As a counterexample, consider a hypothetical morality development model where as history advances, human morality keeps accumulating invariants, in a largely unpredictable (chaotic) fashion. In that case modern morality would have more invariants than that of earlier generations. You could implement a CEV from any time period, but earlier time periods would lead to some consequences that by present standards are very bad, and would predictably remain very bad in the future; nevertheless, a present-humans CEV would still work just fine.
I don’t know what you mean by invariants, or why you think they’re good, but: If the natural development from this earlier time period, unconstrained by CEV, did better than CEV from that time period would have, that means CEV is worse than doing nothing at all.
I used “invariant” here to mean “moral claim that will hold for all successor moralities”.
A vastly simplified example: at t=0, morality is completely undefined.
At t=1, people decide that death is bad, and lock this in indefinitely.
At t=2, people decide that pleasure is good, and lock that in indefinitely. Etc.
An agent operating in a society that develops morality like that, looking back, would want to have all the accidents that lead to current morality to be maintained, but looking forward may not particularly care about how the remaining free choices come out. CEV in that kind of environment can work just fine, and someone implementing it in that situation would want to target it specifically at people from their own time period.
That seems wrong.
As a counterexample, consider a hypothetical morality development model where as history advances, human morality keeps accumulating invariants, in a largely unpredictable (chaotic) fashion. In that case modern morality would have more invariants than that of earlier generations. You could implement a CEV from any time period, but earlier time periods would lead to some consequences that by present standards are very bad, and would predictably remain very bad in the future; nevertheless, a present-humans CEV would still work just fine.
I don’t know what you mean by invariants, or why you think they’re good, but: If the natural development from this earlier time period, unconstrained by CEV, did better than CEV from that time period would have, that means CEV is worse than doing nothing at all.
I used “invariant” here to mean “moral claim that will hold for all successor moralities”.
A vastly simplified example: at t=0, morality is completely undefined. At t=1, people decide that death is bad, and lock this in indefinitely. At t=2, people decide that pleasure is good, and lock that in indefinitely. Etc.
An agent operating in a society that develops morality like that, looking back, would want to have all the accidents that lead to current morality to be maintained, but looking forward may not particularly care about how the remaining free choices come out. CEV in that kind of environment can work just fine, and someone implementing it in that situation would want to target it specifically at people from their own time period.