One of the most intriguing aspects of the current U.S. border crisis is the way that human rights and American decency get articulated in the public sphere of discourse. An initial pull is raw emotion and empathy, then there are counterweights where the long-term consequences of existing policies are weighed against the exigent effects of the policy, and then there are crackpot theories of “crisis actors” and whatnot as bizarro-world distractions. But, if we accept the general thesis of our enlightenment values carrying us ever forward into increasing rights for all, reduced violence and war, and the closing of the curtain on the long human history of despair, poverty, and hunger, we must also ask more generally how this comes to be. Steven Pinker certainly has rounded up some social theories, but what kind of meta-ethics might be at work that seems to push human civilization towards these positive outcomes?
Per the last post, I take the position that we can potentially formulate meaningful sentences about what “ought” to be done, and that those meaningful sentences are, in fact, meaningful precisely because they are grounded in the semantics we derive from real world interactions. How does this work? Well, we can invoke the so-called Cornell Realists argument that the semantics of a word like “ought” is not as flexible as Moore’s Open Question argument suggests. Indeed, if we instead look at the natural world and the theories that we have built up about it (generally “scientific theories” but, also, perhaps “folk scientific ideas” or “developing scientific theories”), certain concepts take on the character of being so-called “joints of reality.” That is, they are less changeable than other concepts and become referential magnets that have an elite status among the concepts we use for the world. To give a classic example, “red” is highly variable even with some assignment of 700nm. Where does red end and pink begin, for instance? What is red exists in a continuum and has no elite center of reference, unlike something like “electrical charge.” Amusingly, there are some words like “spin” and “charm” in particle physics that either have only a slight resemblance to macro-scale versions of the same word (spin), or no relationship at all (charm). Yet they may still remain referentially elite in that they are not subject to variation in counterfactual worlds (“charge” is the same regardless of what word is applied to it or, more importantly, regardless of whether the speaker has any idea what charge actually is or is not). So referential eliteness is tied somehow to an objective metaphysics that holds naturalism as central. This might help us jump out of Quine’s indeterminacy of translation and the Kripke-Wittgenstein inferential rule following paradox, as well, because there is actually a ground of reference built into the language.
If, then, we can extend reference magnetism to ethical language we can claim that the meaning of ought might be elite enough, in relation to other elite referents, that we can claim a less than merely opinion-based relativism about ethical ideas. And, following along, if there were in fact a model that provided a notation for elitism of referents and their relationships, we could get to a mathematics of ethics. Similar ideas have been recently trafficked: Sam Harris suggests that well-being might exist as an adaptive landscape, for instance. An adaptive landscape, borrowed from evolutionary theory, is a multidimensional function space in k+1 dimensions, where there are k environmental variables and the function spits out a measure of fitness like the population increase generationally or, for evolutionary theory, often the frequency of a given gene in the population. A moral landscape is similar with peaks and values associated with different individual and societal choices, but is notably objective in that many are better than others for the greatest number of human beings or the world as a whole. The objective components must derive from this kind of referential elitism drawn from scientific theories and data itself, rather than some kind of deontological assertions about the world. Other atheist and humanist thinkers have made similar claims over time.
OK, so we could measure some facets of human thriving like Bentham’s utils and do a Monte Carlo simulation to tease out the likelihood of a given ought resulting in enhanced thriving. That would certainly be a descriptive mathematics of ethics. But the bottom-up approach is to characterize referential eliteness, then characterize ethical referential eliteness, and then to simulate outcomes. To do so we need to pick a way of thinking about this concept of eliteness. The obvious candidate is to apply the mathematics of optimal inference via Solomonoff and Kolmogorov complexity. If we consider a concept’s eliteness to be related to the inferential projection of its generalization as traded-off against its inherent complexity, something like incompressibility of the concept might give us a good starting point. Moreover, if relative eliteness in a coherent network of concepts can be characterized, perhaps by minimal encoding of the network itself, we at least have some traction on a mathematics of referential eliteness.
So we begin with the notion that a concept is a theory and some theories are better than others in terms of correspondence to both fit with facts and with the network of related and dependent concepts. These concept-theories are maybe about real-world phenomena but they can also be about other ideas, hopes, dreams, etc. Let’s assume that a concept can somehow be encoded as a collection of logical procedures. The procedures are then computable and can be converted into universal Turing machine descriptions that can be written as a series of 0s and 1s given some encoding rules. Where descriptions contain redundancy in the bit pattern, or where groupings of these descriptions can more compactly be replaced or overlain by a more generalized concept-theory (“mammals” for “cats,” “dogs,” etc.) the concept-theory network demonstrates compression as a function of generalization. Elitism then seems to arise naturally from incompressibility: when a concept-theory is minimal yet trades off that minimalism to account for all the exceptions in its class or “kind” it has a kind of elitism. The pull of the class in formulating concept-theories and meta-concept-theories is the magnetism that David Lewis suggested for some kind of objective metaphysics underlying semantics.
Now all we need to do is come up the right coding procedures to get this started!