There are many intricacies about the principle of perfect grasp or what Arnold Zuboff calls the principle of best action. Let's explore a few of them to get a better understanding of what this view actually entails. 1) "There could be a real desire to have another desire that was not itself real. For example, a child’s desire for an actual visit to the moon (as opposed to a fantasy visit) might be based on an ignorance of the visit’s difficulties and nastiness but might also,

Arnold Zuboff has also argued against retributivism and for incompatibilism. He writes: "Think of an evil agent, one who deserves punishment. Think of the man who put pieces of glass in baby food in order to extort money from the baby food company. Now imagine you become convinced that this evil man had been assembled, the night before he launched his disgusting scheme, by an advanced sort of Frankenstein, a mad scientist capable of constructing from the raw materials of living things not a mere automaton,

"Now, an experience being this as opposed to that (other) experience could have nothing to do with any of the particular specifications of either its subjective content or its objective context. After all, with the very same specifications in its content and its context it will count as this experience from within it and as that (other) experience from outside it. Being this experience is just what any experience is within itself, from the inside.

Stoicism is not often framed this way, but it is fundamentally a philosophy based on compatibilism. To the extent that this is possible, the Stoic view largely aligns with my view. The Stoics fully embraced determinism. Stoicism holds that one can only genuinely control one’s own thoughts, and that it is our thoughts, not external circumstance that we should focus our attention on. While we do not have true control over our thoughts, we possess a crucial form of regulatory control:

I argue that compatibilists are not actually debating free will or what it truly means to be responsible for an action, but rather the concept of accountability.

https://x.com/Light_Cynapse/status/1894892621870572026

If we frame the discourse this way, there are actually interesting arguments about what qualifies as morally accountable.

I think the compatibilist confusion originates from two distinct concepts of control as foundations for free will. To distinguish these, I will refer to the first type as regulatory control and the second as ultimate or true control. Regulatory control is the kind of control central to control theory in engineering. For example, if a thermostat regulates temperature, it can be said to have regulatory control—there is a causal dependency of temperature on the thermostat.

In another post, I argued that negative utilitarianism is best understood as a practical guideline rather than a fundamental ethical principle. The principle it proposes is:

An act is right if and only if it minimizes the total sum of suffering.

https://x.com/Light_Cynapse/status/1889745958709199335

The corresponding positive principle would be:

An act is right if and only if it maximizes the total sum of well-being.

But the trolley problem and the more extreme transplant problem demonstrate why negative utilitarianism cannot serve as the ultimate ethical foundation.

Consider the thesis that "we should not aim for ethical principles". If this thesis is wrong, then we should aim for ethical principles. If it is true, then "we should not aim for ethical principles" would itself be an ethical principle to aim for, thereby undermining its own claim that we should not aim for them. This contradiction means that there are ethical principles we should aim for.

Universalism and incompatibilism share many counter-intuitive ethical consequences, making it highly improbable for these concepts to have any role in a hypothetical science of ethics. As a result, consequentialist-utilitarian ethics is way more persuasive. If both incompatibilism and universalism are true, then concepts such as blame, retribution, obligation, and responsibility are rendered incoherent.
Under universalism, obligation is untenable because obligation presupposes a relation between distinct individuals.

The most fundamental question in philosophy is why anything exists at all rather than nothing. Since nothing can come from nothing, absolute nothingness should persist, yet reality exists. One possible answer, the zero-ontology, holds that reality can be both there and not there and sums to nothing overall, much like how matter and antimatter cancel out. But this isn't more than a hunch.
A better approach begins by examining the nature of nothingness.

Lastly, on the topic of epistemology, it is crucial to understand the perspectival nature of probability. This is very easily confused with subjective probability. There's only a small difference, which can be revealed by thinking about tigers. The dangerousness of a tiger is not subjective, in the sense that a tiger is not dangerous for a person far away and dangerous for a person in the tigers vicinity. The tiger is dangerous either way,

Zuboff’s empiricism draws upon Bayesian inference, in which Bayes’ theorem has an objective a priori status. One issue with this theorem is that it requires prior probabilities to update the probability of a hypothesis being true in light of new evidence. This has led some philosophers to adopt a subjectivist stance, arguing that ultimate prior probabilities cannot be known objectively and must instead be assigned based on subjective credences. Zuboff contends that these philosophers conflate subjectivity with perspectivity.

Zuboff's answer to the problem of scepticism:
"How can you know that your present experience doesn’t owe its existence to an artificial stimulation of your brain, disembodied in a vat, or to a merely chance and causeless occurrence of its pattern in the absence of any world or even any time outside of it? The classic scepticism regarding the possibility of intellectual justification for judgments about the character of the world beyond the present appearances in a mind,

What is knowledge? This question is at the heart of epistemology, since philosophers want to know what they can know. The classic account of knowledge involves that it must be justified, true, and believed. “Whenever a knower (S) knows some fact (p), several conditions must obtain. A proposition that S doesn’t even believe cannot be, or express, a fact that S knows. Therefore, knowledge requires belief. False propositions cannot be, or express, facts, and so cannot be known.

Zuboff's principle of highest probability can also deal with the new problem of induction:

"Nelson Goodman thought he had already dealt with Hume through making the sort of response to him that I labeled as bad. He had simply defined induction as rational despite his admission that he could give no justification for it in terms of necessary truth (like the justification I provide). It is in relation to his own solution that Goodman raises his famous ‘new riddle of induction’.

Vindicating the scientific method against the Duhem-Quine thesis:
One big problem, if one could only use falsification to establish fallible, conjectural truth, is that falsification itself cannot deductively falsify hypotheses nor theories. If you toss a coin a billion times and it lands on heads every time, it would still not be contradictory to claim that the coin is truly fair. One cannot deductively refute this hypothesis.

There are two logical solutions to the problem of induction. To find these solutions it is paramount to think clearly about the problem.
The problem of induction arises from the fact that after repeatedly observing "A is X," it remains non-contradictory to observe "A is not X." Therefore, we cannot conclude that "All A are X." The only thing we can logically establish from observation are falsifications: while observing "A is not X" is not inherently contradictory, asserting "All A are X" after such an observation would be contradictory.

The pursuit of knowledge is, at its core, a pursuit of truth. Zuboff notes that beyond critical rationalism and empiricism, many theories of truth attempt to counter skepticism by lowering the standards for what counts as truth. He writes: “These are self-refuting because it turns out that they can make no sense except as claims that these theories themselves are true according to the rejected higher standard.

The principle of perfect grasp is a type of ideal observer theory, making it cognitivist and subjectivist in nature. This means that ethical statements express propositions, which can be true or false, and where truth or falsity depends on people's preferences. This stands in direct opposition to non-cognitivism (such as expressivism), which asserts that ethical statements are not propositions and can only be honest or dishonest, but not true or false. To strengthen the principle of perfect grasp, we need to refute non-cognitivism.

Derek Parfit's famous thought experiment of the teletransporter imagines a person being teleported from Earth to Mars. For our discussion, let’s assume macroscopic teleportation is physically possible. Of interest to us is only what happens to our experience. Will we survive? The common view holds that teleportation would end our experience due to a discontinuity. But discontinuity doesn't end our experience in other cases, like sleep, coma, memory loss, near-death experiences or brain surgery.

There are many possible analogies to approximate the previously derived ethical rule:
"I ought to do what the universal subject would want to be doing if the universal subject had a perfect grasp of everything involved." I will discuss the two most helpful analogies and how they address ethical questions.

1. The Time Traveler Analogy:
Imagine that every other person in a given ethical situation is actually yourself, who has time-traveled back, ...