[rectang]

Thanks, I thoroughly enjoyed your reasoned example!

> starting from a non-maladaptive state of mind

This stage-setting phrase seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. Because of course "I should not break the arm of X" is situational: under certain circumstances, such as defending yourself or something you care about, you absolutely should break the arm of an adversary if necessary.

Fully exploring the space of possible situations to find a "truth" is at least difficult and maybe impossible. I speculate that the theoretical limit you could approach is the scientific approximation described by Karl Popper, and explored by Thomas Kuhn in _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, which means that you're never completely certain and your model is still subject to paradigm shifts. But because ethics is squishier than falsifiable scientific propositions, it will be hard to asymptotically approach that limit.

This is why a lot of the discussion about octopus farming has left me cold: many ethical propositions are being presented as absolute truths, but are almost certainly situationally incomplete. (What is sentience? What is pain? To what degree can we practically spare sentient creatures from pain? Under what circumstances does minimizing pain backfire and increase it in the end? And so on.)