(Yes, it’s possible that after subjective centuries of research, reflection, and self-improvement, the ideal equilibrium of our values would end up looking a lot simpler than our values do today. Humans aesthetically value simplicity, and we care about things like fairness and symmetry that can cause us to reflectively endorse simpler versions of some other things we care about.
But at the current development stage of the field of ethics, fixating on that possibility is probably mostly bad, because we’re so far away from that ideal, and because it’s so hard to predict which simpler values we’d end up with, if our values did end up any simpler. And it’s entirely possible that our values will end up more complex on the axes we care about. Fixating on this idea could be hazardous for people who are too attached to finding the One True Simple Theory of Value.)
(Yes, it’s possible that after subjective centuries of research, reflection, and self-improvement, the ideal equilibrium of our values would end up looking a lot simpler than our values do today. Humans aesthetically value simplicity, and we care about things like fairness and symmetry that can cause us to reflectively endorse simpler versions of some other things we care about.
But at the current development stage of the field of ethics, fixating on that possibility is probably mostly bad, because we’re so far away from that ideal, and because it’s so hard to predict which simpler values we’d end up with, if our values did end up any simpler. And it’s entirely possible that our values will end up more complex on the axes we care about. Fixating on this idea could be hazardous for people who are too attached to finding the One True Simple Theory of Value.)