Ethics
Claim: Ethical systems (religious or otherwise) are heuristics adopted by societies to cope with the intractable complexity of computing moral actions.
A bit of justification:
Ethical dilemmas come up all the time in our lives (both in principle and in practice). We need some standard by which to judge and compare competing solutions, but even that starting point is difficult to pin down. (I've tended to opt for something along the lines of "maximize the space-time integral of good" or "...the space-time integral of joy", but it's hard to make that well-defined.)
But that's the easy part. Once you sit down with some criterion in mind, you quickly realize that predicting and calculating the consequences of any action well enough to apply the criterion is essentially impossible. You need to consider not just the immediate impact of each choice but also the ripple effects of those choices as they spread throughout the world. Given that it's a chaotic system, it's probably provable that you can never really know what final effect your actions would have. ("If a time machine took you to 1935, should you kill Hitler?" "No, killing is bad." "But you might avert the holocaust, so do it." "But what if that changed the outcome Cold War and led to nuclear annihilation?" ...)
We clearly can't demand that every individual foresee and be responsible for the consequences of their actions to the umteenth degree. So instead, society adopts ethical systems (via religions, legal systems, or whatever else) that provide rough but easily understood guidance. The heuristics are chosen so that they lead to pretty good solutions most of the time, but their real importance is that society also indemnifies individuals against negative consequences that might occur despite following those rules. As long as you follow the heuristics as best you can, you won't be punished harshly if things go badly as a result.
This obviously leads to sub-optimal decisions in many cases (and can lead to truly terrible ones at times) and the heuristics still don't always make the "allowed" course(s) of action clear, but given the difficulty of the problem a system like this may be the best that we can do. So then the question is, how and when do societies update and improve their heuristics?
A bit of justification:
Ethical dilemmas come up all the time in our lives (both in principle and in practice). We need some standard by which to judge and compare competing solutions, but even that starting point is difficult to pin down. (I've tended to opt for something along the lines of "maximize the space-time integral of good" or "...the space-time integral of joy", but it's hard to make that well-defined.)
But that's the easy part. Once you sit down with some criterion in mind, you quickly realize that predicting and calculating the consequences of any action well enough to apply the criterion is essentially impossible. You need to consider not just the immediate impact of each choice but also the ripple effects of those choices as they spread throughout the world. Given that it's a chaotic system, it's probably provable that you can never really know what final effect your actions would have. ("If a time machine took you to 1935, should you kill Hitler?" "No, killing is bad." "But you might avert the holocaust, so do it." "But what if that changed the outcome Cold War and led to nuclear annihilation?" ...)
We clearly can't demand that every individual foresee and be responsible for the consequences of their actions to the umteenth degree. So instead, society adopts ethical systems (via religions, legal systems, or whatever else) that provide rough but easily understood guidance. The heuristics are chosen so that they lead to pretty good solutions most of the time, but their real importance is that society also indemnifies individuals against negative consequences that might occur despite following those rules. As long as you follow the heuristics as best you can, you won't be punished harshly if things go badly as a result.
This obviously leads to sub-optimal decisions in many cases (and can lead to truly terrible ones at times) and the heuristics still don't always make the "allowed" course(s) of action clear, but given the difficulty of the problem a system like this may be the best that we can do. So then the question is, how and when do societies update and improve their heuristics?