Formal Ethics Seed Ontology

The Formal Ethics Seed Ontology Wiki presents a proof-of-concept formal ontology of ethics¹Strictly speaking, I would call it semi-formal because the logical statements have not been translated to a theorem prover-friendly format to be checked for inconsistencies.. The aim is to demonstrate the feasibility of clearly describing the core concepts of ethical philosophy in a formal language. I hope that the core definitions are not obviously horribly wrong²Given that this is philosophy, I hope that this benchmark for success is not too low., thereby illustrating the viability of extending ethical philosophy into the domain of formal precision. The dedicated page on project motivations further explains my reasons and the broader context.

See the Wiki Map for a walkthrough of the content³Or the table of contents for an alphabetical list.. The code is on GitHub, and not all auxiliary definitions are included on the wiki, so the thorough reader will need to see the repository for full details.

The concepts in the ontology are presented in both English and SUMO, with discussions on the philosophical theory and formalization decisions. These discussions aim to provide a bridge to the formal rules.

I hope this website structure reflects the class hierarchy of concepts more effectively than a linear document. Moreover, precision is often easier to achieve in English than in SUMO due to the larger choice of concepts without needing to make simplifying assumptions or using terms with near-zero background knowledge. This is a seed ontology in that the intent is to provide a minimal core that could help to flesh out more thorough ontologies, likely with the use of AI autoformalization.

This ontology regards each paradigm as an approach to dealing with ethical judgments and as a language in which ethical judgments can be expressed. This framework provides a flexible structure in which a broad range of ethical theories and their interrelations can be explored. I conjecture that utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology are equivalent and can simulate each other. A brief summary follows,

• Ethics is the philosophy of judging conduct, character, or circumstances to be good or bad in the context of a society of agential beings.
• Consequentialism is the meta-ethical claim that the truth of these judgments should only depend on the consequences.
• Utilitarianism works with utility functions to measure how good or bad situations (or actions) are, and uses these measurements to make ethical judgments.
• Virtue Ethics focuses on the character of agents with the assumption that virtuous agents will tend to take virtuous, good actions.
• Deontology focuses on rules and duties to determine what agents should and shouldn’t do, often regardless of the expected outcomes.
• Moral Nihilism asserts that there are no genuine moral truths — no action is inherently right or wrong⁴And engaging with ethical philosophy is not a good strategy for social coordination..