The idea: Get the UN to get world leaders to agree on a moral philosophy.

Epistemic status: This is a somewhat rough idea. I know a decent bit about the fundamentals of game theory, namely in systems of power and warfare, but not nearly that much. I also don’t have a great internal model of the world; it’s roughly that of a person who reads the news occasionally. I also haven’t double-checked this idea that many times. We (or others) can most likely improve it. So far,

1. One non-expert has given me feedback,
2. one international relations expert, and
3. Arturo Marcias (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/arturo-macias).

Preface: I’m mostly asking for feedback. I am also making this post so readers might implement of try to implement the idea. You, reading this right now: if you just want to know how to get this done, my suggestion would be to send this over to the UN or otherwise try to implement this specific idea.

Why this might be good: As I am sure you know, everyone makes decisions based on three things:

1. The information they have,
2. Their decision-making process (which is often assumed to be their values, such as in game theory, and when it comes to geopolitics, there’s much less human error than in day-to-day life, so it should roughly be their values. and divergence from that is human error.)
3. Their options.

This is because when a person decides something, they use the information they have (1) and their decision-making process (2), and ONLY based on those things do they choose one of their options (3).

It’s abundantly clear why it would be good for world leaders to agree on what they value: said world leaders would always want the same thing, assuming they have the same or similar enough information and human error doesn’t get in the way.

Why this might work: Most people are aligned not with their goals at the moment, but rather with their goals overall. That’s phrased a bit weirdly, so I’ll expand on it: Someone might be a Democrat at one time, but they probably wouldn’t take a pill that made them always hold the opinions of a Democrat of that time.

1. If this isn’t caused by human error, it must be caused by their values.
2. If their values only cared about their opinions and beliefs at that time, then they would take the pill.
3. Since they likely wouldn’t, their values must also care, in part, about their future opinions or beliefs.

In addition, most people wouldn’t take a pill that made them highly addicted to ice cubes.

4. If this isn’t caused by human error, it must be caused by their values.
5. If their values only care about satisfying whatever opinions and beliefs they have at the time, then they would take the pill since they could easily satisfy [the belief that they would hold, in the future] that eating ice cubes is extremely valuable by going to the fridge and grabbing a handful of ice cubes.
6. Since they don’t eat the cube, they must not entirely only care about whatever opinions and beliefs they hold at the time.

IF a person wouldn’t take the pill in the first case, but would in the second, and IF it isn’t caused by human error, then statements 3 and 6 MUST be satisfied.

In order to satisfy statements 3 and 6, said person’s true values could be many things. Three very reasonable possibilities are:

1. They value doing good, and their beliefs and opinions change as they think about them more. (e.g., someone might switch from acting like a nihilist to acting like a utilitarian since that better aligns with their values. They allow THIS change because they know that some reasonable process caused said change. If they thought they would start going crazy soon, they might go through steps to stop a change in their values since they wouldn’t trust the decision of a crazy person, even when the crazy person is them.)
2. They care about making decisions based on logical reasoning and “reasonable” values. Valuing ice cubes so highly is not “reasonable”.
3. More generally, they might have one overarching goal (for example, “doing good”), and they change their opinions and beliefs to better align with that goal.

This may be the case for very impactful people, and so any change to their values, when based on logical reasoning (and with THEIR consent, so they know that it meets THEIR goals (since I don’t think any of them are actually crazy, but I don’t know. If they are crazy, though, or if they often succumb to human error, they still would likely only change their values with THEIR consent.)), they would be welcome!

In addition, not only would world leaders end up with moral values that are more logical, but they would end up with moral values that many more important people agree with!

In addition, world leaders might hold off on major decisions since they know that, on average, they would make a more educated decision after their moral values improve and align with others.

Why this might not work/factors that might cause this to not be implemented/factors that might make this a bad idea:

One major issue is that the process might be too slow. Maybe it won’t be! I honestly don't know. Maybe there’s some study on how long it takes to change the mind of someone who sees their opinion as important, and that might be useful in determining how long this would take.

Another potential way this wouldn't work or be implemented is that many world leaders don’t match the reasonable assumptions behind [the reasoning as to why it might work].

Another one is that it might be very hard to convince everybody that it is important, especially if we define “important” more loosely, allowing more people to fit the description, ESPECIALLY if it needs cooperation from a large group, such as the citizens of a nation, especially if the moral values go against that group’s culture. Imagine you’re heavily a christian hearing that the UN decided that coveting one’s neighbor’s wife is really not that bad (and they mentioned that explicitly in a summary of the program report). Notably, many of these bigger groups are heavily influenced by smaller groups; Most unions have union leaders or union leader bodies, most armies have generals of differing ranks, most political groups have figureheads, most religions have priests or the equivalent of a priest, etc.

Now, presumably, since important people become more and less important over time, either due to them being elected, rising to power, resigning, dying, etc., this program would presumably continue throughout time (to get all the new world leaders and non-new world leaders to agree on a moral philosophy), or perhaps the UN would fully agree on one moral philosophy, or perhaps every few years world leaders and experts convene to decide if it should change, and if so, what it should change to. (This is one of the main ways this idea can be improved: “How should this be implemented long-term”?)

In addition, due to all the forces of corruption, people in power are disproportionately not morally aligned: someone who values being in office the longest would, on average, be in office longer than someone who wants to do good, and those who are willing to become more morally aligned would disproportionately be put at a disadvantage, since this program would be more likely to make them more moral, and thus in power for less time in comparison to those who were less willing to budge: A change from mostly moral to moral might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, causing them to be in power for much less time.

This can be counteracted by having some of these “forces of corruption” push towards being moral: moral world leaders might do better in a world filled with other moral world leaders than [immoral world leaders].

Furthermore, you don’t need to value staying in power to stay in power or try to. Suppose you’re a world leader with some moral values. In that case, you’d want to stay in power when the alternative is less moral than you.

In addition to THIS, one of the main reasons moral world leaders do seemingly immoral things is to fend off less moral world leaders from taking their power. This force would be drastically counteracted by [the UN and most world leaders agreeing on a moral philosophy that they act upon.].

IN ADDITION, a person in a position of power could act the same way as an immoral version of themselves, except for when being moral doesn't have a noticeable effect on how much power they have. (This is practically the bare minimum, namely since it would mean that a program like this would only have an effect in those edge-cases.)

One glaring flaw is that it would be extremely difficult to land on the correct moral philosophy. Philosophers have been trying for years, and there still isn’t a consensus! One counterargument to this is that it doesn’t need to be the RIGHT moral philosophy; it just has to be GOOD ENOUGH to be better than the current status quo, which is much less difficult.

One general note is that the UN sorta already has this: the UN charter. However, it isn’t enforced in this way, and major member states don’t abide by it, or otherwise didn’t in the past, such as Russia. They might want to apply the techniques proposed here, but not all of them would work if the final moral goal is set in stone: No-one can change it such that they agree with it, so if the charter doesn’t agree with their values, No amount of convincing will change their mind, unless you change their fundamental values (something pretty hard to do - imagine how much convincing I’d have to do to get you to stop doing good!)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

I likely forgot about some variables that can be changed to make this idea better, as well as variables that could effect whether or not this is a good idea, so please let me know if you spot any, or if you know what those variables are “equal to”. (that is, what should be adjusted, and what are the the real-world features that effect of this is a good or bad idea?)