sfsp's Journal: Toward a Calculus of Ethics

It always seems to me as if I do my most profound thinking while I am walking the dog.

You probably won't think so.

When you want to decide between two courses of action, how do you do it? How do you balance the scales? What are the units on the weights? I walked along, 5:30 AM, between my shower and my breakfast, thinking about how to calculate ethics.

Maybe you've read "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People," by Stephen Covey. In order to help you decide how you should spend your time, he shows you a graph with 2 intersecting axes: "URGENT" and "IMPORTANT". Eventually, you need to learn to spend your time on things that are IMPORTANT, but not URGENT, because those are the things that change your life.

Or maybe you've taken The World's Smallest Political Quiz. Produced by the Libertarian party, the axes of the graph are "PERSONAL FREEDOM" and "ECONOMIC FREEDOM". The whole Left-Liberal-Democrat-Republican-Conservative-Right spectrum is the line from the left corner of the diamond to the right corner of the diamond.

I started thinking about two axes: "CAN DO" and "SHOULD DO". There are things which can be done, but should not be done. There are things which should be done, but cannot be done. I found extremes to be very easy to define, but I was baffled as to how to find the lines between SHOULD and SHOULD NOT.

A little later, I added a third axis, running from "DO" to "DO NOT". Then I started ringing all the combinations:

C/S/D C/S/Dn C/Sn/D C/Sn/Dn Cn/S/D Cn/S/Dn Cn/Sn/D Cn/Sn/Dn

Well, that's simple enough. There's only eight combinations.

But some of them don't make any sense. If you CAN NOT do some thing, regardless if you think you SHOULD, you will never DO. But the really tantalizing ethical questions of the moment revolve around things that have recently moved from the CAN NOT to the CAN side of the equation. For example, human cloning has recently moved from CAN NOT to CAN (probably), and our sense of SHOULD or SHOULD NOT is struggling hard to catch up before we DO.

It's a lot of handwaving, so far. I'm not very far along, and may never be able to flesh out the idea with anything solid. Where is the line between SHOULD and SHOULD NOT? What exactly is wrong with Sn/D?