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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

Philosophers have been trying and failing for millennia to come up with hard rules for ethics. A rule that is essential in one context invariably leads to absurdity in others (there are many examples involving people strapped to train tracks). So an attempt at formalizing this will not just be ambiguous, but likely unsound and contradictory. While mathematics seem to be this perfect structure encoded in the fabric of the universe, just waiting for us to discover and describe it, ethics in contrast seems to be a very fuzzy, imperfect, ad-hoc creation of mankind.

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>Philosophers have been trying and failing for millennia to come up with hard rules for ethics.

They've been trying to find one true/correct system of ethics, which is doomed to fail due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument. What I'm talking about is not trying to find new systems, rather just formalising existing systems, so that they can be analysed more rigorously and checked for consistency. Much as for instance one can formalise and compare homotopy type theory and set theory as foundations for real analysis.

Rudolf Carnap worked hard on formalizing ethics (and everything else) in the 20th century; the project was a total flop.

It turns out you can't formalize anything that doesn't have proofs -- in other words, it basically only works for what we'd call "mathematics" or "pure logic". You can't formalize literally anything else in philosophy, at all.

The regress argument has nothing to do with ethics in particular. It applies just as much to any non-proof area of study, including all of science, history, and even ordinary observations and recollections.

>It turns out you can't formalize anything that doesn't have proofs -- in other words, it basically only works for what we'd call "mathematics" or "pure logic". You can't formalize literally anything else in philosophy, at all.

What do you mean by "doesn't have proofs" here? It's demonstrably possible to develop a formalised philosophy: see Spinoza's Ethics for an example. It's impossible to prove that one formalisation is more "correct", but the same applies to mathematics, via Gödel's second incompleteness theorem.

>The regress argument has nothing to do with ethics in particular. It applies just as much to any non-proof area of study, including all of science, history, and even ordinary observations and recollections.

It also applies to maths in the form that a system cannot prove its own consistency. Yet that doesn't stop us formally analysing, comparing and making use of different mathematical systems.

> It turns out you can't formalize anything that doesn't have proofs -- in other words, it basically only works for what we'd call "mathematics" or "pure logic". You can't formalize literally anything else in philosophy, at all.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a wealth of logics that have been developed and studied within philosophy, that aim to formalize various philosophical concepts. See modal logics, deontic logics, logics about knowledge and belief, and so on.

The notion of a "proof" is only meaningful in a formal context.

Logic, mathematics, computer science, proof theory... same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_theory

We are eternally stuck interpreting all of our theories in the context of their meta-theoretic assumptions.

Not sure we’re talking about the same thing here. I was replying to your claim that nothing in philosophy (apart from mathematics) can be formalized. The role of logic is not to solve the metaphysical problem of infinite regress.

Logic itself is a formalism.

Subject to all the constraints of formal language theory/linguistics.

It fails to address the symbol-grounding problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_grounding_problem

Yeah, ethics is subjective and it's fascinating that many smart people don't realize this. Ultimately it always boils down to "I feel this is right".

Of course, you can have objective claims such as "if all people followed this principle, it would have this outcome".

There is a tension between relative/subjective ethics and absolute/objective ethics. Philosophers seek to discover the absolute, but they cannot shake the human condition

>Of course, you can have objective claims such as "if all people followed this principle, it would have this outcome".

Good luck proving the outcome for anything less than very trivial cases...

Well obviously you can't prove the outcome of making a change in a complex physical system with many biological components. We can barely model a protein.

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