Utilitarian

The ethics of metaculture is based on Utilitarianism, which in its simplest definition seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Maximizing that which is good is an obvious goal for any system of ethics; less obvious is how we define good, how we quantify it, and which people are included in the equation.

What is Good?

Good is the word we use to describe the things that benefit our survival. Even those that don't believe in evolution still universally share a concept of what constitutes good that is exclusively pro-survival.

The mechanism that evolution has instilled in our brains in order to tell us what is good and what is bad are our emotions. We feel pleasure when we eat or have sex, we feel pain when we or those we love are injured. When sustained over time, a good ratio of pleasure to pain results in happiness and well-being.

The purpose of pleasure is to encourage your brain to do more of whatever it was doing that led to the pleasure, and the purpose of pain is to discourage.

It can therefore be concluded logically that evolution has formed our brains to direct our bodies to seek greater pleasure while minimizing pain, which happens to be the goal of Utilitarianism. It empirically matches the actual ethical calculations our brains make when our neurons decide on a course of action.

Happiness is therefore the measure of good. Beyond just pleasure or joy, which can be fleeting and result in greater harms when pursued shortsightedly, happiness and well-being represent long-term, sustained positive emotional states when referred to in this wiki, and have empirically been shown to be our goal in life.

You Can't Measure Happiness

A common objection is to dismiss the idea that happiness can be measured. But there are a number of ways to measure happiness and while they may not perfectly capture the state of mind of any individual, they do give good aggregate results that say whether a large population is able to achieve satisfaction in life.

Therefore, an ethical utilitarian society would seek to constantly increase the measured aggregate happiness in its people and should actively pursue this goal directly, rather than through proxy measurements such as economic activity and GDP.

Oppressing a Minority To Make The Majority Happy

The other most common objection to utilitarianism is the notion that in some imagined scenario, killing, enslaving, or otherwise depriving one person or group of their happiness would somehow result in a greater level of happiness for the rest. In this case the math simply doesn't work out, mostly due to the fact that oppressing others doesn't actually lead to happiness due to fundamental aspects of human psychology and empathy. Oppressive and authoritarian societies are never as happy as free and egalitarian ones.