Necessary Ethics in Philosophy 2024-11-09 Tuukka Pensala ABSTRACT Here's an outline for finding logically necessary ethics contained in any valid theory of philosophy. I'll be unpacking each numbered proposition. 1. The proposition "Humans are fallible" is not universalizable. 2. A philosophy by definition however is universalizable, and also contains a statement about human fallibility. 3. Therefore, to find a true philosophy, humanity must first become infallible, which is the same as "everyone living in truth". 4. Therefore "everyone living in truth" is a necessary ethical goal in philosophy. I apply the theory to derive: 5. Everyone living in truth implies that no conflicts exist, which in practice requires propertarian property norms. 6. Propertarian norms are therefore a proper subset of the necessary norms. At the end I explain what the ethical goal requires from personal choices: 7. An ethical choice in philosophy maximizes the chance of everyone living in truth. (This is my third attempt at elaborating on ethics generated by the paradoxical nature of fallibility. The text is not perfect yet, but it's a huge improvement in comparison to the previous ones.) ----- 1. The proposition "Humans are fallible" is not universalizable. I expect this to be the most controversial of the propositions. Let's begin with some terms. A universalizable proposition is such that all subjects of a specific group could believe it at any future time. The group in this argument is something like "all subjects capable of understanding philosophy". I think this is a familiar conception for libertarian thinkers. For example, "2 + 2 = 4" is universalizable, but "Rich people should be stolen from" is not, given that stealing is something that the target by definition doesn't approve of, and that the target belongs to the chosen universalization group. ("Rich people's money should be taken" however is universalizable.) Fallibility is possibility to err. An error is a credence-zero event. It's when the unintended happens. It's the realization of something that was subjectively understood to be impossible. I hope the meaning of proposition 1 is clear. Now to proving it. Let's drill straight into the self-referential problem case; let's see what happens when someone tries to accept that they are presently fallible. So, a person has some beliefs. One of them is e.g. "Roses are red". To accept their own fallibility in this case, they modify their belief to, say, "Roses are probably red". But now they've increased their credence of roses being not-red from 0 to something between 0 and 1. Now whatever the color of roses turns out to be, it can't be a credence-zero event anymore -- it won't be an error. By attempting to become cognizant of their fallibility on this question, they've in fact erased it. They are currently infallible on the question of the color of roses. Regardless, they continue and try to start believing their own fallibility about some other existing belief. By the same logic they become infallible on that one too. They continue, and one belief after another turns into an infallible one. This continues until the person has adjusted all their credences. All of their credences are now between 0 and 1, so there's no event that could falsify any of their beliefs. They've become completely immune to errors. Their attempt at integrating a belief of self-fallibility has manifested the negation -- total present infallibility. So the project of accepting present-self fallibility necessarily fails. The impossibility of this belief is what logically blocks the universalization of "humans are fallible" towards every purportedly fallible momentary believer. The proof of proposition 1 is done. "Humans are fallible", "some humans are fallible sometimes" and "Bob is fallible tomorrow" are all non-universalizable. I was going to write that I haven't found previous work on this seemingly basic universalization-blocking paradox, but then I searched again and found Daniel Rönnedal's 2021 paper "The Paradox of Infallibility". He points out essentially the same logical barrier in accepting self-fallibility. --- 2. A philosophy by definition however is universalizable, and also contains a statement about human fallibility. To be a philosopher is to try to explain the universe, including human fallibility, and to share the found knowledge. I don't expect this proposition to be contentious, so let's not dwell on it. ----- 3. Therefore, to find a true philosophy, humanity must first become infallible, which is the same as "everyone living in truth". By proposition 2, every philosophy contains a universalizable statement about human fallibility. Proposition 1 states that attributing fallibility to humans is not universalizable. Thus no philosophy can attribute fallibility to humans. So the only statement about human fallibility that can be given in a proper philosophy is that humans are infallible. Given that humans in current times are sometimes in error, a true philosophy can't yet be defined -- it doesn't yet exist. To create a true philosophy, the only universalizable statement about human fallibility must be made true. Removing all potential for human errors is the same as all humans having only true beliefs. So the weird-sounding phrasing about infallibility can be perfectly rephrased as "everyone living in truth", which sounds nicer. ----- 4. Therefore "everyone living in truth" is a necessary ethical goal in philosophy. Let's say philosophical action is such that it aims to find a true philosophy. Then (by 3), all philosophical action, be it physical or mental, also aims to make all humans live in truth. Given that philosophy is always something that people do, the goal of all philosophical action is also a goal in all valid philosophy. So all valid philosophy contains the norm to get humans to live in truth. The proof of proposition 4 is done. To elaborate, if there was a philosopher who aimed for something that contradicts the necessary goal of getting people to live in truth, either by proposing a contradicting goal, or by acting against the goal, he would be in performative contradiction. (This argument is inspired by Hans-Hermann Hoppe's argumentation ethics, where he utilizes the presuppositions of argumentation, while here I utilize the presuppositions of seeking fundamental universalizable truths.) (Note that the argument does not close the is-ought gap. If one does not choose the goal of creating a true philosophy, they are not logically bound to the norm.) This was the simple part. The rest is application, which is arguably harder to reason about. I'll just present the best individual results I know. ----- 5. Everyone living in truth implies that no conflicts exist, which in practice requires propertarian property norms. Let's start by defining what's a conflict. It is a situation where two or more parties assume control of the same object (double-control). Control is exclusive, so at least one of the conflicting parties must be in error in their belief of having the control. So every human conflict violates the ethical goal of getting rid of all human errors. Human errors are bad => human conflicts are bad. Propertarian norms are the answer to the question: "What kind of individual self-regulation is necessary for non-familiar interacting people to avoid all accidental conflicts in the long term?" Eliminating all accidental conflicts means eliminating all accidental double-control. To avoid accidentally engaging in double-control, any passer-by must be reliably capable of discerning whether a given object is already in use or not. This can be done robustly only when all in-use objects are visibly so. In other words, all in-use objects must have visible borders for their usage, and objects without such borders must not be controlled by anyone. The border can be the physical surface of the object, or additional markers for the area of usage, such as fences. Since e.g. feelings, ideas, or the atmosphere can't be physically demarcated and marked as "in-use" in a way that's obvious for any passer-by prior to interfering with them, they can't be owned, but solid or contained physical objects and pieces of land can. This is how the requirement for perfect accidental conflict avoidance, with some mundane empirical assumptions, yields the rules for what can be ethically owned (only discernably demarcated objects) and who owns what (only the first user or someone decreed by a previous user). (It's quite old news that perfect conflict avoidance necessitates a propertarian social order, but I haven't seen anyone make the more specific point, that mere _accidental_ conflict avoidance is enough to find the conditions for legitimate property. Focusing on this special case of conflicts makes the derivation simpler, since there is no need to account for conflict-seeking individuals in the argument.) ----- 6. Propertarian norms are therefore a proper subset of the necessary norms. Living in truth is more than just avoiding all human conflicts, because an individual can be alone and wrong simultaneously. So conflict avoidance is a proper subset of error avoidance. So there are more norms to discover that supplement the property norms. Propertarian norms are necessary but not sufficient. Propertarianism is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but by itself liberal in comparison to the full normative picture. ----- 7. An ethical choice in philosophy maximizes the chance of everyone living in truth. If one person can be correct at one thing at one time, then also two can, three can, and so forth, which means everyone can be correct in the future. The ethical future could in fact start right now. The chance of that happening is just astronomically low. Regardless, since it's not categorically impossible, any choice that one makes must have a finite chance of producing the ethical future. Different choices have different effects and thus generally also different probabilities to produce the ideal future, starting immediately. To most effectively pursue a goal, one should choose that action which maximizes the chance to reach it. These differences in probability to attain the ideal future are then what measure the goodness of a given choice. So, to apply this ethical theory in the imperfect world is to maximize, not utility or pleasant feelings, but the chance of everyone living in truth, starting from now until the end of time.