Ok. The exam isn't done, but my brain has been thoroughly curdled for now...
The premises:
On Premise 2, I did not intend for my opinion to come off as "we are perfect and evolution is finished". I take it for granted that such a process of optimization is ongoing, and by nature prone to reach local rather than global maxima.
On Premise 3, I disagree that it is fundamentally flawed. What is history if not the the "fossil record" of human society? Do you think it is invalid to examine historical trends and events as a way of evaluating the success of a particular culture? My argument in favor of ethical code X is merely that it has historically been correlated with the success of society Y, which uses it. Obviously correlation is not causation, but I think sufficiently plausible mechanisms exist to make the conclusion of at least partial causality a good one.
Defining "Success"
I would not define the success of an ensemble as the simple quantity of agents it has amassed. This is a key point in my theory which I neglected to define before, and to be honest, had not fully formulated. I define the key fitness criteria for a society as:
- The ability of the ensemble to compete with others for resources, both natural materials and valuable agents.
- The ability of the ensemble to provide for the well-being (resources per agent) of the individual agents.
These two goals are deceptively simple, but the fact that they are mutually conflicting in certain circumstances gives rise to a vast array of complex behavior. Take the population example. One way to get more resources is to produce more agents (China), but in doing so you defeat criteria 2. Likewise, one way to increase the well-being (resources per agent) of the individual agents would be to decrease their total number (Scandinavia), but likewise, this would be to the detriment of criteria 1. I stated before as a fundamental premise that all agents are alike. Let me restate that: all agents are alike on average. Thus, one mechanism by which both criteria 1 and 2 might be maximized is through the selections of especially valuable agents.
These two rules are a statement of the basic conflict in all evolutionary systems: the survival of the agent vs. the survival of the ensemble. Certain ensembles go very far in one direction or another... Tigers in contrast to mosquitoes. Anarchy in contrast to Communism.
Do not confuse my ideas of cultural evolution with biological evolution. It is in fact crucial to my theory that "society" is a learned set of rules, not a genetic hand-me-down. It is not critical that the individual agents be biologically successful for the culture to achieve it's goals. High levels of immigration are totally equivalent to a high birth rate so long as the perturbation to the society caused by the influx of foreign agents is not so grate as to cause it to loose it's identity. This mode of societal "reproduction" could indeed be thought of as a sort of abstract sexual mechanism, mixing aspects of multiple cultures, thus making it a potentially more healthy mode of propagation than the "asexual" sort you would get from simple biological success of the agents within a single society.
I'm not sure what you mean about the subjective vs. the objective components of ethics. Perhaps you could provide an example? Off the cuff though, I would suggest that any ambiguity could be ascribed to the conflict between ensemble level and agent level success.
