Abstracts

Catherine Botha (Bio)

Ethics and Aesthetics: A Proposal

Aesthetic values such as elegance, unity and simplicity play a significant (although admittedly not the only) role in the choice of scientific theories, often influencing how scientists evaluate and select among competing models. Scientists often find certain theories “beautiful” or “elegant” because they are simple, unified, and well-structured, making them more appealing and potentially more likely to be adopted. In this paper, I argue that ethics should also be understood as an aesthetics, i.e. that there should be (and often are, albeit unwittingly so in many cases) specific aesthetic values in play when creating a robust ethical system. The values I discuss drawn from the realms of mathematics and physics - elegance, simplicity and unity - are discussed in the context of the ethics of AI to demonstrate my position.