Repurposed Moral Theories

There are many moral theories that exist — theories that try to teach you how to be ethical, theories that act as metrics or guidelines for acting morally — utilitarianism and deontology being some of the most well-known ones.

Moral/ethical can be seen as synonymous with “good” society. Being moral is the same as optimizing (aiming) for a “good” society. Of course, “good” is incredibly vague and hence doesn’t get us far, which is why philosophers come up with more specific theories to follow (to be moral).

What is interesting is that although utilitarianism/deontology are thought to be moral theories, these strategies can also be applied to similar optimization problems, specifically those that involve aiming at some unclear goal (“good”, “best”, etc). For example, where morals/ethics strive for a “good” society, individuals naturally strive for their best life. We will see how moral theories can be repurposed to be general optimization theories (that can be applied in many different contexts).

What are we optimizing?

Instead of the specific case of morality (how to make society “good”), we consider the general case (how to make some X “good”, how to optimize for X being “good”, e.g. X = society, life). The problem is that “good” is vague, so let’s see if we can be more rigorous about that.

Let’s model the “good” function we are trying to optimize as some sequence of ”values”. “Value” is purposefully vague so it can be defined/applied for whatever…