying more won’t resolve the fundamental contradiction between their own moral development and Utilitarianism.
Ethics which attempt to cleanly systematise our morality will always lead to conclusions which are irreconcilable with a person’s intuitions and will only get worse with continued moral development. This is harmful but it isn’t obvious what the alternative is. Today’s popular moral landscape consists of either deontological ethics which is too god-fearing for young EAs or consequentialism with its own problems.
I suggest Stoicism, a virtue ethical naturalistic account of morality.
Stoicism’s Theory of Moral Development
Agency is our most important faculty. Through reason and experience, we can improve our judgement through continuous exercise. While other skills such as rhetoric or medicine have limited scope, our agency is all encompassing and includes itself via recursion.
Our lives are an optimisation problem. We have many endeavours but they generate conflicting requirements. For example, I may want to enjoy the company of my friends and do well on a test but I cannot progress towards both at once.
By using my judgement I can solve this local optimisation problem. I determine how much time I need to study to do well and, fate permitting, satisfy both endeavours.
I continuously do this with more endeavours and in doing so I globally optimise. To best optimise I must perfect my agency and since agency is all-encompassing, I necessarily get better at optimising by focusing on it above all else.
As we perfect our agency recursively, we necessarily acquire strong norms corresponding to the usual notions of wisdom, justice, benevolence, beneficence, courage, temperance, and other traits that are standardly called virtues. These norms arise from healthy humans perfecting their agency because we are prosocial beings capable of reason.
Utilitarianism and other ‘isms
If this is the way healthy humans develop then how do we then justify that Utilitarianism or any other “ism” which attempts to clearly systematise ethics should dictate to us what we ought to do? Unlike the previous naturalistic account of ethics it does not arise from healthy moral development but instead is artificially created. It arises from a misunderstanding of what human flourishing actually consists of.
Your ethics shouldn’t tyrannise over you. The fact that they do is a result of Utilitarianism having a lot to say about how to think and act but very little to say by what right it does. Why do you not accept repugnant conclusions entailed by Utilitarianism with equanimity and instead need to wring your hands over them?
Conclusion
This has been a brief overview of Stoicism’s naturalistic account of ethics. Well-read consequentialists will have several objections to the arguments presented and will remain unconvinced. I’m not ignorant of that. The purpose of this essay has been to introduce young rationalists and EAs to an ethical system they may have not considered and invite them to learn more. While drafts of this essay had more arguments, they were basic and clumsy because I wanted to be brief. There will be further essays in the series which will be more in-depth.
Further Reading
Aside from reading the ancient texts, I highly suggest reading one of the books under Introductions to Stoicis such as John Sellar’s Stoicism. I also suggest reading Laurence Becker’s A New Stoicism with the associated essay, Towards a New Stoicism, by Massimo Pigliucci. The paraphrased theory of moral development contained in this essay originates from them. It’s important to realise that Stoicism, aside from a brief revival in the 16th century, has been inactive for over a millennia so it’s important that it be reconsidered in light of all the historical development it missed. A New Stoicism accomplishes exactly that.