Good question, this is rather applied on a system scale level so for example, a democratic system is going to be inherently more reversible than a non-democratic system. An action that goes against the reversibility of a system could for example be the removal of freedom of speech as it would narrow down the potential pathways of future civilizations. Reversibility has an opportunity cost inherent to it as it asks us to take into consideration the possibility of other morals being correct. This is like Pascal’s mugging but with the stakes that if we have the wrong moral theory then we lose a lot. This means that if you have a utilitarian lens it might be less effective as there are actions that might be good from the utilitarian standpoint such as turning everything into hedonium, that are bad from a reversibility standpoint as we can’t change anything from there.
I’m having trouble understanding what’s reversible and what’s not. Entropy increases, I think the universe generally is not reversible in that sense.
I’d rather have real examples—I really don’t think I understand what you’re talking about. But for your last sentence: if we can turn things into hedonium, what keeps us from turning it back into whatever flawed configuration turns out to be preferable?
Good question, this is rather applied on a system scale level so for example, a democratic system is going to be inherently more reversible than a non-democratic system. An action that goes against the reversibility of a system could for example be the removal of freedom of speech as it would narrow down the potential pathways of future civilizations. Reversibility has an opportunity cost inherent to it as it asks us to take into consideration the possibility of other morals being correct. This is like Pascal’s mugging but with the stakes that if we have the wrong moral theory then we lose a lot. This means that if you have a utilitarian lens it might be less effective as there are actions that might be good from the utilitarian standpoint such as turning everything into hedonium, that are bad from a reversibility standpoint as we can’t change anything from there.
I’m having trouble understanding what’s reversible and what’s not. Entropy increases, I think the universe generally is not reversible in that sense.
I’d rather have real examples—I really don’t think I understand what you’re talking about. But for your last sentence: if we can turn things into hedonium, what keeps us from turning it back into whatever flawed configuration turns out to be preferable?