Laws or Heuristics?

Rereading Kant I got to thinking about how we as people determine if actions are moral. Unlike Kant we don't really start by applying rules like is the person driven by good will or fear, but instead look at the problem as a whole. In most circumstances we can very quickly determine if something is moral or not even before we fully understand our reasons for why we consider it so (and fMRI studies suggest we have made up our mind well in advance of when we become aware of the decision). When we attempt to codify our decision making we end up making endless conditionals and exceptions to our rules so they don't lead us into situations where our rules contradict our feelings on morality.

This failure at codification may seem intractable but it reminds me of a kind of problem from computer science. There are many problems that are impossible to solve in the general case, for example is the code for a program the fastest possible that yields the correct answer? Like moral rules specific cases are fairly easily resolved but trying to extend the solution to other problems leads to endless exceptions and eventually collapses.

But computer programers face somewhat different professional stresses than philosophers. First they must actually release programs that run, and second they don't have to be provably perfect to be 'right'. The general case solution for so called "hard" problems is to use heuristics to approximate the ideal solution. In this case the a heuristic is a simplified question on a subset of the problem. For code optimization it goes from "Is this whole program as fast as possible?" to "Are these 10 instructions as fast as possible?" By coming up with varied heuristics programers can find answers that may not be the best possible but are within their margin of error.  In fact modern optimization programs are so effective that for complex problems they ignore the guidance users give them because they come up with better solutions without it. This effectiveness doesn't come from one genius programer but from thousands that have been carefully improving the heuristics over decades.

So I wonder if there is a similar kind of approach to ethical problems as there is programing problems. Not a few universal rules that prove everything, but a series of simpler cases we can break problems up into. By continually refining the answers to the simpler problems that we can understand we will eventually reach an adequate general solution.

Lessons from Aristotle

I find Aristotle to be a very fascinating thinker, especially because a lot of his ideas are quite alien to my mostly post enlightenment education. However I find there is a real resonance with many of his points. His blunt statement that not everyone can even potentially achieve eudonamia strikes my modern sentiments as decidedly distasteful. But even a cursory examination of the state of the world shows that everyone is not dealt an equal hand. For all we want to value individual autonomy and self actualization no matter how someone born into abject poverty with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa lives their life it will be drastically different from mine.

As much as many great thinkers wished to build their philosophies on rationality and logic, and I hear their siren song, its undeniable that our humanity requires more than that. How many times have you thought "I'll regret this tomorrow but here I go"? Even beyond emotion Psychology clearly demonstrates we act on many different levels at the same time. Just like Pavlov's dogs we are conditioned by our experiences. And reflex will often take over before we are even aware there is something to do. I've caught a dropped object before realizing I dropped it often enough that it doesn't surprise me. And I've been unable to stop myself from acting on reflex and catching the blade of a knife when I dropped it.

To say we forge our own destinies out of determination and rational thought requires us to forget much of our experience, and Aristotle.

introduction

My name is David Tynan, I'm a transfer student starting my junior year at MCLA. Before I came here I was studying Computer Science at a rather large engineering school in the midwest. While I found it quite interesting I realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. Now I'm a philosophy major. I find the two fields are not as divorced as most people assume as they are both primarily about analyzing and understanding problems, although generally with different questions and goals.

I have only a fairly light background on both ethics and Lincoln, but I'm looking forward to this class quite a bit. I've always found ethics to be an interesting topic of study as most people have a similar intuitive grasp of what is ethical but find it very hard to formalize. Lincoln is of course one of the most popular figures in the history of the united states but there is certainly plenty to cover from an ethical perspective.