There’s a big difference between ethics and physics.
When you “don’t have physics figured out,” this is because there’s something out there in reality that you’re wrong about. And this thing has no obligation to ever reveal itself to you—it’s very easy to come up with physics that’s literally inexplicable to a human—just make it more complicated than the human mind can contain, and bada bing.
When you “don’t have ethics figured out,” it’s not that there’s some ethical essence out there in reality that contradicts you, it’s because you are a human, and humans grow and change as they live and interact with the world. We change our minds because we live life, not because we’re discovering objective truths—it would be senseless to say “maybe the true ethics is more complicated than a human mind can contain!”
Sure that is a common way to derive the challenge for physics that way.
But we can have it via other routes. Digits of pi do not listen to commands on what they should be. Chess is not mean to you when it is intractable. Failure to model is a lack of imagination rather than a model of failure. Statements like “this model is correct and nothing unmodeled has any bearing on its truth or applicability” are so prone to be wrong that they are uninteresting.
I do give that often “nature” primarily means “material reality” when I could have phrased it as “reality has no oblication to be clear” to mean a broader thing. To the extent that observing a target does not change it (I am leaving some superwild things out), limits on ability to make a picture tell more about the observer rather than the observed. It is the difference of a positive proof of a limitation vs failure to produce a proof of a property. And if we have a system A that proves things about system B, that never escapes the reservations about A being true. Therefore it is always “as far as we can tell” and “according to this approach”.
I do think it is more productive to think that questions like “Did I do right in this situation?” have answers that are outside the individual that formulates the question. And that this is not bound to particular theories of rigthness. That is whatever we do with ethics (grow / discover / dialogue build etc) we are not setting it as we go. That activity is more of the area of law. We can decide what is lawful and what is condoned but we can’t similarly do to what is ethical.
There’s a big difference between ethics and physics.
When you “don’t have physics figured out,” this is because there’s something out there in reality that you’re wrong about. And this thing has no obligation to ever reveal itself to you—it’s very easy to come up with physics that’s literally inexplicable to a human—just make it more complicated than the human mind can contain, and bada bing.
When you “don’t have ethics figured out,” it’s not that there’s some ethical essence out there in reality that contradicts you, it’s because you are a human, and humans grow and change as they live and interact with the world. We change our minds because we live life, not because we’re discovering objective truths—it would be senseless to say “maybe the true ethics is more complicated than a human mind can contain!”
Sure that is a common way to derive the challenge for physics that way.
But we can have it via other routes. Digits of pi do not listen to commands on what they should be. Chess is not mean to you when it is intractable. Failure to model is a lack of imagination rather than a model of failure. Statements like “this model is correct and nothing unmodeled has any bearing on its truth or applicability” are so prone to be wrong that they are uninteresting.
I do give that often “nature” primarily means “material reality” when I could have phrased it as “reality has no oblication to be clear” to mean a broader thing. To the extent that observing a target does not change it (I am leaving some superwild things out), limits on ability to make a picture tell more about the observer rather than the observed. It is the difference of a positive proof of a limitation vs failure to produce a proof of a property. And if we have a system A that proves things about system B, that never escapes the reservations about A being true. Therefore it is always “as far as we can tell” and “according to this approach”.
I do think it is more productive to think that questions like “Did I do right in this situation?” have answers that are outside the individual that formulates the question. And that this is not bound to particular theories of rigthness. That is whatever we do with ethics (grow / discover / dialogue build etc) we are not setting it as we go. That activity is more of the area of law. We can decide what is lawful and what is condoned but we can’t similarly do to what is ethical.