[ExI] The meaning of life revisited

[Anders Sandberg]

Ben <bbenzai at yahoo.com> , 15/6/2014 9:12 PM:
William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: 
 
 > "As to the meaning life (as in Anders pdf) as defined for the entire  
race, I offer only this:  we should ..." 
 
It's a funny thing, but as soon as somebody starts suggesting what 'we  
should', I think "hang on a minute, that's not up to you!". 
 
The whole concept of a single individual pronouncing on what an entire  
species 'should' seems a bit, well, pointless to me. 

Not necessarily (but let's agree that most actual attempts are faulty). 
I can pronounce what all of humanity (and all aliens!) should believe about some mathematics based on a proof of a theorem: this is uncontroversial, even if most minds will never understand the proof. 2+2=4 for everybody, even if they disagree. 
In the same way, *if there are true and universal moral statements* I could state one of them, and it would really mean you and everybody else morally should follow it. One of the peculiarities of ethics is that if such statements exist, if you are a moral agent and understand one of them you should now also want to obey it (and you should also want to find out as many such statements as possible since you want to be moral). So in this scheme, if I actually had that statement I could say "we should..." and it would indeed pronounce what all members of the species ought to do. Of course, there is plenty of philosophical disagreement about whether such things exist. Also, unlike the mathematical case it might be necessary that the pronouncement contains the "proof" that makes you understand why doing X is good: it is not enough to just have the conclusion (at least according to Kant, I think). 
In practice, using limited real-world brains rather than abstract moral agents, even if the above (meta)ethical theory is right the limitations of understanding and implementation require a process with a great deal more robustness than just telling people. This is where things like collective understanding, empirical support, trial and error, and live and let live principles are necessary for moral progress. Even if one truly should X, just believing it because somebody said it is not justified enough. 

(Last week I discovered that going meta about metaethics just gives you metaethics: it is its own meta-level theory, handling its own metal-level questions. But there is metametaphysics! Whether metametaphysics is its own meta-level theory I do not know...)

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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