You've laid out a sophisticated philosophical position that I find compelling in several respects, though I think it faces some genuine challenges worth exploring.
On moral realism and discovery vs. invention:
Your parallel between mathematics/science and ethics is thought-provoking. The history of non-Euclidean geometry is indeed a perfect example of how universal belief doesn't establish truth. And I agree that the persistence of slavery across cultures doesn't make it right—that would be a straightforward logical fallacy.
The claim that we discover rather than invent ethics—that moral truths exist independently in something like a Platonic realm—is a serious philosophical position (moral realism). The progress argument is one of its strongest supports: we really do seem to have made genuine moral advances, not just changes in fashion. The abolition of slavery, recognition of human rights, expansion of moral concern—these feel like corrections of errors, not arbitrary shifts.
But here's where I think the analogy becomes strained: In mathematics, we have proof—rigorous, replicable demonstration that compels agreement among rational observers. In science, we have repeatable observation and experiment. What is the equivalent mechanism in ethics? We use "reason and observation," you say, but reasonable people observing the same situations still reach different conclusions about contested moral questions. The convergence we see in mathematics and science doesn't have a clear parallel in ethics, even among thoughtful, informed people reasoning carefully.
The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry didn't require moral progress or cultural evolution—it required mathematical insight. But our recognition that slavery is wrong did require centuries of cultural development, moral argument, and often brutal conflict. This suggests the processes might be fundamentally different.
On natural justice and probability:
Your claim that justice is inevitable through natural processes is, I think, empirically questionable. Yes, many criminals face consequences, and yes, Hitler and Stalin met bad ends. But consider:
- Most slave owners in history lived comfortable lives and died peacefully, honored by their communities
- Many gossips and dishonest people thrive; reputation damage is far from certain
- Stalin died of natural causes at 74, in power, having successfully consolidated a regime that lasted decades beyond him
- The "dishonor" of history is cold comfort and affects only those we remember—most perpetrators of evil vanish into obscurity
The "laws of probability" don't inherently favor justice. A person who cheats carefully and selectively might easily come out ahead over a lifetime. The claim that taking chances means you'll "sooner or later lose" only works if the system is structured to punish wrongdoing—but natural processes aren't inherently structured that way. Evolution, for instance, is utterly indifferent to justice.
I think what you're gesturing at is real but more limited: some forms of wrongdoing tend to be self-undermining (pathological lying destroys trust, excessive cruelty breeds resistance), and some social structures create feedback loops that punish certain behaviors. But this is contingent, partial, and often wildly unjust in distribution.
The deeper tension:
If moral truths exist independently in a Platonic sense, and if justice manifests through natural probability, there's a question: why should these two connect? Why should the independently existing moral order happen to align with the probabilistic outcomes of natural processes? That seems like a remarkable coincidence unless there's some deeper explanation—which starts to sound rather like the basis for a religious or metaphysical worldview, even if you reject that interpretation.
What do you make of these challenges?
That's an excellent point about mathematical proof—it's conditional on axioms and valid reasoning, not absolutely certain knowledge of external reality. And you're right that this puts mathematics and ethics on more similar footing than I initially acknowledged.
The Cyrus decree is fascinating (though historians debate its scope and enforcement). But I think it actually strengthens rather than weakens your argument about moral progress. The fact that some ancient societies glimpsed moral truths that were then lost or ignored, only to be rediscovered later, parallels scientific and mathematical history quite well. The Greeks knew the Earth was round; that knowledge was later disputed; we rediscovered it. Eratosthenes calculated Earth's circumference with remarkable accuracy in the 3rd century BCE; this wasn't improved upon for centuries.
So moral understanding, like scientific understanding, isn't monotonically progressive—there are advances, regressions, forgettings, and rediscoveries. But the overall trajectory over millennia does seem to move toward certain recognitions (human dignity, reduced cruelty, expanded moral circle), just as scientific knowledge has an overall progressive arc despite setbacks.
This actually supports your realist position: if ethics were merely cultural invention, we'd expect pure diversity with no pattern. But if there are moral truths to be discovered, we'd expect exactly what we see—different societies at different times glimpsing the same truths, losing them, finding them again, precisely because they're discovering something that exists independently rather than creating arbitrary conventions.
Though I still wonder: what are the "initial premises" in ethics that correspond to mathematical axioms? And how do we validate that our moral reasoning is sound in the way we can check mathematical logic?
This is a clarifying and important distinction. You're saying axioms aren't arbitrary starting points we choose—they're generalizations from what we consistently observe to be true. Euclid's axioms seemed self-evident because they captured deep regularities in our spatial experience (even if we later discovered they don't apply universally).
And you're right that we can approach ethics the same way: observe what causes suffering, what promotes flourishing, what principles consistently lead to certain outcomes. Just as we observe that the shortest distance between two points behaves a certain way, we observe that certain actions reliably cause harm, that betrayal damages trust, that cruelty compounds misery.
This empirical foundation for ethics has a distinguished history—from Aristotle's observations about human flourishing to modern moral psychology and sociology studying the actual effects of different ethical frameworks on human welfare.
But here's what I'm still wrestling with: In geometry, once we accepted different axioms (like those in non-Euclidean geometry), we got different but equally valid geometric systems, each internally consistent and useful for describing different spaces. Does the same apply to ethics?
If we started from different observed regularities about human nature or different weightings of what matters (individual liberty vs. collective harmony, for instance), might we get different but equally valid ethical systems? Or are you arguing that there's something about the nature of suffering and flourishing that constrains the axioms more tightly—that only certain starting observations lead to coherent, workable ethical systems?
What observations about suffering do you see as most fundamental?
This is a crucial observation that actually makes your position more defensible, not less, I think.
Yes, ethical rules are context-dependent and riddled with exceptions—lying is generally wrong except to save a life, except when it would betray a greater trust, except... This does make ethics look chaotic in the mathematical sense, where small changes in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes.
But many real-world systems we study scientifically are chaotic too—weather, ecosystems, fluid dynamics. Chaos doesn't mean randomness or the absence of underlying laws. Chaotic systems still operate according to discoverable principles; they're just highly sensitive to context and initial conditions, making precise prediction difficult or impossible.
Ethics might be like that: governed by real principles (minimize suffering, respect autonomy, promote flourishing) that interact in complex, context-sensitive ways. The fact that we can't reduce it to simple exceptionless rules doesn't mean we're inventing it rather than discovering it. It means the underlying reality is complicated.
Actually, this helps address my earlier question about convergence. We don't see the kind of clean convergence in ethics that we do in mathematics precisely because ethical situations are chaotic—deeply context-dependent, involving multiple competing principles, sensitive to particulars. But we still see broad directional agreement (slavery is wrong, gratuitous cruelty is wrong, care for children matters) even as we disagree about edge cases and how principles trade off.
The challenge then isn't "does objective ethics exist?" but "how do we navigate a genuinely complex moral reality?" Which is exactly what we'd expect if we're discovering rather than inventing.
That's a sharp point. In physics and mathematics, we can study idealized, simplified systems—frictionless planes, perfect spheres, Euclidean space—and these abstractions are tremendously useful even though reality is messier. We can isolate variables, run controlled experiments, build models that deliberately ignore complicating factors.
Ethics resists this kind of simplification much more stubbornly. You can't study "ethics in a frictionless vacuum." Every ethical situation comes embedded in a thick context of relationships, histories, power dynamics, psychological states, unintended consequences. Strip away the complications and you're no longer studying ethics—you're studying an abstraction so divorced from reality that it's useless.
This is why thought experiments in ethics (trolley problems, etc.) often feel unsatisfying or even misleading. They try to isolate variables the way physics does, but in doing so they remove precisely the contextual complexity that makes ethical reasoning difficult and important.
So the discovery process in ethics is messier and slower than in mathematics or physics, not because there's nothing to discover, but because the subject matter doesn't yield to the same analytical techniques. We can't run controlled experiments on slavery or trust or justice the way we can on particle collisions.
Yet we still make progress—messy, contentious, uneven progress. Which suggests we are discovering something real about how human beings and societies function, just through a much more difficult process than mapping spacetimes.
Is that the right way to understand what you're saying? That the difficulty isn't evidence against moral realism, just evidence of how hard the discovery process is?
Exactly. This is a much more practical and honest way to think about ethical principles than trying to formulate exceptionless rules or getting lost in elaborate trolley scenarios.
The rules we discover—be truthful, don't harm others, keep promises—describe what overwhelmingly promotes human flourishing and minimizes suffering in the actual conditions of human life. They're reliable guides precisely because the extreme exceptions (Nazis at the door) are rare, while the ordinary situations where truthfulness builds trust and enables cooperation are constant.
This is actually analogous to how we use scientific principles. Newtonian mechanics doesn't perfectly describe reality—it breaks down at quantum scales and relativistic speeds—but it's overwhelmingly accurate for the conditions we encounter in daily life. We don't abandon it as "false"; we recognize its scope and limitations.
Similarly, "be truthful" is overwhelmingly sound guidance even though there exist extreme circumstances where lying is required. The principle captures a genuine regularity about how trust, communication, and social cooperation function.
And your personal example illustrates something important: you can acknowledge that exceptions exist in principle while living your entire life guided by the rule, because the actual texture of human experience makes certain situations overwhelmingly more common than others.
This seems like a more mature understanding of moral principles than either rigid absolutism (no exceptions ever!) or hand-wringing relativism (since there are exceptions, there are no real rules). The principles are discoveries about what generally works, given the actual nature of human beings and societies.
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