What are the most important problems in the most important areas like ethics, economics, politics and sciences? In this short article I present an overview of our worst enemies.
Ethics
Several ethical principles and theories are possible, but what characterizes a rational ethic is the need to avoid unwanted arbitrariness. Ethical principles, values, ideas and theories that contain unwanted arbitrariness should always be rejected. This is the minimum requirement for a coherent, rational, authentic ethic.
Unwanted arbitrariness means arbitrariness, i.e. picking an element from a set without following a rule, that is unwanted, i.e. it can be reasonably objected by at least someone who has subjective preferences. If unwanted arbitrariness is allowed, then reasonable argumentation in ethics is no longer possible. The idea to avoid unwanted arbitrariness results in the most fundamental principle in ethics: for every choice you make, you have to be able to give a justifying rule of which you can consistently want that everyone follows that rule in all possible situations.
The most serious kind of unwanted arbitrariness in our ethical theories, is speciesism, a kind of discrimination based on species membership. Discrimination means treating A better than B in a way that B cannot want, based on arbitrary criteria and without tolerating swapping positions (treating A like B and vice versa). Looking at the huge numbers of animals that are used and killed in livestock farming and fishing, which is based on speciesism, we can say that speciesism is probably the biggest kind of discrimination in the world today.
A full description of unwanted arbitrariness, discrimination and speciesism can be found in this article.
Economics
The most general enemy in economics is unjust inefficiency: an inefficiency, i.e. a loss of economic welfare or productivity, that is also unjust, i.e. creating unjustifiable income or wealth inequalities.
The most serious kind of unjust inefficiency is privatized economic rent or excessive scarcity benefits: the received benefit (income) to an owner of a scarce factor of production (property, resource) in excess of the minimum payment required to induce the owner to bring the factor into production.
Economic rent is the result of market barriers. One of the most important global market barriers is migration restriction (countries with closed borders). This results in huge income inequalities (a wage gap of a factor 4 for equal work between high income and low-middle income countries) and productivity losses (almost 50% of global GDP). Opening borders is probably the most effective means to fight poverty, reduce global income inequality and increase economic welfare for the vast majority in both poor and rich countries.
A second very important kind of economic rent is the private property of natural resources. Economic rent can be eliminated by eliminating market barriers or by a tax and dividend system: taxing the rent and distributing the tax revenues as a universal basic income.
Politics
The worst enemy in politics are cognitive biases. These result in irrational policies and decisions by politicians and voters. Irrational means: inaccurate in beliefs, ineffective in means and inconsistent in ends. To improve politics, we can develop a rational democracy. One candidate is futarchy, where people vote on values and bet on beliefs. Moral uncertainty is dealt with by a democratic procedure where everyone has a right to vote for parties or politicians that represent moral values. Empirical uncertainty is dealt with by using prediction markets. Other methods to improve democratic voting are quadratic voting and approval voting.
Biology
The most important issue in biology is wild animal suffering, because there are huge numbers of wild animals and probably a vast majority of them have a lot of negative experiences that could be avoided with new technologies. To decrease wild animal suffering and improve wild animal well-being, we need to solve the most important obstacle: r-selection. This is a reproductive strategy of most animal populations, where a lot of offspring are born and only a small fraction of them survives till reproductive age. R-strategists are animals that maximize their reproduction rate in order to survive as a population, although most individual animals don’t survive for long. R-selection is probably the root cause of most suffering in nature, and probably most suffering on Earth. It is a kind of perpetual overpopulation problem.
To help animals, we need to do research on how to safely and effectively intervene in nature to improve wild animal welfare. Important technologies that could potentially help to decrease wild animal suffering are CRISPR gene drives to reduce r-selection and cultured meat to reduce predation.
Technology
The most important problem related to technology, are existential risks. These are global catastrophes that could permanently derail society or wipe out intelligent-sentient life on earth. Existential risks are very important because the whole future is at stake, which means a huge number of people. New technologies pose the biggest threats but can also create the best solutions to many problems.
Probably the most serious existential risk is misaligned artificial superintelligence: future superintelligent self-learning machines with moral algorithms that deviate from what we intended or wanted. Because those superintelligent AI-systems are smarter than us and because knowledge is power, those AI-systems could dominate us. We will never be smart enough to control them. If their goals are not identical to ours, if their values are not aligned with ours, they could even eliminate us because of competition for resources to achieve their goals. To solve this problem, AI-safety research is a top priority.
Stijn Bruers, the rational ethicist 