In The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argued (if I’m getting it right) that science can determine the best way for us to live our lives. I agree with this. For those of us who agree that science can, in principle, do this, we need to actually use science to do this. So as a next step, I would like to propose, somehow, plugging all knowledge we presently have about human psychology and society into a computer, and employing simulations with different initial conditions to see which moral rules work best at bringing about well-being. For instance, the libertarian rules would be along the lines of “it is immoral to hit and steal,” and the socialist rules would be something like “it is moral for the State to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.” All the people in the simulation would start out believing in one of these sets of rules. We would then run the simulations and see how happy the people in the simulation are some time later. May the happiest simulation win.

The reason for simulations is that it is very hard to run these experiments in real life. However, they could be run in real life by establishing more than one seasteading community with different rules. The people moving to each community would have to actually believe in the rules of the community for it to work.

This approach is utilitarian. Presumably, once we see which rules work best, most people would adopt those rules.

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