Ethical theories are update rules, not action rankings

LessWrong published an essay on Wednesday arguing that ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics are best understood as online learning algorithms rather than fixed rankings of actions. The piece compares each theory to different update dynamics — utilitarianism is fluid but vulnerable to unpredictable world-models, deontology is stable but brittle out-of-distribution, and virtue ethics generalizes richly but is hard to audit. The author applies this lens to the AGI transition, suggesting that naive direct consequentialism may be a poor fit for deeply out-of-distribution, adversarial conditions. The essay concludes that asking whether you're a utilitarian is like asking whether you're a quicksortist — the better question is which update rule fits the environment.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton