Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Philosophy Now
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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/156/Ethical_Truth_in_Light_of_Quantum_Mechanics
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Philosophy Now wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 8:56 pm Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/156/Et ... _Mechanics
I've been hoping someone more versed in the field of philosophy would make some comments about the article. All I can say is I found it very impressive.
In another thread I made the point re AI even if it gets to the point that we can acknowledge it is far more intelligent than any of us, I don't think it will solve our ethical quandary and dictate to us moral standards. Why? Because unless it has sentience, how can it comprehend empathy beyond simulating it. If you cannot empathize and understand what actual emotions are, then intelligent as you may, that "intelligence" has no grounding to make a rational sound decision upon. (Incomplete data - garbage in, garbage out!!)


Good point:-
"Third, it’s only possible to develop a coherent form of ethics when we apply labels of good or bad to just a single type at a time – intentions, or actions, or outcomes. Many moral dilemmas arise when we mix these ways of judging. Bentham’s ethics, for example, offers a judgement for every decision, based solely on how happy people end up: for him, more happiness is always better. But his ethics seem odd when judged from the point of view of actions or intentions: would it really be right to force two innocent people to duel to the death if it made forty thousand spectators ecstatically happy? Twice as right with an audience of eighty thousand? It seems as if ethics can operate clearly in a single realm or dimension, but problems come when we shift from one dimension to another."

* Also loved the art image from Abigail Vettese
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Criticising one of history’s most important-ever scientists can sound like a sketch from Monty Python: “OK, but apart from breakthroughs in optics, mathematics, mechanics, explaining gravity, inventing calculus, something about trigonometry, predicting how planets move, and other stuff that we don’t understand, what has Isaac Newton ever done for us?”

Newton’s work transformed science, and eventually, society. But Newton’s legacy comes with an ugly side: he inspired ‘physics envy’, which, in turn, led humanity to some truly dark places. ‘Physics envy’ is the desire to find Newtonian-type mathematical formulas or algebraic laws in other disciplines.
Uh, in ethics?

Of course, in regard to the moral objectivists among us, who needs mathematical formulas and algebraic laws? With them the "discipline" can simply revolve around God or around ideology or around one or another deontological philosophical assessment. They define and deduce value judgments into existence.
Sometimes the endeavour is absurd, as when economists try to explain their economic opinions in algebraic equations. But when applied to psychology, history, class warfare, or evolution, thinkers with physics envy usually end up describing humans in dangerously oversimplified terms.
Not to worry. As long as the terms they use are understood by them to be the moral equivalent of mathematical formulas and algebraic laws, then, ethically, if they believe something, well, that makes it true!

And what is truly absurd to some is that even though their own One True Path is roundly rejected by those on all of the other One True Paths...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

...that never stops them from embracing all the more their own dogmas.

And when I then suggest the reason for this is that being on a One True Path is far, far, far more important than whatever the path happens to be? Well, then they come after me. Especially when I suggest further that they are on a particular path largely because the life that they lived predisposed them historically, culturally and experientially to be on one rather than another.
Their theories would only work for model people – humans who have been stripped of their nuance and complexity. Moreover, as too many twentieth century tragedies have shown, when people become just elements in an equation, they can be treated as if they have no value at all.
Or, again, for the moral objectivists among us, their theories work because that is basically what they are...theories about ethics. And others out in the real world can be treated by them as though they have no value at all because they are "one of them".

The fools or the infidels.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Physics envy infected philosophy, too; in particular, ethics. Mirroring Newton’s Second Law that force equals acceleration multiplied by mass (F=ma), the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson proposed that good equals the greatest happiness of the greatest number (G=gHgN).
No, seriously, in regard to a moral conflagration of note has anyone actually attempted to calculate what would constitute the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people? And how close might that come to the assessments of the moral deontologists?

Or is it still in the general vicinity of a "consensus" or "majority rules"?
Jeremy Bentham adapted Hutcheson’s idea into what he called his ‘hedonic calculus’ – a phrase which draws deliberately on Newtonian mathematics.
Same thing. With respect to a moral conflict most here will be familiar with what might that look like "for all practical purposes"?
The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant plumped for a different type of formula to define what we should do: we should “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”
On the other hand, Kant predicated this universal law on the assumption that there was a "transcending font" out there able to impose an ultimate judgment on whatever we mere mortals came up with down here.
So Kant was using the Newtonian idea of a universal law to tell people what to do. Both Kant and Bentham believed they had unlocked the secrets of moral philosophy as surely as the Cambridge professor had demystified the cosmos.

But are moral laws really like this – something as real as planetary motion, waiting to be discovered and defined?
I'm certainly willing to explore that with anyone here who does believe that a law pertaining to the morality of, say, abortion can be articulated as objectively as astrophysicists can encompass the motion of planets around the Sun.
It would certainly be helpful if they were, and if those discoveries were subsequently made, and the foundations of ethics at last established. All those testing moral dilemmas would melt away. Difficult decisions could be solved as easily as pressing the ‘equals’ sign on a calculator. People would only need to apply the right formula for the answer to be clear.
Instead, in the West, we are still in the same boat now going all the way back to the Pre-Socratic philosophers: mired in "conflicting goods". What "foundations of ethics"? Especially when compared to the extraordinary achievements in science.

And have the Eastern philosophers fared any better?
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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we cannot face these problems competently and responsibly until the proletariat has full control of the means of production, biggs, becuz without doing so the economic relations betweens humans will involve zero sum games that have big winners and losers. as such, when these two classes - winners and losers - share a society, there can be no hedonic calculi. The foundations of ethics is in property relations and if there's a lot of zero sum gaming going on between people these relations will never be balanced enough to produce a workable normative ethics.

As the great sage Ecmandu once didn't put it, we must end all economic consent violation and capitalist approach escalation.

this is why anarchism is the only logical conclusion if a man wants to keep his wits about him and be respected by his contemporaries. the apolitical man is what we need biggs.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Certainly some moral positions do seem like absolutes. Genocide is truly appalling, and anyone who tries to say that it isn’t evil is beyond the pale. ‘Genocide is wrong’ is to us as certain as gravity.
Still, on the other hand, how can any moral positions taken in regard to any human behavior be demonstrated to in fact be inherently and necessarily evil in a No God world?

If men and women are physically able to do something there will always be those able to rationalize it. If only to insist that doing it brings them personal satisfaction. And down through the ages [for any number of complex personal reasons] what behaviors have not given at least someone personal satisfaction. However ghastly they might be deemed by most of us.

And then the fact that in a No God world, behaviors can be pursued such that, in the absence of an omniscient frame of mind, they are never found out about. How many unsolved murders and rapes and cases involving human trafficking and appalling child abuse are never, ever solved? With God there is no question of getting away with it. With God there is no question of punishment and justice.

The fact is that if next month the Big One hurtles down and smashes into planet Earth rendering the human species itself extinct...what then of objective or universal morality in a No God cosmos?

Though, sure, if you are able to think yourself into believing that you "just know" that some behaviors are inherently and necessarily immoral, fine, that need be as far as it goes. You believe it. That works to comfort and console you. It need go no further even if you are yourself obliterated from existence when the Big One hits.
But many moral quandaries seem much more like a matter of opinion. Is it okay to wear a yellow shirt to a funeral? Or to crush a beetle underfoot when running for a bus? These sort of questions depend on taste and context. They’re still moral questions, but for each one the balance between convenience and causing offense is open to debate. We can agree to differ on these issues and remain friends.
Let's face it, one way or another, virtually any behaviors that we choose can be deemed irrational or immoral by others when we choose them in a social context. Some clearly more trivial than others.

My point however is that in the absence of God, there does not appear to be a way for philosophers or ethicists to resolve any conflicts large or small. That and an assumption that all matters of "taste" are rooted subjectively in dasein.

And that this "personal opinion" of mine is most disturbing to many because I am suggesting in turn that this...

If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted existentially and subjectively in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values "I" can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction...or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then "I" begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.

...may one day become applicable to them too.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Clues to Moral Reality

One problem for those seeking a Newtonian formula for ethics is that it’s hard to see how ethical statements can be like other facts about the world. For instance, society has a huge influence on what is perceived as right and wrong. Even absolute taboos like genocide have been accepted in Ancient Rome, Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere. How can we know we’re right about it now? After all, eating meat and burning fossil fuels – widely acceptable behaviours for most of human history – may well come to be seen as morally reprehensible in just a few years’ time.
Well, my point of course is that, in the absence of God, we cannot know in a Newtonian sense when something is either moral or immoral.

On the other hand, based on my own assessment of dasein here, I have to acknowledge that given a new experience or a new relationship or access to new information and knowledge I may well change my mind about that. After all, how can I possibly grasp the world around us objectively if my own life is vastly different from others?

Or Google "is morality objective?"

You get this: https://www.google.com/search?source=hp ... gle+Search

[by the way, the very first link is this: https://philosophynow.org/issues/115/Is ... e%20Theory.

Still, there they are...page after page after page after page of links and articles and arguments that ponder this. So, what are you going to do...read them all? Just to be sure you don't miss something that might finally pin it down for you?

Or should you take my own frame of mind more seriously? That being "fractured and fragmented" morally is entirely reasonable in a No God world?
Also, how do we detect right and wrong? They’re not like planets to watch in the sky, or apples which hurt when they fall on our heads. We can’t smell, taste, or hear moral values. Instead, we conjure them in our minds – just like things we imagine which don’t really exist. This means right and wrong apparently have more in common with the Tooth Fairy than with the mass, distance, and time with which Newton mapped out the world.
Yep, that's my own point of course. So much pertaining to morality here at PN gets discussed in the Ethical Theory forum. Worlds of words defining and defending other words by and large. Which is why I am always suggesting that our theories about right and wrong need to be examined in regard actual sets of circumstances. Circumstances that are often become entangled in contingency, chance and change.

And let's not forget this regarding Isaac Newton:

Newton was certainly one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. He laid out the three laws of motion in his extraordinary Principia Mathematica. He discovered the law of universal gravitation, the famous inverse-distance-squared law. He wrote much about light and optics after performing his own original experiments on light. He invented calculus. He rejected the authority of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and promoted experiment-based science.

But it is not commonly known that Newton was also a devout Christian who wrote extensively about Christianity. We learn from his writings that he deeply studied the Bible along with writings of early Christian leaders.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
But if we look closer we can find five clues about how right and wrong operate, and they point in a very interesting direction.

First, when you label an action ‘right’, you are forced to label any identical actions ‘right’, too. Only if you can point out a morally significant difference is it okay to describe, say, one killing as an awful murder, and the other as an acceptable homicide. In theory, by saying a particular action is right or wrong, you’re determining how right an identical action is, even if that twin is many miles or centuries away.
Only out in the real world, it's not very often that you can point to two or more sets of circumstances which really do completely overlap. At least pertaining to the is/ought world.

Suppose Jane murders Jim with a Glock 19. Suppose Jack murders Jean with a Glock 19. Now, in the either/or world, a Glock 19 is a Glock 19. There is the right way to manufacture it and the wrong way. But is there the right reason to kill another with it and a wrong way? Or is motivation and intention going to be all over the board? In particular sets of circumstances some will argue that it is moral to shoot another while others insist it was immoral.

Or suppose it's a bazooka. In America it's not illegal to own one. Or one of these weapons: https://www.online-paralegal-programs.c ... in-the-us/

Again, there's a right way to manufacture the best of them and a wrong way. But is there a way in which to pin down instances where it is moral to use them or immoral to use them? There's the law of course. But the law is bursting at the seams with both mitigating and aggravating circumstances. And the laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, from country to country.

The weapons are the same. But not the prescriptions and proscription pertaining to either the buying and selling of them or the use of them. That encompasses considerably more problematic and ambiguous perspectives. And often flat-out conflicting "personal opinions".
Second, the labels of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ only apply to certain things. An action can be good; as can be a state of mind or an intention; and outcomes can be compared in similar terms, some being fairer than others. But an inanimate object, like a chair, isn’t good or bad in quite the same (moral) way. When we describe art, engineering, or dental work as ‘good’, we are showing a different sort of admiration or assessment of it. It’s not usually a moral judgement.
Only to certain things. Some things being fairer than others. Good and bad in the either/or world versus good and bad in the is/ought world. You use a well-constructed chair to clobber another over the head repeatedly, killing her. Was your reason a well-constructed one or a badly constructed one? One can admire the craftsmanship that went into the making of the chair. But what about the killing involving the chair?

As for this part -- "Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics" -- that hasn't actually come up yet.
Third, it’s only possible to develop a coherent form of ethics when we apply labels of good or bad to just a single type at a time – intentions, or actions, or outcomes. Many moral dilemmas arise when we mix these ways of judging.
Exactly. Are your intentions and behaviors precipitating a particular outcome ethically coherent of not? Says who?

Here's one way to go about calculating this:
Bentham’s ethics, for example, offers a judgement for every decision, based solely on how happy people end up: for him, more happiness is always better. But his ethics seem odd when judged from the point of view of actions or intentions: would it really be right to force two innocent people to duel to the death if it made forty thousand spectators ecstatically happy? Twice as right with an audience of eighty thousand? It seems as if ethics can operate clearly in a single realm or dimension, but problems come when we shift from one dimension to another.
Okay, Mr. Deontologist, deconstruct Bentham here and propose the most rational assessment of, say, the Roman Games way back when.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Quantum Ethics

These five clues indicate that right and wrong are very odd things. Indeed, the Australian philosopher JL Mackie called moral values ‘queer’, and suggested they were so unusual it would be impossible to think of them as like anything else at all. But let’s look again at this list of how right and wrong operate in the world. We’ll see that, actually, they are much like something physicists have studied in thousands of experiments, two centuries after Newton.
We'll need a context of course.
All these five clues about ethics come straight from the quantum world. ‘Spooky action at a distance’ is what Albert Einstein called a phenomenon more dryly referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. Investigations have shown that, when a pair of already-related quantum entities, say, photons, are separated, the characteristics of one are determined (and not just known) when observations discover the matching characteristic of its partner, irrespective of the distance between them. This ‘non-locality’ effect goes against all our intuitions – much as it went against Einstein’s, who remained sceptical about it until his death. But repeated tests have proven that this is how sub-atomic particles actually do work. Indeed, the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, for finally proving this very thing.
Got that? Okay, here is how the author then connects this to morality...

‘Spooky action at a distance’ works for moral judgements, too: as we saw, judging something as ‘bad’ instantly applies that same label to identical situations or behaviours, however far away they may be. So a judgement in one place has an instant impact on a twin situation even if it is a great distance away, and there is no direct connection between the two.

I am clearly missing the point here. What identical situations or behaviors? No two abortions are ever exactly the same. There are always going to be any number of variables that set them apart. Variables rooted in ever evolving historical and cultural contexts and in countless individual sets of circumstances. The part that remains the same in fact is that a woman is either able to obtain an abortion legally or she is forced to give birth. And how on Earth does this pertain to interactions in the quantum world? It seems rather ludicrous to link human morality to the interactions of subatomic particles.

Though, again, sure, I'm missing the point. And that point would be...what?
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Another similarity between quantum physics and ethics is the limit to the things we can label. Just as ethics only applies to certain things, there is a finite number of different sub-atomic particles to study. The exact number is debated (seventeen, or more?); but quarks, leptons, photons, and gluons would qualify, recently joined by the newly discovered Higgs boson. Ethicists disagree as vehemently as scientists; but most would accept right and wrong can be assigned to intentions, actions, and some specific qualities in outcomes, but not to most other things.
I'm stumped again with this comparison.

Ethics applies to "certain things" that revolve around conflicting goods. Different people reacting to exactly the same set of circumstances will argue that particular human behaviors are either moral or immoral. Everyone agrees that this or that celebrity has had an abortion. She comes out and admits it. It can be confirmed that the procedure did in fact happen. But with ethics where we are "limited" is in being able to determine [philosophically or otherwise] if this abortion was or was not in fact moral.

With quantum mechanics, the limitations revolve more around what we don't understand about the world of the very, very small itself. But who is going to argue that whatever the science turns out to be it's "subjectively" different for all of us? What does that even mean? Do sub-atomic particles have intentions?

What ethicists disagree about is in regard to how we should react to behaviors that everyone does agree about in regard to what action was taken. The state did execute or will execute particular prisoners: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions ... executions

All the way down to the sub-atomic particles involved. So, is capital punishment as a value judgment in fact moral or immoral?
Quantum physics also shows that quantum-scale entities can behave like waves in some situations and like particles in others. Light, for example, can impact your retina as individual photons, like particles; but it can also come in waves which form interference patterns, leading to ‘wavy’ light and dark areas on screens after the light has been passed through narrow slits (just like the peaks and troughs of a sound wave which allow noise-cancelling headphones to work). The situation is similar in ethics, in which right and wrong seem to apply to actions in some circumstances (which Kant focussed upon), and elsewhere to a quality of outcomes (Bentham’s approach). In this way the ‘action-outcome’ duality (or in jargon terms, the ‘deontological-consequentialist’ duality) of right and wrong mirrors what is called ‘wave-particle duality’ in quantum physics.
Yeah, I suppose in a sense there is some measure of overlap. But neither the particles nor the waves to the best of my knowledge do what they do involving anything approaching...intention? Who among us would pass judgment on quantum interactions? Which approach comes closest to describing them...the deontological or the consequential?

Again, what point do I keep missing here?
Then there’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg proved that we can know the velocity of a subatomic wave-particle, or its location, but never both; and similarly with other pairs of quantum properties. Just so, in moral philosophy, we can often be sure that something is right according to its consequences, or by judging the actions, but not by considering both at the same time. We criticise someone for stealing (a bad action), or we praise them for giving money to the poor (a good outcome); but combine the two and our moral verdict is complicated.
Yes, no doubt about it: even regarding mindless matter there is always going to be some measure of uncertainty. If only because both "the gap" and "Rummy's Rule" are applicable. Or, as Hume suggested, cause and effect is not entirely interchangeable with correlation.

Still, a distinction between and either/or world and the is/ought world here is not exactly insignificant.
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Re: Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics

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Ethical Truth in Light of Quantum Mechanics
Myles King contends that physics helps us understand ethics.
Also, we have the observer effect. In quantum physics, as has been proven repeatedly, what and how the observer choses to observe will profoundly affect what is observed. Thinking about or observing an ethical decision will also affect our ethical choice profoundly. Accurate observer-unaffecting observation-based discovery, as practiced by Newton, is impossible for both.
Again, assuming that "somehow" the human brain did in fact acquire autonomy when biological matter evolved into us, what can we know for certain about the continuities and the contrasts between an observer noting interactions in regard to physics and in regard to morality?

We observe a doctor performing an abortion. We observe a debate between those for or against performing abortions on moral grounds.

Does observing abortion as a medical procedure have any impact at all on the procedure itself? Will different people embracing different moral and political and spiritual beliefs, note a different reality?

And yet in regard to abortion as a moral issue, an observer, over the course of his or her life, might, in accumulating many, many different experiences and relationships and sources of information and knowledge, come to conclude any number of different things. Who here has access to the most accurate observations?
Finally, quantum physics may help answer the conundrum of free will. Only at the human level might everything be predetermined by the environment, by genes; generally, by what has gone before. At the quantum scale, subatomic particles can spontaneously appear from nowhere. If choices in our minds spontaneously appear too, this might help solve the riddle of free will.
Indeed, that might be construed as the most intriguing aspect of quantum reality. Connecting the dots between QM, the human brain and moral responsibility. My point is that, yes, what a particular individual has observed given all of the uniquely personal existential components of his or her life can have a profound impact on their moral philosophy.

Yet, even in regard to moral philosophy, there are many "schools of thought": https://www.theclassroom.com/types-of-m ... 83079.html

So, which one constitutes the keenest observations? As this pertains to a moral conflagration like abortion.
Right and wrong are very ‘queer’, just as Mackie said; but their share their queerness with subatomic particles in surprisingly similar ways.
Though I suspect that, other than in a wholly determined universe, it's the part where they are dissimilar that matters most.
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