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hen comments on Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Excellent explanation, thank you. I've been telling everyone I know about your resolution to my worry. I believe in math again.
Maybe you can solve my similarly dumb worry about ethics: If the best life is the life of ethical action (insofar as we do or ought to prefer to do the ethically right thing over any other comforts or pleasures), and if ethical action consists at least largely in providing and preserving the goods of life for our fellow human beings, then if someone inhabited the limit case of the best possible life (by permanently providing immortality, freedom, and happiness for all human beings), wouldn't they at the same time cut everyone else off from the best kind of life?
Ethical action is defined by situations. The best life in the scenario where we don't have immortality freedom and happiness is to try to bring them about, but the best life in the scenario where we already have them is something different.
Good! That would solve the problem, if true. Do you have a ready argument for this thesis (I mean "but the best life in the scenario where we already have them is something different.")?
"If true" is a tough thing here because I'm not a moral realist. I can argue by analogy for the best moral life in different scenarios being a different life but I don't have a deductive proof of anything.
By analogy: the best ethical life in 1850 is probably not identical to the best ethical life in 1950 or in 2050, simply because people have different capacities and there exist different problems in the world. This means the theoretical most ethical life is actually divorced from the real most ethical life, because no one in 1850 could've given humanity all those things and working toward would've taken away ethical effort from eg, abolishing slavery. Ethics under uncertainty means that more than one person can be living the subjectively ethically perfect life even if only one of them will achieve what their goal is because no one knows who that is ahead of time.